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Featured Author

All That I Am

This month our Featured Author Anna Funder answers questions from The Welby Bookworms.

Q: Why did you feel the need to invent some characters whilst the majority of the characters actually existed? We are thinking of Ilse Herzeld, who in the book is the fictional character Clara?

A At the most basic level, all the characters are invented. They have interior lives that no history can let you in on. And that, I suppose is the freedom and purpose of a novel - to see inside someone's interior life. The basic facts of these disparate events- what Hans did to Bertie, the discovery of the dead women in the locked room in Bloomsbury, the whitewash of an inquest are all true. But no one has made these connections.

My novel makes a story from real evidence and real elements, as a detective makes a story of what happened. And then it re-writes the historical verdict. I find the inquest result outrageously unlikely. All That I Am is an invented story which does the people justice, which was not done at the time. Andre Gide famously said that ‘fiction is history which might have taken place, and history is fiction which has taken place.’ It’s a nice quip, perhaps a too-neat inversion, but food for thought.

As for Ilse Herzfeld - I know very little about her and she is not someone whose own story could fit into this novel, without bending it out of shape. Toller’s secretary’s purpose is to be a foil and muse for Toller, and to bring both a sense of the outside world to him, and therefore, paradoxically, a sense of his isolation. I gave my character a name I liked, that I felt suited who I was making her be. I have to say that I like Clara a lot – her intelligence, subtlety and her fairly valiant efforts both to rally Toller to life, and at the same time to accompany him in his despair.

Q: Did you find it difficult to reconcile the differences between the factual elements of the book and the fictional?

A Inventing the plot of this novel was very difficult - though of course at times thrilling. It is a double love story and a political crime story at the same time, set within the broad panorama of the 20th century in Europe. If I were starting a story which had no ties to real people, and if I did not feel the need to do those people some kind of justice, I would have had a much easier time with it. I could have made whatever plot I wanted, and just made links and solved conundrums much, much more easily. Instead I wanted all the basic elements - both in terms of historical elements like the Reichstag Fire and how that affects my characters, and what they really did (for instance Dora rescuing Toller's manuscript, Hans' betrayal) to be real. I was making a fiction out of real elements, because the book is a fictional solving of a 75 year old cold case. I did not want to find a smoking gun in fiction that wasn’t there in real life – that would have been cheating. Therefore in addition to the work of the imagination bringing these people to life, there was also the work, for want of a better description, of a detective.

Q: In the book the relationship between Dora and Ruth at times was hinted being more intimate was this the case?

A That part is in a dream. The old Ruth misses sex, and her dreams conflate the person who, as it turns out, was the love of her life (Dora) and her sensual desires. This is how dreams work, this is the surprise slippage of the subconscious.

Q: Did you feel that your personal friendship with Ruth Blatt restricted the emotional depth that the main characters had; did you feel it might betray her friendship?

A My friendship with Ruth Blatt was an important inspiration - and a source of great insight. But the Ruth in All That I Am is a different character; she is what the novel required, and what I wanted to represent. She is a great deal more complex and caustic than the real Ruth was. Ruth would have loved this book - she would have been proud, and it would have made her laugh. This book honours her. Without it, apart from a small circle of friends and former students, now in their 70s in Melbourne, Australia, she'd be forgotten. But the book does not set out to be a mirror; it is a work of art. I’m sure parts of it would have surprised Ruth too.

Q: Why you choose not to write the book from one person's point of view, as the change of narrator made it a very hard book to get in to, especially at the start?

A To write from one point of view would have meant having a narrator who could 'solve' all element of the puzzle of these lives, and the crime at the heart of the book. I didn't want to write detective fiction of that kind. But this is a large, literary novel, and not detective one. It is truer, in many senses, to write it this way. In life, no single person knows a whole story; we are always dealing with a fraction of the whole. As a novelist, I wanted to be inside two people's heads and to represent that consciousness. Toller and Ruth see Dora from different vantage points, though both of them love her. This seemed to me an honest way to tell a story, even if it is technically difficult, and perhaps hard for some readers to get used to in the beginning of the book.

Q: Was it your friendship with Ruth Blatt that drew you to writing this book or the results of your research into her previous book?

A My friendship with Ruth led me to discover the story of Dora Fabian, which was the springboard for the novel. Dora, as she remains in historical documents, has an unknowable inner life, and an epitaph that reads, 'suicide by reason of unsound mind due to romantic disappointment.' She is buried in the Jewish Cemetery at East Ham in London without even a headstone or any marker as to who is there. My novel tells a story of prescience and heroism against Hitler, and against British appeasement.