There are commercial strategies to promote your first book, and then there’s what Kim Noble planned. “I asked the publishers if I could hire a digger, then go to a roundabout, dig a massive hole and bury the books under the roundabout,” he tells me, deadpan over coffee. “They didn’t think it was a good idea.” You don’t say, Kim. This is a book that has been decades in the making, Noble reports – while his conversation makes clear why previous efforts came to naught. “Someone once approached me to write a book about a show I’d made. I started to do drawings for it. But I didn’t give them to the publisher, I left them around London in public toilets, so the publisher had to go out and search for them.
“And then,” he adds dolefully, “they decided to do another book instead.”
There’s plenty more where this came from: tales of Noble’s thwarted literary ambitions, of why his oddball standup-meets-art career is flatlining, too. But mournfulness comes as standard with Noble, who has made the most remarkable career by documenting – in a series of alarmingly out-there multimedia happenings – the bleakness and dysfunction of his and arguably all of our lives. But now he is making that longed-for leap into publishing, with a graphic novel that graphic novel publishers rejected, he reports, and that “is going to be a hard book to sell. I don’t know where you’d put it on a shelf. WH Smith at Gatwick – it probably won’t make it to that one.”
Much as Noble’s live shows blur the lines between his desolate life and his art, so too In Pursuit of a Wonderful Nothing is “a book about the process of creating the book”. A collage of text and naive drawings, part scrapbook and part photo album, it relates how Noble was approached 20 years ago by an Icelandic curator keen to create a book from his work. Via messages, Noble “really fell for this person”. But when they scheduled a meeting (part business, part first date), the woman didn’t show up. “I never heard from them again. And I’ve been looking for them ever since.”
Off the record (it’s all in the book!), the 51-year-old then recounts the story behind that story, and it’s an eye-opener – fans of Noble’s self-lacerating stage work, so brutally honest about his screw-ups and his woes, will not be disappointed. Perhaps, Kim, you should emphasise this human-interest angle rather than, er, burying the book under a roundabout? But Noble’s instincts are not commercial. “The publisher wants a biography of me on the back cover, which I’m horrified by. And they wanted a description of the book on there too, which is disgusting.”
Did you make any effort, I ask, to make the book more sellable? “I love that question,” he says, marvelling at the idea. “I mean, I really want it to do well. But I just don’t think I’ve got the skill to write a proper book.”
Happily, no one is expecting a “proper” book from this quarter – nor from his publisher Cheerio, whose back catalogue includes one of Noble’s favourites, a book of shopping lists its author found discarded at a supermarket on the Holloway Road in London. The Londoner has hugely enjoyed the act of creating Wonderful Nothing, and embraces the tangibleness of an artwork he can, at last, hold in his hands. “This is something that, even if it’s shit, it’s there. My live stuff hasn’t led to wonderful riches, or to much else. I see it as a burden rather than, ‘Oh God I’ve created some amazing things.’ But this is something I can carry around and look at when I’m in a care home and say, ‘I made this …’”
It’s not all glamour, mind you, in the life of this provocateur turned man of letters. Our interview is repeatedly interrupted by calls from a care worker attending to Noble’s mother, for whom he is now full-time carer. Both parents have appeared in Noble’s stage work; his 2014 hit You’re Not Alone documented the death of his dad. Glumly, Noble now tells me he’s making work with his declining mum, too. In one experiment, she’s playing the role of his ex in a dialogue about a breakup. In another, “I’m going to try to re-create my birth with my mum. I don’t know what that’s for. Another show, perhaps.
“I can’t help it,” he wails. “I just do the same shit, don’t I?” If you took Noble at his own word, you’d never believe he has created some of the most electrifying stage shows of the last two decades – capped, arguably, by 2022’s Lullaby for Scavengers, in which he abjured human company entirely and went to live with a skulk of foxes. But “opportunities are shrinking”, he says, to make such transgressive work. “I couldn’t get Lullaby on; hardly anywhere in the UK would take it. Even in Europe, theatres are more and more scared of what audiences will think.”
I’m sure we’ve not seen the last of Noble on stage; there is even, he tells me with dread, a live component to his imminent book launch. But until then, the man is uncharacteristically happy to be making his literary debut, at last. “I do struggle with social interactions. So with the focus on just writing and drawing, I’ve been absolutely loving it.”