Painting, Paris and Pareidolia: The Eleven Associates of Alma-Marceau
An intriguing novel set in both the centre of Paris and the suburbs of Birmingham is due to be published this week, which, in addition to taking us on an adventure filled to the brim with espionage, crime, old electronic technology and absinthe cocktails, opens up some odd – make that really odd – ideas about Leonardo da Vinci and the history of art. The debut novel by The Old School Writers Circle – a group of friends who met at school in Birmingham in the late eighties/early nineties – The Eleven Associates of Alma-Marceau has been tipped as one of the art books to watch out for in 2020.
Fused: Without giving too much away, what’s the story about?
The Old School Writers Circle: The Eleven Associates of Alma-Marceau is a novel about a school-leaver called Adam King who enters a painting competition, for which the prize is an internship at a contemporary art museum in Paris. Adam’s parents had died in a car accident just a couple of years earlier, so he’s been living with his grandfather in Stirchley in the suburbs of Birmingham. The grandfather is an amateur radio enthusiast who regularly visits a small electronics shop in Stirchley that is an Aladdin’s cave of old audio and audio-visual technologies. The owner, a young woman called Alice, is full of surprises, as is Adam’s grandfather.
Fused: Who are the Eleven Associates, and what is Alma-Marceau?
OSWC: Over in Paris, we find an unusual group of eleven young people who have dreams of changing the world for the better. Under the informal leadership of Antoine Marionette, whose mother is a wealthy architect and property developer, the group meets up as The Eleven Associates of Alma-Marceau, named in part after Alma – Marceau, the Métro station closest to Antoine’s mother’s townhouse in the middle of the museums district. The group seems good natured, but can they be trusted?
Fused: It’s a story with adventure, espionage and some pretty kooky ideas about the history of art.
OSWC: Yes, it’s definitely got some mystery and intrigue going on, not least about the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. We don’t want to spoil it for readers, suffice it to say that the story proposes that not everything is necessarily as it appears in his paintings. Adam makes a discovery that is so extraordinary and odd that he’s not even sure what to make of it himself, and the story opens up these ideas for the reader to make up their own minds about. It involves ‘potential images’ and pareidolia – the phenomenon of your mind thinking it sees faces and figurative imagery in abstraction, even if it’s not intentional. It is perhaps ultimately, though, about the imagination, in a strangely profound way: the power of the artist’s mind, and that of the viewer, to get into a dialogue – through a painting – about what the eyes can see, and what the mind thinks it can see. We’ve found it quite a beautiful, amazing proposition to consider and to discuss – one that only poses more, new questions about Leonardo and how we think about images. In an era of surveillance, social media, digital manipulation and post-truth, we can’t help but feel that Leonardo is still a step ahead of us, more than five hundred years after his death.
Fused: Tell us about you as a group of writers and the process of making this, your first novel.
OSWC: We’re a group of friends who grew up in the suburbs of Birmingham. We’ve been talking about Leonardo and the visual imagination for over twenty years. Then about five years ago we were having dinner together and decided we should try to write a story that would address these ideas – something that we could all work on together. We were originally thinking of it like a screenplay for a film or TV series, but settled on the idea of a book, which we felt was a more tangible goal. We thought it would just be a fun thing to do, which it certainly has been, though maybe none of us really expected the project to become a reality. Five years later here we are with a beautifully designed hardback book, printed and bound in Italy, being published and distributed internationally. None of us has ever written a novel before – it’s pretty new to all of us, really. We’ve all contributed different aspects – characters, themes, plot elements and so on. When we pitched our plan for the book to the distributors, they were really enthusiastic about it, which spurred us on to get it done.
Fused: Do you have plans for a sequel?
OSWC: [Laughter] It’s probably a bit early to be thinking about that! Well, we’re still all talking to each other, which is not bad going after working on something like this together. We’ll have to see how well this first book does and whether the publisher and distributor want to commit to another one further down the line. We’ve certainly got plenty of ideas we’d like to explore together – new material that has come up from working on The Eleven Associates of Alma-Marceau that we’d like to pursue if we have the chance. We live in various different cities, we’ve all got day jobs and some of us have families, so it’s not always easy to meet up or for us all to find time to read or work on the latest draft. We feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to make this first novel happen and we just hope people will enjoy reading it as much as we’ve enjoyed creating it. Leonardo’s still messing with our minds now – in a good way!
The Eleven Associates of Alma-Marceau, by The Old School Writers Circle, is published by Anomie Special Projects, an imprint of Anomie Publishing, London, and released in the UK on 6 February 2020, cover price £20.
Images courtesy of Anomie Publishing, photography by Ossie Morris
