Swimming Home

The second of my reviews of the Man Booker Prize nominees continues with:

 

Deborah Levy, whose appearance of the Man Booker Prize long-list, appears as something of a surprise.  Her novel, Swimming Home, appears on the new label And Other Stories, and this is only their third novel.  It is rare for such small presses to gain such national recognition.  I said it appears as something of a surprise – but when you read Levy’s novel, the surprise dissipates.  You realise how quickly how strong a novel this is.  Also, it shouldn’t be a surprise, as Levy has previously published a few novels that gained major literary respect in the 1990s for her novels and for her theatre work.  Nevertheless, it has been a fifteen year gap between her last novel and this.

Swimming Home, like The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (another novel on the Man Booker long-list), is deceptively simple.  It takes two clichés – the British family on a foreign holiday and the stranger interrupting the lives of a family – and turns them on their head.  She finds new and interesting ways to dramatize the Jacobs family and their unwanted, and somewhat unbalanced guest, Kitty Finch.  Much of the drama of Swimming Home comes in attempting to work out why Joe Jacobs’s wife has allowed Kitty to stay when clearly she is opposed to her presence, and in watching the chaos Kitty then brings.

There are a number of standout sequences in this novel – a pony ride that becomes terrifying and loaded with menace.  The haunting refrain of water and all that it prefigures.  The characterisation is spot-on – Kitty Finch is an unalloyed delight, equally terrifying and sexy.  The daughter of the Jacobs family – Nina – discovering womanhood and uncovering the underbelly of French village life – is equally well drawn, and becomes the heart of the novel.

Occasionally the obliqueness of Levy’s prose – written for dramatic effect – undermines some of the solidity of her craft – and where she is reaching for profundity.  Mercifully these moments are short-lived, and the story gallops past them.  Also, a few of the secondary characters – notably the two friends who come with the Jacobs on this holiday – are distinctly underdrawn, and their excision from the text would not see it inhibited in any way.  It is also a very short novel, just shy of 160 pages, and is best read in one sitting. 

Swimming Home, then, is a novel that will clearly reward a repeat reading.  Despite its brevity, it packs quite the emotional punch, and sees Levy writing at the top of her game.  

Chances of winning the prize?

I would so like to see this novel make the short-list, possibly more for the clout it will give small press And Other Stories.  It certainly deserves to make the short-list, though I have my suspicions that it will be cut.  But then the Booker has in recent years done very little to expectation, so a surprise short-listing might well happen yet.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

In the first of my reviews of books nominated for the Man Booker Prize 2012, here is:

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is a simple story.  One morning, Harold Fry receives a letter.  It is from a woman he has not seen for twenty years, who is dying of cancer.  He writes a response, and walking to the post box to deliver his few lines of sympathy, keeps on walking.  He will keep on walking until he has walked the 627 miles to Queenie Hennessy’s bed.  The novel is what transpires during those 627 miles – the emotional truths Harold realises about himself, his marriage and the life of his son.  But it is also about the lives of those he encounters on his way – an immigrant nurse, a man with a shoe fetish, the hangers-on, the troubled men, and a stray dog.  The Unlikely Pilgrimage becomes a travelling show.  While, all the way back at his starting point, his wife is realising how much she misses her husband when he is gone.

It is from these simple constructions that Rachel Joyce constructs her truly heart-warming, tender tale.  At times funny, sad, bleak, hopeful and full of life, Joyce rarely puts a foot wrong.  The supporting cast of characters come alive even through the smallest of details.  Harold himself is such a loveable man you want the book to be longer and longer, to not have to leave his side.

It is not without flaws however.  But then what is?  The hangers-on, for me, somewhat derailed a few chapters in the last third.  There were too many of them and they weren’t given enough development; and their unintentional sabotaging of Harold’s pilgrimage seemed more a plot facilitator than something real.  Joyce needed them there to provide some peril in the final third.  I say this with one caveat, the first of these followers, Wilf, is entirely necessary for he provides the breaking down of Harold’s interior walls and a counter-point to the stability Harold marches on. 

The novel proves that Joyce is certainly a name to watch.  Already famous in the world of radio writing, Harold Fry will surely see her literary stock rise, and I know many readers are anxiously awaiting her second novel.

Chances of winning the Man Booker Prize 2012?

It stands as good a chance as any of winning.  It is certainly deserving of literary and commercial success.  Its simple emotional thrust will endear it to the literary judges, but could equally be accused of being emotionally manipulative.  Joyce is not afraid to tug at the heart-strings in sequences and language designed to affect the reader.  Its good-hearted nature, and the way in which one will see new aspects of it in second readings, give it a good chance of making the short-list.  Will it win?  It stands a good chance.

Starting a Character

I started a novel in December 2010.  I talked about its genesis in an earlier blog post (“Origins of a Novel”).  Now the screenplays I’ve written are out in the world, trying to find buyers, I’ve returned to the novel.  Here’s the thing: the few months away from it have allowed me to see it in new light.  It’s funnier than I remember.  A few pages I thought worked really well are actually quite clumsy (and unnecessary) and have been done away with.  For the majority of its 300 pages, though, ‘Adam Strauss and the Three Sisters’ works a treat.  Yeah, it needs tidying up.  A few scrappy lines here.  A missing scene of explanation there.  But the base, it’s solid.  Its walls are strong.  The whole thing works.  The titular characters work, their interaction is strong, and there is a real sense of romance, loss and tension between them.  

I want to talk about the three sisters of the title:

It’s interesting: they were inspired by three real sisters, albeit only very, very loosely.  If they ever read it, they wouldn’t recognise themselves.  My characters do and say very little that the real sisters would do or say.  They have entirely different personalities, world outlooks, and histories.  The only common point of connection is they used to live across the street from a novelist and one of them did one day knock on my door.  That knock on the door, aged fifteen, inspired much of the novels content.

So why did I use them?  Or claim to have used them?  Because when I write I need a physical model to get started: the same way a screenwriter might write for Johnny Depp.  They picture him and his mannerisms, they use their perceived image of him to get the role just right.  I use physical models for my central characters because it’s a way in, a cheat.  I picture someone that I know and instantly half the work is done for me.  What happens next, though, is the interesting part.  As I write my fictionalised version of this real person, the fictional version takes over.  By the time I reach the end of the novel I have to rewrite the initial scenes so the characters conform to who they now are, not who they were inspired by.

It is a little creepy, though, this habit.  I have to use people I don’t really know very well – if you’re my close friend, I’m not going to use you. If I knew you once, for a while, and you’re out of my life, there’s a good chance I might fictionalise you.  In ‘Adam Strauss and the Three Sisters’, Adam is a novelist and this approbation of another’s life for fictional ends forms the final third of the novel – Adam uses the lives of the three sisters (or at least two of them) – and it’s how they react to that.  Badly, if you’re wondering. 

I still live across from the house where these three sisters lived, and where their parents still live.  I see them coming home from time to time (they all live hundreds of miles away most of the year, living lives I know nothing of) and when they do return I don’t see them, I see my characters.  But if I speak to them, which I sometimes do, I see them, the real sisters.  This strange double vision between reality and fiction infuses much of my life – I live in this other world.  I prefer this other world.  But sometimes I have to join the real one.

All this feeds back into a question writers are always asked: where do your ideas come from?  ‘Adam Strauss and the Three Sisters’ was inspired by seeing one of the real sisters in a shopping queue and remembering the time she came to my door.  None of what happens in the novel is real, but everything could be.  It’s not the big things that inspire us, it’s the little things.   Seeing that little divergent path in a life and following it.  Discovering what lies at the end of that ‘what if?’ moment.  It’s following the thread into the other world.  Taking the other path.  It's about starting at a point in reality and changing something, sometimes even the smallest of things.

Left: Fiction                 Right: Real Life

Using real people for the basis of fictionalised ones might not be a method that works for everyone, though.  But if you’re struggling to get a piece of fiction off the ground, it might be because the characters aren’t working.   If so, it might be a good idea to ask of your characters what would they do if…?  If you don’t know, then they’re not working.   This is another reason I use real people as models, right at the start – because I can then ask: What would ‘she’ do if…? And because I know ‘her’, in real life, I can picture her actions and reactions.  By the time I’ve written the character's action or reaction, I’ve already begun sublimating the real person with the fictional person.  The process of erasure of the real world has begun.  The other world is finally living and the work is moving forward.

It might not work for you, as I said, but it’s always worked for me.