Nicolas Dickner is French Canada’s most promising novelist. His first novel, the bestselling Nikolski (2005), earned him a slew of awards. The English edition is competing in Canada Reads this year. Here he talks about his second novel, Tarmac, which was released last year.

NS: Tarmac is about a teenage whiz kid who foresees the end of the world. The girl’s name, though, is Hope. How did you balance the need for hope and the fear of the apocalypse in your book?

ND: Cet équilibre repose sur une légèreté vaguement humoristique, qui sert tour à tour la désinvolture névrotique de Hope et la nécessité pour Mickey de désamorcer son anxiété. Il m’a semblé très important de conserver cet équilibre dès le tout début de l’écriture : je ne voulais ni me joindre à l’alarmisme ambiant, ni faire de la satire, mais flotter entre les deux.

NS: The end of the world never happens. But neither does the expected love affair between the sweet narrator Mickey and the troubled Hope. Were you drawing parallels here?

ND: Oui, certainement. Toutefois, le synopsis initial du roman ne racontait pas une relation amoureuse, mais une relation paternelle. Ma fille venait à peine de naître, et je me demandais comment ma génération pouvait réconcilier ses obsessions apocalyptiques avec la reproduction. Comment envisager simultanément la fin du monde et la suite du monde ? Puisque je crains l’autobiographie, j’ai finalement transposé la question dans une relation amoureuse – ainsi que dans la mystérieuse stérilité de Hope.

NS: Hope eventually leaves her safe suburban bunker in Rivière-du-Loup and begins a wild goose chase that takes her to Manhattan, Seattle and Tokyo in search of a prophet. How does the tone of the book change at this point?

ND: Il est vrai que la première partie du récit sert à mettre en place un cadre – essentiellement, la culture du bungalow et l’ambiance de la Guerre froide. Les événements s’accélèrent lorsque Hope s’écarte de ce cadre, part en quête. Le récit d’époque devient alors un récit d’aventure.

On pourrait chercher une explication savante à ce brusque changement de modalité – mais au fond, il s’agit surtout d’une astuce narrative qui permet de dynamiser les deux questions abstraites qui alimentent cette partie du récit : « quelle est la différence entre l’apocalypse Made in USA et l’eschatologie japonaise ? » et « comment l’histoire personnelle d’un personnage change-t-elle sa vision de la fin du monde ? »

NS: Do you think that the pessimists heralding the world’s end derive enjoyment out of their scaremongering?

ND: L’eschatologie contemporaine est complexe : elle se compose de plusieurs types de fins du monde, de plusieurs types de réactions – aussi s’avère-t-il difficile de généraliser. Il semble cependant qu’une frange importante de l’auditoire tire un plaisir certain des  récits apocalyptiques, comme en témoigne le box office plusieurs fois par année.

Sans doute cela repose-t-il en grande partie sur une sorte de bovarysme à la Mad Max : face à un récit apocalyptique, nous nous imaginons d’abord dans le rôle du survivant – et la survie nous est généralement présentée comme le fruit de la vertu ou de la supériorité, rarement de la simple chance. (Inutile de préciser, en outre, que le spectateur ne s’entrevoit jamais dans le rôle d’un cadavre.)

NS: The novel is written in 97 very short chapters, some only a few pages long. Why did you opt for this approach?

ND: Ce découpage se voulait à l’origine une citation de Cat’s Cradle, le célèbre roman apocalyptique de Kurt Vonnegut, qui comporte 127 courts chapitres (certains se résument à quelques lignes).

Mais au-delà de ce simple clin d’œil, je crois que nous assistons à une tendance vers la fragmentation des textes, sans doute imputable à la place grandissante (sinon prédominante) du Web dans nos vies. Depuis une dizaine d’années, la lecture à l’écran nous a habitués à lire des blocs de textes de plus en plus fractionnés – que ce soit à l’échelle de la section, du paragraphe ou de la phrase. Dans certains cas extrêmes, chaque paragraphe correspond à une phrase.

Je ne saurais dire avec certitude s’il s’agit d’une bonne ou d’une mauvaise chose – mais il m’apparaît cependant inévitable que l’écriture littéraire se laisse influencer par ces nouvelles habitudes de lecture.

Neil Smith is the author of the book of stories Bang Crunch. He’s now working on a novel about a heaven where atheists go when they die.

Martha Johnson, lead singer of Martha and the Muffins of “Echo Beach” fame, reflects on her music career, her life with partner Mark Gane, and their new album, Delicate, which comes out in early February, 18 long years after the release of their previous album.

NS: About your latest album, you’ve said, “Delicate is so personal. I feel like my skin is transparent, and I’ve invited the whole world into my head.” How is this album more personal than past efforts?

MJ: It’s not necessarily more personal but, since our last album, some monumental things occurred that changed my everyday life and my view of the future. As Mark has said, there was a lot of death, disease, sex and high drama surrounding the making of Delicate. Any protective walls I might have had came crashing down around me. I tried to convey the emotions I was experiencing without being too specific. One of the song titles, “Life’s Too Short to Long for Something Else,” pretty well sums it up.

NS: The music of the Muffins has always mixed pure pop (like “Song in My Head”) with ambient soundscapes (like “Three Hundred Years/Chemistry”). Has it been difficult to balance this mix of the pop and the experimental?

MJ: It always seemed like a natural thing for us because of the wide-ranging musical influences that all the original members brought to the early band and that continued on with Mark and me. I, like everyone else my age, grew up in an era of great pop music with the Beatles, Motown, etc., and Mark was immersed in experimental and new music through much of high school and art college. This combination of tastes gives us that unique character.

NS: Why is there an 18-year gap between Delicate and your previous album Modern Lullaby?

MJ: Even though Modern Lullaby was literally done in our bedrooms (Bath, U.K. and Toronto), we put a lot of effort and our own money into it. It was very discouraging when Intrepid Records completely bungled the release and very few people ever heard it. That put us off the music biz for years. Our daughter was born that same year, and I just wanted to enjoy the experience of being a mother. I decided to do a children’s album, Songs from the Tree House, and spent several years performing in schools, libraries and children’s festivals. The children’s music scene was far more civilized, and I met a lot of really wonderful people. But Mark and I never stopped writing throughout that period. We just put things down roughly on cassette tapes and threw them in a drawer. Eventually, we both felt the need to get those things out into the world as a new Muffins album.

NS: I think that your voice is also suited to jazz. Have you ever considered doing a jazz album?

MJ: I’ve always imagined if I did something in the jazz genre, it would be composed of my original songs rather than old standards. I’ve already written several songs in this vein and hope to have enough to record a simple voice and piano album soon. Whether or not it would be a “jazz” album per se, I don’t know, but I crave the simplicity of that pared-down approach.

NS: You and Mark have been making music together for decades now. Were you a couple from the very start of Martha and the Muffins or did your relationship develop over time?

MJ: We met each other through David Millar, who actually started the band with Mark in 1977, but we weren’t a couple until 1981, just before the recording of This Is the Ice Age. Now we’re the “two-headed monster,” as our co-producer Leo Valvassori has called us.

NS: When your other albums came out, you didn’t have to contend with Facebook, YouTube and MySpace. How has the Internet changed your approach to marketing your work?

MJ: It’s totally liberating. Much of our career has been spent battling our former record labels, which, at times, seemed more intent on burying us rather than getting our music out to the world. With the Internet, there is no barrier between you and your listeners, no middle person, no gatekeeper, no bean-counting CEO. It’s up to you as an artist to find the money and the people to help you get the attention of your potential listeners. It’s harder in some ways, but it was far worse having a record company compromise or sabotage your work. It’s a great time to have an album out.

For more information, visit the Martha and the Muffins website. At present, the group has scheduled two shows in Toronto in early February. They are working on additional shows in other cities, including Montreal.

NS: Your narrator, Audrey, was born on February 29 of a leap year. So although she’s lived 24 years, she’s had only six birthdays. What intrigues you about a character who’s half-child and half-adult?

JG: What I feel isn’t so much intrigue as comfort. I’m comfortable with Audrey because her status as leapling makes literal a paradox I feel pretty much 24/7: being an adult without knowing how to be one.
When your narrator is two ages at once, you can throw plausibility out the window. For instance, would a grown-up disarm an air marshal and then lock herself in the bathroom and adjust her ponytail? Probably not. Also, a leapling never comes of age. A big plus. I’m against coming of age.

NS: Audrey’s father is killed by a Christmas tree. You handle death in a way that’s hilarious but touching. How did you strike this balance?
JG: I actually felt off-balance writing it. Granted, one’s reaction to death might be more off-balance if the instrument of death is a magical object, like a Christmas tree. Death by magical object takes you to a new altitude of ludicrousness—and tragedy.
I wanted to draw attention to the off-balancing nature of all deaths. It’s impossible to grasp the loss of a person because he or she is immeasurable. The whole novel is about that: the immeasurability of people. Take the human brain soaking in formaldehyde in Audrey’s father’s lab. You can hold this brain in your lap. It’s 1,400 cubic centimetres. It’s finite. But people are not finite! They are whole universes.
NS: Tortoises live a hundred years; mice live two. Both figure in your novel. What purpose do they play?
JG: Not a metaphorical one! I am against metaphors. The mouse was there from the get-go. He’s supposed to live for only two years, but he lives (ostensibly) for twenty. He also has the number 18 tattooed on his ear from his laboratory days. You can read that tattoo as an exponent. In other words, he’s bigger than he appears.
The tortoise, Winnifred, came later. She started out as a pet. Then she became a character. Then she became a narrator. I didn’t intend this, and I felt great anxiety about it. But she was too much fun to hush up. I needed her because Audrey has blind spots that only Winnifred can fill in. On the other hand, a tortoise comes with blind spots of her own. Can’t see behind that big shell of hers. So I ended up with two blind-spotted narrators who complement each other.
NS: Uncle Thoby attends a school where amputees build their own prosthetic limbs. Despite how crazy the plot becomes, you make everything seem plausible. How did you manage?
JG: Maybe having a tortoise co-narrate your novel helps, because once you cross that line, there are no lines left that you don’t feel perfectly within your rights to cross. Here’s my thinking:
1. Throw plausibility out the window.
2. Try staging your crazy story as a “biography” within your novel. Everyone knows that biographies are the biggest lies ever. Most readers will accept an implausible biography with a knowing nod.
3. Another trick: have Audrey, the audience of your inset “biography,” interject disbelief every so often. Have her liken Uncle Thoby’s new prosthetic to Luke Skywalker’s in “The Empire Strikes Back.” This will calm down any remaining plausibility-obsessed readers.

Neil Smith’s first book is called Bang Crunch. His second book will be a novel set in a heaven where atheists go when they die.

JESUS WAS A BAG OF BONES and guts covered in skin. He was just like us, nothing more. So concludes a new gospel brought to light by atheist academic Theo Griepenkerl in Michel Faber’s weirdly touching novel The Fire Gospel. Theo is an eminent authority on Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. In a bombed-out museum in Iraq, he stumbles across the oldest surviving piece of Christian literature: nine scrolls describing Jesus’s last days on Earth. Theo steals the scrolls, translates them, and publishes them as The Fifth Gospel. But, as Revelation warns, he who adds to the Bible is bound to get burned.

Michel Faber digs up gems when mining his imagination. He’s brought us eerie man-eating aliens (Under the Skin), an asexual brother and sister duo isolated in the Arctic (The Fahrenheit Twins), and a nineteenth-century hooker named Sugar (The Crimson Petal and the White). His newest novel—part of Knopf’s series exploring myths—supposedly retells the story of Prometheus, the fellow who gave fire to humanity and got chained to a rock. But the real story here is about the fellow who gave Christianity to humanity and got nailed to a cross.

The author of the nine scrolls is Malchus, a bit player in the New Testament. He’s that lowly servant whose ear is sliced off during Jesus’s arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. Malchus is a kvetcher. He’s yellow from cirrhosis, losing his hair, and a constant farter—but the guy has heart. He also loves Jesus, whom he portrays as more human than divine. For example, as Jesus hangs from the cross, the son of man screams in agony, accidentally pees on his followers below, and pleads for them to finish him off. When he finally dies, birds peck out his eyes and entrails. By this time, Jesus has few followers remaining; they were waiting for a miracle and are miffed when none occurs. Little Malchus, his faith still miraculously intact, is left to bury Jesus and foot the funeral bill.

Malchus’s grotesque account horrifies present-day Christians. During Theo’s book tour to promote The Fifth Gospel, the academic is met by “freaked-out people who look as though they’ve had their souls ripped out.” One reader tells Theo that despite heated arguments with atheists, the light of her faith burned brightly till Malchus’s story finally snuffed it out. Did Theo spare any thought for people like her? Theo ignores her question. Instead he claims that Malchus’s story has revealed “Jesus’s humanity,” a roundabout way of saying that Jesus was merely human, and flawed at that. When Theo faces death in the clutches of a pair of religious nutbars, the atheist must confront his own flaws: his lack of empathy, his egotism, his naivety, and his petty obsessions. With The Fire Gospel, Michel Faber has created a wicked satire that holds a magnifying glass over Christianity — and sets it aflame.

Neil Smith, an atheist, is writing a novel about heaven. His first book, Bang Crunch, was called “a rare fusion of thematic boldness, humour, gravity, empathy, maturity and first-rate prose” by Michel Faber.