Diane Setterfield is a British writer whose famous book 'The Thirteenth Tale' has made it to the world's best sellers list. Her third novel, Once Upon a River, combines folklore and science, magic and myth. The reality in this gothic novel is intertwined with fairy tales, and the riddles surrounding the locals seem unsolvable.
— Do you remember that moment then you decided to write your first novel? What inspired you?
It was my reading that inspired my first novel. I had discovered Patricia Highsmith’s brilliant Ripley series and when I finished the last one was disappointed that there were no more. Her protagonist, Ripley, appears to be a blandly conventional, quiet-living international businessman. Only he knows the truth about himself – he is a psychopathic fraudster and assassin. The idea of a double life fascinated me and I wanted so much to read a novel about the end of Ripley’s life. It seemed to me that to maintain a double life must get more difficult over time. In particular, when faced with mortality, the only consolation in our secular age is the knowledge that we will be remembered. But Ripley cannot be remembered as nobody knows him in the first place. I began to consider how a Ripley story might work, as he grew more and more tempted to tell the truth about himself – and realised after a little while, that I was part way towards making up a story of my own, and it didn’t have to be about Ripley. Initially I thought my main character would be a man, but within a few weeks it settled down to a female voice and Vida Winter was born.
— Did you expect your first book to be such a success? What do you think, why people was so interested in it?
When I was writing the book I spent a lot of time building my defences against future disappointment. Every week and every day I reminded myself that for every hundred novels that are begun, one is finished. For every hundred that are finished, one is good enough to find an agent. For every hundred that find an agent, one will be published. For every hundred that are published, one will be a success. I repeated this so much that the eventual success of The Thirteenth Tale came as a total shock.
I’m sure every reader will have his or her own idea about why they love the book, but I explain it in two ways. The first is that all my life I have loved novels that combine a wonderful page turning story with beautiful writing. Too often the stories that make you want to stay up all night with your book are let down by clunky prose, or else the opposite – a beautiful prose style comes to seem empty because the story is too slim. Why shouldn’t a great story be written with elegance and lyricism? I want both in my reading, and so I did my best to produce both in my writing.
The second reason is that I had two readers in mind: myself and my mother. I have an academic background in French literature with lots of experience reading the old classics as well as modern experimental literature. My mother on the other hand, though she is very intelligent and a keen reader, left school at fifteen with no qualifications. I wanted to write a book she and I would both love to read. Because this was my aim, I ended up writing a book that appeals to a broad spectrum of readers.
— Many experts compare The Thirteenth Tale with British classical novels, also they says your book like a ‘revolution in genre’. Do you think it’s true? Are you inspired by classical writers?
To my mind genre is not really relevant to writers, although as a reader I love genre novels as much as the classics and contemporary literary novels. I can see that publishers need a shorthand to explain to booksellers what kind of novel a particular book is, and booksellers probably find it useful to borrow these same labels to help their readers select. But to me, the most interesting stories have always been those that have a foot in two camps. I love books like Philippe Claudel’s Grey Souls (a crime novel that is also a literary novel), or Michel Faber’s The Book of Brave New Things (a science fiction novel that is also a love story and a whole lot of other things besides!). As in everything, my writing is shaped by my reading and my preference is for books that are at the edge of their category, or which straddle several classifications. Naturally this preference shapes what I write. The influence of the crime novel, the folktale, the ghost story, are all visible in my work, I expect.
The writers who have inspired me include the Brontës, Wilkie Collins and Dickens, but I think I learned a lot about style from French nineteenth and twentieth century writers such as André Gide. he most obvious influences are not always the deepest ones, and I frequently suspect there are echoes in my own adult books of the books I loved as a child. Foremost among these was a beautiful ghost story about childhood loneliness called When Marnie Was There, by Joan G Robinson.
Are my books revolutionary in genre? Perhaps it is so in my willingness to borrow from diverse genres in a single book, the pleasure I get from mixing things up. But one of my greatest loves is traditional storytelling and tradition is always present in what I do. You can’t be revolutionary and traditional at the same time, can you?
— What do you think about The Thirteenth Tale cinema adaptation? Do you like it?
— Are there any chances for other movies? Maybe you already have some offers? Who do you think can act main characters?
I do like the TV adaptation of The Thirteenth Tale! The performances were wonderful, and the team (who also made the Harry Potter films) went to enormous trouble to find the perfect locations. TV rights to Once Upon a River have been sold to Kudos and I am looking forward to seeing my new book on the TV screen some time in the coming years. I’m not very good at having ideas about who could play roles of characters in my books, but I am sure readers will have plenty of their own ideas!
— It’s been more than 10 years since your first book was published. Are there any changes in your writing process?
The hardest thing is maintaining the initial rush of passion for an idea during the middle phase, when the difficulties have had time to surface and you start to wonder: what on earth made me think this was a good idea? In the old days when I got stuck I used to stay stuck for ages, because I thought what I was trying to do was impossible. Now that I am writing my fourth book, I have a better set of tools with which to approach the problems and I am a lot better at recognizing when it is best to stick at my desk and keep writing, and when it is more productive to go outdoors for a long walk by the river and let the wind blow my old thoughts away and put some new ideas in my head.
— Many critics and experts cannot stop to compare this book with some Dickens work. How do you feel about that? Is this was a specific idea about water/river symbols, or maybe it was just an random?
I was conscious while writing that Ben, the butcher’s son, was the kind of child who might appear in a Dickens novel – hard-done-by but plucky. And I was trying to write about a wide spectrum of society as Dickens liked to do. I have a wealthy industrialist, a university professor’s wife, an inn-keeping family and lots of farm labourers and barge men. So it doesn’t surprise me that people recognize this connection. But I am often disappointed in Dickens’s female characters (Wilkie Collins was a better writer of women) and I hope to have created more fully rounded women than Dickens did.
I had read Our Mutual Friend – Dickens’s great Thames novel - when I was a teenager, but when I read it as an adult, at the time of writing Once Upon A River, I discovered it wasn’t at all as I remembered! It seemed like another book altogether. We can’t trust our memory of books.
— Do you believe in supernatural? Maybe you have any experience that you possibly don’t mind sharing ?
On those rare occasions when I have experienced something I cannot explain, I categorise it simply as that – a thing I cannot explain. I think that one day we will be able to explain things that are puzzling to us now – just as the ‘miracle’ in Once Upon a River has an explanation, but one the nineteenth century hadn’t figured out yet.
And yet, although I don’t believe in supernatural events, I do find supernatural thinking to be deeply embedded in human beings. In my work, I find it a useful and powerful way of exploring the human psyche. Often when I am asked this question I say that I don’t believe in ghosts but I do believe that people are haunted, and it is this quality of hauntedness that interests me.
— Does any of your characters have a prototype in real life? Maybe someone from your family or your favorite musicians, writers?
My grandfather was a very kind man who suffered a lot as a child as his family were poor and he was often hungry. In later life when he had a family of his own - children and grandchildren – he used to say, ‘Serve the little ones first. I’d rather starve than see these children go without.’
This great kindness and generosity, this desire to see others happy and well, was part of what inspired me to create the character of Armstrong. It’s very unusual for me to incorporate an aspect of my own lived experience into a book in this way – in fact I don’t think I have ever done it before – but I wanted to include it as an homage to a man who overcame suffering and brutality in his own early years and grew up to be a loving father and grandfather.
— Some writers never read their own books after publishing? Do you?
No, I don’t. It’s a shame! If I read a passage, I find I cannot enter the mindset of a true reader because the writer in me is still alert. I read looking for things to improve, wondering whether I made the right decision about this scene, wishing I’d added this detail to that character and so on. So I cannot read my own work as a true reader would. Sometimes when I hear readers talking about how my books make them feel, this makes me sad, because I will never be able to read the way they do. Luckily the sadness doesn’t last long – there are plenty of wonderful books out there waiting to be read, and I am free to read as many as I can fit into my life!
— Which writers had an influence on you?
This is such a hard question. Influence is so enormous, and I acknowledge that I am influenced in every sentence I write, but at the same time it is incredibly hard to pin down! Childhood reading almost certainly has more impact than anything else, but we can’t always remember it. Sometimes a single detail in an otherwise unmemorable book will stick in my mind and years later, nourished by later reading, give rise to a beautiful moment of inspiration – but would I be able to relate it to the forgettable holiday read from two decades before? Probably not. So it’s complex. Also, the biggest influences might be in style or in technique, whereas when most readers think of influence they are looking for it in the ideas or themes or atmosphere of a novel. Sadly I have never been able to come up with an answer that satisfies me to this question, other than to say that the essentials for a writer’s reading life are to read a lot, and to read widely, and to read thoughtfully. This is what I spent decades doing before I ever thought of becoming a writer, and the accumulation of so many words, and pages and ideas, formed me, as a person and as a writer.
— Can you imagine your perfect reader? Who would that be?
I once heard someone talk about the universal reader, and I can’t remember how that was defined, but my own theory about the universal reader goes like this:
Every book carries with it an implicit set of instructions about how to read it to get the best out of it. In the early pages a novel must, as well as getting your interest and persuading you to read on, let you know what kind of book it is. If it’s a genre novel for instance, it should be clear in chapter one whether the man who meets the girl is going to murder her in chapter three or marry her in chapter twenty. Crime novels have their mode d’emploi and love stories have another. If you don’t know, it’s not a genre novel, it’s probably a literary novel! More specifically, every book has its own internal set of directions to the reader, that is unique to it. Anyway, the more widely you read, the more of these ‘how to’ instruction manuals you accumulate in your mind. Over time you develop a great many ways of approaching a novel, and every book you read makes you a better reader for the next book you read. When I write I am constantly making reference to this bank of reader approaches and navigating my way through the writing with their help. I know that a reader who loves a love story will be expecting something to happen in this way, and I can either make it happen or give that reader a surprise and make something else happen. The same for all the other reading approaches. This might sound rather theoretical, and I’m sorry if it strikes you as dry, but that is what I’m doing when I’m thinking of the reader as I work. For instance when I decided to make occasional use of an omniscient narrator in Once Upon a River who occasionally addresses the reader directly, I was aware that any reader who loves Trollope or who loves recent 21st century British TV would be very comfortable with that breaking of the fourth wall, but someone who is a faithful contemporary genre fiction fan might find it jolting. So I suppose the very best reader is one who is familiar with many different kinds storytelling and can adopt them with subtlety and flexibility to get the utmost pleasure out of a book.
I think that is the simple answer to your question, isn’t it? The perfect reader is one who has read a lot and loves to read a lot.
Very often in the present day readers can only read for short periods, but there is much to be said in favour of carving out longer periods of time, a couple of hours at a stretch where possible, and my ideal reader would be someone who does this. It does us so much good to let go of our own thoughts, put our own troubles and anxieties aside, and enter the head of another person. I hope my readers will be able to do this, and when they enter the world of Once Upon A River, I hope they will find fragments of their own experience reflected there, which they will be able to think about with a new perspective after the book is finished.