BLOG TOUR SPOTLIGHT: The Well Deceived @authoright #isaackuhnberg #clinkstreetpublishing
The Well Deceived
by Isaac Kuhnberg
It's my spot on the blog tour today for The Well Deceived! Continue below to learn more about the book, the author and a passage on how this story came to life.
Publisher: Clink Street Publishing
Publish Date: May 15, 2018
Paperback
Standalone
Genre: Dystopia
A thought-provoking mystery in turns comic and
disturbing, set in a country that resembles England in the 1950s, with one
crucial difference. No women.
William Riddle is a scholar at Bune, the ancient
public school where the sons of Anglia’s first families are prepared for a
leading role in society. His first few weeks are a miserable round of bullying
and abuse, until he makes a friend: Paul Purkis, son of a government minister.
Together they create a grotesque private world, known as Malcaster, populated
by criminals and deviants, as an outlet for their contempt for the school and
its staff.
Overnight William’s world collapses. He is called into
the headmaster’s office and told that his scientist father has committed an
unspecified act of treason. William is hauled off to a detention centre to be
interrogated. Escaping, he finds refuge in the louche sub-culture of the
capital city, and comes to learn that everything he has ever been taught is a
complete fabrication.
About the Author:
Splitting his time between the South
of France and Cambridge, Issac Kuhnberg enjoys spending his time writing and
painting. At The University of Hull he gained his PhD in English focussing on
the novels and authors of the 1930’s, including Christopher Isherwood and
Evelyn Waugh, which would later inspired his own writing. His debut novel The
Well Deceived by Issac Kuhnberg (published by Clink Street Publishing 15th May
2018 RRP £ paperback and £ ebook) is available to purchase from online
retailers including Amazon and to order from all good bookstores.
Spotlight on William Riddle
William Riddle, the narrator of The Well Deceived, is in many respects a version of my younger
self. So much was inevitable when I chose to make him my narrator. But in a
novel a character’s personality is only a starting point: things only start
getting interesting when we see is how a character reacts to the situation in
which he finds himself. The fact that Anglia, William’s country, is populated
exclusively by men, radically determines the course of his life by dictating
the way he expresses his sexuality and his relationship with authority.
For William, the society of Anglia is normal, because it is the
only one he knows. As he learns more about that society, however, he begins to
question its credibility. The process
begins with his relationship with his father, a brilliant but socially awkward
scientist, who clearly knows rather more than he is prepared to admit. William admires his father, but realizes that
his own gifts lie in a different direction, and that his father’s advice is for
this reason not to be relied on.
Nonetheless he yields to his father’s persuasion, and agrees to become a
scholar at Bune, the ancient public school which educates the sons of Anglia’s
first families. Bune takes its name from the Grand Duke of Hell: an ambivalent
figure who possesses the dual role of commanding thirty legions of demons, and
having the power to make men eloquent and wise. Bune, for that reason, can be
either an opportunity, or a curse. For William it turns out to be both.
In his first year at Bune William is made to serve as a tick – a
kind of menial servant – to an older boy named Nevis, an abusive bully who does
his best to make him think of himself as an inferior boy of inferior status.
His fortunes improve when he is befriended by Paul Purkis, the son of a
government minister. Together the two boys create a grotesque imaginary town
called Malcaster, which serves as an outlet for their feelings of alienation
from the school and its headmaster, who William soon comes to think of an
enemy.
As his status within the school improves, William becomes increasingly
less critical of the society that sustains it. Once he can see himself as one
of the future leaders of society, he decides that privilege is a necessary, if
not desirable, component of an orderly society.
He undergoes the disturbing rite of passage known as ‘Union’, and he and
Paul are made Praetors. A golden future beckons.
Overnight William’s world turns upside down. He is summoned to the
headmaster’s office, and told that his father has committed treason, and that
he is to be expelled. A policeman called Jarvis takes him off to a detention
centre to be interrogated about his father’s whereabouts.
Now for the first time William learns what it means to be without
protection – to exist at the mercy of the state. His transitory privilege has
been stripped away, reducing him to the status of an outcast. It is at this
point that the third and most meaningful phase of his learning starts. To find
out how much of the truth he uncovers, and how much remains concealed from him,
you will have to read the book.
One of the challenges of writing the book was defining the nature
of William’s sexuality. Early in life he
develops his own theory of attraction, based on his experience as his monastic
nursery school:
As a general rule, boys are drawn to the physical type
least like their own. The slighter boys are drawn towards the stockier, and
vice versa. The same pattern of attraction has applied at every phase of my
life, and in every pocket of society I have visited: so much so that I suspect
it of being a universal law of nature.
William’s understanding of sexuality is less complete than he
realizes. Observing, for example, that
the relationship between himself and Paul is not a sexual one – something he
thinks is just as well -- he fails to consider the possibility that Paul might
have very different feelings on the subject. Later on, when the two boys go
slumming in a Cantleford pub, Paul’s readiness to flirt with the youths who buy
them drinks leaves him peeved, but essentially unmoved. William, apparently, is
something of a cold fish. Significantly, the closest he gets to an intense
sexual experience is his experience of Union:
I was flying amazingly over threads of roads and
fields like postage stamps and forest-clumps like heads of broccoli, upwards,
towards the sun. Below all this, in a green glade, improbably beautiful dancers
were performing acrobatic feats for my entertainment, coupling, tripling,
quadrupling. I was consumed by a ravishing kaleidoscopic geometry of elastic
globes and yielding folds and creases, constantly melting and reforming into
fresh arrangements of succulent flesh and flowering hair…. White light
blossomed, and a soundless explosion that went on and on and on; and for an
unmeasurable passage of time I was incapable of thinking or perceiving anything
at all.
William, as I say elsewhere, may start out with a
personality like my own, but as the book progresses he takes over the
narrative, and leads me, as he leads the reader, into uncharted territory.
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