To The Last Thing the Angel Said from Milo Glushchushin's Jeremiad
The 'boy on a bike' postcard I bought in 2024. The image sent to me in 1996 by Jon Johnson.
The Last Thing the Angel Said was my fourth attempt at a novel. The prompt for the initial story came at me subconsciously. It wasn't really 'automatic writing' - is there such a thing? I'd like to think so - but it felt like it, and is probably the closest I will ever come to it. I spent few insomniac nights and days that blurred into one doing little else but writing a series of tales about characters whose names kind of chanted at me: Milo and Mila Glushchushin and their dad Witek and their mom Romualda, their friends Richard Rat, Moby Krzeski, Amelia Steeple, Eurydice Armentiere, the gruesome Peterlejtner twins, Maurice Charleroi, Loretta Churchyard, the enigmatic Michael Szelc, whose crazed singing hypnotised listeners into thinking they saw tiny birds flying around his head. They lived in a town to which I gave the placeholder name Balz. It had five Byzantine-type churches, streets of steps, salt flats with the function of ugly beaches, a ruined mansion on a hill, a Civil War fort on another, plus annual events like a storekeepers' ball with a frogs' leg eating contest, an ikon race and a bug-hunt throughout the town's public buildings. The objects felt like a southern gothic game of Monopoly, and the names had a ring to them too that spoke to me of the slightly other-worldy. Those elements do not, of course, make a book.
Summer 1995 and I was in Warsaw alone. My wife had gone to London for a month or two to see her family. I hung out with the odd friend from the places I had worked at. I did some translation assistance work magicked up for me by one Joanna Podhajska, a freelance translator who became a good friend. I walked a lot, in the early morning or evening, up the hill in central Warsaw or round the corner on the banks of the Wisła river. I read. I studied Polish. I drank cheap, deadly beer from some of the shacks that sprang up near the river. I got woozy drunk and woke up with severe hangovers around 8PM. I pondered writing.
The book's story began to fall into place, elements of its structure scribbled into notebooks and then put on the page. I was able to juggle the original screed of writing around in various ways. I discarded much of it, and it's a bit fuzzy in my mind now as to when exactly the 'real' book got going.
I didn't plan the story very tightly; it was more or less intact as I wrote it, and though of course I ended up excising some of that first draft, most of it remained.
The main characters were the Glushchushins, whose patriarch, Witold, Witek for not-quite-short, had escaped the Russian Revolution in Galicia, in what is now Eastern Poland and Western Ukraine. The name is an Anglicised version of Głuszczyszyn, the name borne by another Polish Joanna, this one a wise young student I had taught a few years earlier, in the Silesian city of Gliwice, and later in life befriended. Though rather alien-looking in its written form, the name has a pleasing poetry when spoken out loud. The book became Milo Glushchushin's Jeremiad.
A lot of the names had to be changed just because readers don't like not being able to pronounce the things they read. And who knew that a jeremiad was a lament of a tale, after the Danny Downer prophet Jeremiah? That had to go, too. The Glushchushins became the Galitzkis - people from Galicia, whose 'c' is pronounced 'ts' - and some characters and chapters had to go. The title, too. I now can't remember when I first started thinking of it as The Last Thing the Angel Said.
The book became a bit of a saga. It was with two agents, but they couldn't shift it. I eventually became a bit sick of it, and concentrated on other writing, the short stories I managed to get published in small press magazines throughout the noughties, and the novel that eventually became the first to be published, Laikonik Express, set in Poland. I obviously returned to it from time-to-time. In 2011 I wrote a crucial new chapter full of stuff that should have been in it all along, but then I put it aside again, sending it out to agents and publishers only half-heartedly and very occasionally.
I can't remember why or when it hit me that The Last Thing the Angel Said would stand a better chance out there if it lost a few of its 120000 words. Once I'd hit on it, it seemed the only way forward. It's not an easy thing, to 'just' chop out a significant number of words from a book. The obvious parts to go were the back-story of Milo's parents, how Witek escaped the Russian Revolution from Galicia, made his way to Paris, then to the US. His job as a surveyor's assistant brought him to Balz, and a series of cataclysmic events led him to meet Milo's mom Romualda, and her father Waldemar. There were a few run-ins with local gangsters too, and some extra-judicial work with a Nagant revolver, beloved of both the Tsar's secret police and the Soviet NKVD. They all went into The Émigré Engineer, leaving a book of 96000 words. While The Émigré Engineer soared ahead into publication via Emerson College's Ploughshares series, I tidied up the remainder, and it was accepted by Krish, the head of Auctus Publishers, who requested a cut to about 90000 words. Seriously? I said I'd see what I could do, but wasn't entirely confident in promising. In the event, as much of the book was written such a long time ago, when I was, subjectively, not such a good writer, it was easy to cut that many words - there was an awful lot of 'budding literary type' in the book, and I finally got it to 89300 words.
It has received a new lease of life in the care of Auctus Publishers, and I'm really happy to be able to bring it out with Krish and his team.
Summer 1995 and I was in Warsaw alone. My wife had gone to London for a month or two to see her family. I hung out with the odd friend from the places I had worked at. I did some translation assistance work magicked up for me by one Joanna Podhajska, a freelance translator who became a good friend. I walked a lot, in the early morning or evening, up the hill in central Warsaw or round the corner on the banks of the Wisła river. I read. I studied Polish. I drank cheap, deadly beer from some of the shacks that sprang up near the river. I got woozy drunk and woke up with severe hangovers around 8PM. I pondered writing.
The book's story began to fall into place, elements of its structure scribbled into notebooks and then put on the page. I was able to juggle the original screed of writing around in various ways. I discarded much of it, and it's a bit fuzzy in my mind now as to when exactly the 'real' book got going.
I didn't plan the story very tightly; it was more or less intact as I wrote it, and though of course I ended up excising some of that first draft, most of it remained.
The main characters were the Glushchushins, whose patriarch, Witold, Witek for not-quite-short, had escaped the Russian Revolution in Galicia, in what is now Eastern Poland and Western Ukraine. The name is an Anglicised version of Głuszczyszyn, the name borne by another Polish Joanna, this one a wise young student I had taught a few years earlier, in the Silesian city of Gliwice, and later in life befriended. Though rather alien-looking in its written form, the name has a pleasing poetry when spoken out loud. The book became Milo Glushchushin's Jeremiad.
A lot of the names had to be changed just because readers don't like not being able to pronounce the things they read. And who knew that a jeremiad was a lament of a tale, after the Danny Downer prophet Jeremiah? That had to go, too. The Glushchushins became the Galitzkis - people from Galicia, whose 'c' is pronounced 'ts' - and some characters and chapters had to go. The title, too. I now can't remember when I first started thinking of it as The Last Thing the Angel Said.
The book became a bit of a saga. It was with two agents, but they couldn't shift it. I eventually became a bit sick of it, and concentrated on other writing, the short stories I managed to get published in small press magazines throughout the noughties, and the novel that eventually became the first to be published, Laikonik Express, set in Poland. I obviously returned to it from time-to-time. In 2011 I wrote a crucial new chapter full of stuff that should have been in it all along, but then I put it aside again, sending it out to agents and publishers only half-heartedly and very occasionally.
I can't remember why or when it hit me that The Last Thing the Angel Said would stand a better chance out there if it lost a few of its 120000 words. Once I'd hit on it, it seemed the only way forward. It's not an easy thing, to 'just' chop out a significant number of words from a book. The obvious parts to go were the back-story of Milo's parents, how Witek escaped the Russian Revolution from Galicia, made his way to Paris, then to the US. His job as a surveyor's assistant brought him to Balz, and a series of cataclysmic events led him to meet Milo's mom Romualda, and her father Waldemar. There were a few run-ins with local gangsters too, and some extra-judicial work with a Nagant revolver, beloved of both the Tsar's secret police and the Soviet NKVD. They all went into The Émigré Engineer, leaving a book of 96000 words. While The Émigré Engineer soared ahead into publication via Emerson College's Ploughshares series, I tidied up the remainder, and it was accepted by Krish, the head of Auctus Publishers, who requested a cut to about 90000 words. Seriously? I said I'd see what I could do, but wasn't entirely confident in promising. In the event, as much of the book was written such a long time ago, when I was, subjectively, not such a good writer, it was easy to cut that many words - there was an awful lot of 'budding literary type' in the book, and I finally got it to 89300 words.
It has received a new lease of life in the care of Auctus Publishers, and I'm really happy to be able to bring it out with Krish and his team.
Above is a detail from the postcard I bought in 2024 from an eBay seller. It was exactly what I was looking for to use on the book cover.
If you find a picture on the Internet, you can't just go ahead and use it for commercial purposes, which makes sense. If you buy an already-existing picture, it's yours, and you can do what you want with it. I think the card is perhaps from Eastern Europe or the Balkans, and it's probably from the first two decades of the twentieth century - it just has that vibe of people with no cameras going to a photo studio to have a memento of a child with his treasured possession, his bicycle. Even I am old enough to have had studio pictures taken.
If you find a picture on the Internet, you can't just go ahead and use it for commercial purposes, which makes sense. If you buy an already-existing picture, it's yours, and you can do what you want with it. I think the card is perhaps from Eastern Europe or the Balkans, and it's probably from the first two decades of the twentieth century - it just has that vibe of people with no cameras going to a photo studio to have a memento of a child with his treasured possession, his bicycle. Even I am old enough to have had studio pictures taken.
A studio portrait of me, c.1959
My friend Jon Johnson, who was an early reader of the sprawling first draft (despite not being a habitual fiction reader) sent me a magazine photo which chimed with at least two of the motifs in the book - bicycles and angels. The photo is by celebrated Czech-French photographer Josef Koudelka.
It was out of the question that I should or even could ever use it for publicity. I knew that permission to use it would cost a ton. I sometimes copied it as a small thumbnail onto the last page of whichever draft of the book I was working on, but more importantly used it as a sort of talisman throughout the book's development. In a way, this photo has been with the book almost from the start. (Photo used here without permission, of course, and I am willing to delete it from this page, should that be required.)
Amazingly (I am easily amazed) I have just found another photo of what I think must be the same boy.
Amazingly (I am easily amazed) I have just found another photo of what I think must be the same boy.
I guess the photo is from a religious parade. I identify with the boy in several ways. Firstly the bicycle. Since I started riding my auntie Annie Malone's outsize 'ladies' bike in Dublin in 1966, I have been fascinated, and sometimes obsessed, by bicycles in various forms, from owning and riding them to racing them to watching 'proper' bike racing probably more often than is advisable.
Secondly, I took part in religious parades through our part of the Diocese of Southwark as a child. Brought up in an Irish Catholic enclave of sorts, my early life was very much tied up with my primary school, St Alban's, and our local church of the same name, just across the playground from our one-storey classrooms. We paraded at various times of the year - Lent, perhaps, Easter, maybe. Dressed as an altar boy - a bit like the child in the photo but with a black cassock, a skirt-like garment, and of course without wings, I did my bit in carrying a candlestick or an incense-holder around the streets of the parish. My non-Catholic friends came out to gawp and scoff, of course, and there was no hiding from them; I was called 'Altar Boy' for years, mainly by kids who didn't know what it even meant, and mostly by kids who were not there. It was mortifying for a while, then just a laugh. Having not lived there since I was 19, I went for a walk around Camberwell in my 30s with my wife at the time, and was startled, and pleased, a little, to be passed by a guy across the street who gave me a cheery wave and said, "Altar Boy - you allright?" without stopping. I had forgotten it till that day.
Secondly, I took part in religious parades through our part of the Diocese of Southwark as a child. Brought up in an Irish Catholic enclave of sorts, my early life was very much tied up with my primary school, St Alban's, and our local church of the same name, just across the playground from our one-storey classrooms. We paraded at various times of the year - Lent, perhaps, Easter, maybe. Dressed as an altar boy - a bit like the child in the photo but with a black cassock, a skirt-like garment, and of course without wings, I did my bit in carrying a candlestick or an incense-holder around the streets of the parish. My non-Catholic friends came out to gawp and scoff, of course, and there was no hiding from them; I was called 'Altar Boy' for years, mainly by kids who didn't know what it even meant, and mostly by kids who were not there. It was mortifying for a while, then just a laugh. Having not lived there since I was 19, I went for a walk around Camberwell in my 30s with my wife at the time, and was startled, and pleased, a little, to be passed by a guy across the street who gave me a cheery wave and said, "Altar Boy - you allright?" without stopping. I had forgotten it till that day.
Me, at altar boy age, 11-ish. Lots of things conspired to wipe that smile off my face...
The photo below is of my bathroom floor. It's sort of 'faux-cathedral floor', if that is a thing. (There are at least a few scenes in Balz's cathedral in the book.) It was used as the background for the book's back-cover. It came out a bit dark, to be honest, but it's still readable.
Milo often said he wasn't racing for the medals - "just metal" - so why was he racing? The prompt was far too deep in him to find and explain.