Neanderthal

So I had an idea for a novel. The Last Neanderthal on Earth. I can picture the cover now: our protagonist stands with his back to the audience, in the mouth of a cave, looking up at the night sky with its stars and full moon. Maybe he is holding a club. Did Neanderthals hold clubs? I’ve no idea, I’ve not done the research. My idea was also that the book would be written from the Neanderthal’s point of view. The problem is, I’ve got no idea how to make this plausible; I don’t know the extent to which Neanderthals were able to use words, nor how they may have ordered the thoughts in their mind. Again, I’ve not done the research. And that’s the problem isn’t it – I have these ideas, but I’m too lazy to follow through on them. I get other ideas for novels too. I had this really weird one, set in a kind of dystopia, where criminals and wrongdoers are punished by being buried alive, with nothing but a tube through which to breathe. Imagine the horror of that – a slow, agonising death through starvation and sensory deprivation. Or maybe the air supply wouldn’t be enough, I don’t know. I picture a field, with rows and rows of these tubes sticking out of the ground at regular intervals, each one signifying where some unfortunate soul has been buried. So far, the book has a title but no plot. It’s called Field of Tubes. Maybe it could become a sort of Kafkaesque short story, like his piece ‘The Hunger Artist’, or ‘In the Penal Colony’. But Kafka was a genius and I am a schmuck. A lazy schmuck. I’ve had other ideas too. Another one is about a guy, an Oxbridge graduate, who scrapes by in a menial job, on a very low income. He lives alone in a less than salubrious part of town, and justifies his penury by telling the world (including his pushy, anxious parents) that he is writing a novel. A Great Novel. But he isn’t. And the novel is all about how this guy is not writing a novel. That’s another one of my ideas, but I’m too lazy even to write a novel about a guy who is too lazy to write a novel. Jeez, what a life we lead. What a life. 

Joshua Seigal