Sarah Hall on How to Paint a Dead Man
“The narratives began to talk to each other.”
Congratulations on making the Man Booker Prize longlist again this year. You must be delighted to have already had so much recognition for your writing?
Thank you. I've been lucky with each book - good following winds perhaps. To be honest all nominations have come as a surprise to me, especially as they involve panels of judges with diverse preferences. I've been on such panels and know how tough literary arm-wrestling is.
There are four distinct narratives in How to Paint a Dead Man. Did you have to write their stories quite separately or were you easily able to flit between them?
No butterfly wings here. The narratives were drafted separately. In the beginning it was an intuitive process, involving the tuning of voices. The characters then appeared in each other's plots; the narratives began to talk to each other. A system of textual macro-management was required otherwise anarchy would have prevailed, so I started to map and link the chapters - on small domestic levels, like instances of bread baking, on dramatic levels, such as sexual exchanges, and on thematic, (dare I say it) existential levels, which sounds terribly grand! By that point in the process my brain was close to exploding.
Had you wanted to use first person, second person, third person, etc to help find each distinct voice?
I used to come home lathered in mud a lot as a kid and my mother would ask ‘Did you want to do that?' The answer is probably yes. At first it wasn't a calculated decision to use each device, but when it became clear it was happening I tried to use it to my advantage. I wanted a clear perspective/sound/identifier for each of the four voices. The second person is the most unusual device to employ in novel-writing, but I really liked using it: that imperative inclusiveness asks the reader to think and respond slightly differently, and in this instance it seemed perfect for Susan's story of dislocation and intimate confession.
Did you have clear paths set for your characters or did you change their course as the novel developed?
Hell's teeth, they did whatever they wanted! We conferred and negotiated a bit about where they might like to go, and what they might do, but I was essentially reporting what was happening in their worlds, what mood everyone was in, who was sleeping with who, the conflict and jeopardy, how love and loss were being reconciled. The strangest thing about writing is the combination of secretarial and supernatural elements, knowing you are both dictating and channelling the goings-on.
How to Paint a Dead Man explores the politics of art through two different artists. Was there a particular painter(s) that inspired you for the theme in this novel?
Four different artists - the two women in the novel are just not as famous as the men. One, a photographer feels, if not inferior, then secondary to her father who paints well-known landscapes, and the other is engaged in the rustic folk art of flower arranging: such is the history of art perhaps. One of the early inspirations for the novel was the work of Giorgio Morandi - his still-life paintings in particular - and there are elements of Morandi's work, its ambiguity, and his enigmatic reputation, in my Giorgio's narrative, though the novel is in no way an attempted biography. I'm interested in how and why we express and commemorate our identities, histories and cultures, and our mortality, through images. So the novel is about art, but in the end it has to study life.
Part of the novel is set in Cumbria (your home county) and part is set in Italy. Were you more comfortable writing about Cumbria than Italy? Is it hard to confidently write about another country?
Isn't the novelist a confidence trickster? A kind of flimflam artist? I find it harder to write about the north. Though it is very familiar to me, something of the territory remains unknown and exotic and compelling, so my preoccupation with it continues. Writing about another, less familiar place required more forensic investigation, research and open senses in order for me to feel I'd transferred and evoked that world. Though I don't believe a writer necessarily has to set foot in a period or in a place to be able to write about it. The imagination is a wonderful organ. It's not classified as an organ, but perhaps it should be.
To hear a podcast with Sarah Hall talking about How to Paint a Dead Man please visit the Faber website
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(Interview by Sophie Rochester)
