Three Monkeys Online

A Curious, Alternative Magazine

The most irresponsible occupation. Liz Jensen, author of The Ninth life of Louis Drax talks about writing.

You’ve described The Ninth life of Louis Drax as your first “grown up” novel. What did you mean by that? To what extent are you aware of your previous novels when writing, and is it a question of constantly seeking improvement with your writing?

I don't seek improvement so much as change. I get bored easily, which is why I make my subject matter so different each time. My narrators are nearly all first-person, but they're wildly different characters. I was very aware that Louis Drax was more serious than what had gone before: there's a lot more darkness than light. I think of Louis Drax as being grown-up because I had to write real adult characters for the first time, rather than caricatures, or children trapped in the bodies of adults – which I had somewhat specialised in before. As one can, with comedy.

One of the things that, to me, characterises your fiction is a delicate balance between comedy and big questions (admitting that there is significantly less comedy in Louis Drax). Do you think that a novelist has a responsibility to explore life’s bigger questions?

I don't think of novelists as having responsibilities, so much as opportunities. Writing is probably the most irresponsible occupation anyone could have, but also the one with the broadest horizons – which is why it's such an adventure. I like to write about ‘big questions' because they interest me, but I don't feel I have a duty to address them in fiction. It just happens. I've recently finished writing a book about two time-travelling cleaning ladies set in 1890s Copenhagen: this allowed me to explore Galileo, worm-holes and spacetime while at the same time writing an unapologetically feelgood extravaganza with lots of sex in it. The novel I've just started is a skewed love
story about euthanasia, guilt and punishment, and although it's a story on a small canvas, I am hoping to weave global warming into it, because I want to find a way of writing about different levels of claustrophobia.

You open The Ninth Life of Louis Drax with a quote from Paul Brok’s book Into the Silent Land. How influential was his book for you?

It inspired me to add elements to the character of Pascal Dannachet, the coma doctor – elements I wouldn't have come up with myself. I used his quote at the front because it absolutely summed up the book. In fact if you are a busy person, you don't need to read my book. Just go to a bookshop and read the Paul Broks quote at the front and you'll have the condensed wisdom of The Ninth Life of Louis Drax.

One of the triumphs of the book is the voice you create for Louis, making him a complex yet believable character. How difficult was it finding that particularly voice? It’s been compared to Mark Haddon’s narrator in The curious incident of the dog in the night time. Is that a lazy comparison or can you see similarities?

I'm flattered by comparisons with Mark Haddon's book: I heard them quite early on, because we share an agent, and she pointed out the similarity after I had given her some early chapters of Louis Drax to read. I immediately read The Curious Incident, and admired it hugely. It's a brilliant work. I think there's an appetite for unusual narrators – honest narrators. I love the gap between what the unaware but direct narrator knows and what the reader gleans.

Louis' narration was easy, and fun to do: I just stole the voice from my kids, and tweaked it a bit. When I started writing the novel in 2002, my two boys were twelve and seven, so Louis Drax, aged nine, came somewhere in between. I love the way my boys talk, and I'm fascinated by the bluntness and humour and cruelty of playground language.

You’ve mentioned in previous interviews the real events in your own family that partly inspired The Ninth Life of Louis Drax [Editor’s Note: Jensen wrote “The inspiration for Louis Drax came from my own grandmother's death in Switzerland in the 1930s. Her body was found at the bottom of a cliff, three days after her eldest son had vanished from the face of the earth”] . Is there an element of catharsis involved in writing novels?

Perhaps on an unconscious level, I was trying to impose a shape on a shapeless story, that never had a proper beginning, middle or end. The mystery of my grandmother's death and my uncle's disappearance in Switzerland in 1937 have never been solved, and never will be. Maybe I wrote the story of a family tragedy in the mountains because I needed to explore it on my mother's behalf – and I wish I could tell you that there was some catharsis in it for her. But there wasn't. My first novel, Egg Dancing, had autobiographical elements which were certainly cathartic for me – but I've never used my own life in a book since then. Mostly, I write to get away from myself and to go places I haven't been, and meet people I haven't met, or be people I haven't been. That, for me, is one of the main joys of fiction.

From a dramatic point of view it’s interesting that you split the story between two narrators. Is it easier to create doubt and tension when you have two perspectives, two voices to play with? Or did you have other considerations in mind when you decided to divide the story?

I would have loved to tell the whole story through Louis' voice, but I couldn't, so I brought in the doctor. It sharpened the pace, and I liked the tension between the mature, rather weak and self-deceiving man and the plain-speaking, emotionally brave child. I think that two narrative voices can give a good momentum: that's what I was after.

You've also taught creative writing. Given the impossible task, what single piece of advice would you give to aspiring novelists to improve their work?

Read.

What writers have had the greatest influence on your work, or, to put it another way, who do you like to read?

That answer varies from year to year, but I'm not sure that there is a correlation between my influences and what I like to read. I love George Eliot, Herman Melville, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Angela Carter, Gunther Grass, Mervyn Peake, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Anne Tyler and Kurt Vonnegut. I think David Mitchell is the most interesting and exciting British writer of his generation.


Liz Jensen’s official Site

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