What's In A Name?
I'd like you to meet the heroine of "A,B&E". Introducing Karen Dash a.k.a Helen Of Toyboy a.k.a "The Hydra" a.k.a - actually she has loads of aliases, seeing as she's on the run from her gangster husband and hiding out in a Club 18-30 resort in island Greece. As you do.
I once saw Anthony Burgess deliver a prolonged riff as to the thought he'd poured into deciding on the name "Alex" for his protagonist of "A Clockwork Orange". He even elaborated on the symbolic weight of the fact the name began with the letter "A" as the first letter of the alphabet. Internet writing communities abound with suggestions for fictional names. Myself, I've got quite a full mental database of the surnames of English footballers from the 1970's (when I collected the stickers) and the names of villains from seminal TV Cop show "The Sweeney". The two fictional cops were named Reagan & Carter, which of course by incredible coincidence were the names of two successive US presidents after the shows were aired...
But Karen Dash - let's settle on that name for now - Karen Dash is running away from her true name. Even before she had to leave her past behind, she was either Mrs Kevin Gage, her academic first husband, or Mrs Damon Lampitt, her gangster second husband. The two worlds she moved in, appointed her status only in relation to her man. A troubling prospect for a woman with a head on her shoulders, a mouth to express herself and a strong sense of who she is. Kevin Gage was a footballer for Wimbledon in the 1980's and Lampitt, a good Welsh name, well because 'to lamp' somebody is a slang term for thumping someone, which seemed appropriate for a hardman. Damon I settled on for its echo of Damocles (you'll have to read the book for that one!) And think about it, girls still largely bear their patrilineal surname until they marry and take on their husband's name, so she was still branded even as a little girl. Who is she this Karen Dash?
I once saw Anthony Burgess deliver a prolonged riff as to the thought he'd poured into deciding on the name "Alex" for his protagonist of "A Clockwork Orange". He even elaborated on the symbolic weight of the fact the name began with the letter "A" as the first letter of the alphabet. Internet writing communities abound with suggestions for fictional names. Myself, I've got quite a full mental database of the surnames of English footballers from the 1970's (when I collected the stickers) and the names of villains from seminal TV Cop show "The Sweeney". The two fictional cops were named Reagan & Carter, which of course by incredible coincidence were the names of two successive US presidents after the shows were aired...
But Karen Dash - let's settle on that name for now - Karen Dash is running away from her true name. Even before she had to leave her past behind, she was either Mrs Kevin Gage, her academic first husband, or Mrs Damon Lampitt, her gangster second husband. The two worlds she moved in, appointed her status only in relation to her man. A troubling prospect for a woman with a head on her shoulders, a mouth to express herself and a strong sense of who she is. Kevin Gage was a footballer for Wimbledon in the 1980's and Lampitt, a good Welsh name, well because 'to lamp' somebody is a slang term for thumping someone, which seemed appropriate for a hardman. Damon I settled on for its echo of Damocles (you'll have to read the book for that one!) And think about it, girls still largely bear their patrilineal surname until they marry and take on their husband's name, so she was still branded even as a little girl. Who is she this Karen Dash?
"No, my assigned identity was forged for me by someone I’ve never even met. Karen Dash. My new moniker. A bit of a giggle. An in-joke on my way out the country." Karen's new identity is that bestowed on her by way of a counterfeit passport. The name 'dashed' off the top of the counterfeiter's head. Referring back to the high quality Swiss colouring pencils of my and maybe his childhood. Where he first had his interest pricked in visual reproduction. Do you remember Caran D'Ache colouring pencils? At the time they were as ubiquitous as the Swiss Army knife and gave the lie to Harry Lime's contention that Switzerland had only ever produced the "cuckoo clock". Now they brand themselves as "Maison de Haute Ecriture" (maybe Harry Lime had a point after all). Karen Dash never existed, despite her larger than life presence on the pages of the novel. It is a name wrought to prevent her true identity being revealed, found and then expunged. It is a dead end of a name.
For she simply cannot afford to be tracked down by her name. She can't appear on any bureaucratic lists. She has no driving licence, no social security paperwork, no health insurance records and no credit card in her (assumed) name. She has nothing to her name, not even her real name. When she goes online, she employs a user name, a different identity yet again. She has been expunged from British life, but has sprouted a new existence within Greece, but a barely audible one like the Echo of the Narcissus story. Perhaps that is why she shouts so loud to be heard, but then has to be concerned with who exactly is listening to her. She is highly sociable, highly visible within her new life, "Perhaps news has travelled back to Blighty, about this batty, sexy lady, domiciled over in Corfu. That their mates must look me up. That I have garnered the status of an urban myth. I had better hope not." Caught in this perpetual pull-me, push-you, of wanting to cast a shadow and the fear of doing so. What's in a name? Everything if it leads back to her true identity, for those after erasing her name once and for all.
I am fascinated by what fictional names can represent. In another of my novels, the three main characters all have different versions of the same phonetic name. In another, the narrator is willfully leading the reader a duplicitous dance and adopts many identities through his employment of identity theft and his travels along the information superhighway under different guises. What's in a name? Whatever you want to invest in it.