Samantha Harvey on The Wilderness
Building a narrative out of mental collapse
Congratulations on The Wilderness making this year's Man Booker Prize longlist. You must be delighted that your first novel has had such an incredible response?
Yes, absolutely. With a first novel you write into a void - you have no idea who your readers will be, or even if you'll be published. So when you are, it's like giving a three hour monologue and at the end, one by one, people begin to clap. It's a relief and an honour and a kind of miracle to discover that those people liked hearing what you had to say.
The Wilderness is the story of a man in his early 60s suffering from Alzheimers. How difficult was it to try and imagine how his mind would be working - and to then put this into words?
The imagining was the easier part - a prolonged exercise in empathy. I extrapolated out from my experiences (of life, time, aging, forgetting, remembering) to Jake's, and I did so because I believed there is no state of being we can't all access if we try hard enough. Particularly with Alzheimer's, which invites such universal themes - what constitutes selfhood, what happens when we age and so on. I'm sure that through empathy we can conjure up any reality, which isn't to say I always succeeded, but I believe that it's possible to, and that's what I aimed for when I wrote The Wilderness.
Putting it into words is always another matter. In this case, how do you build a narrative out of mental collapse? How do you emulate confusion and chaos in an eloquent and sufficiently ordered way? I did struggle with that, and I did sometimes think, why didn't I write this book ten years down the line, when I'm a better and more experienced writer?
As Jake's health deteriorates the reader also has to try and decipher what is real and what is imagined. Did you want the reader to become immersed in Jake's world of confusion?
Yes, and no. I wanted to create the effect of Jake's confusion, but I didn't want the reader to be so confused that they had no idea what was happening, and no way of finding out. If you can rely on and believe nothing, the world you're experiencing becomes simply uninteresting I think. So I tried to strike a balance between a plausible emulation of his state of mind, and the reader's need for clarity.
My idea was that, as long as there is enough coherent narrative to carry you through to the end, the question of whether the events are real or imagined becomes secondary, just as it eventually becomes secondary to Jake. Above all, I wanted it to be a rich and rewarding read in spite of (or even because of) the fact that it challenges the expectation of resolution - and I know I succeed for some readers in this, and not always for others. It does seem to be a novel that polarises opinion. That wasn't what I set out to do, but perhaps it's inherent to any vaguely unconventional approach.
You've been praised for making The Wilderness a life-affirming novel, even though the subject matter could easily be dark and depressing. How were you able to achieve this?
Well, it's about a person's life, and most lives have some happiness and beauty - Jake's is no exception, and he's alive to what he has as much as to what he lacks.
I was always aware of the dangers of writing about such a dark subject, but I hoped that if I showed it from the inside out I could find new light to shed. There's good reason to think that there is a tipping point at which the disease becomes, at times, worse to witness than it is to experience. This was my hunch when I began, and my research strengthened the view. Where sufferers disappear from those around them, they don't disappear from themselves. They go into a world that is sometimes nightmarish and sometimes dreamlike. Where it's dreamlike, the past and present can be rewritten on more beautiful, hopeful terms.
You completed an MA in creative writing in 2005. What were you doing before you decided to start writing?
It was a bit of a mix of things. I had a few unremarkable jobs, I travelled, lived for two years in Japan, worked at a vineyard in New Zealand, thought I might become a philosopher. Then I started writing, and I wrote, and wrote, and haven't really stopped. Writers will tell you it's addictive, and it's true, it is.
This is your first novel. What next for Samantha Harvey?
I'm writing my next, and doing a creative writing PhD, and am also a tutor on the writing MA at Bath Spa University.
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