Just back from hearing John Harding read at Langton's bookshop in Twickenham. He spoke eloquently about his latest novel 'One Big Damn Puzzler', set on a mythical South Sea Island. The central character, the elderly tribeman Managua is translating Hamlet into the native language when a young American lawyer with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder arrives, disturbing the status quo.
I first met John when I was teaching at Richmond College and, as a former student, he came to speak to my class, shortly after his first novel was published. I haven't yet read his latest, but what fascinated me about this evening was the way in which John's description of the creative process so closely echoed my own experience. He began writing a novel about a group of prison inmates putting on a production of Hamlet. He also happened to have read a Theroux book about the Pacific Islands. He'd been reading about OCD recently. He couldn't forget an image in his head of a man sitting writing in a hut. When eventually he abandoned the prison novel, the other influences in his subconcious mind came together to form this narrative. Harding was attempting to describe the creative process and how making a book is the process of gathering all those elements that hover about the unconcious mind and making them concrete.
My own novel 'Bluethroat Morning' also sprang from the remnants of an abandoned novel. The abandoned work was about a snake-charmer in Victorian England and another woman, a herpetologist. When I quit working on that novel, a particular scene wouldn't go away - a Victorian woman walks along a North Norfolk beach in a high wind, her elderly uncle struggling to walk beside her. And from that fragment (and many other barely conscious imaginings) the novel grew.
It fired me up to hear John talk about aspects of novel writing that I so often talk about myself, for example, the moment when characters seem to take on a life of their own - or believing in the world one has created so completely that one really does believe that it exists somewhere (for him, out there in the Pacific; for me, over two hundred years ago (for 'Temple of Hymen'), or else, in some parallel Norfolk ('Bluethroat Morning') )
How weird that one can bore oneself rigid describing one's own creative processes, yet hearing that same story from another's mouth makes it seem suddenly fresh and new.
Before I left, I noticed, on the front table at Langton's Gijs van Hensbergen's book on 'Guernica'; felt a little pang as I'd always wanted to write a 'Guernica' book. Discussing it this evening, I knew, again, that art will figure in what I write next.
Being in bookshops always makes me want to devour what's there: a lovely long holiday with a big pile of crisp hardbacks beside me would be perfect.
In the meantime, I have a single crisp hardback to read: 'One Big Damn Puzzler'.
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