An Eagle Blind is the story of a relationship between two people, Lorna and her partner Chas. They are in their middle age – Lorna is 56, Chas 50, and the action in the novel takes place between April and August of 2021 – ie just coming out of COVID19 lockdown.
Brooke Feildhouse's An Eagle Blind
For me – as both a reader and writer - characters are the most important thing in a novel. It doesn’t always have to be like that. Some authors insist ‘plot.’ is more important. Others – such as Stephen King make ‘situation’ their top priority. My view is that if an author makes a decent job of building a character, then that character takes on a life of his/her own and starts to direct the plot. There’s something alarmingly Dr Frankenstein about creating fictional characters.
Early in my concept for An Eagle Blind I decided to approach the creation of Lorna and Chas rather like a sculptor might who believes his figure ‘already exists’ within a block of stone. All he has to do is chisel away to reveal it. Lorna and Chas are in their sixth decade of life, their past lives hint at a mixture of struggle and success, and each for his own reason seems to be hiding. Sooner or later, they are going to catch up with them. From the start we gather that Lorna has a past already linked to Golightly Palace, she is haunted by her lost child but we don’t fully know why until the last few pages. Chas is an even denser mystery and we don’t discover exactly in what way until the final hammer blow of an ending.
As I ‘chiselled’, stripping away layers to reveal Lorna and Chas’ inner selves, it struck me that there was a beguiling parallel between what we think we know, what we actually know and what we don’t know about Lorna and Chas, and what we didn’t know, but now know all too well about our collapsing environment. When I was a child, the popular fears were of nuclear apocalypse, and that is still a possibility. But it’s by no means a certainty. What has been exposed as a certainty over the last six decades – Lorna and Chas’ lifetimes - is that there will be an environmental apocalypse. What we still don’t know is exactly how long it will actually take before life on our planet becomes untenable.
Don’t worry! An Eagle Blind is by no means all gloom and doom. It has elements of the dystopian but it’s not SciFi – most of the environmental details and statistics aren’t conjecture, they are documented facts. But it has irony, humour and it’s a love story! It might even be said to be an optimistic read. After all, problems exist, that’s a fact of life, and we can never hope to solve them unless we come out of hiding, self-delusion and define what they really are!
Influences
As I wrote An Eagle Blind, three particular literary works were at the front of my mind: The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark in which the reader appears to be being told right at the beginning, what has already taken place. Shirley Jackson’s, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, where a mass murder has already been committed and the reader is able to inhabit the personality of the chief suspect, and - on the subject of catastrophes – Barbara Comyns’ Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead - which was influenced by the mass rye ergot poisoning at Pont-Saint-Esprit - were significant pointers for me. As a visual influence I was much taken by Alain Resnais’ formalist arthouse movie Last Year at Marienbad and I chose to give An Eagle Blind with its constant allusions to the paranormal its own unique and dreamlike setting and locate it in a remote baroque palace. A modern contemporary drama harking back to a period of great social and architectural confidence.
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