By: Joanne Harris

Paperback

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As featured by Toni Whitmont in the May 2010 Booktopia Buzz.

From the Author:

I started out three years ago, with nothing but fragments of plotline and my narrator’s voice to guide me. I’d been going through some troublesome times, and my sunny disposition had taken something of a blow. I found I didn’t want to write, and spent far too much time online, hanging around various sites and searching out ever more ingenious ways of evading reality. Under a pseudonym, I made a number of online friends, wrote a great deal of fanfic, and began to take an increasing interest in the way people interact online, the communities they create and join, and the way they choose to portray themselves. I understood too, how emotionally dependent people can sometimes become reliant on their virtual friends and their virtual communities, even though there can be no way of knowing how honest these avenues of communication really are.
From all this came Blueeyedboy, a dark psychological thriller set in the world of the internet, where no-one is quite what they seem to be, and every taste is catered for, even the ones to which we dare not confess.

'Once there was a widow with three sons, and their names were Black, Brown and Blue. Black was the eldest; moody and aggressive. Brown was the middle child, timid and dull. But Blue was his mother's favourite. And he was a murderer.'

Blueyedboy is the brilliant new novel from Joanne Harris: a dark and intricately plotted tale of a poisonously dysfunctional family, a blind child prodigy, and a serial murderer who is not who he seems. Told through posts on badguysrock@webjournal.com, this is a thriller that makes creative use of all the disguise, deception and mind games that are offered by playing out one's life on the internet.

About The Author

Joanne Harris is the author of the Whitbread-shortlisted Chocolat (made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp) and seven other bestselling novels. Her hobbies are listed in Who's Who as 'mooching, lounging, strutting, strumming, priest-baiting and quiet subversion'. She plays bass guitar in a band first formed when she was 16, is currently studying Old Norse, and lives with her husband and daughter in Yorkshire, about 15 miles from the place she was born.

"Delivers an almighty twist in the tale late on... brilliantly atmospheric and at times heartbreaking."
-- "The Times"

"We all loved Chocolat, and Joanne Harris' new thriller, which follows the lives of three brothers and their dysfunctional families via a series of web journals, has the same beauty with a modern edge. A dark, intricate tale."
"--Company"

"An ingenious, gripping read... it terrified the living daylights out of me."
"-- Daily Express"

"Brilliantly written, plotted and insightful... beware unreliable narrators along with a huge plot twist at the end."
"-- Mirror"

"Engrossing psychological thriller... a novel of unusual complexity... Harris, best known for Chocolat", "again shows her skill and versatility."
""-- "Mail on Sunday
"

An Interview with Joanne Harris:
br/> My, this is dark, isn’t it? And may I say – creepy?

Creepy is fine. I like creepy. And yes, this is a very dark tale, although I see it principally as a black comedy, not to be taken entirely seriously.

Oh? So it’s not a whodunnit, then?

Not exactly. Most of the time I was writing it, I wasn’t sure what (if anything) had been dun, or indeed, by whom. I see it now - like Gentlemen and Players, its close relative - as a kind of murder-mystery with no detective, no apparent crime and a couple of quite unreliable narrators - Joanne Harris with a twist.

A twist? And how! Did you plan it all out beforehand?

Actually, no. I had some ideas laid out at the start, but the main reveal – the whammy – surprised me as much as anyone else. I had to go back and rewrite half the book to accommodate what I’d just found out …

The narrative structure is quite unusual. What made you want to write a novel this way?

Most of my books have multiple first-person narrators, but this is a modern take on the epistolary novel, in that all the chapters take the form of entries on a blogging site called WebJournal. Each entry specifies a mood and a soundtrack, and public entries have a Comments box at the end. Some of these entries are public, therefore open to all; others are restricted, or private. I wanted to give both my narrators the freedom to choose both what to say, when to say it and to whom; and I wanted to explore the different ways in which we present ourselves to different audiences and under different circumstances. Concealing information online is not only acceptable, but often expected; the internet is a medium in which inconvenient truths can be dispensed with; from disabilities to marital status, and where one is able to share only the things about oneself that one has actively chosen to share.

I’m a Luddite with computers. How much of this techie stuff do I need to know?

None at all, really. The jargon is minimal, and it’s all pretty self-explanatory anyway. The chemistry of the small community is essentially the same everywhere; be it a French village, an island, a school or a web community …

Tell us about your protagonist. Is he evil, or isn’t he?

That’s a difficult question to answer. Like Snyde in Gentlemen and Players, B.B. is a difficult character to pinpoint. Devious, cynical and quite self-consciously cruel, he is a profoundly flawed, one might almost say an immoral character - and yet I rather like him (what this says about me I’d rather not think). He is the product of an appalling background, a controlling mother and an imperfect education. Still living at home at forty-two, a janitor in a local hospital, he hates himself, hates his life and yet he has managed both to retain his sense of humour and to re-create himself online as the person he would rather be, instead of the born loser he really is. He inhabits a kind of fantasy world, which occasionally erupts into real life, with unpredictable consequences. And yet he is deeply vulnerable – although whether this is the “real” B.B., or whether he is simply using his vulnerability as another means to an end, is ultimately hard to say. He is, I think, the most complex character I have ever created, and perhaps the hardest to understand. Maybe this is why I like him so much, and why his voice was so easy for me …

What about your second narrator, Albertine?

Albertine, like B.B., is an ambiguous and somewhat damaged character. Marked by her troubled past, she hides behind an intricate façade, only revealing her true feelings in her private blog. Her love-hate relationship with B.B. is based on shared experience and a kind of dreadful fascination; she knows him better than anyone else, and the link that binds them together has made it impossible for her to find a meaningful, honest relationship with anyone else. Like B.B., she dreams of escaping her life, but instead finds herself drawn into an ever more tortuous game of deceit and emotional manipulation.

Identity – both real and fake – tends to be a recurrent theme of yours. How does this book explore the idea?

Many of the characters in my books have problems with their identity. In some cases, like that of Vianne and Anouk Rocher, we have someone desperately seeking to create an identity for themselves in a world that seems to deny them the chance. In others, we see someone taking on the identity of someone else – Snyde in Gentlemen and Players; LeMerle in Holy Fools; Zozie in The Lollipop Shoes. Blueeyedboy goes further, in that B.B. has chosen to create, not only an alternate identity, but a whole alternate existence, past and present, designed, not just to fool other people, but to fool himself, too. In fact, in this book, no-one is quite as they appear; identities are interchangeable, and can be assumed and discarded when necessary. It’s a reflection of the way things are going, I think; a comment on the nature of perception and reality. In this story, as in life, the toughest question to answer truthfully is always going to be: Who am I?

Synaesthesia plays an important role here. Is this something that you yourself have experienced?

I’ve always associated certain colours with tastes and smells. I’m not sure whether this makes me a synaesthete or not, but it made it easy for me to identify with the characters in the book who are. Plus I wanted to explore the idea that what one person feels when faced with a series of stimuli may sometimes differ completely from what someone else may experience in identical circumstances.

There’s a lot of music in this book. Does it reflect your personal taste?

Absolutely. B.B. and I have a fair bit in common, including a lot of our musical influences. Because one of my characters in blind, I wanted to introduce a less visual dimension than I usually do, and focus on other aspects of perception, such as smells, tastes and sounds. I found this much harder than I’d expected! To compensate for the absence of visual reference in some parts of the novel I found myself dwelling much more on the book’s soundtrack - including the voices of my main characters, and of the “little army of mice” that make up Blueeyedboy’s friends-list. I listened to a lot of music while I was writing the book – like B.B., I rarely took out my i-Pod plugs! As a result, the musical tracks are all carefully-chosen to reflect the mood of each entry as well as containing clues – some more obvious than others – which, put together, make up a series of six playlists (one for each section of the book) which serve as a mini-summary of the plot.

Whoa! This is the end? I wanna know what happened next!

Yes, I was afraid you might. As in life, the final chapter doesn’t resolve quite as cleanly as either of us might have liked. But to really appreciate a book, the reader should bring as much to the table as he means to take away. That means deciding for yourself how you think the story ends (and you may find that your opinion on this varies according to your state of mind). What I’m saying, I guess, is this: please don’t ask me what comes next. I’m usually the last to know…

ISBN: 9780385609517
ISBN-10: 0385609515
Audience: General
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Number Of Pages: 352
Published: 3rd May 2010
Dimensions (cm): 25.0 x 16.0  x 2.9
Weight (kg): 0.538