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Featured Author

Mr Chartwell

This month our Featured Author Rebecca Hunt answers questions from the Book Buddies.

Q: What was the trigger for the theme of depression?

AThe central premise for Mr Chartwell - that Winston Churchill's 'black dog' of depression could be realised as an independent character, becoming the dangerous and darkly charismatic Black Pat - materialised quite unexpectedly when I was walking home from work. The more I thought about it, the more I felt it offered me an interesting way of discussing depression.

Q: Winston Churchill and his family feature largely in the book - do you have a personal interest in him?

AWhen I started writing Mr Chartwell it also meant starting a great deal of research on Churchill. I'd always found him interesting, and had a basic understanding of his life and career from my school days and general cultural osmosis, and I was keen to learn more about him. As I ploughed through my pile of books about Churchill, listened to recordings of his speeches, and visited key Churchillian locations, I found my interest and admiration for him grew enormously. I thought when I finished Mr Chartwell I would have chronic Churchill fatigue, but it didn't happen. On the contrary, I think writing the book has instilled in me a life-long fascination.

Q: In the book, Clementine, Churchill's wife, admitted to having known about 'the black dog' for a long time. Why do you think she never tried to talk to Winston about it? ?

AClementine and Winston adored each other and I'm sure she did talk to him about his depression. However, I feel that with something as isolating and internal as depression there isn't always a way of describing the scope and depth of your feelings to another person. The love and support of friends and family is vital, but, like all illnesses, depression can't be shared. In the book Clementine knows about the 'black dog' and can work against his presence, but she cannot directly join her husband in his fight against it.

Q: Did you draw on personal experiences for some aspects of the book?

ASome aspects of the book are more or less universal - losing someone, helping friends, trying to accept change, feeling frightened by circumstances out of your control, and being a red-faced idiot around someone you fancy - so for these things I drew on experiences from my own life. With regards to my portrayal of depression, although I haven't personally suffered from it in the same way as the characters in the book, people close to me have done. I used these experiences to create a picture of depression which I felt was honest. As I expect all novels are to some extent, Mr Chartwell is a combination of fragments of real life, empathy and imagination.

Q: How do you go about devising your plots; and does the notion that literary plots can change real lives play any part in this?

AMy plots evolve over months, sometimes years, of thinking and daydreaming. I will think of two or more discrete episodes (such as the encounter with the Chinese woman and her daughter, or the notion of two people waiting for each other in different tea rooms at opposite ends of a park) and then try to devise ways of connecting them. I suppose there is an analogy with those join-the-dots puzzles. From what appears to be a random collection of points, a shape, a pattern starts to emerge. I don't think that literary plots can change real lives. I'm sort of on Max's side in his arguments with his wife on this one.

Q: Were you thinking 'cinematically' as you wrote this novel?

AYes, in that I was quite specifically modelling aspects of the novel on Lindsay Anderson's film O Lucky Man!, which traces the picaresque adventures of a coffee salesman as he travels the length and breadth of Britain's motorways. I love that film, it finds a real strangeness and poetry in Britain's landscape. It also ends with a face-to-face encounter between the main character and the film director (Lindsay Anderson himself) who steps out from behind the camera at the end of the film.

Q: Was your hope in writing Mr Chartwell to enlighten people with no experience of depression, or did you have a different or specific target audience in mind?

AWhen I first started writing Mr Chartwell I remember reading somewhere that it was helpful to keep an audience for your book in mind - yep, sounds like a good plan, I thought, but then quickly gave up on it. Of course, I always really hoped the book would be interesting to others, but I found writing it easier when I concentrated on following the idea and letting it develop in its own way. It was important to me that my depiction of depression was truthful to my personal understanding of it, and I kept that as my objective as I was very wary of trying to write about depression in a way which seemed prescriptive.

Q: Is your next book going to be about such an emotive topic?

AFor me it's vital a project has some sort of emotional heartbeat in order to maintain my level of engagement with it. And while I wouldn't aim to be controversial in my writing, I hope I will be bold.