In Arun Sood’s tender New Skin for the Old Ceremony, four old friends embark on a road trip around the Isle of Skye. They reminisce on a similar motorcycle journey they once made in India and reflect on how their lives have changed as they’ve grown. Nasim Asl spoke to Arun ahead of his novel’s publication.

New Skin for Old Ceremony
By Arun Sood
Published by 404 Ink

How are you feeling about the release of New Skin for the Old Ceremony – your debut novel?

There is a sense of nervous anticipation that does come with the excitement. If you put a little part of yourself out into a public space, there’s a bit of nervousness that comes with it. It’s fiction, but as fiction does, it draws on experience and themes that can be personal or important to you. There’s so much attention on authorial intention that there’s a bit of apprehension that comes with themes that come close to your own personal life and how they might be taken.

I know you’re a poet too, and I was struck by the poetic nature of your prose style in the book. Why did you want to write this story?

A friend once said to me, if you’re thinking of writing a book, write the book you would want to pick up and would be excited by. I’ve always been excited by the idea of an Easy Rider-esque road narrative, but transposed to Scotland. This idea of friends, not a lot happens aside from the unfurling or coming together of the relationships, but interwoven with themes of nationalism, populism, race, and fragmentary friendships. A simple road narrative allows for these bigger themes to be explored. It was liberating to use language in a new way and to be playful. I enjoyed writing it, but I had to treat it like work to get the novel finished.

It does feel like a cinematic novel, especially at the beginning when we’re introduced to each character in turn, then dip in and out of the past and present.

In terms of the writing process, it was as inspired by cinema as it was by other fiction. I was thinking of cinema with the character introductions, like flashing and cutting between them. And the jumps in time between north India and Skye…The relationship between road movie and travel writing is interesting. Road movies are derivative of epic travels, journeys like Homer.

Let’s talk about the title – why did you go for that Leonard Cohen album as the title for the book?

I always listen to music when I’m writing. That album was definitely played a lot! I did listen to other albums while writing other parts of the book, but these four characters form a collective bond through listening to this album in the early stage of the book. The album congeals their special friendship – even as their friendships disintegrate, the art and the album stay. We all have that music or album or song that takes us back to a place. I also quite like the formal fact of having chapters based on and named for the 12 tracks of the album. When I was thinking about the chapters, I’d think about song lyrics in a particular track, and how they might relate to what happened in that chapter.

And the book’s subtitle – a kirtan – what does that mean?

It’s an Indian classical musical form, which usually derives from or is centred on spiritual or Vedic texts. I did it in this bashful, non-traditional way, where the music that is being derived is the Leonard Cohen album, rather than this spiritual Vedic text. I love that album. I listened to it a lot when I was travelling in India when I was 19.

One thing that weaves through the experience of two of the characters and the story is the experience of being mixed-race and trying to find belonging in two different cultures.

 It felt natural to write that into the characters because it’s something I’ve experienced and thought about, that type of journeying, or ‘roots tourism’. It does crop up in the first section of the book, especially with Raj. He feels he should connect to India, but he gets there and feels dislocated from it, which is difficult for him to come to terms with, whereas Viddy realises and accepts more easily the dualities in her identity. In terms of the form of the novel, that’s why I’ve got the Kirtan and smashed it with Leonard Cohen because being mixed or growing up between cultures or in diasporic cultures, it can be difficult to know what belongs to you or what doesn’t. Some of the frictions or conversations Raj and Viddy have are derived from some of my own musings on what it is to be between cultures, including growing up in a nation like Scotland with a very strong national identity.

A large part of the book does indeed take place in Scotland. What was it like writing the landscape and trying to capture Scottish identity?

 Even regionally in Scotland there are very strong identities and there can be sometimes abrasive attitudes towards east or west. It was interesting to capture Liam being very rooted in his Glaswegian identity, which was very different to Bobby, who’s from Aberdeenshire. Then you had Raj moving from the east to the west, then they all end up in the Northern Highlands and Islands. I wanted to explore how these regional identities are bound under notions of nationalism, of Scottishness. As much as Bobby and Liam have jibes to each other, there’s a resolute notion of them being rooted in being Scottish. And the timeframe of the novel goes from Blair’s Britain to post-independence referendum. So, a lot happens in Scotland during those years.

There’s a real contrast between that world and the earlier trip to India.

 Both locations, Skye and North India, are prone to being romanticised in ways that can sometimes be problematic or far removed from the reality of actually knowing these places or living in these places. Liam’s romanticisation of Northern India as this place of spirituality, full of yoga and gurus and enlightenment is exposed as ridiculous in the face of the socio-political reality, but it remains an alluring place for him. Similarly, Bobby wants to have this romantic notion of Skye but is conscious that it’s problematic to think of Skye as a wild, untouched place when it’s been exposed so much in recent years. It’s not actually somewhere people can go to live a wild, free existence. These are complex places in themselves.

New Skin for Old Ceremony by Arun Sood is published by 404 Ink, priced £9.99.