The Climate of London: routes to fiction about London by way of climate, ethnicity and security issues

The aim of the proposed research project would be to write a novel provisionally entitled The Climate of London. The novel would attempt to represent London in terms of issues of race and class, touching on questions of Empire and post-colonial migration, security and terrorism, and the environment. I am intending to use weather and climate as a way of organising and arching over these various issues. I have written three previous novels, including The Last King of Scotland (about Idi Amin), Ladysmith (the Anglo-Boer War) and Zanzibar (al-Qaida in Africa), which are outlined in more detail in my CV, and which all to a greater or lesser extent deal with issues of post-colonialism. I am currently completing a novel, entitled Turbulence, about a pacifist weather forecaster who is called on to do a forecast for D-day.

I would now like to focus my attention on post-colonial issues in London fiction, as seen through climate and terrorism. Conrad and James have given fictional accounts of 1880's anarchism in the city, from which I believe there is much to be learned for writers hoping to do the same with religious-based terrorism in our own time. I would like to link these researches to the ethnicity-aware accounts of London that have already been given by Selvon, Smith and Levy. The novel resulting from these researches would, I hope, be an example of a type of writing that avoided the fixed point of view and corresponding impasse often associated with identity politics. This is where the climate and weather issues come in: I had the notion, which still needs further unpacking, of a novel that primarily saw London as a climate, or a microclimate, to which all its inhabitants were equally subject. This is the main factor I would hope to add to Conrad and James, Levy and Smith.

One reason I want to write the novel now is that what is loosely termed eco-criticism - literacy criticism that locates the value in a work in environmental terms could be one definition - is beginning to take hold in the academy and on the books pages of newspapers. The time is right for a novel that really exploited the new work being done by critics and writers such as Jonathon Bate and Robert McFarlane. There is knowledge and understanding in the critical apparatus, and to a lesser extent in poetry and non-fiction, but in fiction at least, there is little new material; it is a situation I would hope to change in writing and publishing The Climate of London.

Readers would gain from the novel an insight into conditions in London at the start of the Twenty-first century as well as an understanding of the historical and literacy background to the current situation in London. I do not have a contract for such a novel but fully expect as heretofore that the work will be published by Faber and Faber. It may be that it also becomes a feature film, as with my first novel The Last King of Scotland, which is due out in summer 2006.