Shortlist Spotlight – Christine Dwyer Hickey
6th May, 2020
Watch Christine Dwyer Hickey reading from The Narrow Land in our exclusive video:
And here she talks about the origins of her story, and her reaction to being shortlisted.
Q: How do you feel about being shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction? Have you ever considered yourself a historical novelist?
In a word – thrilled. This novel was very well received in Ireland but seemed to slip under the literary radar in the UK which was somewhat disappointing. And now almost a year after it first came out, here it is shortlisted for one of the most prestigious prizes for a novel in the English language. As a writer, this sort of recognition makes it all worthwhile.
I’ve never really thought of myself as a historical novelist which seems a bit odd now that I think of it. After all, most of my novels are set in the past or at least play with the concept of time.
Q: How did the people and times you write about in this novel first lodge in your imagination?
The German boy came out of a story told to me by a man in Leipzig about his childhood in Germany after World War 2. Then, many children were suffering from malnutrition and had to be sent off to farms to be fattened up. Some of these children were later dispatched to America for adoption.
A few years later, a trip to Cape Cod gave me the location. Finally, there was a documentary on Edward Hopper which I watched several times during a long convalescence following surgery. Everything in this documentary contributed: the landscape, the sea, the searing light, the other-worldly quality of this isolated region.
Hopper too, of course, a quiet and powerful presence while beside him, his wife Jo lively and talkative, with an underlying tone of disappointment in her voice. And so, gradually, I began to enter their troubled and often tempestuous marriage.
In a novel such as The Narrow Land, research is central. I was trying to get into the mind of one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century after all – a man who was intensely private and disliked discussing his art. I did my reading first: books on post-war Germany and America; biographies about Hopper and essays on his work. I also read extracts from Jo Hopper’s diary. After that, it was boots on the ground starting with a trip to Nyack to the house and small town where Edward Hopper was raised. This gave me an entry into his childhood. I followed this with a long spell on the Cape which included a very expensive (but worth every penny) Airbnb rental just up the beach from where the Hoppers spent their summers painting and arguing.
I saw the light as they would have seen it, the wildlife and fauna, the night sky and the sea. The local library helped out in many ways too, perhaps most usefully, by unearthing photographs of the interior of the house just as it was in the Hoppers’ time.
When does fiction take over from the fact? Out of the fact comes the fiction. This could be a painting, an event that took place in 1950 or perhaps something read in Jo’s diary. I would loosen the fact so that I could get under it and extend it somehow, then weave it like a thread into the overall story.
Q: Do you think historical fiction can help in times of crisis like these? What are you reading at home right now?
On a positive note, and God knows we need all the positive notes we can get just now, historical fiction can be a very effective balm in times such as these. It takes us right into the heart of another era and allows us to experience lives and circumstances as if they are our own. From the Wolf Hall trilogy, to Schindler’s Ark, we see the same themes over and over, even if the settings are very different. Death and disease; greed and exploitation, and the savagery of power, the way it breaks and bends people to fit its demands. The big wheel goes round again and again, and keeps coming back to the same small resting place. In the stories of others, we see that everything passes and that eventually all suffering wears itself out.
I’m re-reading the collected poems of W.H. Auden, a collection I turn to in troubled times and an ideal companion in a quiet house in the middle of the night. Auden is such a wonderful poet. His verse moves along like light on a river, pushed on by a profound and complete understanding of the human condition.