Andrew J.H. Sharp's Blog

Yes, The Chef, the Bird and the Blessing (just released in eformat with paperback to follow in August) is not a 'serious' novel, what with the quirky voice of the narrator, his reclusive employer, Mr Bin, and his visionary wife who prophesies a future of electric gates and marble porticos. A comedy? Even a farce?

And yet ... it's also a story that touches on the power of suppressed memory, on the meaning of friendship and on our relationship with the natural world. In these serious times, perhaps we need weighty subjects to be floating lightly in a pool of reading escape.

After a pregnant lull, Zimbabwe has given painful birth yet again to international headlines. Post-natal blues have set in as commentators offer their gloomy assessments for the future now that the ruling regime has retained power in controversial elections.

Amongst all the analysis of the politics there are stories about people bravely taking on injustice and trying to keep civic society going. There are also stories of the dispossessed and disheartened. Zimbabwe is under the world’s gaze, its stories uncovered, broadcast and shared.

So what, you might ask, am I doing writing a fabricated story set in Zimbabwe? If a writer is hoping to introduce readers to a country and its history then the journalist’s piece must surely be more powerful and worthy than mere fiction. It also seems more respectful to those who are fighting for change to give them a voice rather than to waste time giving a voice to made-up characters.

In any case, who wants to read fiction set in a place where history is on the march, when the real-life story is so compelling and changing day by day? By all means write a book about Zimbabwe but don’t make it up: do the research, interview people, find the true-life stories. Follow the lead of books like The Last Resort, by Douglas Rogers or The Fear, by Peter Godwin.

And yet … and yet … fiction is more than make-believe. We turn to fiction for a different quality of understanding of true-life events and of history. It takes perhaps five minutes to read an article in a newspaper or on a webpage and, however poignant, however good the reporter is with words, our engagement is fleeting. Our empathy is pricked but not fully engaged. But a novel demands something more of us. If the writer has done their work well, it engages us at a much deeper level. When we’ve finished a good novel, we place the book down a little absently and sit there, thinking, perhaps even taking a deep breath. Our thoughts might be for the character we have followed through three hundred pages or it might be that we have, for the first time, understood what it is like, for example, to live in a place smothered by shadowy forces.

The novel’s art is to draw the reader in so that they invest emotionally in the characters and in the landscape of history and event in which those characters live. Whilst lost in the novel, we can become the characters, experience for ourselves their world, share their dilemmas. We come to know subtleties of motive that are harder to do justice to in non-fiction.

So although the characters in fiction are not a depiction of any real person, they can expose to us choices that real people, and ourselves, might face. They can also show us something about how things ought to be and what has gone wrong. Tolstoy went further when he wrote (to paraphrase him): literature should cause violence to be set aside.

Fortunate is fiction and is set in Zimbabwe just before the last elections in 2008. It can only tell the stories of a limited number of characters and those characters represent only themselves: fictional people. But I hope it shows, and the reader will experience, some portion of truth.

In 2004 the novelist Tony Saint lamented that he was not even the the fifth best novelist in Waverton after his first novel had failed to reach the shortlist for the annual Waverton Good Read Award.

Never heard of the WGRA? You are not alone. A little history, then. A family doctor in the village of La Cadière d’Azure, France, decided it might give his patients something to think about beyond their ailments if he got them all reading and voting on the latest novels. So Le Prix De La Cadière d’Azure was born and, although the prize is now discontinued, it inspired enterprising people in the village of Waverton (pop. 2000) in Cheshire, UK, to do the same.

Publishers are invited to send debut novels by British authors to be read by dozens of villagers who create a long list, then a short list and then – voila – the winner. It’s one of the few literary prizes run by readers and is now in its eleventh year. Previous winners have included Mark Haddon for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Maria Lewycka for A History of Tractors in Ukrainian, and Tom Rob Smith for Child 44. There are also one or two winning authors that you’ve never heard of like … ahem … myself. The Waverton win came (a cheque and a splendid dinner – thank-you, Waverton) and went but then came calamity: my publisher ceased trading and my literary agent changed career. I hope that I was not to blame.

Despite the below-the-national-radar win and the collapse of my marketing and publishing support, I was delighted that out there, beyond the baying and smog of the city, the steady readers of rural England had liked my novel. They say that the British comedian Norman Wisdom was big in Albania when he was unknown elsewhere and I like to think that I was big in Waverton once.

I had no time in any case to think about the lack of national interest because in the villages of my home patch it was all bouquets and elderflower champagne. Deep in the rural county of Rutland, in mink-and-manure Manton, the villagers filled the village hall for my author talk and in Kibworth in Leicestershire the effervescent owner of the Kibworth Bookshop corralled locals into the pub for a book group evening over gin and beer. In tiny Arnesby, where thatch is as rampant as roses, I fielded questions that good family folk really want to know from an author, such as what his mother thinks of the swearing in his novel. In book groups in Knighton, a village long ago swallowed up by Leicester, we drank glass after glass of wine until we’d all forgotten why we were sitting there with a novel in our laps. In Woodhouse Eves, retirement village for philosophers it seemed, I was probably out of my depth.

Nevertheless, I was flattered and grateful for those evenings with readers.

I’m conscious of the fact that my recently released second novel, Fortunate, is just one of hundreds of thousands of books to be published this year in the English reading world. So I will be more than happy to be big in a village - any village – once again. If you would like me to come to yours, let me know and, diary and distance permitting, I’ll see if I can oblige.

Most novels have an ‘inciting incident’ near the start of the story that upsets the status quo for the main character. It might be a catastrophic event that threatens to turn the character’s world upside down and they must rise to the challenge. It might be that the character is faced with a terrible choice and their decision will have life-long consequences. Sometimes the challenge is more subtle – the reader can see that the character is in danger of missing a path to fulfilment but the character is blind to enlightenment and so tragedy follows, as in Kazuo Ishiguro's, The Remains of the Day.

But well before the inciting incident in the novel, comes an inciting incident in the author’s life. This is the happening that results in the novel being written. It may not be anything obviously dramatic, like a bereavement or a broken limb – it can be something the author has read, seen or heard, something that lingers in the memory; perhaps an overheard conversation or a memory from childhood. This could also be called an inciting inspiration.

For my novel, Fortunate, the incident happened in a café in Greece. Whilst waiting for one of those thick and fortifying Greek coffees, I idly picked up the menu and found a poem printed on it by the poet C. P. Cavafy. It read, For some people the day comes when they have to declare the great Yes or the great No… he who refuses does not repent. Asked again, he’d still say no, but that no … drags him down all his life.

We have all had such Yes/No moments. Sometimes we don’t recognise them for what they are until much later. What if I had a character who came to such a moment and knew that this would define the rest of her life but who did not know which answer, Yes or No, would be the wrong one? The one that would drag her down for ever.

The seed was sown.

But often one incident is not enough to suggest the story. Something else is needed. The second incident was reading an article in the newspaper, The Independent. The headline read: Mugabe’s secret war – in Britain. Tyrant uses threats, bribery and surveillance to silence his opponents in UK. The article went on to say: Mugabe’s feared security force, the Central Intelligence Organisation is waging a highly organised campaign to terrify the 4,000 MDC members living in the UK…. A former CIO agent called Robert was quoted as saying: ‘The Zimbabwean community in Britain is a small pond and there are now some big CIO fish in it…’ The article went on to claim that Zimbabwean exiles were being threatened and harassed.

The piece got me thinking. It was unlikely that any native resident of the UK going about their ordinary life in a Midlands town would be aware of the activities of the CIO (known as Charlie 10 by Zimbabweans) but what if I created a character who became caught up in the CIO’s activities, who found themselves of interest to the CIO, who found that they had unwittingly lifted the paving slab on their goings-on and now couldn’t drop it back down again.

That’s how my character Beth was born.

Further incidents came like sign boards on a road. I read about Clive Wearing, a talented musician, who suffered a viral inflammation of his brain that caused him to lose his memory. It was also impossible for him to create new memories. He lives in the now, in the moment and has no concept of the past, and therefore no concept of the future. His wife wrote a moving book about him and their relationship, titled Forever Today. I also came across the story of Henry Molaison. Molaison lived permanently in the present tense following surgery to relieve his epilepsy. His short term memory was inadvertently destroyed by the operation so that he was unable to form new memories. As a consequence it appeared that his self-awareness was fragmentary. He’d lost his sense of self.

That’s how my character Matt was born.

Matt is Beth’s husband and has had a similar catastrophe to Wearing and Molaison. He used to be an archaeologist interested in rock art. He goes from being able to ‘remember’ back 30,000 years to the paintings of ancient humans to only being able to remember back a minute.

A poem, a newspaper headline, a story to do with memory. Somehow these inciting incidents came together to inspire the writing of Fortunate.

It’s difficult to think of any novel that we love, however powerful the story of its characters, without remembering the landscape in which the novel is set and feeling that that landscape is essential to the strength of the story. For example, the caved deserts of North Africa and the shattered hillsides of war-time Italy in The English Patient; the succulently fruited Keralan backwaters in The God of Small Things.

Almost every novel is set in a landscape (can anyone think of a novel that is not?)and that landscape is often a vital driver to the story.
When we think of the word landscape, we may imagine scenery: the view through a car window or from the summit of a mountain. But there is more to it than that. Landscape can be defined as the emotional effect that land has on us - the feelings we have about it, the associations it triggers in us - whether it’s Yorkshire’s bleak moors, Colorado’s stark black and white peaks, Hong Kong’s razzle-dazzle harbour or our own homely back yard. But in a novel, landscape goes further, it’s much more than merely the place in which the action happens. It’s more even than the atmosphere suggested by the places in which the novel is set. In many novels, the landscape is a character - has a personality - against which the main character must fight or be tested by. For example, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.

But landscape in a novel means even more. The historical backdrop is also the landscape. It’s the other context in which the characters exist. They have their place in the land’s history and they cannot escape it. My novel, Fortunate, is the story of Beth Jenkins - locum doctor, semi-bereaved wife, home-sick Welsh woman - but landscape is a character in her story and plays a major part.

Fortunate’s physical landscapes include an ordinary city in Midlands England, where an ordinary woman finds herself trapped by events that she has little control over. It also includes landscapes in Zimbabwe: the mesmerising Victoria Falls; remote, hot, Lake Kariba; the painted rocks of the Matopos. But the historical landscape is just as important: there is Beth’s own history (a rootless childhood, a devastating event in the life of the man she loves) and there is Zimbabwe’s. They soon collide.

To Beth, place and land are just a post (zip) code although she has a vague sense of Hiraeth (the Welsh word for a homesickness) for the land of Wales - but is puzzled that she has such feelings at all. Then she meets her Zimbabwean refugee patients. For them, land is everything. It’s their religion, their ‘spiritual nexus’. It’s where their souls are rooted. In Zimbabwe, she finds a nation that has frequent revolutions over ownership of land. Beth arrives in Zimbabwe to find that she’s caught up in the latest revolution. More than that, she holds the keys – in a figurative sense – to the possession of land, to a piece of contested real estate. She makes a decision. She becomes a heroine. Then the trouble starts.

Beth is caught up in a historical landscape which mixes sourly with the physical landscape. So, amongst other themes, Fortunate is about our relationship with the land we live on. About what it might mean to us and how that might change.

Like a ship being committed to the water, my second novel, Fortunate, has just been launched and to celebrate the occasion we had a launch party. When my first novel was published, I searched the internet to find ‘How to run a book launch’. This netted a heart-breaking and worrying piece from an author whose launch was attended by just two others. Lesson: get firm commitments and offer cake. Apart from that sorry tale there was not much else out there, so here are a few tips for any other about-to-be-launched authors or for readers who are curious about this aspect of a writer’s world.

1. Here you are, at last, mingling with those who are going to be the most important people to you in the world over the next few months: your readers. Up until now the imaginative landscape that you have been living in whilst writing your novel has been unpopulated by anyone except you and your characters. But now your readers are going to live in the same world as you and feel the same emotions as they make their journey in the landscape that you’ve created. C.S. Lewis wrote, ‘We read to know that we are not alone.’ But we also write to know that we are no alone. The launch is the moment when you open the door to your imaginative realm and invite your readers in. But what is going to surprise you is this: your readers will make their own, unique, path through your landscape, enriching your own vision with theirs. Their comments and insights become a conversation. That’s when you know that you are truly not alone. Thank them.

2. A launch is also the occasion to publicly thank those who have helped smooth the way to publication for you. Whilst fingers on keyboard was you alone, a little thought will unveil to you an army of family, friends and industry professionals, without whom you would either be an emaciated or skeletal figure by now or be messily binding your book yourself with glue and tape.

3. Make sure your signature is presentable. I write my signature in my medical work well over one hundred times a day and each takes me half a millisecond as is just a brief spasm of my fingers - which the pharmacist recognizes as so cryptic that it could only be a doctor’s signature. However this is not good enough for your book which should be signed with the artistry of a calligrapher. I’m working on it.

4. Rehearse the names of the people you know. In the extreme excitement and pressure of the evening it’s possible, particularly if you are closer to fifty than thirty, to be seized by a sudden mental paralysis so that the name escapes you when you are asked you to write: To my dearest friend … . If they won’t help you as your pen hovers rather too long over the page perhaps you can ask, ‘Do you spell your name with a Q?’ This may be sufficiently puzzling for them to mouth their name to themselves to check. If you’re good at lip reading, your problem is solved.

5. Your publisher or agent may wax lyrical about you even if you are at that stage of your novel-writing career where your name appears on the cover of the book in the point size that loan companies use for their small print. The praise will severely embarrass you. You will just have to live with it.

6. You will be expected to give an entertaining speech. If you are like me, although you’re happy to spread 100,000 words over the pages of your novel, you would rather eat your manuscript than speak in public. But just like learning the techniques of writing, it is possible to learn the skill of speaking. The alternative is to tell your publisher that you are a reclusive genius and your silence is part of your mystique. Be prepared to have to find another publisher.

7. When you read out a short passage from your novel you don’t have to follow what is printed on the page. Choose a passage where the tension builds (but stop on the cliff-hanger) and skip passages that are not essential to the build up. The moment of climax in your reading does not have to be one that’s a high point in the book - that might require an impractical reading of the preceding three chapters.

8. Prepare for the commonest question that you will be asked: ‘Is this autobiographical?’

Maybe your novel is. In which case you are likely to prove the saying that the greatest catastrophe to befall a family is to have a writer in its midst. I answer by quoting the Czech writer Milan Kundera who put rather well the relationship between the characters in a book and the author. He said that the characters in his novels were his own unrealized possibilities … Each character had crossed a border that he himself had circumvented.

Despite your novel not being your ill-disguised life history, or a searing and amusing (to you) depiction of your friends, you will find having a novel published an exposing experience. Libby Purves, writing in The Times, points out that the characters and scenarios in a novel have emerged from somewhere not normally exposed to public view; a hidden place in the depths of the writer’s head. Hence a feeling of nakedness as the book is finally open to public dissection.

9. Enjoy it. You have no idea whether the ship that you are launching is going to disappear on a downward trajectory when it hits the water or float across the globe in glory, but the launch marks the culmination of years of work and so let the champagne fizz. Your nearest and dearest will also be enjoying the occasion when they can finally draw a line under it all. Until the next one.