Helen Dunmore - TALKING TO THE DEAD

Helen Dunmore was invited to a readers group at the Institute of Cancer Research on 4 November 2000. The group had chosen TALKING TO THE DEAD as their book for the month.

The group meet once a month to eat, drink, chat - and of course to discuss the book they've been reading. Some people were colleagues and clearly knew each other well; for others (me included) this was their first experience of a readers' group, and the first time they had met many of the people there. Once everyone had been introduced, and had shared some initial reactions to the novel, we asked Helen Dunmore some questions:

Q: I was grabbed by the first chapter - I loved the way it was written; you knew immediately that something dramatic was going to happen. The descriptions of the sea, the river were wonderful - you could visualise everything except, oddly, I couldn't imagine the house - it's as if you're on the inside looking out.

Helen: That's very interesting. I hadn't thought about before but it's true - you're inside the house with the skin of the house around you and you take it for granted, and I don't describe it very much - only the kitchen, her bedroom.
     
Helen told us that every novel has a kind of substratum that is not necessarily referred to in the novel, but informs it. One story behind Talking to the Dead was a conversation Helen had had with her own sister while walking around the Firle graveyard one sunny Sunday, with Helen's baby in a pushchair, when she was starting to think about writing the book. Someone who is buried in the Firle graveyard is Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf's sister, and the place where Virginia Woolf lived is Charleston. So the house in Talking to the Dead is Charleston, the garden is Charleston garden. If you know that area of the country you'll recognise the topography. One sister, Virginia Woolf, killed herself by drowning. The relationship between those two sisters - which was very strange, very compelling - was in Helen's mind. Virginia Woolf needed Vanessa Bell to be a mother to her because her own mother had died, and then her substitute mother died. And Edward is a slightly Duncan Grant figure. It's probably not accidental, too, that Helen wrote Talking to the Dead when she had a young baby, because when you have a baby you are open to thoughts about the vulnerability of children. So those things inform the novel. Helen doesn't think that has to be explained - none of this appears on the pages, after all - but to Helen it's interesting, to her it's a part of the story.

Q: Do you feel that the characters are doomed, that you know what's going to happen to these characters right from the outset because of the way they are?

Helen: No, they struggle hard, but they are deeply marked, by the death of the baby and by the lack of maternal and paternal care they have received.
    
Q: Should we have known more about Isabel's childhood, about the way she'd always had to be a mother to her siblings?

Helen: I think the whole thing starts to roll when the girls realise that their mother can be maternal, but not towards them. When their brother is born, suddenly they see it. Children can accept having parents who are fairly indifferent towards them, because they assume they don't know any other way to be, but if they see the parents suddenly clinging on to a child of the other sex that is very wounding, and that's what ignites the whole thing.

Q: What was so special about the son to make the mother respond to him but not to her daughters?

Helen: I don't think there was anything so special about him - I think it's that there are some women who can't nurture their daughters but can their sons and maybe she was in that group. He was a baby - not able to do right or wrong.

Q: I kept looking for something in the characters to explain their behaviour.

Helen: I didn't want to have a lot of, to put it crudely, psychological explanation. I think most people have so much in themselves for the story to echo against that they don't need any more information: they've got enough there. A personal dislike is plonking a lot of psychological explanation into a novel - I hate it, so I don't do it! But it is tempting.

Q: But it's also unusual not to do it, and it challenged me to think for myself. You didn't just give an explanation, you gave the setting, the situation. It must be harder to do that, and to keep someone interested in the book, than to put in all those background details.

Helen: Yes, it is.

Q: The first book we read was The Magus by John Fowles, and the edition we read was prefaced by the author explaining that he didn't know what was going on in the book. People write to him about this book, there are obsessives all over the planet who want to know what's going on, and he says 'I don't know. Here's the book, you read it, you make up your own minds.' Do you sympathise with that attitude?

Helen: I think people do still think there is an ultimate truth to a book, and there isn't. All I can say is that the reality of the book is probably different for me than it is for anybody else because for me there are all the scenes that don't appear in the book and I can kind of - like turning on a film, I can see them, but I choose not to, I make it go very small or else I wouldn't be able to write anything new - I mean with each book you have to kind of pack it away. But even talking to you now, it begins to unpack, and there are little scenes that didn't go in which are as vivid to me as the ones that did.

Q: So who's the villain?

[laughter] Helen: I think one thing that as adults we forget is this very passionate child life going on that we never know anything about, or have access to, and it's different from adult reality. I was interested in tapping into that, where you believe that somebody can almost carry out magical acts - I mean Nina ascribes to Isabel all kinds of magical powers: she's not just an elder sister, she's a magical being, and that still lingers when they're adults: she mythologizes Isabel.

Q: Are you an author for whom the characters have a life of their own? Do they go off sometimes and do things that surprise you?

Helen: Yes - I don't know any authors who feel in control of the narrative from start to finish, unless they're writing formula fiction. I think there has to be room for the characters to emerge - or to shrink: to get smaller and less significant.

Q: Nina's relationship with Richard - what was going on there?

Helen: With Richard and Nina I thought yes, this is going to happen: they are both hungry; they're both starving. Richard is Mr Successful, he's Mr Businessman, he's got his hands on the outside world, but Isabel has rendered him fatally unsure of himself. I think the sad thing with him is that he's going to open up to the opportunity with Nina and then she's going to slam the door as well.
 
Q: Did you know right from the beginning how it was going to end?

Helen: I always knew there would be a tragic end, but the cliff scene came into focus later on. The book had to begin and end with them talking to one another; I was very clear that it would be just those two and the last part, where they walk up the staircase hand in hand and then I wanted you to think right back to the beginning and yes, they're right on that staircase, they're still communicating, they always will be. I felt something irrevocable had happened in the book - it wasn't something they were going to get over. And that's why this book is a tragedy - this would be the thing Nina would always come back to, and try and deal with, and she never would. And it would be Isabel that she would be talking to - that's why it's called Talking to the Dead, because it is a conversation, because Nina wants Isabel to tell her what the hell's been going on, and Isabel won't and can't. But she still asks her.

Q: Did Isabel get pregnant on purpose?

Helen: I think she got pregnant because she was frightened, and I think Nina realises that her life had taken on a dimension of unreality. However you want to define it, she was mentally ill in some way and maybe she thought if she had a baby it would be all right. It's always a sign of hope, having a baby, isn't it?

Q: I thought the nanny was a great touch.

Helen: I think she's necessary to the story; you need someone who in a way doesn't have a clue what's going on and keeps saying sensible things like 'Why don't you eat a bit, Isabel?' or 'This baby would be fine if you'd look after it properly'. It points up how far the rest have gone.

Q: I was disappointed that the food scene didn't happen.

Helen: Isabel wouldn't have wanted it! She'd have put a stop to it, wouldn't she! I think food in families is so powerful because so many registers of emotion are enacted through meals, aren't they? Also Isabel is out of it, she's drifting farther and farther away, and I felt in some ways she was courageous because she kept trying to seem normal - and Nina sees right through her, which is painful. And Isabel will sit there, and she clearly has a huge problem with food and she'll pretend she hasn't, and her retreat from the senses is so far gone.

Q: One character who fascinated me was Alex, who drove all the way down from Scotland with that salmon. What was Alex about? And again food, I loved the description of that salmon.

Helen: It's funny when people comment on things which you see as perfectly normal [laughter]. I think the thing about writing is that the way I see the world is obviously to some extent - not in terms of the characters, but in terms of what the characters notice, would tend to be the things that I notice. And everybody notices the world in their own way and thinks it's normal - we all normalise what we do - but in fact everybody sitting around this table probably sees it differently and so the way I write would be the way I see the table and the people round it.
     
Q: You referred a bit earlier to the title of the book, Talking to the Dead and I hadn't come across the poem until last night I found it, purely by accident. So I didn't realise when I was reading the novel that it was taken from a poem, 'Autobiography' by Louis MacNeice, and I thought it was quite haunting. When did that come into the book?

Helen: It was while I was writing it. It's a poem I've always loved and I've done a lot of poetry workshops in schools with children and used that poem often and it has a wonderful haunting rhythm:

In my childhood trees were green
And there was plenty to be seen.

Come back early or never come.

My father made the walls resound,
He wore his collar the wrong way round.

Come back early or never come.

My mother wore a yellow dress;
Gently, gently, gentleness.

Come back early or never come.

When I was five the black dreams came;
Nothing after was quite the same.

Come back early or never come.

The dark was talking to the dead;
The lamp was dark beside my bed.

Come back early or never come.

When I woke they did not care;
Nobody, nobody was there.

Come back early or never come.

When my silent terror cried,
Nobody, nobody replied.

Come back early or never come.

I got up; the chilly sun
Saw me walk away alone.

Come back early or never come.

Q: Would you like to read a passage from the novel to us?

Helen: I'll read a passage from the first scene in the graveyard. It refers to two graveyards - the Firle graveyard and Barnoon graveyard in St Ives, a beautiful place overlooking the sea, which is where, in the novel, Colin is buried. 'People idling through graveyards always stop by the graves of the young. Hundreds of miles from here there's another grave with the same surname on it as yours, a tiny grave in a steep cemetery above the sea. There's a path through the cemetery which tourists use as a short cut down to the beach. They stop, read the inscription, the name and dates, and the two lines of poetry. Often there's a jamjar of flowers left on the grave. If the tourists have children with them, they'll grasp their hands tightly as they walk on. I haven't been there for years...' (Continued on page 3 of Talking to the Dead.)