The Sadhu Express

THE SADHU EXPRESS -- THE TITLE OF MY NEW NOVEL

Synopsis

Maddie needs a life changing makeover. She has the money, the fancy job, the social life, but she's bored of her perpetual fear of being burned at the stake for being single at the tender age of thirty five. A chance meeting in a chip shop on Old Kent Road changes all that and sends her spinning around India in search of a new identity; with Kevin, a British born Indian lad who calls himself Lapsang. Jimmy however, a close colleague of Maddie's from her days back at the Stock Exchange decides her idea to jack everything in is genius, and as well as sending his Thai bride packing back to the land of smiles, decides he wants a piece of their action. After years of singledom, Maddie finds herself hijacked by the grips of an uncomfortable threesome with two men she realizes she feels equal amounts of love for. On a journey full of tears and snot, airport dramas, coffee throwing fights and a zillion miscommunications, Maddie secretly wonders two things; if they should all relocated to a land where polygamy exists so she can marry the pair of them, or whether she would in fact be better off back in London and free and single.

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This is what I am playing with at the moment. I love novel writing for so many reasons - it's a real cerebral tour de force and both a painting with words and images that give vent to expression of the mysterious self in all its manifestations. I also believe novel writing can be used as a tool for self healing and exploration. I love the way the inroads lead to territory within that is not easy to reach or to even get to. It also allows humour to florish and dance upon pages, and it lets the personality, both light and dark sides live - just simply live; in a place where they can vent their shades and takes on reality.
I come from the school of thought that believes that all writing can be considered fiction. As the like a photographers lens, we can only capture hyper-subjectivity and this itself gives rise to the individual, lets it walk up the mountain of creativity without the need for intervention or oxygen.
I love novel writing because it is not serious (or at least doesn't have to be). I spent 5 years writing in a hyper-serious academic way. It was still a extremely creative and a mindblowing form of writing style - i.e. the ethnography, but because it was engaged with the work of other theorists it was a metaphoric and continuous tug-of-war that left me trying to prove, trying to prove, prove the unprovable of human life.
Novel writing plugs people in, can offer and deliver massive messages to the masses. And to the self. Anthropology disconnects people from places, then types in a language that only the initiated can understand.. The result: the zoo effect, where we observe and basque in the waters of ego-celebrityism of academic argument. A village where we hide behind peoples quotes. This creates a world of androids. I have a friend now who only talks to me in quotations borrowed from the theory double act that is, Deleuze and Guaratti. I have experienced the rise of some academics and the suppression of others. Life at university is a bandwagon of citations and publication war. Oh to be published by Routledge London/New York/Paris - is like gaining an Oscar and standing in the rain for the paparazzi of the imagination. I have watched ordinary people become cold and alienated from their brothers and sisters, detached, whilst floating in the realms of the super-ego. A holiday park were one goes to feed oneself self delusion. A recipe of disaster that leaves some men (and more rarely women) marrying 'natives' so that they can have a permenant inside view.

Academic writing is wonderful but located at the surface, the surface of interplay and gives us a glossy picture of our own intellect. Imperialism of landmass, that incidentally happens to be our very own body. Novel writing lives at the surface of play, but also swims in the underwater caves, surfs the swells of the imagination and remains deconnected from any such parent that wants to slap it on the hand like a naughty child. I love the freedom that the novel permits. There is no right or wrong, there is just acceptability that anything can happen, a home where creativity lives and where academic theorising dies.

The novel, and fiction writing at best is anthropology undenied.
It is a portrate that is safe for ordinary people to own then to throw away, but to experience in that process of shedding. Academic texts gather dust when they fail to deliver to people by closing the doors with there styles and language. I enjoy academic writing as a sport, but would have to embarrasingly admit, that it is no less than a fox hunt.

I will be posting some of my writings here in the upcoming weeks. Check them out, enjoy - leave feedback then trash into the senses.

Love
Lisa