About Sisterland
Page 36
Q: Why did you position men as a secondary gender in the story rather than just do away with them altogether?
A: I wanted to explore extremism in action, and needed men to show them being treated as slaves – and how this diminished women as well as men. I'm also conscious of what happens when communities or tribes or are kept apart because I grew up in the north of Ireland during the Troubles. It's never a sound principle to segregate people, or to allow them to self-segregate, because the other side becomes reduced to stereotypes.
Q: Did you set out to write a sci-fi novel?
A: Not at all, although as a student I read Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which was the basis for the film Blade Runner, and was hooked in by his vision. And who doesn’t love Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale? I had no choice but to set the novel in the future because I wanted to show what a society would be like where women had been in power for a century or so. However, I made a deliberate decision not to have too much by way of futuristic trappings, bar practical odds and ends like the comtel.
Q: Why does your world mistrust emotions or ‘moes’?
A: Women are always being told they are too emotional and the implications are that it holds them back. Successful women seem to be better able to keep a rein on their emotional responses. I wondered what would happen if emotion suppression was taken to extremes.
Q:Did you set out to make the Nine so totalitarian?
A: Yes, because when I look about the world I see how power corrupts people. Even relatively mild-mannered people undergo a transition and start to inhabit ivory towers. They become convinced they are incapable of being wrong, and stop taking advice. I wonder if they don’t become afflicted with temporary insanity?
Q: Your characters have unusual names such as Innocence, Goodwill and Devotion. Is there a reason for that?
A: I wanted them all to have so-called virtue names. But I also chose Constance because of the revolutionary countess, Constance de Markievicz, a woman ahead of her time. Silence came about because I’ve never forgotten meeting a little girl called Silence in the US at a wedding: it occurred to me that her name would be perfect for a character in a book, but it had to be the right character and the right book. I spend a lot of time thinking about names and often change them several times during rewrites.
Q: How did you dream up terms such as peers, meets, Himtime, and so on?
A: Sometimes friends who read early drafts suggested them, sometimes I fiddled about with various words shunted together until I came up with them myself. It was a wonderful distraction from writing. With MUM I was thinking of the antithesis to motherhood, and hoped the juxtaposition would make it more chilling; the same goes for all the mothers like the Mating Mother, and so on. Motherhood has always been regarded as such a sacred condition, so I wondered how would it be if these mothers didn’t have the best interests of citizens at heart? But insisted they did?
Q: Do you have a favourite character?
A: Modesty – she started life as a minor character but her role became more important with each rewrite. She just muscled her way into the story. I expect she’s on course to run some future version of Sisterland. I also became fond of the memory-keeper, Honour, and was sorry to have to kill her off. But she had to go. No room for sentiment when it comes to plot.
Q: What were you trying to convey with the memory-keepers?
A: That memory is highly selective. We all choose what to retain and what to suppress of our own memories, to some extent. But what if the State undertook to do it for us? What kind of society would that produce?
Q: Two dates are mentioned in your novel: June 29 and August 24, Memoryday and Sisterday respectively. Is there any significance?
A: They are the dates of my parents’ birthdays. I like to slide family references into my books. Both my parents are dead so they’ll never know I did it. But I know. It’s also a way of testing whether my brothers read through to the end – I’m presuming my sister will.
Q: Do Harper and Constance escape to Outsideland?
A: I really don’t know – I have an open mind about it. It’s possible they do. Equally, it’s possible they are captured, in which case Faithful would be taken away from them and they’d be discontinued. I don’t think Constance would be given another chance: it would be regarded as too great a betrayal. We’ll never know which outcome met their escape plan, but what matters is they had one.
Book Club Topics
1. How easily did you enter the fictional world of Sisterland?
2. Are there any characters you particularly disapprove of or admire? How did you feel about the Shaper Mother? The Nine? Silence? Harper?
3. How does Constance change during the course of the book?
4. What did you notice about Constance’s evolving relationship with Harper? In matingplace? After the Silent Revolution?
5. Why do you think the author decided to tell the story through Constance’s eyes? Who else could she have chosen?
6. Which themes are being explored?
7. What is the author saying about memories? And emotions?
8. Some of the characters discuss symbols during the narrative. Which symbols does the author use and why?
9. Do you have a favourite passage and why?
10. What did you make of boyplace/girlplace, matingplace and segregation of women and men, with permits needed to attempt babyfusion?
11. Did you find the end satisfying or how would you change it?
12. How does this book compare with other books by the same author?
Also by Martina Devlin
The House Where it Happened
It is 1711, and the Ulster-Scots community in a remote corner of Ireland is in turmoil. A pretty young newcomer is accusing one woman after another of witchcraft. But Ellen, the serving girl in the house where the visitor is staying, is loyal to the family – and over-fond of her master.
Yet she knows that Knowehead is a house like no other.
And so she watches and ponders, as a seemingly normal girl claims she is bewitched – as a community turns against eight respectable women – and as malevolent forces unleashed more than half a century earlier threaten a superstitious people beyond their understanding.
Martina Devlin has fictionalised a compelling episode from history, transforming it into a spine-chilling tale.
Praise for The House Where It Happened
“Martina Devlin is an immensely skilled storyteller and I was utterly gripped by this book’s power. Its sulfurous shadows and air of suppressed menace remind you that the author of Wuthering Heights had Ulster blood, like Devlin” – Joseph O’Connor
Buy The House Where It Happened Now
Praise for The House Where It Happened
“An immensely skilled storyteller and I was utterly gripped by this book’s power”
Joseph O’Connor
“This is a creepy, absorbing tale. The eerie world of Knowehead House is vivid and convincing, layered with authentic detail and lit by striking turns of phrase. Martina Devlin has given us scenes we want to look away from but can’t, a whiff of the past that lifts from the page and stays with you, once the story’s told”
Lia Mills
“Absorbing”
Irish Times
“Compelling”
Sunday Business Post
“A cracking good story”
Irish Examiner
“A memorable and spirited narrator”
Irish Independent
“Gorgeously atmospheric and gripping . . . meticulously researched”
Claudia Carroll, Irish Daily Mail
“Brilliant”
Belfast Telegraph
“An astonishing achievement . . . a wealth of scholarship and research”
Nell McCafferty
“Completely bewitched”
The Sunday World
“Great read, a proper ghost story based on real events and research”
Sus
an Lanigan, author
“A novel that grips onto you tightly from the outset”
Claire Savage, Culture Northern Ireland
“One of my favourite books last year, absolutely loved it”
Lisa Redmond of LisaReadsBooks
“Recommended”
Margaret B Madden, BleachHouseLibrary
Ship Of Dreams
A group of people meet on one of the Titanic's lifeboats, saved from death by random chance. These survivors, from different nationalities and walks of life, have only one factor in common: all have survived a tragedy that captures the world’s imagination. This thread binds them together when they are rescued and taken to New York.
Two of the survivors are Irish emigrants hoping to make a new life for themselves. Both have a secret: one is carrying a baby and the other has buried a baby.
Also on board is a beautiful American girl who has scaled New York society to marry the heir to a hotel fortune. But her gilded life is threatened when he drowns. Then there is the French gentleman’s secretary with ambitions to better himself, a US Cavalry officer convinced his dead wife intervened to rescue him, and an English teacher plucked from the sea by the Irish girls.
Certainties have been shattered and life in the Titanic’s wake can never be the same again…
Buy Ship of Dreams Now
Temptation
One lesson Kitty Kennedy has taken from her two marriages is that not all men and women are meant to live together . . . forever.
Alone again on New Year's Day, Kitty is inspired with the ideal New Year's resolution - to become somebody's mistress. Except finding the right candidate proves trickier than she expects.
Sunny, Kitty's sister, always makes sure she never spends New Year alone. But men are only a diversion while the actress pursues her real goal, a Hollywood career.
Kitty's best friend Rose thought love was a foregone conclusion until her fiancé realised he couldn't devote his life to her. Or to any woman. Rose longs to risk loving once more when she meets a younger man . . . but fear is holding her back.
For Kitty, Sunny and Rose, giving in to temptation may be their only chance of paradise.
Buy Temptation Now
Find More Poolbeg Titles
Available on Kindle