Bellman and Black
Bellman and Black is the story of boy who experiences something so frightening that he tries to forget it – quite successfully. He grows up into a man who succeeds at whatever he tries his hand at and becomes a wealthy businessman. But the things we try to hide from ourselves are the things that have the most power over us, and his determination to make sure the past stays forgotten comes at a great cost.
Where did your inspiration for the story come from?
There was no single inspiration, but the first stirrings of the book came about when I was listening to Desert Island Discs several years ago. Christopher Ondaatje, the businessman, explorer and philanthropist, was asked what vastly successful business moguls have that other people don’t, and he answered that the question was better the other way round: what was it he lacked that made him so driven? This set me thinking about workaholism and what might lie behind it. William Bellman was the result of this thinking.
A second strand of the story grows out of my fascination with rooks. As a child I once had an encounter with a rook in thick fog. Its beak appeared to be made of stone, and my storyloving mind wondered whether some witch had wanted to turn him into a stone statue but he had jumped out of the way just in time, and only his beak was touched by the spell…
The Thirteenth Tale is currently being made into a film, so how did it make you feel to find this out?
Delighted! The day I learned Christopher Hampton was going to write the script was thrilling, and Vanessa Redgrave and Olivia Colman are great favourites of mine on the screen. I think quite visually when I am writing, so I am really looking forward to seeing how far the film matches my own image of Angelfield House and the topiary gardens. I don’t have long to wait now – the film is scheduled for broadcast on BBC2 at Christmas.
What was the appeal to write a gothic tale?
I never set out to write a gothic tale. I just get a character in my head and he or she leads me to the story. But what I relished in writing this story was that it allowed me to explore something which is difficult to explore in any other way. Death is the great unknown, the biggest question that confronts us as human beings and one we’ll never the know the answer to – until that moment when we do know it, of course, by which time it will be too late to share it. But the fact that a question cannot be answered is no reason for not asking it and gothic fiction is a great place to do that.
Please can you give us some insight in to The Thirteenth Tale?
My favourite description of it (not mine, someone else’s) is that it is ‘a love letter to reading.’ The book grew out of my love of reading, and readers enjoy seeing their own love of reading reflected in it. I think this is why it is so popular among bookgroups and inspires such loyalty.
I remember that as I was writing it, my teenage discovery of Wilkie Collins was sometimes on my mind. I wanted to recreate that kind of reading experience for others: where you sit up reading ‘just one more chapter’ even though you have work or school in the morning. It also mattered that my book should be thoughtful and moving. And – because I am very demanding – I wanted it to be beautifully written, so that it could be reread, read slowly, read aloud. This is the kind of thing I like to read, and so I wanted to write something of the same kind.
You are a former academic, so what can you tell us about your background before writing?
I was an academic before coming to writing, teaching French literature and language. I see the years as a student then teacher as my apprenticeship. Reading is without doubt the most important preparation in a writer’s life and when I was working on my PhD I read and reread the same half dozen works by André Gide over a period of seven years. This kind of reading – intense, obsessive, constant – lays down rhythms in your mind that are not easily eradicated. What is more, it takes you under the skin of a book. You learn to see the underpinnings, the internal structures, the engine. By the end, you know just how a story is made, you understand the function of every cog in the machine. And you start to get a sense of how you would do it yourself.
But that’s just the literature and there’s a whole lot more beside. I would encourage anyone who wants to be a writer to learn a foreign language, because there’s nothing like it for teaching you the elusive and precise nuances of your own language. The practice of weekly translation from my undergraduate years has become an everyday working tool for me: when a sentence doesn’t run the way I want it to, I habitually translate it into French and retranslate it back into English. It’s like switching a light on in a dim room: suddenly I can see what’s not working and why. Usually (but not always) I can see what it is I have to do to put it right.
Ghost stories are designed to scare, so what frightens you the most?
Writing itself is frightening. You set out with something in mind that you feel peculiarly passionate about although in truth it is rather flimsy - a character, a fragment of a scene, or an image, it might even be as little as a few words – and sit down to a process that is going to take many months and more likely years, and you don’t know with any certainty that you are going to be able to do it. For a long time you have only an indistinct sense of what it is that you are trying to do, and even when you have worked long enough to know what you are aiming to achieve, you can’t help but see how far you are falling short. Writing a novel always seems like an impossible undertaking until it’s finished - and even then you don’t know quite how you did it.
With Bellman & Black there was a double dose of fear. Because it’s a ghost story and William Bellman is a haunted man, fear was my subject matter. To write about fear begins with imagining fear. My neuroscience reading tells me that the brain can’t tell the difference between an imagined experience and a real one, and my experience confirms that. Imagining William Bellman’s life, I spent more time than is comfortable with a raised heartbeat and a dry mouth. Towards the end of the writing even my sleep was disturbed, just like Bellman’s. Horrible. But it was good research, I suppose.
Which authors inspired this book?
I am a great admirer of Erik Fosnes Hansen and a few years ago I read his magnificently puzzling Tales of Protection in which there are glimpses of a mysterious black-clad figure. And in my schooldays I read Marlowe’s Dr Faustus. It made a huge impression on me and I’m quite certain that the central scene in the graveyard between Bellman and Black has its roots in that play. Then, when I was deep in the story and needed to know more about rooks I read Mark Cocker’s Crow Country. My goodness, what a joy that was. Poetic, moving and brilliantly observed. The truth about rooks is every bit as fascinating as anything you could make up about them. Bellman & Black owes a lot to it.
What is your writing process?
I don’t know whether process is the right word, but generally I just do every day what the book wants me to do that day. For this one, I had William Bellman and the man in black in my head for several years. I wrote a super-fast first draft in about a month. This was only possible because I got right away from it all, and hid up a mountain in Norway for that period. There was more research for this than for The Thirteenth Tale, but I tried to get the shape of the story and the characters first before I did too much reading. After that it was a long process of refining, expanding, coaxing it into life.
What is next for you?
Meeting a lot of readers in the UK, the US, Canada, Norway and Spain! It makes a nice change from sitting on the sofa with my laptop.