The moment when several apparently disconnected threads came together was during a wander around Bosham church. There’s a bird etched onto the memorial stone for King Cnut’s daughter and, though I’d seen it many times before, the etching suddenly appeared to me to be very much like a baby rook. Eureka! I knew then that the village traditions, mysteries and myths surrounding the ancient stone coffins in Bosham church would provide a frame around which to weave the various narrative strands which were the chaos of my first draft.
You ‘bookend’ the novel with two vividly imagined episodes featuring real historical figures – are you tempted to write a full-blown historical novel?
The brief battlefield scene which opens Rook was written very early on and the process absorbed me for days. The imagining of such a savage scene forced a focus on concrete imagery which links love and loss, a theme which was to be central to the novel, though I didn’t know it at the time. I later wrote more of Edyth Swan-neck’s story which was cut right back during redrafting to leave just the two episodes. Rook wasn’t the place for it. I had an inkling this was novel three surfacing but again resisted the idea (this seems to be part of my creative process!) because the voice which came so powerfully when writing Edyth’s viewpoint is intense and would be difficult to maintain for a whole novel. However, the hidden histories in the Bayeux Tapestry remain a preoccupation, as does Edyth’s story and what happened to her after the Norman Conquest. I’m now planning a trip to West Stow Anglo-Saxon village. So, yes, I’m more than tempted.
Both your novels explore secrets and hidden stories. Is this a preoccupation of yours?
Yes. Untold stories fascinate me, the power they hold over people/characters who, for whatever reason, can’t at first voice them. The ‘underside’ of things draws me: the secrets people choose to keep; a point of view which may go unstated in a newspaper story; mysteries which can’t be solved because we don’t have enough information – but we try to solve them anyway. More than a preoccupation, the unfolding of a story which is at first hidden is very much part of my writing process. Michèle Roberts talks of ‘writing into the dark’ with a first draft and that’s how it is for me: both exciting and frightening. The sense of the story about to be discovered, as if it already exists somewhere, is what drives me.
You write about Rook so convincingly. How did you do your research into birds?
I began with Crow Country by Mark Cocker, a glorious book which sent me off on an exuberant quest to Norfolk to watch thousands and thousands of rooks come into roost – one of the most uplifting experiences of my life. Rook himself grew from information gleaned from my husband and his sisters about a pet rook their mother kept for years in the casing of an old television in their kitchen. I also learned a great deal from Corvus: A Life with Birds by Esther Woolfson, who writes with captivating detail about a baby rook she reared. I’ve never had a close encounter with a live rook, but when editing during one early summer I often ate my lunch outside in the company of a semi-tame female blackbird. Watching the blackbird watch me, the way she moved and the way I felt when she eventually took food from my hand, all added to my understanding of Rook and Nora’s relationship, and helped me appreciate the fragile balance between what is wild and what is tame.
Both The Devil’s Music and Rook are closely tied to the landscape of Sussex where you live – do you think you would be a different writer if you lived in the city? Do you think writers are products of the landscape they grow up in?
Details of landscape and my response to it have become part of how I understand and see myself, but it’s not as straightforward as being a ‘product’ of where I grew up, since my connection with landscape has deepened through writing. Simon Schama suggests that landscape is ‘the work of the mind. Its scenery built up as much from the strata of memory as from layers of rock’, and it’s true my attachment to the seascapes of Sussex is rooted in memory. I grew up in Bexhill, East Sussex, where we had a beach hut. Often we’d be there in all weathers, from breakfast until bedtime, and my childhood memories are mostly of being outside, barefoot under broad skies; of running on pebbles, climbing breakwaters, exploring rock pools, building huge sandcastles with crowds of other children. I also lived for thirty years in the Witterings in West Sussex, writing The Devil’s Music in a house just across the road from the sea.
I’ve learnt recently that the word ‘landscaef’, brought to Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers, meant a clearing in the forest with animals, huts, fields and fences; a place carved out of the wilderness; a place made ‘home’. Choosing a Sussex beach as the primary setting for The Devil’s Music was, I expect, a way of providing myself with a place to feel at home when everything about the process of writing my first novel was challenging and unfamiliar. Rook ventures a little further inland, along a creek path, across wheat fields. With novel three – which looks as though it might be set in forests on the Downs – I’m getting really adventurous!
Who are your key literary influences?
I began to love the idea of writing when I was about nine or ten after reading Catherine Storr (Marianne Dreams) and Alan Garner (The Owl Service). Since then, I’ve continued to be influenced by each encounter with a writer whose work thrills me in some way. There are many, so this list is not exhaustive, and I have to include poets: T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence when I was a teenager; contemporary poets such as Vicki Feaver, Helen Dunmore, Stephanie Norgate, who I came across in my thirties. Later, fiction writers like Jeanette Winterson, Michael Ondaatje, Maggie O’Farrell, Julie Myerson, Patrick McGrath, Jon McGregor and early Ian McEwan; more recently, Evie Wyld, Sarah Hall, Katie Ward, Deborah Levy and the poets Philip Gross and Esther Morgan have delighted me with what they’ve achieved with language and form.
First published in Great Britain 2012
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2012 by Jane Rusbridge
The excerpt on page vii is from ‘A Herbal’, taken from Human Chain
© Seamus Heaney. Reprinted with kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
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