Interview 1
Interview 2
In this recent interview (transcript below), Richard Craven offered a window into his rich and unconventional literary career, revealing a writer deeply engaged with satire, parody, and a sharp critique of modern culture. With a background spanning English literature and philosophy, Craven’s work reflects a reverence for the classical and a disdain for what he perceives as the decay of cultural and moral values. His novels, including Amoeba Dick and Pretty Poli, are part of the Bristolian Chronicles, a series that captures both the grotesque and the comic aspects of urban life.
Craven describes himself as a conservative satirist, driven by what he calls “splenetic distaste” for the decline of common decency and the erosion of Western heritage. His creative journey began with an early fascination for the satirical poetry of Alexander Pope, the sweeping narratives of Dickens, and the biting social commentary of Trollope. Over time, his work has come to embody a fusion of classical literary forms and modern discontent, reflecting his belief in the enduring value of structured verse and carefully delineated narrative arcs.
In conversation, Craven exudes the same wit and precision found in his prose. He speaks candidly about his influences, ranging from Juvenal’s ancient satire to the philosophical complexities of Kripke and Rawls, Craven’s blend of humour, intellect, and visceral imagery emerges from a deeply personal engagement with his environment. For him, Bristol is not just a setting but a character—an unruly, vibrant city that mirrors the chaotic yet structured nature of his novels.
What stands out most is Craven’s commitment to craft. His writing reveals a meticulous attention to detail and a strong narrative foundation. Even as he critiques the decline of civic structures and cultural identity, Craven remains anchored in literary tradition, seeking to preserve its vitality while holding a mirror to the present.
Transcript
Interview 5 November 2024
1. Literary Journey:
1. How did you come to write novels? I know you have a background in philosophy, but I’d love to hear about the other experiences that shaped your journey.
I was a moderately academic child at school without being in any way outstanding, and aged 12-13 had an enthusiastic English teacher, who taught us all the rudiments of grammar and figures of speech, which I think must have informed my prose style. At around the same age I was devouring the novels of Capt. W.E.Johns, C.S.Forester and, somewhat controversially perhaps, Sven Hassell. My introduction to philosophy came when I was about 15. After doing my Latin O level very early, I was parked for a couple of years in a sort of pre-A level class for clever kids, where I found myself translating large chunks of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, as well as several of Juvenal’s Satires and some of Horace’s Odes. These latter I think probably generated my taste for satire, which developed a couple of years later in an Eng. Lit. A level class when I first encountered The Rape of the Lock, which germinated my fixation with Alexander Pope in particular, and heroic couplet in general. Then my first degree was in Eng. Lit., although unfortunately I didn’t take it very seriously at the time. During my 20’s I read a lot of sci-fi, and without wishing to denigrate sci-fi in any way as an art form – my first novel Bile, which I wrote immediately after finishing my Philo degree in my early thirties, was sci-fi – I didn’t really get into classical lit. fic. until my early-mid thirties, when after finishing Bile I spent a couple of years devouring all of Dickens and then Trollope’s Barchester and Palliser series – it’s been said that my novels are somewhat Dickensian, with their tendency for caricature and grotesquerie. In my late thirties, after having kids and splitting up with their mother, I moved to Bristol and for a Philosophy MA and then a PhD, during which I wasn’t writing creatively, but I quit Philo the day of my PhD award 13 years ago – itch well and truly scratched – and made the conscious decision to spend the next twenty years producing at least 10 substantial literary works of art, be these novels, plays, verse collections, or short story collections.
2. Has studying philosophy influenced the way you approach writing? I’m curious how your philosophical thinking finds its way into your novels.
Yes and no. Yes, because it has imbued me with a respect for pure practical reasoning, and the Kripkean metaphysics I had recently studied at UCL certainly imprinted itself on Bile, with its preoccupation with functionalist vs. essentialist accounts of personal identity. But then later on when I devoted myself to more self-consciously literary fiction after quitting academia, the ontological and metaphysical preoccupations of Bile gave way to the more socio-political outlook of my novels and verse satires. It should be borne in mind in relating this that I have engaged in vanishingly little formal study of political philosophy – one or two introductory classes on Rawls and Nozick, and of course I read Mill on classical liberalism and Bentham and some secondary readings in utilitarianism. And in recent years reading Roger Scruton has put my conservatism on a reasonably formal footing, regarding which as a satirist I’m driven by a splenetic conservative distaste for the disgusting behaviour encouraged by postmodernism and wokery, in terms both of civil institutions towards their clientele, and at the interpersonal level.
3. You use parody so effectively in your work—what makes it your go-to style for storytelling? How does it help you explore the themes you’re interested in?
It may be slightly unfair to call my novels parodies – although I do so myself – insofar as ridicule is customarily considered inherent in parody whereas I have immense respect for the works which I imitate – Moby Dick, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Ulysses and the Odyssey, Felix Holt the Radical and La Peste. With this proviso in mind, I write parodies for a lazy reason and a “ridiculist” reason. The lazy reason is that in writing an imitation of an earlier work, I inherit a ready-made structure. I still have to do the plotting, but the narrative arc is already there for me to plug my plot into. The “ridiculist” reason is quite simply that parody lends itself to satire, for example the Greek tragedic features of The Mayor of Casterbridge get retooled as a comedy of manners in Pretty Poli.
4. Who are the writers or thinkers who’ve had the biggest influence on you? I’d love to hear about the books or authors that have stuck with you.
I alluded earlier to Dickens especially, but also Trollope. My novels tend to be parades of grotesques, and Dickens is certainly salient in that respect. As a writer of novels about manners, I’m certainly influenced by Jane Austen and Henry James – although my taste for James is a more recent development. My prose style is certainly very much of the nineteenth century, but I’m also heavily influenced by any number of twentieth century novelists, of whom I think Anthony Powell, Conrad, Fitzgerald and Graham Greene deserve particular mention. I speak subfluent French and also read quite a lot of French classical lit. fic. – Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, Zola, Benjamin Constant, Voltaire, Andre Gide, Camus. Pretty much the only living authors I read are Edward St Aubyn and Michel Houellebecq, the latter again in the original French, and whom I very much esteem for his flat out contempt for woke. As a poet and playwright my influences are divided between the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists in the case of my sonnets and my play The Senseless Counterfeit, especially Shakespeare of course, but also Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Webster and whoever wrote the Revenger’s Tragedy – I think it’s of uncertain authorial provenance. In the case of my heroic couplet satires, The Montpeliad and the Dunciad, both are modelled on Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, which is itself modelled on the Restoration poet John Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe. Heroic couplet satire reached its zenith as an artform in the 18th century with Pope and his colleagues, but I think earlier and later exponents deserve mention – in particular Shakespeare’s early contemporary Thomas Nashe’s “dildoniad” The Choise of Valentines, and in the twentieth century Roy Campbell’s Bloomsbury set satire The Georgiad, and Anthony Burgess’s 1990-ish Essay on Censorship protesting the Ayatollah’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
5. Your writing blends humor, classical references, and the grotesque in such a unique way. What inspires this style.
My conservative spleen against the gradual systematic erosion of common decency, my voluminous reading of classical literary fiction, and my feeling that the Western world is being deliberately deprived of its cultural heritage.
2. Amoeba Dick:
6. Titus’s journey through Bristol reflects a lot about identity and decay—was that something you had in mind from the start, or did it evolve as you wrote the novel?
I sociocultural decay very much in mind from the get-go. When 20 years ago I first moved to Bristol from Gloucestershire to start my Philo postgrad, what immediately struck me was the extent to which civilised norms had been eroded since I had last lived in a city – London several years previously. I had never really seen pervasive litter and street-drinking before. Nor was I accustomed to the casual use of the words “like” and “fucking” as conversational filler words. My interest in identity has evolved in tandem with my literary output. I am increasingly of the opinion that the West in general and the British in particular are the victims of a concerted and worryingly successful effort on the part of a supercilious but half-witted so-called elite to deprive them of their heritage and their cultural identity.
7. The novel has this interesting focus on gym culture. What does Amoeba Dick say about our obsession with fitness and body image? And how much of that comes from your own experiences in the gym?
It’s more to do with my own experience to be honest. The other thing that struck me when I first moved to Bristol was how fat everyone had suddenly become. Having said which, the first time I encountered widespread obesity was when I spent several months in the USA in my mid-twenties. I remember thinking at the time, everything in America eventually crosses the Atlantic, and thus it came about to be! Regarding my own experience, although I was quite sporty in a school second eleven sort of way, in my mid-twenties I became less fit, and eventually developed a chronic back problem. One day when I was in my early thirties, the doctor prescribed me 6 sessions with a personal trainer at the North Kensington sports centre, and that’s what kindled my enduring gym habit. Gym culture lends itself very readily to satire, because it abounds with these archetypes – the narcissistic sylphs, the grunting chimpanzees and steroidal thugs, the people with skin diseases disporting themselves in the jacuzzi, and the old men eternally washing their nether regions in the communal shower.
8. The connection between disease and transformation is really striking in the novel. What inspired you to explore those themes in such a visceral way?
At the most obvious level, I suppose, physical disease and transformation is a metaphor for its cultural or spiritual analogue. And there is a long tradition of satirists embracing the explicit- ever since Juvenal in the 2nd century ad, so really I’m just working inside a tradition.
9. You’ve got these great chapters that dive into the history of marital aids and pathogens in hot tubs. They’re hilarious and weirdly insightful! How did you decide to frame those topics the way you did, especially as a kind of parallel to Melville’s whale biology chapters in Moby Dick?
Melville notoriously confines much of the action in Moby Dick to the opening and concluding chapters, padding out the middle extensively with very long disquisitions on the mechanics of the whaling industry and whale biology – in the latter case mistakenly defining the whale as a species of fish. In the case of Amoeba Dick, dildos and hot tub pathogens, in particular the bacterium Aeromonas hydrophila, are both integral to the plot, insofar as, following his genital gangrene blamed on a colony of Aeromonas hydrophila lurking in the gym hot tub, the Pex ‘n’ Quads gym manager Herod takes to sporting about his ravaged loins a huge semi-mythical white dildo known as the White Willy. Accordingly, I thought it fitting to pad out Amoeba Dick with a chapter each on the history of the literary representation of the dildo – dildonics if you will – and on the evolution of the bacterium Aeromonas hydrophila as a pathogen associated with hot tub folliculitis.
10. When you were at the gym yourself, were you thinking about these novels? How much did your time there influence the direction of the story?
Of course, but not all the time. Quite often I take a novel to the gym and read it on the exercise bike. And when I’m reading I’m not thinking actively about the direction of whatever I’m working on, although in the course of time a sort of percolatory effect may inform my writing in due course.
3. Pretty Poli:
11. Pretty Poli is clearly a parody of The Mayor of Casterbridge. What drew you to Hardy’s novel, and why did you want to rework it in such a satirical way?
Satire is my stock in trade, so any time I retool someone else’s novel, it’s inevitably going to be satirical. Again it’s worth bearing in mind that Hardy’s work is not the object of my ridicule. I have nothing but respect for the Mayor of Casterbridge, although I don’t mind conceding that some of the characteristically American portentousness of Moby Dick is implicitly subjected to a gentle ribbing in Amoeba Dick. What drew me to Hardy’s novel – and here I’m trying to recall my mindset from when I wrote Pretty Poli ten years ago – is that I thought it’s structure might avail Pretty Poli as a critique of the venality of Bristol’s dawning epoch of mayoral politics.
12. The way you use birds in Pretty Poli is fascinating—what made you decide to mix human and bird traits, and do they symbolize something bigger within the story?
I’m really not sure about this. I think it may be something to do with parrots notoriously being creatures which parrot things. I certainly wanted to make the Hawksmoor Perroquet as a parrot the creature of the depressive provincial merchant banking grey eminence Sir Hearty Luncheon.
13. Do the bird motifs in Pretty Poli tie into your other work, like Amoeba Dick? I’m wondering if there’s a larger pattern or theme you’re exploring across your novels.
No, the avian motif in is peculiar to Pretty Poli. What ties all the Bristolian Chronicles together is its comedie humaine, the overlapping casts of characters – Sir Hearty Luncheon, the hippy ketamine dealer Mr Luvvertory, Lord Snatch the dissipated aristocratic heroin addict, Constable Wifebeating-Cokehead the corrupt and inept policeman, and ultimately Bristol itself.
14. Pretty Poli has a lot of political commentary, especially around power and ambition. What were you hoping to say about politics through the story, and how does it reflect what’s going on today?
To an extent I’ve already answered this question. I’m of a fairly conservative disposition, and my splenetic satire very much reflects my appalled fascination with the growing degeneracy of modern life.
15. Bristol is such an important setting in your work. What is it about the city that inspires you—or frustrates you? How does it shape your characters and stories?
Bristol is very much the main character in the Bristolian Chronicles, much like Paris in Balzac’s Comedie Humaine. I’ve lived in the same house in a particularly louche suburb for twenty years, and am alternately amused, fascinated and appalled by the life of the City. It’s a very dirty city. The streets are carpeted with litter. Everyone seems to be alcoholic, drug-taking is on an industrial scale, and it’s almost impossible to have a proper conversation. Nobody can finish a sentence without their interlocutors talking and usually shouting over them, and the common language is not English but what I call Likeney – every other word seems to be “like” or “fucking”. I absolutely do depict this state of affairs in all my novels.
4. Literary Styles and Formal Verse:
16. Your novels mix real, fantastical, and unreliable elements—what’s your process for deciding what to include? Do you consciously work with unreliable narrators, or is it something that evolves as you write?
It evolves as I write, although that said the inclusion of compendious footnotes and a bibliography, much of both of which are spurious, amounts to a more purposive embedding of unreliability in the narration.
17. How do you balance the complexity of your style with keeping the story engaging? Your novels are full of allusions and humor, but they also have a strong narrative flow.
Every chapter has its teleological place in the narrative arc. As long as this is achieved, I get to embellish with amusing digressions.
18. You’ve written a lot in structured verse, like sonnets. What keeps you coming back to formal poetry, and how does that influence the way you write fiction?
My taste for writing formal verse is of a piece with my political conservatism. I see myself as playing a role in the rehabilitation of cultural heritage. When I write sonnets, I’m imitating Elizabethan and Jacobean forms, when I write heroic couplet satires, I’m imitating the Augustan poets of the early-mid 18th century, and my novels are imbued with a 19th century flavour.
19. Do you see any parallels between the strict structure of sonnets and the more chaotic, open narratives in your novels? It feels like there’s a tension between the two that’s really interesting.
I wouldn’t say that the narratives in my novels are chaotic, seeing as they inherit the structure of the works of which they are parodies or homages. The lives and events which they depict are chaotic. But that’s the way I see life. Civic structures have disintegrated, and life is increasingly disordered and chaotic. My novels are representations of the chaotic, but the representations aren’t themselves chaotic. There’s always a reasonably delineated narrative arc.
20. What role do you think literary forms like sonnets play in shaping a writer’s voice? How has writing formal verse impacted your prose?
That’s a very interesting question. As you know my verse is primarily in the form of iambic pentameter, and I suspect that if you analysed my prose – although I haven’t actually done this -you might well find it pervaded with echoes of the iamb – a foot of verse consisting of two syllables with the stress on the second syllable.