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| photo: Susie Barker | |
British author Diane Setterfield has written three novels: The Thirteenth Tale, Bellman & Black and her newest, Once Upon a River. She studied French literature at the University of Bristol and taught English at the Institut Universitaire de Technologie and the Ecole nationale supérieure de Chimie, both in Mulhouse, France. She left academia in the late 1990s to pursue writing. Setterfield lives in Oxford by the Thames.
You describe yourself as "a reader first, a writer second." Did you have any specific literary influences in mind while writing Once Upon a River?
For this book, distant memories of The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot were probably stirring in the deep recesses of my mind. The end is unforgettable--and the river figures very powerfully--but I only have hazy memories of the rest. I recently reread Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie and its account of rural life enchanted me just as it did when I read it at school. Akenfield, Ronald Blythe's poetic account of a lost rural life, also made an indelible impression. As for more contemporary influences, I read The Returned after meeting Jason Mott in Miami a few years ago and loved the way it presented the return of dead people as a simple given without explanation. That was a bold move on his part and neatly sidestepped the horror genre. I had something different in mind for Once Upon a River but his approach proved it was possible to write about such a thing without being scary. That was reassuring.
You've kept a reading diary for more than three decades. What inspired you to start recording each book you read?
It came about when I met someone at university who became one of my oldest and dearest friends. We discovered very quickly our shared love of reading. She told me that she had a list of every book she'd ever read since she was 10, and I immediately started my own list. That was in 1982, so I'm onto my third notebook now. It still irks me that she has an eight-year head start! Every year between Christmas and the new year I find a quiet moment to sit and browse the list of books I've read in the previous year, and I put a star next to the ones I've loved the most. Last year it was Tove Jansson's The Summer Book and Kate Atkinson's Not the End of the World.
Storytelling is a key theme in Once Upon a River. In a world where we tell our stories in posts and tweets, do you feel there is still an appreciation for the art of storytelling?
Of course there is! We are human, and storytelling is deep-rooted in us. I think in one form or another it will last as long as our species does--and the fact that we tweet and post stories is evidence of its importance. As technologies evolve, the age-old craft of storytelling adapts. As a novelist I value the printed book enormously, but I am also the first to admit that the human need to find, tell and listen to stories is not dependent on any one medium. It existed in an oral tradition long before the invention of the printing press (and that tradition is still going strong in Once Upon a River). Later it found a visual language with the magic lantern (also seen in my new book) and later still with the advent of moving pictures in film and TV. The medium is just a vehicle and the real locus of the storytelling is that co-created space that exists somewhere between the mind of the teller and that of the reader/listener/viewer. A story is a shared mental and emotional event more than words or images on a page or on a screen.
Once Upon a River reads like a fairytale. Is that a genre you enjoy? Did you have a particular fairytale in mind as you were writing?
I love fairytales, yes. They are often our first stories and a fundamental part of culture. It's a mistake to think they belong to children--under the surface (and sometimes on the surface) they are dark, dangerous and very adult. I love reading new and old versions and have particularly enjoyed Angela Carter and Philip Pullman's retellings. For Once Upon a River, I think I had the classical myths in mind. Odysseus's voyage into the underworld to bring back his dead wife, Eurydice, was one of the key ones, as was Demeter's effort to rescue her daughter Persephone from Hades. I translated some themes from these myths into folk tales. In one, goblins snatch unwary children away to a dangerous place beneath the river. In another, a father pays dearly to rescue his daughter from the underworld.
You live by the Thames River, which in your novel at times feels personified. Did you intend to make the river a character?
Yes, most certainly. The story was influenced by a walk (years ago now) along the river path with my parents. The river was raging--I'd never seen it so wild or so high. We were forced to turn back. I was perfectly grown up, we weren't in serious danger, but I remember a very real tingle of fear. It was an acknowledgement of water's power and the powerlessness of human beings against it. Once we were away from the water's edge, my Mum told me about a drowning that took place at that spot. That was enough to get me started.
During the writing, the Thames exerted its power and I was drawn closer. Now my house is minutes away; if I was only a little taller I would be able to see the Thames from my upstairs windows.
How did writing Once Upon a River compare to the experience of writing The Thirteenth Tale and Bellman & Black?
If only writing got easier! You would think it would, wouldn't you? Other things get easier--and quicker--with repetition. The trouble is, writing a new book always turns you back into a novice. Writing The Thirteenth Tale was no help at all in writing Bellman & Black, and Bellman & Black was no preparation for Once Upon a River. Each book is set in an entirely new world that must be conjured from scratch; each set of characters must be freshly drawn out of thin air. The fear of failure is the same each time. There are just as many difficulties to resolve and they seem just as insurmountable. The difference I suppose is that the third time through the process you can say to yourself on the bad days, "I felt like this before, and it all worked out in the end."
Maybe I'm underestimating the value of experience. I do know that I have a tool kit now that I lacked before. I'm better at diagnosing the difficulties. My early complaints were often variants on "I just don't know how to do it!" That vagueness has evolved into questions like, "Why am I nervous about writing this particular character?" and "What can I do to simplify this plot line?" Also, I am better at recognizing when sitting at my desk and pressing on will pay dividends and when I would do better to go to the river and let walking and my subconscious do the work for me. --Melissa Firman