Booker Shortlist Authors On The Moment Inspiration Struck

Writing Creation Lake was a uniquely blissful experience. The novel synthesised into one object many things I think about and feel connected to, in terms of who we are and how we’re meant to live, and how to maintain an exalted idea of human life despite doubt and chaos. My narrator infuses the novel with an ambience of betrayal, an aspect that has stayed mysterious to me, but the mechanism that makes art work might operate best with critical parts unshown, even to their maker.

An early inspiration could have been that farmer in the Vallée de l’Homme, his first language Occitan, who held up a large crudely cleaved hunk of rock he’d found while ploughing and told me it was a 500,000-year-old tool. He’d placed this misshapen rock in my hand and I’d wondered what it could be used for, beyond head-smashing. Another enticing spark: my son reporting to me of a deep cavern he’d visited in the Lot départment, way underground, tall as a cathedral and flocked entirely in white magnesium crystals.

For a decade I’d wanted to write this novel. I worked on it for several years, attempting to design a voice and structure, until suddenly I wrote it in 14 months. The first two lines of the book were the first two I composed: “Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said. He said they were prone to addiction, too, and especially smoking.” They are declarations by my character Bruno Lacombe, an elder addressing a group of young militants who have formed a commune in a remote corner of south-western France. Bruno, a veteran of the long 20th century, has abandoned not just militancy but life as we know it. He lives in a cave, convinced he has located a world where all chronologies merge on to a single plane of existence.

Bruno’s ideas are being transposed for the reader by my novel’s first-person narrator, alias “Sadie”, an undercover operative and agent of destruction who intends to instigate a police raid of the commune. More about her in a moment, but back to those first two lines: while I didn’t plant an image of Neanderthals smoking cigarettes merely as a clue, my reader can assume that Neanderthals did not smoke cigarettes, and that the novel is a parallel world featuring hallucinatory glints. I heard Bruno’s voice as priestly, tender, a little lunatic. I heard Sadie’s as amoral and blunt. (Perhaps rereading Nabokov’s Pale Fire encouraged a permissive instability: Sadie and Bruno, my Kinbote and Shade.)

Sadie is a heavy drinker who prides herself on perfection, and leaves messes in her wake. Bruno, meanwhile, is a melancholic dreamer who revises, counter-historicises, makes myths – concerning peasant uprisings and repressions, the past and future of farming, of rural life. All myth functions as intentionally fictive: we know that myths aren’t real, but their fictionality serves to resolve some real social and historical dilemma or contradiction or failure. Whether Bruno can heal himself is only one question. Whether he can fix Sadie, merely another. His concerns, and my own, go beyond the confines of individuals, to some tear in our existence that we don’t know how to suture, and have instead opted to repress. To have, in Bruno, a character willing to face this tear, but lovingly, was a form of profound personal repair.

The novel takes place over six weeks’ time, but the real trajectory is not chronological. It is earth-to-sky. Through Bruno, I felt I was tunnelling down into the sedimented secrets of human existence, digging a hole to the centre of the Earth. When I got there, I was able to see the cosmos as if from a chambered but roofless place, an unreachable wonder framed in a human context, like a “Skyspace” by the artist James Turrell. The feeling was transcendent. I’m still living off its psychedelic updraft.

It was 2021 and I was working on a different novel, had been working on it for a few years. It was finished and not very good, or at least not as good as I wanted it to be. It was literally keeping me up at night, its characters and plot lines and the fact it didn’t feel the way I imagined it would feel. Then April of that year came around, and two very sad things happened at once: my paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother passed away within a few days of each other.

It was a terrible week. I was in the car on the way to my grandfather’s funeral when the idea came to me. It feels incorrect, to have inspiration strike in the midst of grief, but what probably happened was that I was trying to get away somehow, to tell myself a distracting story. And a distracting story it was: a paranoid woman alone in a house, 15 years after the end of the second world war, her brother’s girlfriend come to stay for the summer, half mystery, half romance.

At first I was terrified of committing to this new story; it felt a little like cheating on the novel I had already finished. And even when I did consider writing it, I tried to negotiate: not setting it in the Netherlands, maybe in the UK or France, or shifting the resolution to be about someone’s aunt, distant family. Then I had a friend on the phone, also an author, who was very strict with me and told me to stop avoiding writing about the things I cared about, things I’d been ranting to her about for years. Dutch historiography, the country’s relationship to narratives of heroism and complicity.

She also said I needed to write it now. I hemmed and hawed, said I still needed to get the other novel into shape before I could move on, and she kindly forbade it. I’m eternally grateful to her for that. After that phone call I took a long walk with the dog along the lakes behind my parents’ home, and the story began to take shape in full. I started plotting the novel that day in April, and wrote the first words in September. By February I finished a first draft. The editorial process took another six months, and by the following September it was finished. The Safekeep felt exactly the way I hoped it would feel. I’ve never had a story roll out of me like that, and am taking it as the rare gift that it is.

I started my novel before the pandemic arrived and kept at it during various lockdowns, in the midst of all that panic and isolation.

Elements of my own life began to merge with an entirely invented story of a contemplative community of nuns. I see now it explores some recurrent preoccupations of mine, particularly friendships and rivalries between women (albeit quite different in texture from those in my previous novels, The Weekend and The Natural Way of Things), and the question of how to live with others despite prickly relations. It also touches on forgiveness and atonement, on the moral challenge of despair, and on the way we as societies decide some people deserve to be outcasts.

I felt as if I started the book a dozen times, writing into one seam then coming to its end and crawling out backwards. Writing, throwing it out, starting again and throwing it out. For a couple of years I worked, every day thinking, “I haven’t even started”. But somehow the novel slowly formed itself, falling into shape in a kind of rush towards the end of the process.

I did know something of what I wanted – to grip the writing less tightly than I had before. I wanted to trust my reader more. Worn down by politics and the world’s aggression, I was tired of the impulse to control or harp. I came across this sentence from WB Yeats: “Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible,” from The Cutting of an Agate). This sentence became my guide.

I aimed for a bone-clean, understated novel. I wanted to invite the reader into a calm and spacious consideration of their own life as they join my narrator in hers.

As I finished the first draft I was rocked by a cancer diagnosis arriving for me and two of my sisters at the same time. When treatment was over I felt stronger, but also that my life had been dipped in some kind of acid, a substance that had burned away anything inessential or trivial, leaving only the most fundamental structures remaining. My life had caught up with what the book was already trying to do, and my experience consolidated my urgent desire to write a book of depth and precision, a book that is restful but unsentimental, and full of love.

Percival Everett, James

I wish I could say that for years the idea of making this novel burned in me, but I can’t. It was nothing so romantic. I was playing tennis and as I watched my crosscourt backhand barely miss the sideline by the length of the average adult body I thought, has anyone ever told Huck Finn’s story from Jim’s point of view?

This was an interesting notion, but also a discovery of what was wrong with my backhand. I was surprised to find that it had not been done, but I also acknowledged that the idea had not occurred to me until that moment. The fact is that I probably could not have written the novel until that time in my life, as a person and as a writer. Though I never intended the book as a corrective to Twain’s novel, I did want to address the failure of the culture to acknowledge the humanity of enslaved people. It was not so much that I wanted to give the character Jim agency (he already had that), but that I desired to offer him a method, a vehicle for expressing that agency.

Because of my admiration for Mark Twain and his work I had some fear that I might simply retell his story. I solved this problem by reading Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 15 times in a row. I would read the last line and return immediately to the beginning. The benefit was twofold: I was completely immersed in the world and I was absolutely sick of the text, which by the fifth reading was a nonsensical blur anyway. I wanted to know the world without feeling any loyalty to Twain’s pages and I believe I achieved that.

Once in the world, my work was clear and the novel moved at a reasonable clip. I suffer from a sort of work amnesia and therefore any estimation of how long I worked on the novel is a wild guess. Also, such a metric is finally meaningless. Every novel develops its own rhythm and sense of time; some feel like a raft trip down the rapids, others feel like a canoe ride across a lake. They have in common that drowning is a possibility.

Samantha Harvey, Orbital

Many novels, I think, have multiple possible origin stories. With Orbital, was it the astronaut/cosmonaut quotes I used to collect in my teens (Alexei Leonov: “The Earth was small, light blue, and so touchingly alone”)? Was it my time spent working in an astronomy museum? Was it a conversation with my partner in the kitchen one day, in which he said I should write a play set on the ISS and I said, “Rubbish idea, can’t do microgravity on the stage”? (I owe him my thanks all the same.) Was it time spent looking at images of the Earth from orbit, the feeling I got when I looked at those images? Undoubtedly all of those things and many more.

I do remember a particular thought: I want to write A Month in the Country in space. I want to do for the natural beauty of space what JL Carr does for the natural beauty of North Yorkshire. This turned out – guess what – to be absurd in practice, but many creative impulses are absurd so I went ahead. I wanted to try some form of nature writing about space, as fictional realism, not sci-fi or nonfiction; I could use the stage of a space station as a sort of hide from which to view the Earth and the wilderness of cosmos beyond. So I began writing and I got a little way in and gave up because I was overwhelmed by fears of trespass and illegitimacy. I haven’t been in orbit! There are people who have and they write about it! This is not mine to tell! And I did what I never do with novels – I gave up.

Several months later, and after failed attempts at other novels, I went back to it by pure accident – I opened the wrong document on my laptop. And there in front of me was writing that felt alive in the way none of those other novel attempts did. There and then, I carried on writing from where I’d left off all those months before. I lived, for another two years, with a constant livestream of images from low-Earth orbit and wrote through several evolving drafts, each one shorter than the last, and each one trying, through form, language, scale, time, to capture something, something, of the depth of space and the confounding bright loveliness of our planet turning, seemingly endlessly, through it.

Anne Michaels, Held

I knew that Held would require a great deal of research: evolutionary biology, the history and philosophy of science, consciousness, history. I wanted the research to be “invisible”, glinting under the surface. I wanted the structure of the book to be its own proof. I knew that writing Held would be a long process of distillation – to say as little as possible in the wild attempt to say everything that matters. And to make space for the reader: this has always been one of my abiding intentions; a book – or at least this book – is nothing if it does not listen.

Everything I write is a form of witness. Every time writer and reader meet each other’s gaze, there is the possibility that something might be mended. Held says: precisely in the places we feel most abandoned, we are not alone.

Held asks: why have we, as a species, come to surrender so much that matters, squander so much? What is, if there is any to be found, the consolation at the heart of our mortality?

I wanted to investigate our relationship with technology, and our conflation of science and technology. The beginning of our manipulation of the invisible world in the late 19th century (the discovery of X-rays, electrons, the quantum world) displaced our ancient relationship with the invisible world, and marked a profound change in our relationship to what, by its very nature, cannot be proven. Held is an argument for the value of those relationships. Invisibility, distillation, is at the heart of Held; much has been “left out” of this book. But, of course, not left out; instead, boiled away in distillation; now invisible, a trace, an absence.