Frequently Asked Questions

 

1.    What is the fur?  Or, What does the fur represent? 

 

The fur is not that hard to understand.  It’s fungus which grows on stuff.  Humans and objects.

 

I’m not playing any tricks!  There’s no hidden meaning!  It’s not a direct metaphor for anything.  There is no secret code that will unlock the ‘real meaning’ of what I’m saying.  The fur can represent all sorts of things.  And each reader is going to find something different.  Each reader is going to imagine the world of the fur in a different way; there’ll be intersections, and that’s why we can talk about it, thankfully.

 

And yet…

 

On another level, I know what people are getting at here.  What is the significance of this idea of the fur?  Why did I write about a fungus plague? 

 

For me, the fur in the novel is a potent symbol for the Fall – the idea that the created world is messed up, sinful, falling apart.  It’s the basic idea behind Judaism and Christianity – that humans and the created order rebelled against God and consequently are not what they should be.  Yet distorted as creation might have become it still reflects some of God’s good intentions.  (Go to your Bible and read the Genesis 2-4 – the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the garden of Eden.)

 

Basically, the story of the Fall is that the world is sinful.  Things are messed up, and it’s not attributable just to individual choices, it’s infected into the very pores of life.  In the same way, fur blights people who don’t deserve it (as well as though who do).  (If this all sounds very pessimistic, don’t despair: both Jews and Christians believe that God has been working since then to make things better, to restore the world to what it’s meant to be, by raising up a people who worship him and know what it is to be in a loving relationship with him.)

 

The fur isn’t just this.  It’s multi-faceted, it throws off light in a hundred directions.  It can’t be reduced to one explanation.   But here’s some other thematic resonances, symbolic significances the fur has taken on in my own mind:

 

• Adolescence/ sexuality – the invasion of hair where there wasn’t any before.  The way, as a teenager, the world can feel very seedy, hungover, dirty.
• Decay – the idea of the world reclaiming itself from White Man and his arrogance. 
• Existential guilt/ awareness – like Sartre’s idea of Nausea.  The horror of the physicality of things.  The knowledge that things are not as they should be.  The awareness that one must make a stand.
• The adolescent mind more generally – the world felt post-apocalyptic for me as a teenager.  I even wrote a story called The Holocaust Survival Manual when I was 17 about a reclusive teenager who imagines the world has been blown up because of this girl who doesn’t like him.  In between are lyrics from the Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Zero’.  This was about six months before I started The Fur, and it’s like an ancestor of it. 

 

 

2.   What inspired the fur (ie the fungus plague)?

 

• Swamps.
• A seedy motel I stayed in during Country Week sports tournament in Year 12.  It had mould everywhere, blood stains and a lemon tree in the middle. 
• My fascination with ruins.
• My fascination with post-apocalyptic worlds – eg John Christopher’s writings; Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle For Leibowitz; and Philip K. Dick’s writing.
• Maybe the triffids in John Wyndham’s book?
• Living in share houses during my university years.  (And still.)
• A lady at a book club made the astute observation that there was an echo of Wittenoom, the asbestos mining town that has had all its power cut off and has only a few people clinging onto it.

 

 

3.   Is it autobiographical?

 

I don’t like this question.  People seem obsessed by it.  They worry more about that than about the story itself.  Or some do. 

 

It is not an autobiography.  That’s for sure.

 

But it reflects a simplified version of some of my journey.  Many parts of Michael’s life reflect my own.  Many do not.  I lived near Collie once, and I moved to Bunbury then Murdoch.  But my Mum’s alive and well; I never actually lived in Collie; and I studied law for a year when I first went to uni.  My dad’s never been a minister and I have a sister and a brother. 

 

Particularly, I would like to stress that I have never got naked with a girl named Emily, in fact I’ve barely even ever gone to a nightclub, and certainly never picked up at one.  That was an imagined scene designed to represent the whole complicated bundle of issues around sexual guilt, temptation and all sorts of other things.  I regret making it so explicit, because everyone just goes on about it.  I didn’t want it to be a focal point; I wanted it to be a jolt, like it was to the character, and a lucky escape.  Please scratch out ‘erection’ and ‘pubic hair’ and ‘breasts’; there’s a lot of people who can’t handle those words.  I personally have never seen or experienced any of them, of course, if you really want to know.   So there, you morbidly curious coroners.

 

Sometimes I want to move to another city where I don’t know anyone, and no-one can think they’re in The Fur.  Any bits that are derogatory or controversial are most definitely not based on real people.

 

*

 

The most autobiographical section is the tournament chapter, which I wrote first as a short story back in 98.  From there, the rest of the plot spread forwards and backwards with a lot of imagination to explain it all in terms of a furred world.  So the rest is further from my life. 

 

 

*

 

Michael isn’t just based on me.  He’s also based on a friend of mine, MM.  And a whole heap of characters I have read about in books. 

 

There were two girls who initially inspired Rebecca.  One was a strange girl I never properly talked to when I was in year 10, named Michelle Hunter.  She said she liked me, and I was scared so I told her to leave me alone.  I regret it to this very day.  She liked the Smashing Pumpkins, Ash and William Gibson when I’d barely heard of any of them.  And then they became my favourite things (for a time).  I’m sorry Michelle, if you ever read this.  (We both moved away.)  And the other was a penfriend I had in year 12, named Bianca.  She was the first person who ever seemed interested in me for who I was, and she’ll never know what a difference that made in my life.  Thanks Bianca.

 

 

 

4.   Are you rich?

 

No, I don’t think you could say that.  I will see my first royalty payment in March 2005. 

 

 

5.   Will there be a sequel?

 

Yes, there will be at least two, I think.  I’m currently writing the second.  It’s called Narrow is the path.  I’m very proud of it so far.  I think you’ll like it.  Rebecca is in it, and there are many surprises.  Michael is also a lot happier.