Published monthly

Home  | Contents  | Features  | Galleries  | Reviews  |  Archive  | E-Mail    

You could reach a unique targeted audience of over 15,000 people per month by advertising here for just £25

William Brodrick ~ Questions and answers for Bookplace.

I have to ask you: what a) made you become an Augustinian friar; b) then a barrister; and c) now an author??? Quite a few radical career changes there??? These are not easy questions to answer, but I’ll try! Becoming a friar doesn’t make sense unless one has a standpoint of faith.  It is a very personal matter, and almost impossible to explain without recourse to religious language – which requires the listener to share the vocabulary in the first place.  I tried to touch on this in The Sixth Lamentation – and I do so again in The Gardens of the Dead – and the best I can say here is that the impulse occurs very deep in the heart of oneself; it can be likened to a voice, as when we speak of conscience; and listening to it is both an act of cooperation and choice.  The same can be said of how I came to leave: the impulse that drew me towards the life of a friar drew me away.  I was approaching what would have been my final vows.  The closer they came, the more uncertain I felt.  Perhaps it is right to say that understanding ‘vocation’ has a lot to do with understanding our deepest ‘desires’.  And my desire had moved away from the place I thought I had come to rest.  Consequently I did not leave the Order because of a loss of faith, or an abandonment of purpose.  I was on the one road.  But I had been an Augustinian for five and half years, so it was a difficult decision; a movement into the unknown. 

For many years I had worked as a volunteer in various projects for homeless people.  So after leaving religious life, and having finished my studies in philosophy and theology, I obtained a job at ‘The Passage Day Centre’ in Victoria.  These remain very special years for me, but I was concerned about becoming qualified in some way so as to open up future employment prospects.  It was when that question was most acute that I met a barrister who suggested a career at the Bar.  If that conversation had not occurred I would never have given the notion a glancing thought.  I duly borrowed a lot of money from the bank; my wife’s family generously paid the academic fees; and a few years later, very much in debt, I stood in court, instructed in a my first case.

In terms of life’s paths, and discovering one’s place in life, that should have been it.  I ought to have been content, waiting for my wig to fall to bits.  But in my first year of practice I fell ill with cancer.  The treatment was successful and in a relatively short time I was back in harness … but as a changed man, although it took a very long time to realise just how changed I was.  That confrontation with mortality was like stepping into a brightly lit room.  I couldn’t see for the squinting.  Over the years that followed my career progressed satisfactorily, but I was dissatisfied.  Very gradually, I recognised that what I wanted to do had been plain since I was a child, only I had never taken it seriously: the desire to write.  And it was only this dress rehearsal with death that had thrown it into relief.  As to how I left the Bar to write is dealt with below.  Suffice it to say the moment I began to put words on the page I felt I’d arrived.  It was awful, because I couldn’t imagine that one day I’d be published.

What brought you to writing and how did those previous incarnations influence your writing? My father wrote a great deal, and none of it was published, save a poem and some verse – in one instance, in my school magazine.  The sight of him tapping away, the memory I evoke now of his privacy, his concentration, all this made writing a rather special activity, something remote and mysterious.   My mother compounded that conclusion (almost certainly by accident) when she said, ‘don’t write until you have something to say.’  The effect of this advice, and the memory of my father hunched at the table, placed the writer’s life well and truly out of my reach.  I grew up and, of course, the moment when I ‘had something to say’ – never arrived (and it never has done).  I reached the age of forty and had been at the Bar for ten years.  I was happily married with children but professionally restless because while I didn’t have a mandate to write, that is what I dreamed about doing.  I eventually began my first novel on the basis that I’d rather make a hash of it, than not try at all.

The reason I could make this decision is tied to another factor: I had become sure of how I wanted to write.  The idea of a lawyer/monk repeat character had already suggested himself to my imagination – and not simply because he represented my life choices in reverse.  I chose the name Anselm because his patron, the medieval scholastic of Bec and Canterbury, had also been a theologian and lawyer, and was the author of an enduring maxim that defined for me the relationship between faith and reason: fides quirens intellectum: faith seeking understanding.  It is not understanding seeking faith.  This prompted the idea of a man who searched more than he found; a restless fellow on a long journey.  The very different worlds of the Bar and the monastery were united in this one individual.  By placing him in a modern context I envisaged from the outset a series of novels without knowing what subject matter they might contain.  So, yes, it was very much my previous incarnations that shaped how I came to write and influences what I now write about.

Did the critical success of The Sixth Lamentation put any sort of pressure on you when it came to writing the new book? Were you surprised that it received such a warm welcome? Yes it did put pressure on me, but of a very insidious kind.  I had written my first novel in the calm and solitude of cafés, the sitting room and various hideaways.  There was a kind of peaceful co-existence between me placing words on the page, and the imaginary audience who occupied the air around me.  This calm vanished upon publication.  I suspect it happens to many writers.  What you did naturally before is now suddenly under scrutiny.  You become an observer of yourself.  It is rather like riding a bicycle, or more accurately, thinking about riding a bicycle.  After reading reviews – of whatever complexion – you can’t help but look at what you are doing, and, thinking about it in a new way, you fall off … which is disconcerting, because that didn’t happen before.  I consider it a Rite of Passage back to the quiet place inside, from which the writing springs unselfconsciously.  It takes time, patience and perseverance.

I was stunned by the reception of The Sixth Lamentation.  I give special weight to the letters from readers who shared with me not only their thoughts, but their experience of the painful history with which the book is concerned.  I don’t want to give any examples, but many were deeply moving.  Critical approval is very welcome, of course; but it is this link between writer and reader that is especially important.

Gardens of the Dead is a very different book to The Sixth Lamentation… one could even say that it is unrecognisable as coming from the same author. Are you aware of that? Very much so.  The Sixth Lamentation is, in fact, a short book, given its scope.  It covers three generations and examines the impact of history on fifteen major characters.  The canvas is therefore wide, but painted in miniature.  So one might say that much of the book requires close reading (for some that is a flaw, I know.  When the manuscript was for sale I visited various publishers who were thinking of buying it.  One told me that the whole story needed to be accessible in a single, quick reading.  I wasn’t sure of that advice, since I like rereading books, scraping away for the hidden details.  Another publisher bought it, thankfully).  This close reading would also reveal, I think, that there are several books in The Sixth Lamentation – for example, the story of Franz Snyman, or Father Rochet.  These characters are all placed in a picture far wider than themselves, precisely so that their respective greatness is seen from a distance, through time, in its terrible context.  The Gardens of the Dead is very different in that the narrative is determined by the viewpoints of six characters, all of whom have been touched by the one trial.  But is it really so different?  Both novels are concerned with evil, how it might be undone, and the limits of undoing; they are about quirky heroes who have apparently, if not actually, lost themselves. They are both about the cost of reconciliation.  They both explore how the law attempts to knit with human experience and fails.  Each book relies heavily upon what I would call a disclosing vocabulary, by which I mean the repetition of individual words that gather significance as the story unfolds.  For example in The Sixth Lamentation, ‘stone’ is an important word, occurring in the first line.  It is a constant reminder of brokenness, of evil, it’s hardness, and its capacity to injure.  By the end, another image, that of water, is seen to slowly wear it down.  The Gardens of the Dead uses animal imagery in order to build up a distinction between the bestial and the human.  And by the end, a beast is shown to have a shred of humanity that might one day redeem him.  So I would argue that both novels are similar.  They look in the same direction, but through different ends of the one telescope.  One is close up; the other is from afar.  The brushstrokes come from the same learning hand.

If you had to pick a genre that your writing fits into, what would that be? Literary fiction, crime & thriller?? I find this an enormously difficult question to answer, and a troubling one.  Difficult because I did not set out to write with a strict genre in mind; troubling because once a book has a label, it is reduced and could easily be lost to a wider readership.  I appreciate why such terms are necessary, but I think problems arise if one says that Great Expectations is a detective story, or that Crime and Punishment is a crime novel.  They are just those things, but they’re a lot, lot more.  One reviewer found fault with The Sixth Lamentation precisely because ‘with a book of this kind (a thriller)’ certain conventions had to be followed, and I hadn’t handled them very well.  I was quite prepared to accept the latter judgement; my problem was with the opening premise.  So I sometimes wonder if such (necessary) labelling might distort our critical appreciation.  If pushed, I’d say my writing is literary fiction.  But I immediately want to add qualifying phrases and I’m brought back to why people require simple terms in the first place.  In the end, I rely upon the discernment and judgment of readers.  They know what they are reading.

What is the bond between Anselm and yourself, apart from the fact that he was a barrister first and then a monk? The bond is strong.  Anselm blinks a few times at the world and is puzzled.  He has a coherent view of life, but is more at home with knotty questions than clever answers.  He is a man with faith, seeking understanding.  After that, though, we differ.  He is far more agreeable than me and his faults aren’t so glaring.  He falls just short of mysticism, while I’m still awash with the empiricism he finds so wanting.

Is he a Cadfael for the modern age? Oddly enough, I began my writing project by looking at both Cadfael and Father Brown.  I didn’t find in either of them a guide, save that I wanted to do something very different.  With Cadfael, I was attracted to the comforting ambiance of the cloister set against a turbulent period of history, but I wanted to write stories with a stronger emphasis on the moral mess that frequently characterises human conduct.  I hadn’t read Chesterton for donkey’s years, and when I returned to the unassuming detective I was – I confess – a little disappointed.  In short, while it can be comforting, I didn’t warm to Father Brown’s theological certainty.  My interest lay elsewhere – in doubt.  If Anselm came to have Cadfael’s popularity, I would be very pleased.  But they are – as they should be – very different personalities.

The Sixth Lamentation was described somewhere as a “tale of great moral complexity”. Do you have ambitions to bring that sort of principle to your stories?  Yes, I do, although I don’t like saying so.  It rather sets one up for a fall!  And the truth of the matter is that I don’t sit down thinking up a tale to fit that description.  Writing, as I’m sure you know, is a very intimate activity.  You put yourself into a book.  I think it just so happens that when I’ve finished, the story is morally textured, and situated at the point where good and evil meet.  An interviewer once asked me this: ‘There are strong polarities of good and evil in this novel, but you have situated every character in the middle, among the grey.  Why?’ Not having consciously made such a decision, I didn’t know the answer.  I hadn’t even noticed.  I suppose I did it because that is how I see things.  So, in one sense, I discover what is true of my writing by listening to what others find there.  Once again I emphasize the importance of readers, demonstrating that the writing and the reading are a shared project.

How would you compare Anselm to other literary detectives? Those, for instance, created by the likes of Ruth Rendell and Ian Rankin. Where exactly does he sit in the grand scheme of things? My first thought is that it’s flattering for Anselm to be mentioned in the same sentence as these others.  My second is that Anselm is not so much a detective as someone who finds himself thrust into situations that require resolution.  And I really do think that this is a feature of normal life.  We are all detectives.  We are all trying to make sense of the biggest puzzle of the lot.  Which brings me back to my earlier point about genre.  Yes, Anselm is a detective or sorts; but he is an ordinary person, engaged in a basically human, enduring quest to make sense of his life.  And that is the stuff of novels.

Finally, can you list your five favourite books, with a brief sentence on why they appeal to you.

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, because I have always been entranced by Pip’s longing to become a gentleman; his adventure across a social world long gone.

The Hungry Grass by Richard Power, because it is the most compassionate portrait of a priest I have read; a jewel in Irish fiction.

Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky because of the Raskolnikov’s redemptive journey towards Sonia.

The Intimate Merton, a compilation of Thomas Merton’s journals.  In these pages one finds a monk grappling honestly with his own identity; at times his search for God is haunting.

The Poetry of Robert Frost because he names things so simply; the words seem freshly minted.

Website design from £200 - ask for details

The small print

Gateway is published by Paul Edmund Norman on the first day of each month. Hosting is by Flying Porcupine at www.flyingporcupine.com - and web design by Gateway. Submitting to Gateway: Basically, all you need do is e-mail it along and I'll consider it - it can be any length, if it's very long I'll serialise it, if it's medium-length I'll put it in as a novella, if it's a short story or a feature article it will go in as it comes. Payment is zero, I'm afraid, as I don't make any money from Gateway, I do it all for fun! For Advertising rates in Gateway please contact me at paulenorman@yahoo.co.uk Should you be kind enough to want to send me books to review, please contact me by e-mail and I will gladly forward you my home address. Meanwhile, here's how to contact me: paulenorman@yahoo.co.uk Gateway banner created by and © Paul Edmund Norman

Home  : Contents  : Features  : Reviews  : Galleries  : Archive  : E-Mail

Web hosting and domain names from Vision Internet