AUTHOR Q&A:

What prompted you to start writing?
Why the Titanic?
This novel took eight years to write. Why did it take you so long?
What kind of research was involved?
Apparently a number of your characters are named after friends and colleagues. Does this inform your characters’ development?
You have created an alternative 20th Century in this novel. What goes in to building a world from scratch?
What did writing The Company of the Dead teach you about writing?
What are you working on now?
Do you have any advice for someone wondering if they have a good idea for a novel?

 

What prompted you to start writing?
I had always wanted to write or at least entertained the notion, but like many people, never found the time. I had an interest in the arts at high school but that got buried under my studies for Medicine. In 1996 I found myself between training programs, and time was no longer an excuse. I wrote a short story and showed it to a friend who thankfully was very encouraging. It seems that was all I needed.

Why the Titanic?
I hope this doesn’t sound too preposterous but I have to say I approached this book with a ridiculous amount of ambition. As I said, it was 1996. The decade, century and millennium were drawing to a close. I wanted to explore the 20th century as an epoch of glory, rather than the vision of decline we are habitually offered. I’ve always been an optimist. Rather than compare it to another era I thought it might be interesting to contrast it with a skewed and twisted version of itself.
I needed a seminal event from which to cast this alternate world adrift. I knew a film was being made about the Titanic. I had no idea how successful it would be but I was interested to see how various forms of media began to take interest in the subject. It occurred to me that at the birth of the 20th century the world was shocked and appalled and changed by the sinking of a ship. It seemed as though the century would end with almost as much interest in the subject. I had my framework. It didn’t hurt that I’d always been fascinated by accounts of the sinking. It felt safe to start my book with a subject I felt close to.

This novel took eight years to write. Why did it take you so long?
I think the question is, how did I manage to finish it at all. If you’d told me back then I would take eight years to write this, with no guarantee of publication, I would have thought twice about it. Perhaps. Because I have to say, I wrote because I wanted to write.
As the years went by, my training, (I was specialising in obstetrics and gynaecology,) became more intense, leaving less and less time to write. I started the novel as a basic trainee in O&G, and the book was completed as I obtained my final qualifications. They felt very much a part of each other for a while.
And I’m going to stick with sounding ambitious, and paraphrase Tolkien by saying ‘this tale grew in the telling’. It felt like I was building a pyramid. By that I mean to say that I always knew where the book was heading, but the higher I elevated the ‘peak’ of the novel, the wider its base had to be, and that took time.
Also, there was an inordinate amount of research and preparation for each sequence of the book.

What kind of research was involved?
I recently prepared a bibliography, which I was going to post on this website. I decided against publishing it as it gives too much away to someone who has not read the whole book. I worked out that I’d read at least 36 books from cover to cover during my research. I also spent hours interviewing people who were specialists in their various fields in order to flesh out certain aspects of the plot. One thing I promised myself was that I would be as true to my readers as possible. Provided they accepted the basic premise that time travel is possible, a premise that cannot be disproved, then everything else in the plot, hopefully, stands to reason. I have to say that the most daunting aspect of approaching my next book is the research it will require.

Apparently a number of your characters are named after friends and colleagues. Does this inform your characters’ development?
I have to smile when you ask me a question like that because that’s what they ask me, the people whose names I have appropriated for the book. Mind you they never put the question quite like that.
The answer is largely no. I wouldn’t presume to know anyone that well, certainly not enough to form some fictional counterpart of them. I’m going to refer to another author here, someone I love. Milan Kundera, in his Unbearable Lightness of Being, says somewhere in that book that each character in his novel is based on him, but unlike him they went on to perform acts that he could not conceive of performing himself. That was the approach I took. Having said that, certain mannerisms of my friends crept into their characters from time to time, perhaps a turn of phrase more than anything else.

You have created an alternative 20th century in this novel. What goes into building a world from scratch?
I wouldn’t exactly say it was built from scratch. I had the world of 1912 as a starting point, and a number of small changes whose ripples I had to pursue. I also had an end point. I knew how the world of 2012 had to look. It was more a case of charting the movement from point A to point B.
I was fortunate enough to attract the interest of a historian, whose work I respect. I had the benefit of being able to ask him: If x were to happen, would y be a believable consequence, and so on. It was very important to me that the world of Company was a believable if bleak alternative to the world we know.

What did writing The Company of the Dead teach you about writing?
What I know about writing I learned from writing, if that makes any sense. Looking back at earlier drafts I am vaguely appalled by the approaches I took. I have an element of obsessive-compulsiveness to my personality. That manifested in my need to write the book chronologically. I had a set of notes I worked with. Occasionally I wrote a paragraph of text that was far advanced of where I was. I would then work my way towards it like a snail dragging its shell. There are portions of the novel that I know I have reworked almost a thousand times. The changes might be just the matter of a word here or a sentence there.
My occupation is so time-consuming it didn’t lend itself to my taking any courses in writing or joining a writing group, so writing the book was an apprenticeship in itself.

What are you working on now?
I have the germ of an idea for a screenplay, that a friend and I are collaborating on. In terms of novels, about halfway through Company I had the idea for another story. I was both heartened and horrified by the fact that the few people I discussed it with told me to abandon Company and get to work on it straight away. I’m glad I didn’t.
The new story, whose title I’ve had in my head for the last five years, has nothing to do with Company. I don’t want to say too much about it except this. It won’t take me eight years.

Do you have any advice for someone wondering if they have a good idea for a novel?
I hardly feel qualified to answer that but I will say this. I don’t believe there are too many bad ideas. It’s all a question of execution. If you believe something is worthwhile, don’t let someone dishearten you. Sit down, start writing. What have you got to lose?