Bella Pollen Interview

I am British, but growing up in New York has left me with a quite pathetic nostalgia for all things American (current president and politics excepted) I spend as much time there as I can get away with and because so many of my childhood memories are locked up in New York, I become quite moist-eyed the minute I touch down in JFK. When in the city, I find myself mooning around the streets eating hot dogs, Good Humour ice-creams , playing Frisbee in the subway and bossing cab drivers around in a cringing faux Bronx accent.

Q. As one of the two brothers, Daniel has an abrupt 'life' in the book. Did you know you were going to kill him off so quickly?

I first wrote Hunting Unicorns as an original screenplay in which the story begins a year after Daniel’s death. Although I always intended to start the book earlier, i.e. with an account of Daniel’s death itself, it didn’t occur to me immediately to use him as the narrator. Once I’d started writing it from Rory’s perspective however I very quickly ran into trouble: First because somehow Daniel just established himself in that first chapter as a wonderfully irreverent and attractive character whom I didn’t want to lose, and second because when Rory described his grief it felt self pitying and self conscious. Rory’s problem is that he is unable to talk about his brother’s death partly because due to the guilt he feels at the part he has played in it and partly due to his Englishman’s innate horror at exposing his feelings . Once Daniel began telling the story, whilst affectionately mocking his brother from above, it became immediately clear that this was a far more effective way for the reader to understand who Rory was.

Q. As a device to represent Rory's feelings, the figure of Daniel watching from Heaven works very well - I'm reminded of The Lovely Bones and A Crime in the Neighborhood - but were you ever tempted to let Rory 'speak' for himself?

Because Daniel and Rory are ‘two sides of the same coin’, ‘ twins separated by a year’ their characters overlap to some extent therefore when Daniel ‘speaks’ for his brother, or Rory talks about Daniel, they are in some ways revealing much about themselves. Rory, left guilty and grieving down on earth was just in no fit state to narrate his own story. I needed that humour mixed with the wistful new wisdom that Daniel from heaven had the distance and perspective to provide.

Q. You have an impressive knowledge of the processes and pitfalls of alcoholism - how so?

I have a lot of friends who are either NA or AA. I’ve also a lot of friends who have died from drugs. Many of these come from generations of alcoholics and I have watched the struggle as they desperately try to overcome what they see as an inevitable fate.

Q. Early on you capture Maggie's emotional loneliness and the solitariness of Manhattan very succinctly - I particularly liked the line 'if you think about it, a crime of passion must be a luxury for a lonely person'.
Does this kind of writing come to you easily or do you have to work at it?

Absolutely nothing about writing comes easy to me. The whole business is painful , lonely, frustrating and deeply unhealthy and the only good ideas you ever get are while you’re having a root canal or something are therefore forgotten before you get a chance to write them down. Once in a blue moon, through sheer luck a decent line will pop into your head and stay there just long enough to be committed to paper.

Being brought up in New York, where my mother was teacher in Harlem, I was blissfully unaware of the whole question of class until I began working in England when I realised that the aristocracy were universally reviled, loathed and scorned for their birth , education , history and accent. Keen to appear as cool as the next person I was more than happy to subscribe to this, which was a little absurd really, given that I come from a line of somewhat eccentric aristocrats myself. One of my great grandmothers kept a full grown lion in England, until it bit the postman and was dispatched to Bristol Zoo where, despite Great Granny living in the cage with it, it died of heartache. Another relation was a female conductress (music, not bus) who liked to wear her tiara backwards so that the audience could reap the benefit of its diamond studded beauty. My mother’s mother was one of 10 children of the Earl of Radnor and was brought up in Edwardian splendour until she eloped with a soldier to Africa and lived in a mud hut for a year before my mother was eventually born. Of course the British upper class has its fair share of pompous narrow-minded archaic twits, but there are other sides to it. In Hunting Unicorns I was interested in exploring the dichotomy of the youngest generation of aristocrats who find themselves in the impossible position of wanting to pursue a career/life of their choice and having to upkeep an inherited estate without the inherited wealth to sustain it.

Q. The Bevan family has, of course, a dark family secret which brings out the worst/best (?) in Maggie's journalistic instincts. Rory neatly confronts her with the contradictions she feels. As a journalist yourself is this something you have resolved personally?

The journalist’s need to tell a story, the public’s right to know. What are the boundaries and who gets to draw the lines? Let’s face it; these are the hot button issues of the day. Will the soldier who justifies loss of civilian life as ‘collateral damage’ feel quite the same way when his family’s in the line of fire? It’s easy to know where you stand or what your morals are so long as nothing that really matters to you is at stake. This is the problem that faces Maggie in the book. She cares passionately about people she doesn’t know, but somebody actually needing her is more than she can handle. As a journalist I haven’t yet been put to the test.

I just don’t think there’s a way of writing ‘good sex’ in a book whatever that means, certainly not ‘sexy sex ‘– it always comes across as self conscious and excruciatingly embarrassing and if you don’t believe me, look up the nominated passages for this years Literary Review’s Bad Sex Awards after which, you may well be tempted never to have sex again!

Hunting Unicorns was a hard book to write structurally: It has two protagonists, one dead and one alive, one female, one male, one American and one English, one written in the present tense, the other in the past . The biggest challenge was making these two voices very distinctive yet be able to cut between them without jarring the narrative. It was also hard to get the tone right. Unicorns is a comedy, but it’s a comedy that deals with love, death, guilt, and regret.

It should get easier , the more books you write in that you should be able to tell yourself that you’ve done it all before, so you can do it again right? How hard can it be? But somehow it just doesn’t work like this. Whatever book I’m writing one of two things happens: I flick through the last one and think. ‘Jesus, who wrote this bullshit, I pray it wasn’t me.’ Or in my more confident moments I think: I wrote this? All those pages? But there are so many of them! Either way, I start weeping uncontrollably.

Q. What are you reading at the moment?

At the moment I’m working on a new book which is tentatively a comedy about people smuggling set on the Mexican Border. Ho Hum……………..

Q. Which books have impressed you recently?

I am currently reading Winner of the National Book Award, by Jincy Willett, which my U.S publishers sent me and which I’m enjoying a lot. I’ve just finished both Bel Canto and the Orchid Thief both of which I loved and have passed on to everyone I know.

Q. Which classic would you have liked to have written?

I would like to have written anything, anything at all, that could be considered a classic, but if I really get to choose, Portnoy’s Complaint wouldn’t be half bad.