Michelle de Kretser: ‘Picking out little random bits of the world’
Michelle de Kretser on lost dogs, benign ghosts, and being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize
Congratulations on being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008. Where were you when you heard the news and has it sunk in yet?
Thank you. I didn't know the announcement was due, so I found out in the best way possible, by switching on my computer and reading my email. It's just as well I wasn't holding my cup of coffee or it would have gone all over the keyboard. It was a wonderful moment, and an amazing one. The feeling that it can't really have happened remains.
Earlier this year The Lost Dog won the Christina Stead Prize for fiction and the Book of the Year. Did you think it would become so successful?
Of course not! You try to write the best book you can at the time, and hope, as it goes out into the world, that it will speak to other people. But the fate of a book is impossible to predict - and so often changes, in any case, over time.
What inspired you to write the book?
In 2001, my 12-year-old dog, Gus, ran off into the bush and was missing for 13 days. The Lost Dog changes most of the details of Gus's adventure; but that was the kernel of the novel.
A visitor on the Man Booker Prize forums commented your novel is about race, art and authenticity. Do you agree?
I think everyone reads a different book, and each reading constructs a different novel. I also think that an interesting novel is one which supports a variety of interpretations. So art, race, authenticity... why not? And other things too, I hope!
You have said that one of 'the traditional functions of art, is to try to rescue the meaninglessness of the world'. Is that what you hope to achieve with this book?
Wow, that sounds very lofty, doesn't it! While I'm writing, larger aims disappear behind the need to work on the shape of a sentence. Now what I hope for The Lost Dog is what I've hoped for each of my novels: that it might delight or console a reader, or change the way someone looks at the world.
Having said that, I remember that one of the things I enjoyed was writing about Melbourne. This is the first novel I've written set in Australia and I loved picking out little random bits of the world around me - a house with a photograph on its façade, an overheard sentence, a derelict advertising sign - and weaving them into the pattern of the novel.
Tom Loxley emigrated to Australia, as you did when you were 14 years old. Did this similar background make it easier to explore the complications of modern Australia and the issue of identity?
In fact Tom is 12 when he emigrates. I deliberately made him as young as possible - the back story required him to be at least 12 - to dramatise the sense that his childhood ends when he comes to Australia. But of course he and I have experiences in common - chiefly, the transformation that comes with changing countries and the sense of shifting selves it brings. Perhaps being not entirely an insider makes it easier to speculate about the nature of the society in which I live.
The spirit of Henry James is present throughout the book. Is it a ghost story?
I'd like to think so. I hope the novel is immediately eerie or disturbing in places. In the larger sense, I think it's about being haunted by what isn't there: by a missing pet or the lost possibilities in a life, by misunderstandings and memories. And of course it's also informed by the Jamesian perception that what is seen depends on who is seeing it, so I'm very glad you feel his presence in the novel. A benign ghost, I hope.
Many Man Booker nominated novels have been adapted for film. Do you think The Lost Dog would work on the big screen?
I don't know - but I'd be happy to talk it over with anyone interested in acquiring film rights!
You have mentioned that 'fiction honours time in a way that visual art can't'. Do you think time will honour fiction?
Certainly, in the sense that making up stories is an old, old human need. How long the novel persists, as a form, is hard to say. But it's a resilient form. I wouldn't give up on it yet.
Can you recommend a book that you have read recently?
I hugely admired The Impostor by Damon Galgut, a spare, mesmerising fable about contemporary South Africa.
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