On the Most Boring Conversation
in the World
I once had a very humiliating moment, in a lift, with a musician I know – a cellist. Without thinking, I said, ‘You must get tired of lugging that thing around all the time.’
The cellist looked at me, disappointed, and said, ‘Are we going to have the most boring conversation in the world?’
We stepped out of the lift in silence.
People who have something obvious about them, something they carry around in public view — like a cello — all have a most boring conversation they are desperate to avoid. Because so many people come up to them and start that conversation.
‘Bet you wish you played piccolo, eh? Eh?’
A few years ago, I was teaching an Arvon course. One of the writers attending was a smart, good-looking young man called Harry whose legs had been amputated. He walked on stylish prosthetics. I realised that, for Harry, to tell the story of how he lost his legs was the most boring conversation in the world. So, I didn’t ask. At dinner. After the workshop. And when the time came for us to meet one-on-one, I let him lead the conversation. Just an open question: What did you want to talk about?
Harry brought up the subject. He told me that he didn’t want to be defined by what had happened to him – an IED in Afghanistan, when he was a soldier on night patrol. He said he could spend his life doing things like driving round Silverstone with Lewis Hamilton, or fundraising for veterans associations.
Instead, he wanted to write – but he realised that the first thing he wrote would have to tell his story, but in his own way, on his own terms. He didn’t yet know what way that would be.
By the end of the week, Harry had produced a couple of pages narrated not by himself, not by a soldier, but by a tourniquet — a tourniquet that stays in a soldier’s pocket until he steps on a mine, and is then used to save his life.
In 2016, these pages became the opening of Anatomy of a Soldier, Harry Parker’s first novel, published by Faber.
But this isn’t just a story of successful publication. It’s the story of someone – through Arvon – finding an approach, a voice, a fresh point of view that could take what, for them, was the most boring conversation in the world and transform it into a fascinating, original and moving work of art.
[Image credit: Harry Parker, photographed by Clara Molden for Country Life. Credit: Country Life]
personal issues such as disability are extraordinarily difficult to write about I find. Underplay it and you're not doing justice to a very serious matter, overplay it and what is the reader meant to make of it except feel bad?