Where do novels come from? The trigger for Little Monsters was actually the first sentence – 'When I was thirteen my father killed my mother' - which came to me one night, probably as a semi-remembered remnant of a dream.
As I wrote I started to think about other novels in which children are abandoned or treated badly, Jane Eyre in particular, and this contributed to a bleakness in the emotional and physical landscape; but I also had in mind the sort of books in which children reinvent themselves in order to survive, as refugees are obliged to do. The novel’s very interested in how we decide who we are and what plays into that, as well as in how our versions of ourselves are often inept or inadequate. Most of the characters have an idea of themselves that often, tragically, fails to account for them. This is true for Nicholas, Carol’s cousin, convinced of his vocation as a soldier, but also for Carol, who signally fails to understand her needs, and possibly for Jozef, whose care is also a form of evasion.
One of the best things about writing a novel is that you may need to appear to know a lot about something of which you’re almost entirely ignorant. In one novel, it was taxidermy. In the case of Little Monsters, it was gliding. This came into the book for the obvious reason that there really was a gliding club near the pub; and, of course, it also represents the themes of flight and fortuitousness, which are central to the novel. When it became clear that it would have a narrative role to play as well, I had to do my homework. Thank God for the Internet! Without it, Jozef’s glider would never have left the ground.
One last thing. Someone was looking at the proof and, after reading the first sentence, said, in an anxious way, I do hope this isn’t autobiographical. No, I reassured her. My mother is still alive. My father died last year, a month before his 101st birthday. And, last but not least, I’m a man. That’s good, she said. But it set me thinking about the way in which one’s own life is the source for so much of what’s made up. That’s when I realised that my name, Charles, derives from Carolus and that my partner’s name, Giuseppe, is the Italian version of Jozef.
[Little Monsters is out now and you can buy it here. Charles Lambert’s own blog is here.]
Posted by Charles Lambert at 06/03/08, 15:07:13 Comments (0) | Permalink Tags | Writing | Picador authors
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