The Making of Ugly Botany: An Introduction

There are times in an author's life where you write lots of things and, occasionally, you write something that you are extra-proud of; where you think, if I had just written this thing and nothing else, it would have been enough. Ugly Botany is one of those books. It was chock-full of fascinations, vivid characters, locations and themes, and nearly a month after finishing it, it still haunts my mind. I've always been curious about the Victorian era, with not so much the architecture and the stuffy things you're taught in school the Victorians did, but the darker, more complex and and more important side of the Victorians.

About this time last year, I thought about the Victorian era as one of constant, agonizing progress, all of which built up and exploded into the mess of the twentieth century. The horrors of that century, I believe, would not have happened without the 19th century. The worst horrors of all, the Holocaust and the invention of the Atomic Bomb, were simply unthinkable without the 19th century.

And yet, we think of the 19th century as a comparatively innocent and simple time; all the while this horrid, poisonous danger was slowly building up. It was the last conceivable century in which the world was all rosy-cheeked and innocent or, at the very least, naive enough to think of itself that way; War, Invasion, Leadership, even Death, were thought of with comparative romanticism as opposed to what they would become after the horrors of the First and Second world wars. War, especially.

Onto the book itself. It might surprise you to think the concept started with the chimpanzee, who back then was not even called Winston but Watson (in a nod to Sherlock Holmes). The era was non-descript. I had a whizz-banger of an idea for a chimp to be this maniacal character that would suddenly explode into a rage and kill half a dozen other characters; a truly inventive Deus ex machina (with apologies to Poe, whose Murders in the Rue Morgue was a further inspiration). And then, I had a dream in which the main concept of love-making sustaining the British Empire came to be -- make love to avoid war, so to speak. There might be an irony in this horrible, nasty enterprise being sustained by two people loving each other, but as Perkins says in the book, "when it was pornographic, the Empire prospered".

Just so there's no confusion whatsoever, this book is a ANTI-COLONIAL text. It's message is blatant: only true filthy smut can sustain something so horrible. The British Empire was a bad thing, guys. It's not un-patriotic to say so. I disagree with some of the more extreme critiques of Empire ("The British Empire was just as bad as the Nazis!" or "The Entirety of British History is bad"), as aside from these being fucking stupid arguments made by morons, I feel this is why Anti-Colonialism gets a bad rap. People can't just acknowledge that it was evil to invade these countries, take away peoples' freedom and forever scar their national memory, they have to go straight for the single most extreme brand of rhetoric. The truth is, most western countries engaged in Colonialism and, no doubt, if I were French instead of British, I would be writing the same thing about France etc.

I've long been fascinated with the predators in the book, namely chimpanzees, pythons, and crocodiles. They scare the shit out of me. The thought of being eaten, or being seen as food, is a primal fear that resonates with me to an extraordinary degree. That these intellectual racists finds themselves, for once, overpowered, and not the conquerors of the world, is part of the book's big punishment of colonialism.

I've always wanted to write a book that read just like a book in the nineteenth century, except I think the violence is extreme for that era of literature. Good. My purpose was to show how horrible the natural world can be. People say "Jaws demonised sharks" or " wild animals are our friends" but, at the end of the day, these creatures want to be left alone and they don't care what kind of negative depiction they get in the media: if you bother them, they will eat you.