The Colour of Memory

Note on revised edition

It was too good a chance to pass up. The lack of a digital file meant that the text of The Colour of Memory would have to be entirely reset for this Canongate reissue. And so, twenty-three years after it was published, I had the opportunity to make some changes to my first novel. These changes, I felt, could only be deletions, not additions — I would intervene as the sharper editor I should have been, not as the more mature writer I had become — and they were mainly small. I took out some dialogue which seemed superfluous and deleted as many expletives as possible from the dialogue that remained. I removed a line which I’d stolen from a friend, unaware that he in turn had stolen it from Woody Allen. The only big change was to get rid of what used to be chapter 030 — an interminable and quite pointless account of a card game. The remaining chapters are now numbered differently: in this edition the last chapter is number 001, rather than number 000.

The book did not start out as a novel (and, for anyone expecting a plot, never adequately became one). It was commissioned as something loosely termed ‘The Brixton Diaries’ in the hope that the life my friends and I were leading in a particular area of south London at a particular time (the mid-to late-1980s) might have an interest that was more than local and personal. Gradually I saw a way of using and shaping the material in a slightly different way, in a form that would deploy it to better, more personal ends (I invented a sister for myself, or for my narrator, rather) and, hopefully, more lasting effect. A couple of years ago I said somewhere that ‘I like to write stuff that is only an inch from life — but all the art is in that inch.’ The importance of that inch — and the fun to be had within it — first made itself apparent in these pages.

Maybe the period in which the novel is set feels closer now, in the midst of a catastrophic recession, than it did a decade ago, before the wheels came off the economy. The difference, of course, is that back in the 1980s, in spite of the ravages of Thatcherism, the safety net of welfare support was still more or less intact. That word Thatcherism never comes up in the text itself, and neither does AIDS — not because they are unimportant to the story but, on the contrary, because they are ever-present. Nevertheless it — the book — has an idyllic quality, a rough lyricism, of which I have fond memories.

G. D.

April 2012