Stranger Than Fiction
I feel so incredibly lucky to have a garden right now - our own little patch of outside space in London where we can briefly escape from the new, crazy reality. Who on earth would have thought, just a couple of weeks ago, that we’d be in this unprecedented situation, our societies transformed to a much more all-encompassing extent even than the all-out war situations that many of us historical novelists write about?
Even in the midst of the WW2 Blitz, with the Luftwaffe raining down bombs on London, the economy still largely functioned, bars and restaurants were still open, and people still travelled, went out to work, mingled with each other and got on with their lives as best as they could. But daily life at the moment seems like the premise of a dystopian novel. Travelling back in time to 1917 like Louisa in Beyond The Moon hardly feels much more outlandish. Truth, as the saying goes, is stranger than fiction. And never more so than at the moment.
I’m so grateful to all the key workers in the National Health Service, and to everyone else striving so hard to keep our country going – the police, postal workers, shop workers, food chain employees, utilities workers etc. It’s a hugely worrying time for everyone, especially for those to whom infection poses an extra risk, and those whose livelihoods are affected.
Luckily for me I'm able to work from home, and am used to doing just that, but it’s very strange to feel that I can’t just nip out to the coffee shop as before. We may even get a full lockdown in London in the next few days. I’d like to be able to disappear into writing novel number two to keep my mind off it all, but my children are off school, and need entertaining/home schooling (wish me luck – and a plentiful supply of red wine!).
Anyway, a book club had a couple of interesting questions about Beyond The Moon for me a few days ago, and I thought I'd post their questions and my answers here:
"The idea of how Louisa found Robert was interesting but how she “fell” into the time period and took the place of Rose was quite the storyline. How did you come up with her replacing Rose when in reality Rose was killed the explosion? Is there anything in history that points to this type of reincarnation?
How about the patient who saw Louisa dancing with Robert? I thought something would be more developed there. Or was it to give us the question of reality vs. mental health hallucinations? What’s real in whose mind?"
The idea for Beyond The Moon had been germinating in my mind for over 10 years before I actually sat down to write it. From the very first I always envisaged that it would be different to the “conventional”, genre-type time travel story. I wanted it to be somehow a more meaningful, transformative journey for Louisa, that would be more than her just somehow physically falling through time.
I’ve always been hugely interested in the idea of reincarnation. I’m not really a religious person, but I do think there’s more than an element of the mystical to life. Beyond The Moon was partly inspired by Anya Seton’s Green Darkness, which I read long ago. This is a novel that’s partly about a young woman who travels back to a previous life where she was in love with a monk. As with most reincarnation novels, however (or at least those I’ve read), the heroine was completely submerged in her previous life, and didn’t retain any knowledge of her future life.
I always found that a bit of a let down. How much more interesting, I thought, to have someone go back in time to a previous reincarnation of themselves – but still retain all their memories of their modern-day incarnation. I thought it would be extremely interesting exercise to put Louisa through that experience, where she would be put on her mettle and forced to be a real VAD nurse from 1917. I put a lot of thought into the exact mechanism of how Louisa would end up back in 1917, but still as 2017 Louisa. In the end I realised the only real way I could do it was to kill off “Rose” in an accident, allowing Louisa the ability to take over, simply slip into her life and carry on.
I’ve seen nothing in history about this kind of reincarnation – apart from the few historic examples mentioned by Ralph Bronstein in Beyond The Moon, ie the Chinese legend of Meng Po and Plato’s Myth of Er. That’s what made it so interesting for me to write about – the idea was wholly mine to play with. And it allowed me to make Louisa’s time-travelling experience all the more mysterious and extraordinary than it’s usually portrayed in books.
And it’s interesting that you mention Pam seeing Louisa and Robert dancing together. Pam was due to have a somewhat larger role in the novel at first. I decided to leave her vision of Louisa and Robert together largely unexplained. But hopefully the reader can accept it as true at a more subliminal level. This is where the idea of the mystical, irrational elements to life come in. There aren’t always answers to these questions, and explanations for experiences.
Louisa went back to the past as Rose, and Marisa appeared in the past as Flora. Something similar, clearly, was also going on with Pam. But it is up to the reader to draw their own conclusions. I also wanted to use Pam’s vision to explore the idea of mental illness, and how we perceive it, a little. What if Pam couldn’t simply be signed off as “delusional”? What if she, too, had lived a previous life (one somehow connected with Louisa’s), and was not simply hallucinating, but in fact recollecting events from that previous life? You are exactly right: “What’s real in whose mind?”
Even in the midst of the WW2 Blitz, with the Luftwaffe raining down bombs on London, the economy still largely functioned, bars and restaurants were still open, and people still travelled, went out to work, mingled with each other and got on with their lives as best as they could. But daily life at the moment seems like the premise of a dystopian novel. Travelling back in time to 1917 like Louisa in Beyond The Moon hardly feels much more outlandish. Truth, as the saying goes, is stranger than fiction. And never more so than at the moment.
I’m so grateful to all the key workers in the National Health Service, and to everyone else striving so hard to keep our country going – the police, postal workers, shop workers, food chain employees, utilities workers etc. It’s a hugely worrying time for everyone, especially for those to whom infection poses an extra risk, and those whose livelihoods are affected.
Luckily for me I'm able to work from home, and am used to doing just that, but it’s very strange to feel that I can’t just nip out to the coffee shop as before. We may even get a full lockdown in London in the next few days. I’d like to be able to disappear into writing novel number two to keep my mind off it all, but my children are off school, and need entertaining/home schooling (wish me luck – and a plentiful supply of red wine!).
Anyway, a book club had a couple of interesting questions about Beyond The Moon for me a few days ago, and I thought I'd post their questions and my answers here:
"The idea of how Louisa found Robert was interesting but how she “fell” into the time period and took the place of Rose was quite the storyline. How did you come up with her replacing Rose when in reality Rose was killed the explosion? Is there anything in history that points to this type of reincarnation?
How about the patient who saw Louisa dancing with Robert? I thought something would be more developed there. Or was it to give us the question of reality vs. mental health hallucinations? What’s real in whose mind?"
The idea for Beyond The Moon had been germinating in my mind for over 10 years before I actually sat down to write it. From the very first I always envisaged that it would be different to the “conventional”, genre-type time travel story. I wanted it to be somehow a more meaningful, transformative journey for Louisa, that would be more than her just somehow physically falling through time.
I’ve always been hugely interested in the idea of reincarnation. I’m not really a religious person, but I do think there’s more than an element of the mystical to life. Beyond The Moon was partly inspired by Anya Seton’s Green Darkness, which I read long ago. This is a novel that’s partly about a young woman who travels back to a previous life where she was in love with a monk. As with most reincarnation novels, however (or at least those I’ve read), the heroine was completely submerged in her previous life, and didn’t retain any knowledge of her future life.
I always found that a bit of a let down. How much more interesting, I thought, to have someone go back in time to a previous reincarnation of themselves – but still retain all their memories of their modern-day incarnation. I thought it would be extremely interesting exercise to put Louisa through that experience, where she would be put on her mettle and forced to be a real VAD nurse from 1917. I put a lot of thought into the exact mechanism of how Louisa would end up back in 1917, but still as 2017 Louisa. In the end I realised the only real way I could do it was to kill off “Rose” in an accident, allowing Louisa the ability to take over, simply slip into her life and carry on.
I’ve seen nothing in history about this kind of reincarnation – apart from the few historic examples mentioned by Ralph Bronstein in Beyond The Moon, ie the Chinese legend of Meng Po and Plato’s Myth of Er. That’s what made it so interesting for me to write about – the idea was wholly mine to play with. And it allowed me to make Louisa’s time-travelling experience all the more mysterious and extraordinary than it’s usually portrayed in books.
And it’s interesting that you mention Pam seeing Louisa and Robert dancing together. Pam was due to have a somewhat larger role in the novel at first. I decided to leave her vision of Louisa and Robert together largely unexplained. But hopefully the reader can accept it as true at a more subliminal level. This is where the idea of the mystical, irrational elements to life come in. There aren’t always answers to these questions, and explanations for experiences.
Louisa went back to the past as Rose, and Marisa appeared in the past as Flora. Something similar, clearly, was also going on with Pam. But it is up to the reader to draw their own conclusions. I also wanted to use Pam’s vision to explore the idea of mental illness, and how we perceive it, a little. What if Pam couldn’t simply be signed off as “delusional”? What if she, too, had lived a previous life (one somehow connected with Louisa’s), and was not simply hallucinating, but in fact recollecting events from that previous life? You are exactly right: “What’s real in whose mind?”
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