About the Book

Read more about Azimuth

Looking back today over the creation of Azimuth I become aware of what I was trying to do in a way that may have been unclear during the ten years it took to write. I wanted to construct a gripping, popular story but with smart writing. I wanted to discuss the good and the bad in life; war, death, god, love and friendship. We live in frightening times and most of us cannot understand why it should be so. When the Great Powers and so many individual governments use anonymous killing machines and complex economic pillaging to further their ends, putting millions to death via desperate poverty and the sword, we feel powerless and scared. We can’t begin to get our minds around the awfulness of it. It is hard to put a human face to such inhumanity. Yet, at the same time, our lives are enhanced by marvellous, intimate events such as love, childbirth, sex, nature and gifts of the imagination.

So I was driven to try to create a world where such horrors and delights were experienced at a human level and which might help us all to think clearly about what we are here for as humankind. No religious tract. No soppy faith stuff. Just a steady focus on being alive and what we can do to stop feeling so powerless.

Azimuth is fantasy literature in the same way that Lord of the Rings is. One part is set some time before the Buddha and the other some time after Mohammed. I leant heavily upon legend and fable, on heroes and mythical events, on Samurai codes and on the time when ordinary people felt that there were gods everywhere controlling all of our affairs and later, in one god controlling everything. Then I constructed two narratives, a bit like two snakes wrapped around each other. In one, Kamil the Historian reads his account of the life of a warrior who became a wise magus, comprising sixty six tales selected from the life of this fictional man. Meanwhile, in his own time Kamil, himself, this podgy middle aged and fusty historian becomes dragged into court conspiracies, to discover he is a natural early detective and acute observer of human drives and frailties. And also to realise that he is a man with very male needs.

Thus, as you read the three books covering the three great periods of the Magus’ life, everything you encounter is at ground level, seen through  human eyes and you, too, can experience extraordinary events and struggle to make sense of them like the Magus and Kamil do. You will meet many powerful women, who control the affairs of their people and much of the overall story, male and female characters who display the full range of human contradiction and unpredictability, stuff from nightmares and horror, stuff of dreams and delight, wild adventure with twists and turns to baffle and amuse.

Azimuth is fabulous (a reaching out towards adult fable), a work of the imagination rather than the result of historical research and I hope it transports you, grips you and provides you with an understated means to grapple with the great questions of life. The early reviews point this way!

 

What is not in Azimuth!

I thought it would be entertaining to write a blog about the minor characters in Azimuth and link to them via this site so that you, in effect, may know more about them than when you meet them on the page – if you so desire! This was precipitated by the comment of a keen follower of Azimuth who, a bit like the fanatical fan of the writer in Misery (no, it couldn’t happen to me, could it? I’ll just hide the sledgehammer!) was distressed at the end of the trilogy not to know what happened to the seven half-humans, once the final book had ended. “I love them,” she said. “They are real.”  I created them (or they may have made me create them) but the fact is that they could well still exist albeit in some pure thought form. This is not such a bizarre concept. Indeed, recently I saw a documentary asking serious questions about the basic quantum force of the universe and ‘thought’ was one of the hypotheses being advanced. Just as in The Matrix films it is posited that we are all actually a few lines of clever code in a vast computer program (again, some scientists consider this a strong possibility to explain present human reality) the characters that authors create may live on after the last page of a novel – as pure energy. Rather a charming notion if we look back over great literature, don’t you think? Anna Karenina enjoying ethereal companionship with Hamlet and Bilbo Baggins. In this alternative literary universe all the characters authors have created don’t die but live on. Meanwhile, the notion that minor characters in novels and plays have been unjustly marginalized by authors is not so new, being the central motif of Six Characters in Search of an Author by Pirandello or Rozencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard. The conceit in these and other literary creations is that we, the readers, are curious to know more biographical detail about them than the author allows or even knows.

Since Azimuth contains dozens of minor characters, there is plenty to write about. It will encourage me to go into a channeling state, like a batty medium, and make contact with them again. My reaching out into the ether might entertain you and at the same time lead you to obtain the core material, Azimuth the Trilogy. I can’t be more frank, can I? This is marketing but not as you know it, Captain.

Here’s the link. Over to you! (click here)

New Images for E-books

To continue the marketing theme, I have redesigned the front covers of the three Azimuth books with the considerable help and expertise of Helen Teague, the clothes designer (click here). And this is what they look like. Click on each image to purchase at Kindle Amazon.