Mitzi Rapkin: You probably hear a lot of stories of real life. What makes a certain story elevate to the point where you want to spend potentially years with it exploring the ideas in a book? I knew the village in Scotland he was talking about, and the level of feeling that came through his voice made it stick in my mind.
And I was interested in how I could use the trope, if you will, of finding a body as a way to explore something about my characters.
You know, many, many detective stories or mysteries begin with a body, so I wanted to take that but take it in a very different direction. Mitzi Rapkin: Was there one certain question or a few that nagged at you that you wanted to explore?
Really, my entire life I thought of myself as belonging to a very small family. I was the only child of two only children, and around the time that I encountered the old school friend, Mark, I also discovered that I did have relatives. The three words are like veiled signposts to what happens in the novel.
I had the feeling that as you wrote, you were struggling with outcomes: wanting a happy ending for Karel; for Zoe; for Matthew, her older brother; for Duncan, her younger brother and an artist.
Can you tell us a bit about that? Readers are always on the side of romance; if two remotely promising people meet, we fan the flames. From one paragraph to the next Cather thrusts us out of the world of romance and into the world of accidents. After finding the boy, Matthew, Zoe and Duncan, each embark on a separate quest.
I wanted readers to feel how much was at stake for them and how easily things could go otherwise. I would love to hear about how you came to structure the book in short-ish sections, each devoted to one of the children.
I originally fantasized using some version of the omniscient voice throughout; it seemed a pleasingly grown up thing to do. But using a close third person, and short sections, allowed me to juxtapose the differences between the siblings more acutely. I also liked the way the short sections created suspense. In recent years each of my novels has been propelled, in part, by an aesthetic ambition.
My last novel, Mercury , was my attempt to write a political novel. The Boy in the Field is my attempt to write a short novel in which a good deal happens. In Banishing Verona, for example, your hero and he is is an autistic young man whose life is changed by a tornado of a girl called Verona.
This book strikes me as a clear stream of mountain water, fresh and invigorating. It is quite short as novels go, but it is crystalline in covering a wide range of important topics without fanfare.
How did you arrive at this nearly perfect book? Thank you, Mari, for these lovely words. Like you, in your beautiful first novel The Pelton Papers , I was partly inspired by a painter, in my case the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi. I chose him because I find his work—he paints the same four or five bottles over and over again—inspiring. His ability to look, and keep looking, made me think about what I was trying to achieve beneath the surface action of the prose. A few years ago, I discovered that I have quite a lot of them; they all happen to live in Australia.
In I went to meet them. For the first time in forty years I found myself in the presence of other people who share my DNA, albeit a small fraction. The experience made me think a good deal about this mysterious thing called family. When I came back to my desk, I tried to give some of my own sense of wonder to Duncan, who is adopted, and to his siblings as they grapple with the aftermath of finding the boy. I think that sense of wonder vibrates throughout the book. Fiction does get written in all kinds of ways but I think in the kind we write, the characters always keep back a few secrets, and yes, there is a sense of wonder.
In The Pelton Papers you very gracefully allow your heroine Agnes Pelton to keep her love life largely secret. You have affected the lives of so many students, myself very much included. Can you talk about the role teaching plays in your writing? I do find myself deeply drawn into their work and am often thinking about their characters when my own need help.
Teaching reminds me that we all read differently and that nearly all of us need early readers. I used to think that I would eventually graduate from needing a reader and be able to find and fix the problems in my own work.
In my own case, this person is Andrea Barrett, the author of a number of brilliant novels and collections of stories. There are many roads to becoming a better writer but one is surely through teaching.
A beautiful way of concluding our conversation. Thank you, Margot, and congratulations on The Boy in the Field. Suspend Your Disbelief. Search Search for:. Share this: Click to email this to a friend Opens in new window Click to share on Facebook Opens in new window Click to share on Twitter Opens in new window. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:.
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