Jane Rogers’ latest novel Body Tourists has just been published by Sceptre, and is an expansion of her short story and radio play. Set a few years in the future, it posits a world where digital imprints of the deceased can be implanted into the bodies of young people, giving them a 14 day extra lease of life… Jane Rogers chatted with Paul Simpson about the challenges involved.

NB There are multiple spoilers for Body Tourists within.

How did Body Tourists come about?

It actually came about as a short story originally – Simon Ings commissioned it as a story for Arc, the digital quarterly connected to the New Scientist. I’d already had the idea – the consciousnesses of old people inhabiting the body of younger people – fizzing around in my head for a while. I wrote it for that story and thought there was mileage in this. But I didn’t sit down and write the novel straightaway.

Clive Brill, a friend, read it and said it would make a good radio play – why don’t we tell [Radio 4 Commissioning Editor] Jeremy Howe about it? And then it was commissioned as a radio play. The commission, for boring reasons, got held over and in the meantime I wrote the novel. It was funny that the radio play appeared just a few months before the novel, but it was much older.

Does the short story appear in the book or did you rework it completely?

The radio play covered the ground of the story, and that was the opening of the book.

There’s a lot of material in the ‘earlier version’ (short story and the radio play) – had you worked out a lot of the worldbuilding before you penned the short story, or as you were doing the novel, did things come to you as you were working on that?

Obviously because the novel is longer and goes into much more detail so I had to do a lot more worldbuilding for the novel. I found some things I had been very pleased with in the story didn’t work in the novel, so I had to do some unpicking.

For example, in the early section when Octavia is brought back by Luke and she wants to go out; he takes her out to a gay bar. In the short story I had them go out into an appallingly noisy street where every kind of vehicle was emitting deafening noises. He puts silencers in her ears to help her across the street, and when they get into the bar she asks why it’s like that, and he says that so many people were walking along looking in their phones and getting run over all the time, every vehicle now makes the loudest noise it can. I thought that was quite a nice touch in the story but it didn’t work when I came to develop the whole world of the novel, because it’s a bit too silly. I think people would soon stop doing that, and also people wouldn’t be walking anyway.

Although now there’s an EU rule that electric cars do have to emit sound because of the dangers of people not hearing them!

jessie lamb coverThat’s what I thought but when I started to develop the idea, I thought it wouldn’t work and everybody would stop it. I also decided that people would have some sort of sensor on their phone to tell them if something was about to bump into them. You develop the idea but don’t need to explain it all for the reader – I just needed to believe in it for myself to know how it would work.

I’m a great fan of Black Mirror, and [Charlie Brooker] has people plug some little button into the side of their head, and they’re suddenly in somebody else’s head – and it’s not explained. That’s what we need to do.

Less is more is so much the case!

Exactly.

The character of Luke seems to me to be the last person who should be let near this technology. What do you think of the character? He’s both protagonist and antagonist in this.

I have a very soft spot for Luke. I see him as being probably borderline autistic; he has problems with people. His sister Hilary says this about him, that he’s not very good at relating to people but that he is actually quite idealistic. He does think that he’s going to do some good with this and give people another chance. That’s why he’s very happy for Lindy to be brought back.

That feels like an exception and does paint him in a good light.

You have to remember he’s very much under the thumb of Gudrun, and she’s paying for all this. He thinks it’s going to get up and running and be used to do good but Gudrun keeps asking for her mates to come back.

The father/son son/father situation with the rock star is one of the strongest character relationships in the book to me – which may be because I’m of a similar age to the rock star, and wonder how I would react in that circumstance.

I have to say the germ for that came from Keith Richards’ wonderful autobiography where he does talk about his dad and his childhood and background.

Do we assume that Octavia dies at the end of the first section – I always wondered with the radio play whether she survived?

(laughs) As a reader, I should ask you that question. What do you think happened?

I think she either died in the whitewater rapids, or the system failed, but I don’t think she broke out of the prison.

That’s my thinking as well. When I originally wrote it ended with that line, ‘By God, I am alive’. For me it was ironic because her habitation of Ryan’s body is going to expire that day and anyway she’s doing something that is physically killing that body because she’s going to drown it. She feels alive, but she feels alive at the point of death.

But you are not the first reader to question where she is and what happened. It’s interesting – people really like Octavia and want her to survive.

I did wonder if she’d end up inside somebody else and Luke tries to get it right this time…. I was half expecting it, but you become engaged in the other characters so it goes to the back of your mind. Her line reminded me of the line from The World is Not Enough – “There’s no point in living if you don’t feel alive”.

The world you’ve created is extrapolating further from the original, but were there things you wanted to bring into this world but you couldn’t because of the nature of the story you were telling – or are holding back for a further book that uses some of the other tech we brush up against during this?

There’s a lot there – there always is when you start to delve into the future. An earlier draft of this novel was considerably longer because it went into much more detail about the people on Paula’s estate who were addicted to virtual reality. I did a great deal of research about that; I wrote an earlier radio play called Real Worlds [broadcast as part of the States of Mind season in 2016] which had a future setting where the husband is addicted to virtual reality, and I did lots of research into VR for that.

I wanted to use more of that research in this story – I wanted to explore in detail the lives of people who are in that condition and what I realised was that it was detracting from the body tourism idea. It was a tangent to the key story so I took it right back to quite a small amount about it now. It’s something that terrifies me as a potential future and it is something that I will go on to write more about I think.

The moment where Paul shows the child what turns out to be the dinosaur VR is almost heartbreaking: he can’t leave the VR alone, yet he’s doing it for a good reason.

He’s sharing it with a kid, that’s right. That’s what I wanted to show. It’s utterly pointless to write about something that is totally bad. Nothing is totally bad; there are shades of grey in everything. That assumption – which I started with when I began researching into VR – that it’s very bad I wanted to dispel a bit with that particular scene, and I felt very sorry for Paul trying to educate his kid about dinosaurs.

The scene where the teacher is accused of molesting a child is also very powerful – was it based on any specific instance?

No, it’s not based on anything. I did a bit of research into how the police might proceed when such an accusation is made but it’s entirely out of my imagination.

What was the biggest challenge?

There are different challenges at different stages. I liked the notion that basically I was taking the idea of body tourism and testing different characters’ responses to it, both hosts and tourists and seeing how it worked out for individuals. But the feedback I got from early readers was this just felt like a collection of short stories, it was too disconnected. I said the theme ties it together and made it a novel but a couple of people I showed it to, whose opinion I absolutely respect, said it feels fragmentary, so one of the challenges was to turn Paula into a central character whose story would sort of link most of the others together. I think it made the book better, and obliged me to explore the characters in more depth.

Did it alter Paula’s trajectory in the novel?

It was shortened because originally I developed a virtual reality story and made Paula a real political campaigner, so her journey was longer in the original but I think she was a shallower character. I love writing different voices and exploring different stories but that’s only of interest if the characters come alive for the reader.

I think I was trying to do too much initially and I needed to shorten the timescale and limit the number of characters.

The book covers months if not years…

From Paula and Ryan going to Luke’s clinic and being body hosts to Luke ending up in prison, I was constantly trying to shorten the timeframe but then I was really struggling because I needed Paula to have a baby and that does take nine months! It’s shrunk a lot, and it’s not much more than two years from start to finish.

Have you thought where the tech might go after this – or can it, now that Luke’s in prison?

Gudrun gives a very unpleasant hint at the end that she’s going to sell it to the Chinese.

The book is a ‘what if’ book: what if this were possible? There could be some fantastic results, and that’s what Elsa and Lindy find – it has been utterly miraculous – and there are some terrible results.

At the end with Gudrun I suggest it could become a completely unscrupulous thing, but I don’t think that would necessarily be the case. It’s hard to know – it could be a force for good or very wicked indeed, where young people are just bred to be used for their bodies and to be put to sleep and inhabited by people who have already had a life of their own. It could become truly exploitative and terrible.

Was there a reason behind the ’14 day deadline’ that tourists can stay in the hosts, other than giving a good dramatic hook? Was it from research?

To be honest, my first reason for choosing it was he’s got to get volunteers, and to get volunteers, you’ve got to offer them an inducement – the money – but there are certain conditions. You can’t just say, “Come and I’ll put you to sleep and I’ll pay you if I wake you up in three years’ time”! People wouldn’t go for it unless they knew it was a limited time they were volunteering for. Knowing a little about people volunteering for medical research, people want to know how long it’s going to last and what the effects will be – you can’t just madly experiment on people without giving them any reassurances. I wanted it to feel real, and to feel real you have to have certain things that are sensible.

That’s where it began, and as Luke says to Octavia, he hopes it will be possible to do it for longer, but at this stage he’s got to get over all sorts of hurdles, which of course he doesn’t get over in terms of having the research approved. I’m deliberately a bit woolly about that but clear enough that the reader doesn’t think he can just do what he wants.

Might you return to the Body Tourism idea or have you said what you want to say on the subject?

I generally seem to do something very different with each book.

The original intent was satirical – I see we live in a world which has been pretty much used up by older people and that younger people are getting a very raw deal. My grandchildren will live in a world that I fear will be very inferior to the one I grew up in and I was looking for an idea that would explore that. The last thing that the old can take from the young is youth, so I’ve explored that satirical notion in this novel, so I think for another novel, I’d rather start off with a different idea.

 

Body Tourists is out now from Sceptre

Thanks to Kate Keehan for her assistance in arranging this interview