Matthew Branton: Publishing is for wimps

Novelist and surfer Matthew Branton is so enraged by the British literary scene that he's virtually self-destructed. William Leith hears his manifesto

Matthew Branton is a 34-year-old novelist from Sevenoaks who lives in Hawaii and likes to do dangerous things. For instance, he belts down mountain roads, naked, riding on a skateboard, as often as he can. "Do not attempt this if dying from your injuries would be a problem," he explains on his website, www.matthewbranton.com. Of his mountainside skating, he says, "I never see anyone up there except hikers, and a naked man doing 80 down a mountain on a skateboard shrieking get-out-the-fucking way in English and Japanese contributes, I'm sure, to their hiking experience." He also says, "Wearing safety gear clouds your ability to react purely without consciousness... if you're not entirely 'in the zone' every millisecond you're doing this, you die horribly. If you're not prepared to die horribly at any second, you shouldn't be doing this."

Branton also likes to risk drowning by surfing big waves. "Bollocks aside, when you surf big waves, you are putting yourself very close to death," he explains. "All highly dangerous sports – except ours – involve some form of safety equipment, clothing, or safeguard. We have a pair of nylon trunks."

This is a man who likes to live life without protection – he is a bareback type of guy. Recently, he's decided to extend this bareback attitude to his writing career. Having written his fifth novel, The Tie and The Crest, Branton has decided to dispense with his publishers, Bloomsbury, and release the book to his readers, for free, on the internet, with the help of The Independent on Sunday. The book, whose title is taken from a line in the Jam song, "Eton Rifles", is the gripping tale of a fictional 13-year-old schoolgirl who is, like all Branton's characters, shafted by the establishment. "I wanted to create a character whose family life is ruined by money." Of his strange, possibly crazy decision not to publish the book, he says, "I'm just saying: 'that's enough,' you know." He is talking to me on the telephone from his beach house in Hawaii. "I will not go on working in this industry. I will live off fish that I can catch and veg that I am growing until my demands are met."

Why is Branton doing this? And what are his demands? For a moment, there is silence on the telephone line. "If there's any long pauses," he tells me, "it's because I'm having a bit of a think and a swig of tea."

If you look at Branton's novels, it's not such a surprise to find that they have been written by a man who likes to take his clothes off and court death, or, at the very least, professional suicide. Most of his characters are like this. They are self-defined pariahs. They are mad depressives. These are people locked in a grim battle with the forces of conservatism and normality; people in Branton's books hate and fear the suburban life as if it were a totalitarian regime. In Coast, his characters are affluent teenagers who take crystal meth and indulge in wild orgies; in his debut, The Love Parade, they are kids whose lives are being messed up by, of all things, the pop music industry.

Branton hates the regular world we live in: the world of shopping malls, suits, cars, and white-collar jobs. He hates what he calls "the mainstreaming of alternatives". He wrote The Hired Gun, a novel about a workaholic hitman, as a sort of protest at the Western work ethic. "I was in London," he tells me, "and we were in the middle of what I think was the sharpest boom we've had so far in this boom-and-bust cycle." This was the late 1990s. "Everyone in the world was just knocking their brains out at work. And when you're not at work you have to go to the party afterwards, because if you start not going to them, you won't be at work much longer. Work was demanding our whole lives of us. There was no time off. And The Hired Gun was saying: don't give everything to work. It's just not worth it."

What Branton wants, of course, is not just to live his life outside the Western work ethic, but to work outside it, too. To Branton, being a pariah is the only acceptable identity. "There's a great line in Friends, when Chandler goes, 'Oh hell, I've got to go to work now, because if I don't go in and crunch those numbers, it... won't make much difference.' And that is how a lot of people feel about their work."

But Branton is also angry. He's furious. This is where his "demands" come in. He has terminated his relationship with his publisher, he says, because he wants to make a difference. He wants to add one more small voice to the growing anti-capitalist movement. No doubt he wants to attract attention to himself, too; he values readers, of course, more than money. But he begins his explanation, which quickly becomes a rant, with a broadside at culture in general.

"The dumbing-down that has been an undeniable process in our culture over the last 10 years is now having real-world effects. I believe that it's directly and at least partly responsible for our participation in this filthy enterprise in the Middle East." Branton's logic, which I can sometimes follow, is that our relationship with popular culture has changed disastrously over the last 10 years. The fact that discerning people are now able to consume middlebrow books and TV shows "ironically" really means that they have become more middlebrow, rather than more ironic. And, it turns out, this new middlebrow population is easy to push around. "Why was Blair so instantly able to dismiss the will of the people after the peace march on 15 February?" asks Branton dismissively.

The ambition to be a writer kicked in when Branton was a child in Sevenoaks, living in "a nice normal little street with a Co-op on one corner and a newsagent on the other". His mother was a nurse working night shifts, so he had to be quiet while she slept during the day. The young Branton read a lot and wrote his first book, "a comic novel about a detective and his assistant", when he was 10. Later, his isolation increased when he, alone among his friends, passed the 11-plus, and was sent to grammar school in Tunbridge Wells. "I did a lot of bunking off," he says. Later still, he studied English Literature at Sheffield Polytechnic.

Branton's rant continues. He is venomous. "It's because of this dumbing down, and our collusion in it, our acceptance of it, thinking that watching soaps every day is somehow authentic, thinking that buying chick-lit and lad-lit and Harry bloody Potter is okay because it's a meaningless holiday read, whatever. These things aren't okay. We're not Cool Britannia. We're a global laughing stock, with our Spice Girls and our Cockney gangster movies, and our artists who shit the bed and get paid for it, and our boarding-school wizards. And nothing else!"

There is more. A lot more. "Our culture is important, right?" he spits. "It shapes who we are. Young people are made to feel that living some kind of cross between Sex and the City and Cold Feet, with a swindling bloody mortgage and a swindling pension, and a house stuffed full of cheap tasteful shit, manufactured for sub-breadline wages in China, is the best you can hope for in this life." Branton pauses. "If I'm the only voice saying, no, no, it really bloody isn't the best you can hope for, if you will only stop swallowing the crap that's fed you, then fine, at least I'm saying it."

He gets more and more exasperated. "Sophie Dahl's just signed a megabucks deal for her second book... And maybe there's even going to be a sequel to Black Swan, the Naomi Campbell book. I bet there bloody will be." Arriving at a crescendo, he declaims: "Decent people throughout the world are being stamped down, shouted down, gunned down, bombed down... while our leaders bark the orders at the behest of big business."

It's easy to see what's happened. Things have got too much for him, and he's finally cracked. The thing about Branton is that his novels are actually rather good; they contain fully-realised worlds, and they stay with you for a while. They're better than they look: from the covers you'd think they were light, frothy fables from the E-generation. Actually, they are dark, doomy fables from the E-generation. Branton, I think, was sick of not being taken seriously. Now that he's taking a big risk, now that he's entering the literary world without the prophylactic of his publisher, it feels good. He's unprotected. He's looking forward to a wild ride.

"If anyone is interested," he says, "then here is one small good thing. And what we need now from people is lots of small good things, because the big things are in a terrible bloody mess." He pauses, possibly to take a pull on his spliff. "Yes," he declares. "I probably won't make any difference on my own."

You can read part one of 'The Tie and the Crest' exclusively at www.independent.co.uk/branton