by Morag Joss
FD: On that same point—in a previous novel, The Night Following, you also take your characters up to “high ground”—up onto the moors. This follows a classical English novelist tradition, the landscape as metaphor for the emotional condition. How does that drive your narrative?
MJ: Ah—the pathetic fallacy. At the conception stage of a novel I often begin with setting; I love its possibilities, the depths of its effects on people’s sensibilities and behavior. Before I’d written a word of this novel I spent some time on Exmoor, one day walking alone for twelve miles over the moor (slightly foolish, in retrospect).
The setting of a novel—in this case an imposing natural landscape—is as you say a “metaphor for the emotional condition,” that is, a mirror held up to the internal life of the characters. That’s why it’s so variable. At times the moor embraces, at other times it threatens, because the landscape described through a character’s eyes is a two-way viewfinder: to the world the character experiences, but also to the state of the character’s soul.
Setting, and weather (seldom irrelevant in the English novel), can be catalysts for action, too, both direct and metaphorical. For instance, when Deborah responds to the arrival of September, her desperate stopping-up of leaky windows and silencing of rattling doors express a fear of encroachment and invasion on a much more sinister level than the rain and wind.
And then there’s setting as character (the masterly example of this is Hardy’s personification of Egdon Heath, which opens The Return of the Native). I do seem to return to this; as you say, it’s there in The Night Following as well as in this novel, and also in Half Broken Things and the river setting of Among the Missing. Then there’s the mighty river in your novel Shannon. It’s a classical tradition, all right.
FD: There’s always menace in your novels, and it always seems to come from sources that are supposed to be helpful. Digger, for instance, in this novel, settles somewhere between creepy and frightening. The young man, Theo, may be extremely dangerous for all we know. What does this force of contrasts allow you to do?
MJ: It allows me to add another layer of instability and precariousness to Howard and Deborah’s world. Their relationship, health, livelihood, family bonds, and home all hang by a thread, and Digger and Theo can’t be relied upon as lifelines. Nothing is certain, nobody can be wholly trusted (perhaps not even to exist?). I hope the sense of doubt about Digger and Theo makes a reader feel anxious about what’s going on and curious to find out, and vigilant on behalf of Howard and/or Deborah, who most often seem unaware of the menace. I hope to create an expectation that nearly every character in the novel will turn out to be complex, and most motivations impure. But as well as that, Digger and Theo’s ambiguity drives much of the plot insofar as the plot hinges on Deborah and Howard’s inability to see clearly—literally and metaphorically—what is going on around them.
FD: You call down a number of classical tropes: the head of the household shearing off his own hair; the generous caller who turns out to be the opposite. If you had to describe a tradition which you think your novels observe—what would it be?
MJ: That’s a question that requires me to stop stirring, step back from the stove and try to remember the recipe I’d forgotten I was supposed to be following.…
I invariably think up a story and can’t see what it’s “about” (I mean in terms of theme) or what it “means” until afterward, sometimes long after it’s written. It’s possibly odd to write this way: the tug of a story idea and the impulse to write it coming before the point of it, and apparently (but never in fact) independent of a tradition or thread leading back to hidden influences. For example, I didn’t see, until it was nearly finished, that the central character in The Night Following is a sort of Ancient Mariner figure and her story a similar tale of transgression and attempted expiation. I wasn’t aware until I was some way into writing it that Our Picnics in the Sun may owe something to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.
You suggest a Samson-like figure with the shearing off of hair, and the wolf in sheep’s clothing in the duplicitous caller at the door. Perhaps my novels—yours too, perhaps all novels—keep returning to some of the fundamentals of story: the fall from power, danger masked and unmasked, love lost and restored, the return of the prodigal. These are the fundamentals of myth and fairy tale from the Greeks onward, aren’t they?
FD: One of the rivers running through this book is that of failed optimism. Adam hopes to be in more contact and visit soon. Howard hopes for a return of Deborah’s old loving. Deborah still hopes for a life that she glimpsed but never achieved. Many people might read this novel as a metaphor for much of current society: is it?
MJ: There is, certainly, a lot of failed optimism in the novel. Moreover, Deborah and Howard fail to recognize or understand each other’s failed optimism, and it’s in the microcosm of the silence—of the inertia, rather—of their shared disappointment that there may be a metaphor not so much of society in the collective sense, but of all of us individually.
The power of disappointment is, I think, strangely underobserved in this society, which seems often minutely obsessed with every other nuance of every emotional reaction to every possible life event. But disappointment: it’s a slightly underground, privately endured little emotion, isn’t it? It holds a note of resignation. But I don’t think it’s always like that. I’m interested in a kind of disappointment that isn’t resigned at all but is full of anger and, if not acknowledged, can be dangerously corrosive of spirit, love, and of life itself. By the end of the novel the power of that disappointment has found expression and is spent. There’s a closing peace, a reconciliation with failed optimism.
FD: There’s a most powerful—let’s call it “birth device”—at the end of the book that seems to unify, even justify, all the failed hopes. How do you work? Did you always have that idea in mind and worked toward it, or was it organic—did the book reveal it to you?
MJ: It came organically. With each book I’m learning more and more to trust the book to show me what it needs (and I have listened to wise advice on this matter). I still plan quite meticulously but am braver about deviating from the plan if it seems right. This is partly a question of trusting the book but also of trusting myself, that is, trusting the act of writing—and, of course, re- and re- and re- and re-writing—to reveal what exactly the story is to be and how it should be told: why this happens and not that, why a character feels this way and not otherwise.
FD: I have to ask—it seems right! Who is your favorite character?
MJ: I honestly don’t have one. I look upon all the characters with feelings of great kindness because I understand them completely, and they are all, in their various ways, vulnerable. I like Adam at all the stages of his growing up—I enjoyed writing through the eyes of a seven-, then fourteen-, then twenty-one-year-old lad. I came to love even Howard.
FD: You’ve now established yourself as a significant contemporary English novelist. I know that comparisons are odious—but of whom, if anyone, do you remind yourself?
MJ: That’s another difficult question, as well as an extravagant compliment, for which I give grateful and incredulous thanks! While I’m actually writing the answer is nobody at all, because I’m writing from inside the world of the novel, so to speak, and the task is a solitary, single-handed and unique-to-me battle to close the shortfall between my intentions and my abilities. Though I bring to it all my enthusiasms for other writers and no doubt some influences, it still feels like me vs. the task, and a very unequal battle it is.
The morning after battle, looking at my work dispassionately, if I knew a way to be influenced a great deal more by the writers I admire, I’d grab it. I wish my writing did remind me of, for example, William Trevor, Alice Munro, Carol Shields, E. L. Doctorow.
FD: In many of your novels there’s a deferred apocalypse, it feels, just around the corner, or the characters go through a series of miniapocalypses. Is Life, after all, in your artistic view, a matt
er of Thoreau’s quiet desperation and/or Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “just one damn thing over and over”?
MJ: I’ve been thinking quite a lot about this lately. Does a novel have to present a view of life as leading somewhere, or can it reflect Thoreau’s or Millay’s view of it as repetitive and unavailing—put another way, if the obstacles to happiness or fulfillment for the characters in a novel are not, by the end, wholly overcome, does at least the failure to overcome them have to be meaningful in some way? I think it does, even if the twenty-first-century novel can’t rely for its bearings on a coherent, universal moral order without being either nostalgic or conservative.
So I come down on the side of neither Thoreau nor Millay—the struggles my characters undergo aren’t meaningless, though I do see that the resolution of those struggles—which sometimes is the putting aside of anguish and the “good” death—may seem less than comforting.
I like the rest of the Thoreau quotation: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
The song—whatever it is in us that strives to dispel the “quiet desperation”—that’s the important thing.
He also wrote, “In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.”
From the moment Theo appears, Deborah’s and Howard’s lives become a slow and sometimes painful progression, after years of misunderstood silence, toward giving voice to their songs. So if there’s a unifying artistic view in my work, maybe it’s that the song does not go unsung.
For his BBC radio and television shows FRANK DELANEY has interviewed more than 3,500 of the world’s most important writers, and judged many literary prizes, including the Booker. Born and raised in Ireland, Delaney spent more than twenty-five years in England before moving to the United States in 2002. Author of more than two dozen works of fiction and nonfiction, his first “American” book was the New York Times bestselling novel Ireland.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Have you ever considered picking up and moving to the country? What about that appeals to you? What do you think the biggest challenge would be?
2. How does grief influence the life choices Howard and Deborah make?
3. What do you see as Howard and Deborah’s relationship to technology? Are they truly off the grid? Does their outsiders-to-society status provide more help or detriment in the end?
4. What do you see as being the significance of the title Our Picnics in the Sun? What do you think it means?
5. What would be different, in your opinion, if Howard had his power of speech back? How do you think that would change his character? Or alter his dilemma?
6. How much of Howard and Deborah’s marriage, from its inception, do you think has been based on attraction? Do you think there’s anything else mutually important to them? Where do you see these two characters connecting? Where do you see the disconnect?
7. Why do you think it is so important to Deborah that her son visit? Do you think Adam is a good son? Why or why not?
8. How would you describe Adam’s relationship to his parents? How does it differ from Theo’s relationship to Deborah and Howard?
9. What is more important than money? For Deborah and Howard, who cling to the notion that there are many things better than money, and that Adam’s quest for it is soulless, what do they have that is better than financial stability?
10. What is the effect, for you as the reader, of the author’s use of multiple narrative voices?
11. Who do you think is the most dangerous character in this novel? How is that person dangerous, and why?
12. Compare and contrast Nicholas’s [the companion with whom Theo arrived at Deborah’s B & B] role to Theo in comparison to Howard’s role to Adam.
13. Could a story like Our Picnics in the Sun occur in a city, do you think? How would it be different?
14. How would you handle a situation like Deborah’s, running a B & B in the middle of nowhere with a disabled partner? How would you handle the monotony of the chores, or being constantly subjected to the elements?
BY MORAG JOSS
Our Picnics in the Sun
Among the Missing
The Night Following
Funeral Music
Fearful Symmetry
Fruitful Bodies
Half Broken Things
Puccini’s Ghosts
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MORAG JOSS is the author of several novels, including Among the Missing and the CWA Silver Dagger winner Half Broken Things, which was also adapted as a film for U.K. national television. In 2008 she was a recipient of a Heinrich Boll Fellowship, and in 2009 she was nominated for an Edgar Award for her sixth novel, The Night Following.
www.moragjoss.com