Scarlett Thomas and Rebecca Gowers are both cutting-edge writers with one foot in the past. They weave modern stories using details from bygone eras. In Thomas's The End of Mr. Y, an obscure book by a Victorian scientist becomes an obsession for the heroine, and in the soon-to-be reissued PopCo, an encoded manuscript unlocks a wild adventure for the sparky Alice. In the latest novel from Gowers, The Twisted Heart, a modern-day bookworm finds herself sucked into a mystery involving the young Charles Dickens and the slaughter of a prostitute known as The Countess. We put the writers in touch to compare notes on blending old and new.
From: Rebecca Gowers
To: Scarlett Thomas
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 12:45 PM
Hey Scarlett – I hope you are doing well? It feels funny to be meeting like this, in an artificial conversation, but here goes.
When I read The End of Mr. Y, I was struck by the extraordinary neatness of the way the word 'mystery' is buried in the title, such that it was hard to imagine this hadn't been your starting point for the whole novel. I am curious, though, as to whether you created the Victorian Mr. Y text first, and then clothed it round with the present tense story of Ariel Manto, or whether the writing process was less clear cut than that.
I've just pulled Conan Doyle's short story, 'The Silver Hatchet' (1883) off my shelves: 'The inspector smiled contemptuously. "Restrain yourself, mein herr," he said. "You do but make your case worse by such wild excuses for the wicked deeds you confess to. Magic and charms are not known in the legal vocabulary, as my friend Winkel will assure you."' Brilliant! It must have been a lot of fun to lift this kind of curse literature into new realms.
Reb
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On 29 Jul 2008, at 21:53, Scarlett Thomas wrote:
Hi Reb,
So sorry for my very delayed reply. I'm just back from the bleakly beautiful North East coast of Scotland, where, sadly, everything old seems to be in ruins, and even the lighthouses aren't essential now because of GPS. Somehow this experience, of noticing the changing landscape, with rivers turning into lochs, villages disappearing and beautiful Stevenson lighthouses fading uselessly into the Haar, linked in with something you say here about starting points for novels and the way they're written.
The title for The End of Mr. Y didn't come to me until half-way through, although as you say, it feels like it should have been there all along, perhaps like a church in an old village that seems to draw the village around itself, even though the village came first. Landscapes, which are both planned and unplanned at the same time, seem to make sense in a way that seems almost like narrative. They tell us stories, but we have to put them together ourselves, we have to make the stories out of the landmarks, and the motifs. Which brings me onto what I noticed most about When to Walk, which was the lovely poetry of your repeated refrains. Did you plan those, or did they come naturally out of the landscape around them, and did you plan the patterns or, perhaps, take stock of them only later? How do they work in the new novel? Are they your version of a curse, or perhaps more appropriately, a magic spell or incantation?
Hope you're very well, and I can't wait to read the new novel.
Scarlett
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From: Rebecca Gowers
Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2008 8:47 AM
Dear Scarlett,
I don't think I am entirely well because the copyedit on my new novel has left me unable to fall asleep in anything like a normal way. It was only wrapped up a few hours ago.
I suppose refrains and motifs add a sense of cohesion to any novel, even for the reader who doesn't consciously notice them, so in a way they are like a writer's magic trick, and you hope you're being artful about it. More than once, though, I have been struck cold noticing a pattern in my work that I was unaware of having put there.
The new novel, yes, has elements in it that repeat in various ways, on purpose; and as you say, this is in part to give the reader the greatest possible opportunity to pick out meaning where they please. But in fact, riskily enough, the reader's itself one strand in a pattern that runs through the whole thing.
I would and could very easily ask you more questions, but think we are wildly exceeding our word count already, and I still have to write a postscript for the new bk. I do hope you will like it: thank you for being so kind about the last one.
Best,
Reb
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