Julian Gough: ‘Low rent is key to maintaining a vibrant artistic community’

Julian Gough flickers on to the screen for a video call, his face pale against a vibrant backdrop of a green pasture and a small flock of sheep with fluorescent lighting bolts marked on their fleeces. The image by Larry Hynes is a tribute to Philip K Dick, Gough tells me, and his landmark science fiction title Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

As the writer elaborates: “I was going to do a podcast called Electric Sheep Farming. I thought that the title was like a big open metaphor that would embrace everything I wanted to do: have a conversation about art and technology that would be rooted in reality.” While the podcast never happened, the screensaver stayed, and Gough’s ambition neatly sums up our virtual encounter.

While we have ostensibly met to chat about Gough’s new children’s book, Rabbit & Bear: This Lake is Fake – the final instalment of his popular six-book series – there is so much more for the polymath to muse on: the meaning of life, the limiting technologies of the publishing industry, Celtic Tiger capitalism versus the arts, the origins of the universe.

Gough is speaking to me from Berlin, the city that has been his home for almost two decades, after he found himself an economic refugee from his native Galway. “The Celtic Tiger priced me out of Ireland,” he recalls. “I couldn’t pay the rent, so I was evicted, and I emigrated on Ryanair to the nearest arts-friendly city that had affordable rent, and Berlin was bursting with empty properties.”

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In the years since, he admits, the situation has deteriorated. “A whole way of life [has been] obliterated,” he says; the disappearance of a culture where you could “survive as an artist on £17 a week. You could lower your overheads to an absurd extent and live on almost nothing. That bought you time to find your voice and get up on your feet. You didn’t have to earn money from art at the start, but that’s just not possible now and that’s a catastrophe for the arts.”

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Like everything we talk about during an intense and fascinating hour online, Gough is quick to extrapolate from his personal experience to posit broader truths. “Low rent is key to maintaining a vibrant artistic community,” he continues. “It is not a coincidence that art has flourished in cities which had empty properties – whether that’s Renaissance Florence or Paris. The reason there was a creative boom in Paris between the wars is not because Paris was somehow more authentic, but because the franc was weak: you could survive and thrive on feck all.”

It is with a genuine sense of gratitude, then, that Gough admits that living in Berlin has allowed him to continue taking creative risks. If he began his artistic life in the 1980s as a musician with the band Toasted Heretic, for whom he wrote lyrics and performed lead vocals, he has since written several novels, a collection of poetry, the aforementioned children’s books series, the ending to the popular computer game Minecraft, and an evolving history of the universe, which he is currently writing with reader feedback on Substack.

Each of these pursuits, Gough explains, has been “extremely organic”. Rabbit & Bear, for example, began “as a bedtime story for my kid”, he explains. “I loved reading to her, but occasionally the books we were reading just weren’t good enough. We were reading one in particular, with these animal characters, who were completely interchangeable, and a story where nothing happened, and we were discussing how boring it is and all the things we would change to make it better.”

For Gough, the intergenerational relationship he was building through this bedtime story time was its own reward. The very recent death of his much-loved father, Richard (Dick), reminded him of how much he “helped me build the worldview that led to Rabbit & Bear. A lot of Bear’s wisdom comes from him,” Gough says. “He was a wonderful man.” When his daughter was asleep, meanwhile, Gough was inspired enough by their collaboration that he “went upstairs and started writing my own story, and the next night that’s what I read to her and she would make suggestions and edit it, and so on”. Soon enough, Rabbit’s Bad Habits was finished.

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Gough says publishing a children’s book, despite his previous success as an author, was an eye-opener about the publishing industry. “When I was writing it, I wasn’t thinking about the children’s book market or anything like that,” he recalls, “but when I gave it to my agent, I discovered that it was actually going to be hard to get it published, as it was a weird length. There was this gap between picture books, which were 32 pages and 500 words long, and chapter books, which were 20,000 words of text over 100 pages. But it was a technology problem – the cost-effectiveness of publishing this way – that imposed this gap. It was an artificial split that had made its way into the psychology of the publishers.”

I think when people can’t find the right book for their kids or kids can’t find the right book for them, they blame themselves

Eventually, Gough’s book found its way to an editor, Rachel Wade at Hodder, who saw the potential in Rabbit & Bear as the type of book that would help children graduate from one genre to another: it would help emerging readers, who would still benefit from illustrations, to become more confident. Wade asked illustrator Jim Field to come on board, and when the first book was published in 2016 it was an instant success. Gough was delighted, as both a writer and as a parent.

“I think when people can’t find the right book for their kids or kids can’t find the right book for them, they blame themselves. But it was really this invisible problem: print costs, and the limitations of technology.” Rabbit & Bear was one of the books that helped to break that mould, and the genre of the illustrated chapter book has grown and grown in the years since.

Eight years and six books later, Gough has decided to put Rabbit & Bear into hibernation, a decision he made for fear of “repeating himself”, but also because he has become obsessed with a new project, which he calls his “most ambitious book ever: The Egg & the Rock, a creative non-fiction book about the universe” grounded in the theory that the universe is, like human life, the product of a process of evolution.

“It is ridiculously ambitious,” he admits of the project he started two years ago, “with a lot of scientific ideas”, that Gough – who studied English and philosophy at NUI Galway – knew he wasn’t necessarily qualified to present. To counter potential misunderstandings, he decided to write his book in instalments on the digital platform, Substack, so he could get ongoing feedback from scientists and readers. “It would be easy, as someone not a specialist in the field, to make basic mistakes,” he says, “so if I can get the ideas out there immediately, I can get important feedback before the book is out there.”

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Despite the different potential audience for his various projects, Gough sees The Egg & the Rock as complementary to all of his work over the last decade: the End Poem he wrote for Minecraft in 2011, his 2018 novel Connect, even Rabbit & Bear.

“I am interested in seeing reality more clearly, and in sharing that with other people. In the same way that Rabbit & Bear books helped to solve a problem that children might have,” he says, he is writing The Egg & the Rock to “solve a problem that adults have: the problem of meaning. Since Galileo, there has been a catastrophic divide between science and religion, where science pursued this materialist and reductive way of understanding the world, and handed over the production of meaning to religion. That was fine 500 years ago, but as religion has collapsed, with it we have had this collapse in meaning, and science has not been capable of taking up burden. But there is a story there that you can tell about the universe that is profound and meaningful, and compatible with science.”

Gough sees it as his role to tell that story. “The job of the artist,” he continues with evangelical zeal, “is to extract meaning from the data. Jules Vernes did it. Mary Shelley did it with Frankenstein. These were writers deeply embedded in scientific breakthroughs of the day, wrestling with those discourses to find ways to make meaning through art.”

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The Substack form is also a critical way for Gough to ensure a wide audience for the work, which he sees as a matter of principle rather than a commercial opportunity. “Some information should be free,” he says. “It shouldn’t be hidden from people just because they don’t have money.” This is a point he controversially followed to its end point when he gifted his Minecraft End Poem “to the universe” last year, following a bruising experience with the game’s creator’s Mojang when they sold the video game to Microsoft in 2014.

“Some ideas,” Gough concludes, “are too important to put behind a paywall. You just want them out in the world.”

Rabbit & Bear: This Lake is Fake is published by Hodder Children’s Books. You can read or subscribe to The Egg & the Rock at theeggandtherock.com