The Spark for The Walk
It was more a smoulder than a spark, a long smoulder, like the fires that burn for decades in disused coal mines, inhibited only by scarcity of oxygen.
Sometime in the 1980s, the film maker, Guy Spiller, approached me with an idea for a project. He gave me a book with an unwieldy title, A Source Book on the Wreck of the Grosvenor East Indiaman. Buried deep inside it was William Hubberly’s journal, which recounts, day by day, his walk from the shipwreck in northern Pondoland, down the Transkei Wild Coast, to the great dune deserts just east of Port Elizabeth. It is a tale of unspeakable suffering and it has a fine and simple plot. Stranded in a strange land, 150 castaways set out for home and one by one they are left behind or they starve or they are murdered until in the end there is only one left and that last survivor must surely be accounted the loneliest person in the world.
At the beginning of 2012 had just finished an MA at Stellenbosch and the novel I had written for the course, The Book of War, was making its way into book shops and the world. I went to Stellenbosch on the recommendation of a friend, novelist and playwright Harry Kalmer, and I was lucky because The Book of War book found the best mentors it could have had in Marlene van Niekerk and Willem Anker. I inferred from them that there was some hope if I was prepared to keep writing. But what?
It was Cormac McCarthy that convinced me I should try my hand at fiction. Reading him I mean, we’re not friends or anything. Although God knows he feels like one sometimes but then so do Willie Shakspere and Norman Mailer. In any event, I came back to William Hubberly’s story with a thought. What if the book had, at its centre, an emotional relationship as powerful as that between the father and the son in McCarthy’s The Road? So I started writing, reworking the account of the shipwreck that is given in the Source Book and following William Hubberly step by step. In my mind was the hope that characters, as had been the case with The Book of War, might arise naturally out of the source material and take action to enrich the story. As I worked, however, I came to realize that any novelization, any icing on the narrative, was fraudulent and unnecessary. I wanted to stick as close to the truth as possible, and I came to love the way Hubberly mentioned people’s names only when the died or were left behind. “In the night,” he writes, “John Howse, a seaman, died through great weariness.” It seemed senseless to try and improve on that.
There’s a mystery in William Hubberly’s story, and in Walk....
Read the rest at Lauren Beukes' Spark
Sometime in the 1980s, the film maker, Guy Spiller, approached me with an idea for a project. He gave me a book with an unwieldy title, A Source Book on the Wreck of the Grosvenor East Indiaman. Buried deep inside it was William Hubberly’s journal, which recounts, day by day, his walk from the shipwreck in northern Pondoland, down the Transkei Wild Coast, to the great dune deserts just east of Port Elizabeth. It is a tale of unspeakable suffering and it has a fine and simple plot. Stranded in a strange land, 150 castaways set out for home and one by one they are left behind or they starve or they are murdered until in the end there is only one left and that last survivor must surely be accounted the loneliest person in the world.
At the beginning of 2012 had just finished an MA at Stellenbosch and the novel I had written for the course, The Book of War, was making its way into book shops and the world. I went to Stellenbosch on the recommendation of a friend, novelist and playwright Harry Kalmer, and I was lucky because The Book of War book found the best mentors it could have had in Marlene van Niekerk and Willem Anker. I inferred from them that there was some hope if I was prepared to keep writing. But what?
It was Cormac McCarthy that convinced me I should try my hand at fiction. Reading him I mean, we’re not friends or anything. Although God knows he feels like one sometimes but then so do Willie Shakspere and Norman Mailer. In any event, I came back to William Hubberly’s story with a thought. What if the book had, at its centre, an emotional relationship as powerful as that between the father and the son in McCarthy’s The Road? So I started writing, reworking the account of the shipwreck that is given in the Source Book and following William Hubberly step by step. In my mind was the hope that characters, as had been the case with The Book of War, might arise naturally out of the source material and take action to enrich the story. As I worked, however, I came to realize that any novelization, any icing on the narrative, was fraudulent and unnecessary. I wanted to stick as close to the truth as possible, and I came to love the way Hubberly mentioned people’s names only when the died or were left behind. “In the night,” he writes, “John Howse, a seaman, died through great weariness.” It seemed senseless to try and improve on that.
There’s a mystery in William Hubberly’s story, and in Walk....
Read the rest at Lauren Beukes' Spark
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