{"id":1142,"date":"2011-09-27T00:52:19","date_gmt":"2011-09-27T00:52:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/?p=1142"},"modified":"2011-09-27T14:07:10","modified_gmt":"2011-09-27T14:07:10","slug":"what-happens-in-vegas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/?p=1142","title":{"rendered":"What Happens in Vegas…"},"content":{"rendered":"

…ends up in my novel. This may be something of a surprise seeing as most of it is set in an English country pub which, apart from the copious amounts of booze drunk, is probably one of the places least<\/em> like Las Vegas in the world.<\/p>\n

However, as has happened throughout the writing of this novel, what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve ended up doing in real life tends to have muscled its way into the narrative. The problem is that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m taking so long to write the thing that the danger is that the plot I started out with will be crowded out with bizarre and incidental links to what else I was up to over the two years that it will have taken to finish (I have to be optimistic that it will be completed by Christmas — well, first draft, maybe?).<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d like to say that the horribly long period between this post (written on a slow, stopping Chiltern Railways train in the dark) and the last (completed on a balcony in Santa Barbara overlooking the Pacific) was due to many words being committed to Microsoft Word but the time has mainly been spent enjoying the rest of the holiday (of which more later), getting back to work with the commute made more grinding by Chiltern Railways\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 horrible new timetable \u00e2\u20ac\u201c improved only for people north of Leamington Spa it seems \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and doing all the tedious stuff that normally arrives in September.<\/p>\n

But, as mentioned in my comments on the last post in response to Bren Gosling\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s enquiries, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve come up with a whole load of new ideas for the novel. Some are wholly extraneous, irrelevant and (quite possibly) completely gratuitous but others serve to provide some missing context and backstory and to provide a bit of extra complexity to some characters.<\/p>\n

And so to Las Vegas. This was the last stop on the holiday and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m probably one of the last of my friends to have visited the place.<\/p>\n

We arrived by car from Arizona and the Grand Canyon and, as I got the first view from the freeway about 10 miles away, I was quite prepared to dislike the peculiar cluster of high-rise buildings on the Strip, completely out of scale with the low-rise sprawl beneath.<\/p>\n

Through a combination of special offers and me haggling at the reception desk for a pair of rooms with a connecting door, we ended up with a suite and adjoining king size room on the 39th<\/sup> floor of the brand new Cosmopolitan hotel. The combined floor space was probably bigger than my house. Whereas the view from my house is of green fields and the rolling hills of the Chilterns behind, the view from the three (!) balconies we had in Las Vegas was of the Eiffel Tower (at the Paris casino), Caesar\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Palace, the Flamingo, a glimpse of the campanile tower at the Venetian and the amazing Bellagio fountains. We were too high up to hear the music (maybe a blessing) but the synchronised show was a spectacle nevertheless.<\/p>\n

\"Vegas<\/a>
Nightfall on the Strip, Las Vegas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As well as being very well appointed and luxurious, the hotel room had some unexpected bonuses \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a washing machine and tumble dryer were very useful for people who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been living out of suitcases for two weeks. So rather than a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket and some caviar blinis, room service delivered us a free packet of washing powder!<\/p>\n

This was all very serendipitous research for the novel. As some of my ex-City friends might remember a piece I workshopped with Alison last autumn where Kim and James end up in a penthouse suite in a luxury hotel in London. If anything, the Cosmopolitan was larger and better appointed than the almost surreally sumptuous suite I imagined my characters stumbling into — it even had several plasma screens that controlled the music, lights, door locks and so on as well as being TVs.<\/p>\n

I walked around photographing the suite and then also video recording it to keep for research (even the three toilets).<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll resist the temptation to make art follow life too slavishly and avoid writing into my novel a scene where Kim makes use of the facilities and puts her smalls in for an overnight wash and dry cycle (although, at that point in the story, she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not changed for 36 hours so she probably ought to).<\/p>\n

\"Paris-Las-Vegas\"<\/a>
The Eiffel Tower, Las Vegas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Another Las Vegas experience that may make its presence felt in the novel is the Beatles\/Cirque du Soleil Love<\/em> show at the Mirage. This is something I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d wanted to see since its inception about six years ago but never really thought I would \u00e2\u20ac\u201c bar a transfer to the UK. Some of the remixes in the soundtrack album \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcblew my mind\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 (to paraphrase one of the songs featured) when I first heard them.<\/p>\n

It was a superb show but, being along time worshipper of the Beatles music, I was most interested in the surround sound \u00e2\u20ac\u201c having Paul McCartney\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s harmonies on Come Together <\/em>come out from speakers behind your ears is a memorable experience.<\/p>\n

The Beatles have some very strong German connections: John Lennon is often quoted as saying \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcI was born in Liverpool but I grew up in Hamburg\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. This German influence on the outlook of one of the best-known Englishmen and shapers of popular culture in the 20th <\/span>century won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be lost on Kim \u00e2\u20ac\u201c who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a devout Anglophile but also has the patriotic fervour of the ex-pat.<\/p>\n

\"Caesar's<\/a>
Caesar's Palace on the Strip, Las Vegas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Las Vegas \u00e2\u20ac\u201c or the Las Vegas of the Strip \u00e2\u20ac\u201c is such a ridiculously OTT monument to artifice that, a little like my reaction to Disneyland, the place couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be viewed ironically \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it ridiculed itself. I was awed by the scale and audacity of the place \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a pyramid, a recreation of the New York skyline, a casino with an erupting volcano outside it and, perhaps most bizarrely, a monorail system of all things.<\/p>\n

\"New<\/a>
New York, Las Vegas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The whole place is a fiction \u00e2\u20ac\u201c an attempt to paint audacious, and convincing, narratives to disguise the low-level, slot-machine routine gambling that provides the casinos with the cashflow that is the life-blood of the city.<\/p>\n

But, ironically, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a fiction that isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t executed in a tacky way. A lot of money is spent on exactly sourcing the right sort of materials to create a pyramid or the Manhattan skyline or similar.<\/p>\n

Kim would know that one of the key figures behind much of the extravagant architecture on the Strip is Steve Wynn<\/a>, who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s used his fortune to buy a lot of valuable modern art (though one of his acquisitions lost much of its value when he put his elbow through the canvas<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The all-you-can-eat buffets in the hotels also emphasise how Las Vegas is built on human fallibilities \u00e2\u20ac\u201c greed being one, but also (obviously) gambling and \u00c2\u00a0sex is suffused throughout the city. It never seemed to be far from the surface in Las Vegas \u00e2\u20ac\u201c whether the organised touts on the Strip with their \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcGirls To Your Room in 20 Minutes\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 T-Shirts (incredibly I saw someone wearing one of these as a souvenir at the airport), the risqu\u00c3\u00a9 shows (including one Cirque du Soleil one) or the general atmosphere of a perpetual stag or hen party \u00e2\u20ac\u201c thronged with gangs of hardly-clothed young people, although no-one is going to be comfortable completely covering up in the 40C temperatures we experienced.<\/p>\n

It’s no wonder, despite the Strip’s relatively recent transformation in the 1990s, that Las Vegas has come to occupy its own niche in the pantheon of popular culture — many novels and films mine use it as a shorthand to access fallibility and excess.<\/p>\n

But despite the hedonism, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also an appreciation of real beauty and culture \u00e2\u20ac\u201c as in the opulent setting of the Venetian with its \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcreal\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 gondolas — its artifice is a step up from the fibreglass reconstructions in theme parks. The first time I walked into the recreation of St. Mark’s Square I gasped at the incredibly lifelike blue sky. It’s such a ridiculous conceit to reconstruct a water-bound jewel of the Renaissance in an American desert that it’s completely seductive — and you’re soon on the water being serenaded past Dolce and Gabbana and Louis Vuitton. I can see how Emma would fall in love with this place in a second.<\/p>\n

\"Gondoliers<\/a>
Gondoliers in Vegas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a fiction writers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 dream \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a fantastical place that is motivated by, and appeals to, all the human desires that are normally kept hidden by the inhibitions of \u00c2\u00a0society. I was so fascinated by the place I bought a couple of books when I got back on the development and history of the Strip — and I’m fascinated by the psychology of manipulation that is used in casino design.<\/p>\n

It’s almost a cliche that there are no clocks or windows in casinos (although there are big windows at the new Cosmopolitan) but there are many other subtle triggers that are used to manipulate customers’ behaviour (perhaps no more than in a supermarket but it’s better to end up with too many buy-one-get-one-frees than to have your bank account cleared out). There must certainly be parallels with fiction writing and narrative.<\/p>\n

So, despite, or perhaps because, my novel is largely set in such a supposedly staid and traditional place, some of the characters will be seduced by the idea of Las Vegas \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it would be the sort of destination that both James and Emma would visit on their own stag\/hen dos and probably go out for a long weekend in the winter.<\/p>\n

And if anyone goes on holiday to Las Vegas during the course of my novel then you know that something interesting is going to happen — and what happens in Vegas isn’t necessarily going to stay there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…ends up in my novel. This may be something of a surprise seeing as most of it is set in an English country pub which, apart from the copious amounts of booze drunk, is probably one of the places least like Las Vegas in the world. However, as has happened throughout the writing of this … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “What Happens in Vegas…”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[424],"tags":[35,730,729,240,34,130,728,110,1260,42,68],"class_list":["post-1142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-influences-2","tag-backstory","tag-beatles","tag-contrasts","tag-emma","tag-james","tag-kim","tag-las-vegas","tag-psychology","tag-research","tag-sex","tag-theme"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1142"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1161,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1142\/revisions\/1161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}