Karen Maitland's Blog - Posts Tagged "a-most-wanted-man"
Found Between the Pages
I’ve just been reading a John le Carré novel, A Most Wanted Man followed by his amazing autobiographical collection of stories - The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life. I was fascinated to learn from ‘The Pigeon Tunnel’ how he drew on elements in the life of a man he befriended to inspire the main character in ‘A Most Wanted Man,’ even though the fictional character is so very different. But one of images that really struck me was the way Le Carre had watched the real man make and fly a little paper aeroplane, and much later used this small action to such powerful effect in the novel.
I imagine there isn’t a fiction writer anywhere who hasn’t at sometime taken insignificant image from their own life and crafted into their fiction, regardless of the genre they write. In my Jacobean thriller series, a humble wooden comb appears in two novels – ‘Traitor in the Ice and A Plague of Serpents. This comb was used by one of the characters to pass on a coded message to a would-be assassin. But it wasn’t until after I’d written the first draft of ‘Traitor in the Ice,’ that I was hunting for something in a seldom-opened trunk and came across a wooden comb which I’d been given decades ago, but had forgotten about. And as soon as I saw it, I realised where the comb in my imagination had come from.
In my thriller ‘Rivers of Treason my main protagonist, Daniel Pursglove, finds an object concealed between the pages of a book that leads him to suspect a group of traitors. Many years ago, I worked for in public library and we were always finding things left inside returned books. There were usual pressed flowers and seaweed, feathers, bus tickets, postcards, letters, bills, bank notes, and once, a gentleman’s ‘Will,’ still sealed in its envelope. I even found a locket on a chain, which happily could be returned to its owner, and an unused condom – imagine the stories you could weave around that one!
But more bizarre, was the shrivelled kipper I found sandwiched between the pages of returned novel. It was this image that, years later, was to resurfaced in my thriller, ‘Rivers of Treason.’ I vividly remember the indented shape and stain the kipper left on the pages, and the fragment of dried fish that stubbornly stuck to the paper, after the kipper was peeled off. What Daniel discovers in his book is not a kipper, but it was once alive and it too leaves a shape and a stain, just like that long-dead fish. Isn’t it strange what trivial images our brain cells somehow retain for years and even more, how our imaginations use them?
I imagine there isn’t a fiction writer anywhere who hasn’t at sometime taken insignificant image from their own life and crafted into their fiction, regardless of the genre they write. In my Jacobean thriller series, a humble wooden comb appears in two novels – ‘Traitor in the Ice and A Plague of Serpents. This comb was used by one of the characters to pass on a coded message to a would-be assassin. But it wasn’t until after I’d written the first draft of ‘Traitor in the Ice,’ that I was hunting for something in a seldom-opened trunk and came across a wooden comb which I’d been given decades ago, but had forgotten about. And as soon as I saw it, I realised where the comb in my imagination had come from.
In my thriller ‘Rivers of Treason my main protagonist, Daniel Pursglove, finds an object concealed between the pages of a book that leads him to suspect a group of traitors. Many years ago, I worked for in public library and we were always finding things left inside returned books. There were usual pressed flowers and seaweed, feathers, bus tickets, postcards, letters, bills, bank notes, and once, a gentleman’s ‘Will,’ still sealed in its envelope. I even found a locket on a chain, which happily could be returned to its owner, and an unused condom – imagine the stories you could weave around that one!
But more bizarre, was the shrivelled kipper I found sandwiched between the pages of returned novel. It was this image that, years later, was to resurfaced in my thriller, ‘Rivers of Treason.’ I vividly remember the indented shape and stain the kipper left on the pages, and the fragment of dried fish that stubbornly stuck to the paper, after the kipper was peeled off. What Daniel discovers in his book is not a kipper, but it was once alive and it too leaves a shape and a stain, just like that long-dead fish. Isn’t it strange what trivial images our brain cells somehow retain for years and even more, how our imaginations use them?
