Peter Taylor-Gooby's Blog: Ptg's Blog

This review by a librarian on NetGalley captures what the book is about:
The Immigrant Queen by Peter Taylor-Gooby is a compelling and thought-provoking novel that explores the complexities of identity, migration, and belonging. The story follows the life of an immigrant woman who faces the challenges of adapting to a new culture while navigating personal and societal struggles. Taylor-Gooby’s writing is rich in detail, offering a nuanced portrayal of the immigrant experience and the emotional and political hurdles that come with it. The book combines elements of social commentary with a deeply personal narrative, making it both engaging and reflective. It’s a powerful read for those interested in themes of migration and the human quest for identity and acceptance.

*****

Why I wrote The Immigrant Queen
The fact that we now talk of Aspasia, the hero of this novel, less than we do of Pericles, her husband, or Alcibiades of Athens or Socrates (who may also have been her lover) is unfortunate since her achievement, considering her starting point, is even more impressive than theirs. That is one of the reasons I wrote The Immigrant Queen.
Aspasia was an intelligent, wise, well-educated and beautiful woman, but what drove her to attain the leading position for a woman in the city that dominated the Eastern Mediterranean? There is no firm answer but if she wished to pursue knowledge, express and develop her ideas in the company of other thinkers, to claim some of the opportunities that men had in her society and to live as she wished with her lover, to be Aspasia, First Lady of Athens, she simply had no alternative. She must struggle in a city that largely ignored women and despised immigrants and finally succeed. That life is what I seek to portray in The Immigrant Queen.

The Immigrant Queen: Extract

Limander, a slave and bard to Aspasia, meets a young nobleman and falls for him. Love between slave and noble carries the death penalty.

The young scribe was last to leave and I waited, head bowed, for him to go so that I could carry out the screens. A gold band circled the neck of his tunic – he was of high standing in Athens, from one of the five noble families of the city. He dropped the stylus into his satchel but the tablet slipped from his fingers and fell face down on the floor and I heard the crack as the wax split across. He stared at it as if terrified, dropped to all fours and put out a hand to touch it. A leader of the people does not behave like this. After a moment I went over and stood beside him.
‘Sir. May I help you?’
He looked up at me, his eyes moist with tears. He seemed so young.
‘The musician! None of them appreciated you, you sang so beautifully of love and all they want to do is talk about politics and speech-making.’
‘Thank you. But, if I may ask, sir, is there anything I can do for you?’
‘It’s Lord Pericles, no-one will understand. He wants to publish these conversations for the glory of Athens and he insists on checking everything. I am late already and now I’ve broken the tablet and he will be angry.’
Why are you telling me so much? But I knew I could help him and suddenly I wanted to. There was a quality of eagerness in his face and of wanting, as if he was – I know not what. Someone who has suffered disappointment so often that he expects it but does not stop trying. And he was so young, anyone would want to make things better for him.
I took the tablet from him and set it on the tiles.
‘Put your hand on it to soften the wax where the crack is, just enough. Here, let me help.’
I took his wrist and pressed his palm on the tablet. His hand was warm in mine. When I judged the wax was ready I lifted it. I took the stylus and smoothed over the crack where it ran between the letters. Delia taught me how to do that.
‘There. Now I will make good the damaged words and it is healed.’
I handed it to him. He looked up at me again, his eyes wide.
‘A magician! I did not know that was possible. Thank you for your kindness.’
I bowed.
‘Limander. Happy to help.’
He laughed.
‘I am Alcis, and you are so much like a butler – I’m sorry, I should not say that.’
He paused as if he did not know how to put his feelings into words.
‘You are blessed by the muse, a fortunate man. I always wanted to sing. I am an actor – but only in my dreams. Pericles would never let any of his clan stoop so low.’
He paused again.
‘It must be a fine thing to stand on a stage before everyone and have them rapt, silent, intent on you, your gestures, your singing, as if you are the only person out of all Athens who matters to them. But they didn’t listen to you, as if they were deaf to your music. But you are glorious.’
He glanced down, and when he looked up at me, his eyes shone.
‘Am I a fool?’
I smiled as if I understood. How could I not?
‘An actor. Many times I have played for actors.’
I strummed a few notes and sang softly the opening chorus of Antigone:

“Now the long blade of the sun flames forth…”

His face lit up and he joined me, his voice strong for one so slender:

“Lying level, east to west,
It touches with glory seven-gated Thebes!
The eye of golden day strikes the white shield of the enemy,
Lord Polynices, like an eagle, screams insult at our land.”

He laughed and I couldn’t help laughing with him. Then, just as suddenly as the joy had come a shadow fell on his face.
‘No, I’d love to sing with you, but I must go. Pericles does not wait happily. But you and I, we will meet again won’t we, at the Assembly, or the gymnasium, or the theatre or a party? We will sing again, together? You’re new, let me show you the city.’
Another friend for me in this city, but we will meet in none of those places because they are for citizens and nobles. I am a slave and no comrade for you, but how can I tell you that now?
‘I’d like that,’ I replied and kept the sadness from my face.
He stood, touched my arm, blushed, and was gone.
‘Or perhaps in this house?’ I whispered.
I lingered a moment and prayed to Necessity, pitiless deity of all without choice, the goddess who rules slaves and heeds no man. I had glimpsed the life I might have had in Athens, if I were a visitor, perhaps in the train of an envoy from Sicily, not a slave from a subject nation.
I heard someone moving in the hall and looked up. Pelion came towards me, carrying one of the screens.
‘Take care, brother. You know that lad is Lord Pericles’ cousin? Slave and noble, that never ends well.’
His voice was steady, but there was a hesitancy in it.
‘I wanted to help him. I just did.’
He avoided my gaze.
‘We need to change your bandage. Clean hands and a lyre, they don’t guess you’re a slave right away, but someone will see through you. You can’t wear that bandage for ever.’
He led me back to the shed, not speaking, and dressed my arm, as deftly as a nurse. I touched the dressing.
‘You rest,’ I said. ‘I’ll do the firewood.’
He patted my arm, careful of the mark.
‘My job.’
He took the axe and set about the logs in the yard. I hauled water and went back to the hall to scrub the spilled wine from the mosaic. Much later I returned across the courtyard under a chariot moon. I threw myself down on the straw and lay in darkness, a slave who dreamed he might live as he did in Mytilene, when he was honoured as a Bard and free. Pelion speaks the truth, I told myself. Besides, the young noble has probably forgotten you already, and you still think of him, like a fool.

Nic
Nic pulls a piece of paper from her pocket and sits hunched forward on the seat of the taxi, trying to read it in the streetlights. She waves it at me:
‘That’s it: they outsource.’
It’s torn off some packaging. The label reads: Summerson’s Prepared Meat and the address is N18. She’s already thumbing her mobile.
‘Driver. We need to get to Argon Road. Where the Lea Navigation crosses the A406 – quick as you can.’
It’s late and the lights hurt my eyes.
‘No. It’s OK. We’ll go where I first said.’
The driver pulls up in the middle of the bus lane and looks round at us.
‘Make your mind up.’
‘Where I said, please. I’m paying.’
‘You been drinking? Read the sign.’ He taps the glass: £100 Clean-up Fee. No Exceptions. He has a round fleshy face and dark marks under his eyes. A miniature plastic crib is stuck on the middle of the dashboard with a snapshot of a baby in pink, both arms reaching towards the camera, propped up in it.
‘Your little girl?’
‘Yeah.’ He touches the crib and it sways in its mounting. ‘Little Louie.’ A bus horn blares out behind us. ‘Gotta go.’
Nic snatches my wallet.
‘Argon Road, follow the trail. This is important.’
‘Nic – give that back.’
She’s got the window open and the wallet’s half out, flapping in the slip-stream. She clings onto the tiny strap and watches it as it sways backwards and forwards.
‘Nic, you need your medicine.’
She falls back against me, so suddenly it almost winds me.
‘I never wanted to be like this, never, never, never … no way I can tell you what it’s like. Why can’t I just be someone like Jack?’
She fixes her eyes on me and she’s twelve years old and school is too easy for her and I’m telling her to be patient.
‘I know I’m right. We can’t not go there. You’ve got to trust me.’
I didn’t ask for this, any of it. I just wanted kids.
I slip the wallet back in my pocket and tap on the glass.
‘Like the lady says, can you take us up to Argon Road?’
‘Right you are. You know it’s double fare up that way after ten?’

Argon Road slants off the North Circular to the trading estate behind Ikea.
‘You’ll wait for us? Ten minutes?’ I hand over an extra £20.
‘Sorry.’
The door locks click and he’s off.
I pull my coat tight and look round. The air’s damp from the river and smells of diesel fumes and tarmac.
Two-storey corrugated iron sheds line the road, each with its compound, behind a three-metre metal fence. Harsh yellow streetlights clustered in fours on forty metre poles cast midnight shadows. I feel like an intruder in a giant’s world. A huge lorry with blank sides like a moving fortress glides past, the driver invisible in the cab. In the background the roar of the A406 is continuous, here there’s the pulse of solitary engines and the occasional shout and clatter of iron crates, but no movement I can see.
I shift closer to Nic but she’s concentrating on the torn packet, holding it out in front of her as if it’s a map and she expects to see landmarks. I shade my eyes to look for numbers on the buildings.
‘That’s it.’
The letters SPM in lime-green neon, superimposed on a golden bullock, shine out from a scaffolding above a one-storey shed at the end of the row.
Nic’s ahead of me, I half run to keep up with her.
I can’t catch my breath.
‘Slow down, we’ve got to keep together.’
‘That’s it,’ she says again. ‘Don’t you see – they outsource. No forced workers actually in your restaurant.’
‘Nic, it’s just a business. Come on, you need to get home. We’ll sort out your pills.’
The windows along the side of the shed are ablaze with light. I smell the sour salt smell of blood and see people moving around inside. The fence is higher than the one for the next compound, and the gates are locked. Nic stands back, checking it where it turns a corner. The air’s chill on my face and I start to shiver inside my overcoat. She doesn’t seem to notice the cold.
She hooks her fingers into the wire mesh above her head and hoists herself up. I grab at her belt.
‘Don’t be a fool. That’s razor-wire on top.’
‘Lend me your coat.’
Her shoes are too broad to get a foothold. I catch her as she slithers down. She stumbles backwards against me and I get my arms round her.
She pauses for a second, leaning back into my chest. She’s so cold. I open my coat and wrap it round her. For a few moments neither of us moves. I could stand there, like that, forever, they’d find us frozen in the morning. She stirs and rattles the fence.
‘Thanks Dad. Let’s go.’
I take her hand.
‘I’ll see if I can get a cab on the main road.’

I’m lucky – I live in a small town on the edge of countryside where no-one’s told the Spring about Covid-19 and I have a good-sized garden. It must be very difficult and very hard managing in a small flat trying to home-school children and keep up with the home-working…
As an amateur author everything seems to rest on the ideas coming in my head. I spend many hours remodelling and replotting and rewriting, but it always seems to start out with a vision that appears in my head: people there in great clarity. I can’t hear what they’re saying but I can tell by their body language what their relation is whether it’s conflict or love or compassion that’s driving them. It’s that revelation that forms the starting point and the passion that compels me to write, whatever happens to the words in the slow process of finalising the script is secondary.
Perhaps it’s that nothing measures up to the colossal scale of what it going on about us, perhaps it’s that there is enough drama in everyday life and on TV and on the media now to quieten whatever produces the visions, perhaps it’s just a temporary break, a lockdown of ideas. I try to start out on something, but find it hard to take the words anywhere and look forward to resuming normal life when I hope the writing will come back to me.
On my walks, I spend time thinking about what the world After Coronavirus will be like and how it will differ from the past. We must rebuild and we must rebuild better. The pandemic has brought us face to face with so much that doesn’t quite work in our world and also shown us the neighbourliness and the quiet acts of generosity and of self-sacrifice that all of us value.
One of the objectives of fiction is to help us understand our lives together, through imagination, compassion and empathy, and to visualise how things could be different. My most recent novel “Blood Ties” is set in the under-world of people-trafficking and forced labour. The characters strive to change or ignore or acquiesce in the issues hidden in plain sight all round them.

Delighted to see my novel mentioned in the August "Times Higher Education" - a journal for intellectuals, in an article about whether imaginative fiction has more influence on people's ideas than academic research: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/...

"'Blood Ties', like his previous books, is about the implications of a world dominated by market principles and follows an advertising executive who is blackmailed into leading a campaign to make modern slavery acceptable to the public."

Looking around, there seem to be three kinds of novels:
- A: A small minority, heavily promoted by major publishers, that take-off into the stratosphere and sell very well
- B: Most other novels, which are published with initial notices, reviews and blog-mentions, sell some copies, hit a peak and then decline to the ‘500,000th on Amazon’ status
- C: A small group, between C and B, which sustain reasonable sales and continue to do so over time.
So far as I can see, there are often no obvious differences in quality in novels in the three groups. So what makes the difference? Particularly what moves a novel from group C to group B?

My day job involves running large surveys of public attitudes to the welfare state. Sounds boring? Not necessarily. The big change you notice, over time and also comparing Britain with other advanced countries is that attitudes here have become more individualist. People are generally keen on the big public services, the ones that cost lots of money, like the NHS, state pensions and the education system. They’re much less keen on benefits or services directed at the poor, those on low wages or on zero-hours contracts or unemployed. They also don’t like paying tax, and don’t realize how much the tax burden has shifted away from income tax (better off people pay a higher proportion of their income in income tax) and towards VAT (those on low incomes pay the highest proportion of income in VAT).
When you ask people why they look at the world in the way they do, there are two kinds of answers. First, they don’t trust politicians or policy-makers or anyone really with ideas about how society should be organized. They don’t want people to meddle and that means a world of the lowest common denominator, where people get what they earn and pay for what they have and that’s it.
The other reason is that many people don’t think very much about what you might call the ‘public realm’ or ‘the community’ or society. In a project I’m currently running we ask groups of 30 or 40 people to hammer out what they’d like the welfare state to be like for their children’s generation in extended discussions over two or three days. There are experts on hand to provide ideas or facts, but only if people ask for them.
Everyone is aware how hard it is for young people to pay for college or university, to get access to decent housing through private renting and virtually impossible to buy a house without a lot of help, and to get a secure job and hold it down. Very few people think in terms of collective interventions by government department or local councils or agencies like trade unions or community groups. So what’s the answer?
It’s not cut the fees and pay for the colleges and universities through tax or get councils to build a lot of housing using cheap government loans or pass laws to give people greater rights at work or get the government to invest to create more jobs. It’s much more often: help people help themselves: more training and more university places so young people can get better qualifications and get on – compete better with each other. And that’s it.
The world that people think about and which limits their opportunities to work out what to do in society has become steadily narrower, more concerned with me and my family and anyone else is somewhere beyond my concerns. All my solutions are about how me and mine can get ahead.
I’ve written this up in academic books which get read and discussed by other academics who have all sorts of bright ideas about how the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the rise of newly developed economies in the global market and the decline of manufacturing industry from about half (in 1955) to about 10 per cent of the economy play a part, but none of this goes anywhere.
So I’ve started on novels. Writing a novel is the most testing experience I’ve had. It involves imaging a world run purely on market principles, in which everyone is a complete individualist, caring only for their own interests and bargaining for everything. Such a society could function and grow. It would be very unequal and it would require strong laws – but it would work. The point is of course that things we take for granted, that link us together – trust, empathy, love - would be outlawed. Life would not be recognizably human. People would have to work hard to stand still, but it would never be clear what the point was, apart from doing better than somebody else.
That’s what I’ve tried to portray in my new novel, ‘The Baby Auction’.

Social science and novels have much in common. Both deal in understanding the world and how to live in it, both build on traditions of previous knowledge, both use words. Social science studies how the things that people do – the laws they make, the way men and women interact, the dreams and aspirations people have, the way they run their economies, how the rich treat the poor, affects our world. Novels deal in empathy, emotion, individual feeling, why this person made this choice and not that.
The big difference is that social science deals in aggregates: ethnic groups, social class, gender groups, old and young; literature explores the world of the individual. Everyone knows of novels, from Zamyatin’s ‘We’ to Atkinson’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ to Ballard’s ‘High Rise’, that are really based on truths of social science, about totalitarianism, gender politics, class in the mass society. We talk about science fiction, but not about social science fiction. Why not?
One answer to this question is that social science is unfashionable, boring, just not engaging because it reduces our lived experience to numbers and categories. Clothes or murder are interesting, the sociology of fashion or the ONS crime statistics aren’t.
There’s another answer, and it goes to the heart of what literature is about. The novel form insists on the uniqueness of the character: this is Jane fleeing across the moor, with Rochester tugging her back, this is Kathy, victim of the society that has bred her to harvest her body-parts and of Ruth, who steals her lover – and who accepts it all, this is Winston Smith, facing inevitable defeat in his lonely struggle against Big Brother. But there’s a paradox. How can the character be unique? Readers all over the world empathise with them, their experiences, feelings and responses are part of something that is common to all of us.
The novel form squares the circle between the exclusive individuality of experience and the common possibility of empathy, of identification and sympathy between the experiences of different people. Social science takes a different route to the same goal. The social scientist seeks to locate the experience of the individual within the common experience of people in that kind of society by aggregating, sifting and working out what all the members – the gender group, the social class, the ethnic minority – have in common with each other and how they typically interact.
Social science has been responsible for huge advances, from understanding racism and how to combat it to maximising assembly-line productivity, from explaining why people eat foods they know are bad for them to demonstrating the best way to nurture and develop a child. We can’t see literature through the same lens as social science because that would be to admit the trick. Novels are both individual and social at the same time, and they only work at the level of individual empathy because we ignore the tedious commonality of experience that makes the social possible.
To have a category of ‘social science fiction’ on the shelves at our local bookshop would defeat the point of literature and distance Jane and Kathy and Winston Smith, reducing them to instances of general laws. They typify how people like that behave under such and such circumstances, and not people as real as we are, people we can understand, whose emotions we can feel and – who knows? – people we might one day be like.