Felicity Pulman on 'A Ring through Time'
This is the special post I promised yesterday. Felicity Pulman's 'Ghost Boy' is a delightful timeslip novel and her new book 'A Ring through Time' makes a matched pair: Australia's colonial history, told through the eyes of modern children. I love 'Ghost Boy' - and I was very pleased to read it's matched pair. It's not a sequel and they're not a duology, but they really do make a good set. I keep telling her "You should do a third." I'm officially a bad influence, but I think everyone knows that now.
Gillian
A Ring Through Time, is billed as a ‘ghostly romance’ for young adults, and ghosts certainly feature in the story, but really, I’ve come to the conclusion that writing a novel is, in itself, something of a mystical process. Above all, I’ve learned that writers need to listen to and trust those hunches, those voices, those little shivers down the spine, because they come from the subconscious that, ultimately, knows so much more about your story than you do!
To illustrate this, I thought I’d share with you something of the process of writing my latest novel. It began when we first visited Norfolk Island over ten years ago. My husband, Mike, and I went snorkeling at Emily Bay. I strapped on my mask and put my face in the water, and I heard a girl’s voice say: ‘If only I could see my own life as clearly as I can see everything now.’ I had no idea who she was, or what had gone so badly wrong in her life that she needed to see it more clearly, but I made a note of what she said because I know that voices are a gift, even if you have no idea who’s speaking or what the hell it’s all about!
Because I knew that the voice was important, I began to take an interest in everything about the island. Norfolk Island is idyllically beautiful and it has a fascinating history, starting in the 1780s with the infamous First and later the Second Convict Settlements, and continuing with the settlement of the Pitcairn Islanders in 1856. This is an ongoing bone of contention between the descendents of the islanders and the ‘Australian contingent’, who embody the foothold kept by Australia on the island under the aegis of the Australian administrator. The islanders have their own parliament, but they believe that Queen Victoria granted the island entirely to them and they want full autonomy – a tension that I have hinted at in that part of my story set in the present.
While Mike was fascinated by the story of the Mutiny on the Bounty, those mutineers who found a home on Pitcairn Island and whose descendents are now the ‘first families’ on the island, my heart went out to those wretches who suffered unbelievable torments under a series of commandants on the island, in particular during the Second Settlement. I wandered endlessly through the haunting ruins, and scribbled copious notes and chucked them in a folder. Once home, and for various reasons, I embarked on the Shalott trilogy, followed by the Janna Mysteries, and the folder lay forgotten until, at a crossroads in my writing life, I decided to apply for a May Gibbs Fellowship. For that, I had to come up with a proposal and so I went looking for that long-forgotten file.
To my delight, I was successful and was granted a month’s writing in a studio in Adelaide. At which stage I started to panic. I’d written a synopsis of my proposed story for my application, but it really wasn’t resonating with me. But I had no idea what else to do. Mike accompanied me to South Australia so that we could cruise the Murray River before I started my time in the studio. I’d brought all my notes and what research I’d done with me, but reading the journal I kept at the time I see just how lacking in confidence I was.
One of our stops on the riverboat was at Swan Reach and we visited the museum there. I was immediately drawn to a display of (rather gruesome, I thought) jewellery made out of hair – mourning brooches and such. I can’t remember if there actually was a hair ring among them, but I ‘saw’ it anyway, and realised, with such a thrill of excitement, that this was going to be the key to my story.
Writing is an act of faith, I’ve always believed that. All I know is that, armed with first the ‘voice’ and then the ‘vision’, the story started to write itself – different from my original proposal, but so much better. By the time I left Adelaide, it was already half-done. More important, by then I knew exactly where I was going with it, and how it was going to end.
Once home in Sydney, I had a whole lot more research to do and decisions to make, and we also visited Norfolk Island once more. And let me pay tribute here to the islanders and to many others who were so generous with their time and their knowledge. All of this information helped to inform my story. The ghostly romance was based on the love affair between Alexander Maconochie’s daughter and her violin tutor. Maconochie was known as the ‘reforming commandant’, a man well before his time and a good man. Even so, when the romance was discovered Minnie Maconochie was sent back to England in disgrace! I suppose her tutor was also punished, but I found a reference to the fact that he subsequently made a name for himself as a musician in Sydney and in Hobart – a happier ending than poor Minnie who became her father’s emanuensis once he returned to the UK, and who died while still only in her 30s.
Two despots came after Maconochie ‘to impose order on the island once more’: Major Joseph Childs, under whose watch the ‘cooking pot riot’ occurred, and John Price, who hanged 12 men for it without allowing any clergyman or priest to be present, and who had them buried in an unmarked grave in unhallowed ground outside the cemetery – the so-called Murderers’ Mound’ still visible today.
I’ve based my character’s father on John Price, but called him John Bennett as Price didn’t have a teenage daughter, and what happened to Alice certainly never happened to any of his children. What I have done is used fictional characters to illustrate the past, interweaving them with an account of what convict life was like under Price, ‘a brutal, vicious sadist’, and portraying events such as the ‘cooking pot riot’ and the hangings that followed.
Alice and Cormac’s love was doomed from the start, and so is Allie’s love for Noah in the present day – unless she can solve the secrets of the past and lay those unhappy ghosts to rest.
Ghosts, mysteries, music, romance – these are the sorts of things I love to write about, and hopefully that you will want to read!
© Felicity Pulman, 2013
Gillian
A Ring Through Time, is billed as a ‘ghostly romance’ for young adults, and ghosts certainly feature in the story, but really, I’ve come to the conclusion that writing a novel is, in itself, something of a mystical process. Above all, I’ve learned that writers need to listen to and trust those hunches, those voices, those little shivers down the spine, because they come from the subconscious that, ultimately, knows so much more about your story than you do!
To illustrate this, I thought I’d share with you something of the process of writing my latest novel. It began when we first visited Norfolk Island over ten years ago. My husband, Mike, and I went snorkeling at Emily Bay. I strapped on my mask and put my face in the water, and I heard a girl’s voice say: ‘If only I could see my own life as clearly as I can see everything now.’ I had no idea who she was, or what had gone so badly wrong in her life that she needed to see it more clearly, but I made a note of what she said because I know that voices are a gift, even if you have no idea who’s speaking or what the hell it’s all about!
Because I knew that the voice was important, I began to take an interest in everything about the island. Norfolk Island is idyllically beautiful and it has a fascinating history, starting in the 1780s with the infamous First and later the Second Convict Settlements, and continuing with the settlement of the Pitcairn Islanders in 1856. This is an ongoing bone of contention between the descendents of the islanders and the ‘Australian contingent’, who embody the foothold kept by Australia on the island under the aegis of the Australian administrator. The islanders have their own parliament, but they believe that Queen Victoria granted the island entirely to them and they want full autonomy – a tension that I have hinted at in that part of my story set in the present.
While Mike was fascinated by the story of the Mutiny on the Bounty, those mutineers who found a home on Pitcairn Island and whose descendents are now the ‘first families’ on the island, my heart went out to those wretches who suffered unbelievable torments under a series of commandants on the island, in particular during the Second Settlement. I wandered endlessly through the haunting ruins, and scribbled copious notes and chucked them in a folder. Once home, and for various reasons, I embarked on the Shalott trilogy, followed by the Janna Mysteries, and the folder lay forgotten until, at a crossroads in my writing life, I decided to apply for a May Gibbs Fellowship. For that, I had to come up with a proposal and so I went looking for that long-forgotten file.
To my delight, I was successful and was granted a month’s writing in a studio in Adelaide. At which stage I started to panic. I’d written a synopsis of my proposed story for my application, but it really wasn’t resonating with me. But I had no idea what else to do. Mike accompanied me to South Australia so that we could cruise the Murray River before I started my time in the studio. I’d brought all my notes and what research I’d done with me, but reading the journal I kept at the time I see just how lacking in confidence I was.
One of our stops on the riverboat was at Swan Reach and we visited the museum there. I was immediately drawn to a display of (rather gruesome, I thought) jewellery made out of hair – mourning brooches and such. I can’t remember if there actually was a hair ring among them, but I ‘saw’ it anyway, and realised, with such a thrill of excitement, that this was going to be the key to my story.
Writing is an act of faith, I’ve always believed that. All I know is that, armed with first the ‘voice’ and then the ‘vision’, the story started to write itself – different from my original proposal, but so much better. By the time I left Adelaide, it was already half-done. More important, by then I knew exactly where I was going with it, and how it was going to end.
Once home in Sydney, I had a whole lot more research to do and decisions to make, and we also visited Norfolk Island once more. And let me pay tribute here to the islanders and to many others who were so generous with their time and their knowledge. All of this information helped to inform my story. The ghostly romance was based on the love affair between Alexander Maconochie’s daughter and her violin tutor. Maconochie was known as the ‘reforming commandant’, a man well before his time and a good man. Even so, when the romance was discovered Minnie Maconochie was sent back to England in disgrace! I suppose her tutor was also punished, but I found a reference to the fact that he subsequently made a name for himself as a musician in Sydney and in Hobart – a happier ending than poor Minnie who became her father’s emanuensis once he returned to the UK, and who died while still only in her 30s.
Two despots came after Maconochie ‘to impose order on the island once more’: Major Joseph Childs, under whose watch the ‘cooking pot riot’ occurred, and John Price, who hanged 12 men for it without allowing any clergyman or priest to be present, and who had them buried in an unmarked grave in unhallowed ground outside the cemetery – the so-called Murderers’ Mound’ still visible today.
I’ve based my character’s father on John Price, but called him John Bennett as Price didn’t have a teenage daughter, and what happened to Alice certainly never happened to any of his children. What I have done is used fictional characters to illustrate the past, interweaving them with an account of what convict life was like under Price, ‘a brutal, vicious sadist’, and portraying events such as the ‘cooking pot riot’ and the hangings that followed.
Alice and Cormac’s love was doomed from the start, and so is Allie’s love for Noah in the present day – unless she can solve the secrets of the past and lay those unhappy ghosts to rest.
Ghosts, mysteries, music, romance – these are the sorts of things I love to write about, and hopefully that you will want to read!
© Felicity Pulman, 2013
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