Published last week, Jon Ransom’s The Whale Tattoo has been causing quite a stir. As a queer working-class writer his route to publication was not the usual one, so we asked him to tell us about the genesis of his novel.
My mother died unexpectedly. Then my father was diagnosed with cancer everywhere at once. Afterwards, I became bewildered by death. That people can disappear from our lives so suddenly is unsettling. I figured the only way to navigate grief was to do something I found dangerous – write down the stories I had hidden inside my head. They appeared more like photographs, fragmented, incomplete and often surreal.
I started with the whale. I’d seen these huge and mysterious creatures washed up on the Norfolk coast. When out of water they appear disturbing and prophetic. Right away the thought that the whale, and later the water itself, could speak mesmerized me.
At this point Joe Gunner became my protagonist – a baffled working-class lad who believed death was chasing after him. I wanted him to be unlike the queer men I’d read about, who I sometimes admired, yet mostly couldn’t relate to. Joe had to be unapologetic and raw, like the lads I grew-up with.
Without any real sense of how to approach writing, I grabbed free moments on the bus, traveling to and from work, where I’d write small pieces of fractured prose on my mobile phone (the entire first draft of The Whale Tattoo was written this way). Immediately I liked the rhythmic element to my work, how it helped make pictures with words. Writing felt very visual and somehow musical. I just went with my instincts.
Joe’s world was always going to play out on the marsh and alongside the river (because much of my own experience sits here). This landscape shifts with light and the weather, and more often than not appears like an illusion. It is wild and can be unforgiving, perfectly fitting Joe’s unsettled state of mind. The rhythm here is controlled by the tides. They shape everything. The ebb and flow of the water became the pull that carried the characters along, always moving, sometimes backwards, frequently with no real understanding of what is beneath the surface. This uncertainty drove much of the writing – in the sense that I didn’t really know what I was doing both in my own life and in the world I was writing about. It did feel dreamlike and surreal, and this is how the nursery rhyme Row, Row, Row Your Boat found its way into the story (something my mother had sung to me as a child).
By now I was hooked. Obsessed with completing the story (even if it would be slight in length). I wanted to understand everything about Joe. The cyclical hate he experienced with his father and the Soldier. The way he and Fysh didn’t care to unpick their sexuality because they lacked the language and the desire to do so. I asked myself how much, if any, fate played in their world. Intrigued by the way I’d pulled in the colour red, Fysh’s hair, Birdee’s boat, the fireworks, I realised I’d tied huge elements of Joe’s life together with this surprising colour. It felt important. As did the concept of what is real and imagined. The more I wrote the further I thought about what can be conjured, these illusions that appear, and how much of the world is really ‘out there’ as opposed to inside our heads.
With the first draft of The Whale Tattoo finished I had to figure out what I would do with it. Unable to imagine not writing, I searched out opportunities to continue. I was awarded an Arvon grant to attend the residential course Fiction: Work in Progress. Then the recipient of an Arts Council England Free Reads prize. At the same time I’d been submitting short stories that were getting published here and in the US. Next I won a place on the National Centre for Writing 2019 Escalator mentoring scheme for early career fiction writers, where I was mentored by Anjali Joseph. A year later I signed with The Good Literary Agency who found a publisher for The Whale Tattoo shortly after. In April I was awarded a grant: Developing Your Creative Practice from Arts Council England, to fund my second novel The Gallopers.