books.
I first heard about HELEN GRANT from her 2013 Swan River Press collection, The Sea Change & Other Stories. Known mainly as a popular novelist for the Young Adult range, her latest - Ghost (Fledgling Press) - cleverly defies reader expectation, with its young protagonist of the title and the resonant echoes of a historical past.
What
inspired the plot and choice of setting for Ghost?
Helen
Grant: I've always found real life locations a great source of
inspiration; all my novels and most of my short stories are set in
real places that I have visited. I think an atmospheric location is
not only a rich backdrop to a story, it can also suggest elements of
the plot. For me, an interesting setting is like an empty stage set,
waiting for the characters to appear, and the details of the stage
scenery suggest to me what kind of action might take place.
Ghost
is set in Perthshire, Scotland, where we have lived since 2011. One
aspect of living here that I've always found fascinating is being
able to see the traces of the past in the landscape. I'm fascinated
by the vanished country houses of Scotland – many of them built in
the 1800s and then abandoned in the mid twentieth century when they
became impractical to maintain. Langlands House, the setting for the
book, is not a real place, but it is inspired by some of the derelict
houses I've visited. Most of them are ruinous because when they were
abandoned they were unroofed, and the weather has got in. I thought:
supposing there was a house like this, but someone had just locked
the door and walked away, leaving all the contents inside? Who would
be living in a place like that, and why? And that is where the story
of Ghost
came from.
Innerpeffray
Library, an antiquarian library near Crieff, was also a source of
inspiration for the fictional library at Langlands House. I liked the
idea of a library that has so many interesting and beautiful books on
such a wide range of topics, but all of them outdated. My heroine
does her best to interpret the world around her with nothing to rely
on but that.
Without
wishing to give away any plot elements, did you decide at the outset
of Ghost's
writing that the old adage of what-goes-around-comes-around would be
a key part of the climax?
HG:
I knew from the outset what the ending of the book would be. The
final scenes were very clear in my mind even before I started
writing. But I don't really see the ending as being all about
what-goes-around-comes-around. I think it's more about the difficulty
of escaping who we are, and the history that has shaped us. It's very
hard to say any more about this topic without offering any massive
spoilers!
A
real strength of the novel's first half are the tropes of
supernatural fiction being at first suggested, then changed. Was this
always your intention, during the drafting, or did you change your
mind and decide to defy the reader's expectations?
HG:
This was one hundred per cent intentional. I wanted the reader to ask
themselves what was really happening, and perhaps to make some
assumptions before more of the truth of the situation was revealed.
Ghost
was a very difficult book to write, and I did more rewriting and
editing on it than I have done on any of my other novels. But the
rewriting was largely about the characterisation and some plot
details. I was very clear about the supernatural tropes and their
role in the novel throughout the writing process.
The
feel
of
the novel reminded me of Nina Bawden's Carrie's
War.
The house, the lone girl protagonist, the family feud and consequence
for which she feels profound guilt, etc. Were such novels for older
children, and / or their TV adaptations, a major influence on your
writing?
HG:
No. I recall Carrie's
War
being on television when I was a child but I have never read it, and
I can't think of any other novel for older children which was an
influence here. I would say that a big influence was Gothic
literature, which also favours tropes such as the isolated heroine
and the intriguingly dilapidated ruin, and often has a supernatural
element. I've always loved classic Gothic fiction, ever since I was a
teenager myself, devouring The
Mysteries of Udolpho
and Dracula.
Combining
my Gothic tastes with my environment of rural Scotland was what
produced Ghost.
While
the novel form has long been considered – by agents and publishers
- as more commercial than collections of short tales, still might we
hope for a follow-up to The
Sea Change (Swan
River Press (2013)) in the future?
HG:
Yes, definitely. I have now written more than enough new stories to
create a new collection, and I really hope to see one come out in
future. However, a few readers did comment after reading The
Sea Change,
that they would like to have seen some completely new fiction in it.
It would be ideal if a future collection included some totally unseen
work - and I haven't had time to sit down and write anything!
I
agree that collections of short stories are seen as a harder sell
than a novel. All the same, ghost stories remain perennially popular.
Personally, I love writing them. A novel of 120,000 words is a big
undertaking, whereas a story of 5,000 words gives a sense of
satisfaction and completion but takes a comparatively short amount of
time to write. I think also that as a novelist there is always this
pressure to produce something similar to the thing you wrote last
time, probably because it's confusing for the readership if you write
a crime thriller and then follow it up with a Gothic romance. But
there isn't the same pressure with short stories. You can experiment
a bit more. I sometimes write ghost stories with quite traditional
settings but just recently I've been experimenting with more
existential stuff and I really enjoy doing that.
For
me, the traditional ghost-in-a-haunted-house type tale is way past
its use-by date. What is your own view of the ghost in modern
literature?
HG:
This is an interesting question. My daughter, who loves classic ghost
stories, admits that some of the traditional tropes are now clichés
but says that to a certain extent she reads the stories for those
clichés. And I think that the traditional setting of the decaying
old house or dank mossy churchyard is used for a reason: those places
genuinely are creepy. I should know – I spend my spare time
exploring places like that! In the hands of a really good writer, I
think they can still come to full and creepy life. An excellent
example in my mind is Neil Gaiman's short story October
in the Chair,
which features both haunted house and graveyard. It's a story which
fills me with tension and dread – and also sadness - every single
time I read it.
I
think though that when we say "traditional ghost…" we are
thinking of a very specific type of ghost: the lingering spirit of
the recently dead. For me, a ghost can be very different from that.
In a recent interview, I was asked (as I often am) whether I believe
in ghosts myself, to which I answered: Yes. I don't believe in things
in white sheets and chains hanging around a graveyard going
"Wooooo….!" But I think it's possible to be haunted. I've
occasionally seen someone in a crowd and thought that it was someone
I know to be dead, and I've dreamed very vividly about people who
have died. Now, I know that I am not really seeing a ghost when I
"see" people in this way, but I think these experiences are
a kind of haunting, because they show that the lost person is still
very present in my mind. I think Ghost
is a book in which the past very much haunts the present, and the
dead reach out of their graves to exert their influence on the
living. Isn't that the definition of a ghost story?
Huge
thanks to Helen for her contribution.
Helen's official
website is at: http://www.helengrantbooks.com/
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