James Meek on being shortlisted for To Calais, In Ordinary Time

1st May, 2020

Enjoy James Meek reading from To Calais, In Ordinary Time in our exclusive video:

And in this Q&A session he gives a fascinating insight into the coincidence of publishing a book about a past pandemic, while a pandemic was raging.

Q: How do you feel about being shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction?  Have you ever considered yourself a historical novelist?

It’s nice to feel esteemed by thoughtful strangers. Thank you. I think of myself as a novelist rather than as a historical novelist. I think of the nominated book not so much as a historical novel as a story about people that happens to be set in the past. I understand that for many people that’s not a meaningful distinction.

About nine years ago I was reading about the Black Death and thinking that, like climate change, it was a catastrophic event that changed human society without destroying humanity. It occurred to me that we tend to think of catastrophes in terms of survivors and victims, and if we take our imagination a little bit further, in terms of living people fearing they and their loved ones will die. As I imagined it I realised that in a catastrophe of the scale of the plague of 1348, confronting the possibility of post-disaster life becomes almost more strange than fearing death.

The book was written in two stages: first, a long period of reading and of two long walks through England to create a kind of illusion in my mind that the middle ages was a place I vaguely remembered visiting, rather than something I’d only read about. Second, the invention of a set of characters and a story making a fictional journey through this falsely remembered world. But there was another element, too – because I wrote the book in three versions of modern English, reflecting the three languages of medieval England, English, French and Latin, I had to keep laying my fictional trail while constantly consulting linguistic reference sources, particularly the online version of the OED.

Q: Do you think historical fiction can help in times of crisis like these? What are you reading at home right now?

Any good book can help for those stranded at home. I don’t know how people will respond to my book, a book set during a notorious pandemic, while there is a pandemic raging. My guess is that some will take strength from it and some will feel: too soon. Maybe it can help to know others have trod this way, so different and so the same. There’s a balance to be struck between rejoicing in the living and hallowing the dead and I’m glad that – this is how I see it, anyway – mine leans towards the first.