Helen Dunmore: The Betrayal
Creating an atmosphere of stifling suspicion
MBP: Congratulations on being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010. You won the Orange Prize in 1996 and have since been nominated for many literary awards. How important are they to you as a writer?
HD: I am delighted to be longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and of course I hope that it will draw new readers to The Betrayal. It's a very rich longlist, so I'm honoured to be in that company. But literary prizes certainly arouse strong passions. I remember going to one poetry prize award ceremony, where a judge was lurking behind a pillar after the prize announcement. He told me that he feared an onslaught (possibly physical) from a disappointed contender. Winning the Orange Prize for fiction was a great moment for me, but I never forget that Keats would very likely not have won the TS Eliot Prize, nor James Joyce the Man Booker, had these prizes existed in their day.
MBP: ‘The Betrayal' could apply dramatically to so many aspects of this novel - did you start out with this title or did it come as you were writing?
HD: The Betrayal was the title of the novel from the beginning, and that is rare for me. Usually I have a working title and then discover the real title much later on. This novel is a drama of betrayal on many levels. Neighbours inform on one another and the workplace is a nest of voluntary spies. I wanted to create an atmosphere of stifling suspicion - a spy novel atmosphere, really. Andrei, a paediatrician, is betrayed by a colleague who forces him into a highly dangerous relationship with a senior secret police officer, Volkov. Volkov, who has dealt out death and exile to thousands, is powerless in the face of his child's serious illness. He feels betrayed by his own mortality, and so, bizarrely, does Stalin, who has destroyed so many millions. In the background there is always a central betrayal, which is that of an entire people by a totalitarian dictatorship.
MBP: Throughout the gruelling backdrop of Stalinist Leningrad, you've managed to weave in a tender love story between Andrei and Anna. How difficult was it to maintain a love story against the terror of Stalin's Russia?
HD: These are characters with whom I've lived for a very long time - thirteen or fourteen years. In a similar way, but over a much longer period, I've tried to absorb an understanding of their world. Andrei and Anna are in their mid-thirties; as I've mentioned, he is a children's doctor while she works in a nursery. They were born shortly after the Revolution of 1917 and came to adulthood during the Great Terror of the 1930s. They lived through the Siege of Leningrad: these experiences formed the basis for my novel The Siege. Like many Leningraders, they hoped for better things after the struggle and sacrifices of the war, and were bitterly disappointed. They have experienced extremes, and yet they are alive and together. They have as many flaws as any of us - Andrei can be obtuse, Anna secretive. They haven't been able to have a child, although they are effectively parents to Anna's much younger brother. They can't talk about their infertility. But their relationship and the small, vulnerable, intimate space of home is of supreme importance to them both. However, the government has assumed the power to break this small world open like an egg any time it chooses, and as The Betrayal begins, the first cracks are starting to show.
MBP: The Betrayal paints a particularly moving portrait of the heroine Anna Levina. Does her stoicism come from being a survivor of the Siege of Leningrad?
HD: As I've said earlier, Anna can be secretive. There are many things in her life which she rarely or never talks about. She's been scarred by her past as well as shaped by it. She certainly has practical strength and a degree of stoicism, but she also has a great love of life. She notices everything - even though she has suppressed her life as an artist she cannot suppress her own powers of observation. She's very much immersed in the physical world too - in her work with children, in her relationship with Andrei, in her constant battle to ‘get hold of' what her household needs, in her love of the dacha and the garden she grows there. She can take unpromising ingredients and make something tasty of them, just as she can make a ball-dress out of an old length of cotton. She relishes treats of any kind - especially because these are rather rare. She likes being in the world although she also has a streak of melancholy, and a very sharp, ironic sense of humour. For me the most difficult scene to write was the one where Anna realises that the walls of her apartment won't protect her, or her family. But I'm well aware that this is only my view of the character. Once the novel is out in the world, it is for the reader to re-create the characters and say who they are.
MBP: Volkov, the high ranking secret police officer, is a terrifying character in The Betrayal, yet he is shown to be human too. Did you want the reader to find some good in him?
HD: I don't think I wanted the reader to find good in Volkov, but I wanted there to be reality in him. He is one of those characters who became much more complex as the writing of the book developed. At first, he is purely a source of fear, as rumours fly around the hospital that a senior secret police officer is bringing his child in for tests. But when Volkov and Andrei meet, Volkov is both the embodiment of terror and the parent of a sick child. Their encounters have an intensity which takes the novel to some of its darkest places. I think a novelist learns a great deal about a character by exploring that character's solitude. Finally, Volkov is alone; and then we really know him.
MBP: In The Betrayal we see how those living under the restrictions of Stalin's Russia in 1952 bravely survived, but also how neighbours and friends could betray. How did you imagine a society where 'trust no-one' was a creed to live by?
HD: My view of the society in which Anna and Andrei live was based on extensive research, and much of what happened in the Soviet Union at that time was unique to the place and to the historical moment. There is a selected bibliography at the end of the novel, because I thought readers might be interested to follow up some of the material on which I drew, and read more about what was happening in the Soviet Union during that period.
However, I've never thought of what happened under Stalin as something that could not occur elsewhere, in a different form. We all have the potential to betray one another. In Britain today we are fortunate enough to live in a society where betrayal is not, on the whole, rewarded. But it might be. That is to say, I don't believe that our society possesses a protective gene which secures it against developing a culture of spying and denunciation. This is perhaps why it is all too easy to imagine such a world.
The BetrayalHelen Dunmore
