Talking (new) fiction: Katrina Kell’s Chloé

I love creative projects that cross artforms in some way. My own writing has drawn on sculpture, art and dance, and I have been privileged and truly thrilled to have some of my works inspire paintings, a visual arts installation and, most recently, a concert by a symphony orchestra. So I was immediately drawn to Chloé, a newly released novel by Western Australian author Katrina Kell.

Chloé was inspired by the famous painting of the same name that hangs in the main bar of the Melbourne hotel Young and Jackson. It is a once-seen-never-forgotten work by French artist Jules Lefebvre—a large, lush nude that speaks of another time, a distant world. Given the iconic place it has come to have in Melbourne’s history (I’ll let Katrina tell you about that), my only surprise is that it’s taken so long for a writer to take it on.

I think Katrina has done Chloé proud.

Katrina is also the author of two YA novels, as well as short fiction, poetry and essays, and the unpublished manuscript of Chloé won an Australian Society of Authors Award Mentorship. She lives and works in Boorloo (Perth) and is an Honorary Research Associate at Murdoch University.

Look at this gorgeous cover!

A riveting novel based on the true story of the brave, enigmatic young woman who modelled for one of Australia’s most famous paintings.

Taking the reader from Victoria’s wild shipwreck coast to the artists’ studios of revolutionary Paris and the bloody battlefields of Flanders, this sweeping novel reimagines the volatile history of the beautiful and enigmatic young woman immortalised in one of Australia’s most iconic paintings. Created in Paris in 1875, Chloé, Jules Lefebvre’s depiction of a naked water nymph, was brought to Melbourne’s Young & Jackson Hotel in 1909, where it has hung ever since.

In this passionate, luminous retelling, Katrina Kell seeks to unlock the riddle behind the girl on the canvas, known to history only as Marie. In doing so, she weaves the compelling story of an incandescent spirit—a woman with the strength to defy the boundaries of class and convention in order to survive, and an enduring power to influence the lives of others across time and distance.

France in an Aussie pub

AC: Katrina, in order to imagine the creation of a painting and the lives of its artist and model, it’s necessary to spend a long time minutely studying its composition, its brushstrokes, its light and shadow, the background, the tone of the model’s skin, the lift of her shoulder, the expression on her half-turned face. Did you have the opportunity to do that in person at the outset of your project, or sometime after you’d been researching the painting, and the story, at a distance? I’m wondering what it felt like for you, seeing the painting for the first time.

KK: I saw Chloé at Young and Jackson Hotel in Melbourne early in my research journey. The nude figure depicted in the artwork appears almost life-size. Her gilt-framed image dominates, some might say rules, the public bar she is displayed in. I was immediately struck by the intensity of the Parisian model’s expression. Her glowing corporeality was palpable, but it was her face, her sombre countenance, that drew me into the picture. There was such sadness in her gaze, overlain by an edge of defiance. She was far more complex and intense than the titular naiad Lefebvre claims he painted.

Separating fact from fiction

AC: I imagine your first imperative as a researcher was to explore the lives of the model Marie Peregrine and the artist Jules Lefebvre. I’m sure the latter was easier than the former! Was there anything at all to find concerning Marie? Were there clues, other than those to be found in the very significant visual image in Chloé, that gave you a way into her character?

KK: Researching Lefebvre’s artistic career was certainly easier, but learning about his character proved much more challenging. Reliable material was only available in French. Initially, I was helped by a friend, a professional translator, until I grew confident in my translations. In Paris, I researched in several French institutions and gained access to the space where Lefebvre painted Chloé. It was a poignant experience, climbing the marble spiral staircase to his former atelier, and feeling the ambiance in the chamber where Marie had once posed for the artist.

There were a few sketchy clues about Marie, and the challenge was to separate fact from fiction. Chloé has been a beloved cultural icon for over a century. Myths about Marie and Jules Lefebvre are deeply entrenched and often reductive, so I needed to mine the few nuggets of truth to get to the heart of Marie’s story.

The Anglo-Irish writer George Moore (1852–1933) wrote about a girl named Marie in his memoir Confessions of a Young Man (1888). Moore claimed she was the model for ‘Lefebvre’s Chloé’. In his auto-fictional short story ‘The End of Marie Pellegrin’, he wrote again of the Parisian girl I suspect was Chloé’s model. Moore’s accounts of Marie’s turbulent life closely mirror details shared by Lefebvre during a conversation he had with the American journalist Lucy Hamilton Hooper (1835–1893). It was a spine-tingling moment when I read Hooper’s interview in her ‘Paris Letters’ column in the Appletons’ Journal. I was aware of the oppression and threats to proletarian women following the violent crushing of the revolutionary Paris Commune, and it was becoming clear that Marie’s lived experience would have been fraught with trauma and danger.

‘Having a drink with Chloé’

AC: A second story is woven through the novel—set in Australia, during the First World War. First, could you tell us about the significance of the painting Chloé to Australian soldiers at that time?

KK: ‘Having a drink with Chloé’ has been a ‘good luck’ ritual for Australian soldiers since the First World War. When Chloé was hung in Young and Jackson’s in 1909, the pub, opposite Flinders Street Railway Station, quickly became a drawcard. During this era, many young men would rarely have seen an unclothed woman. Chloé may have been their first and only chance of viewing a naked female body. Some even wrote love letters to the famous painting, and Chloé’s ‘good luck’ symbolism continued over many decades and military conflicts. As West Australian traveller Peter Graeme wrote, of a soldier he saw downing beers in front of the painting in honour of his fallen mates, Chloé may have been ‘the symbol of the feminine side of his life. That part which he puts away from him, except in his inarticulate dreams’ (see my article in The Conversation).

Ancestral links

AC: And the twin brothers, Rory and Paddy, who enlist in the war: how did their story evolve?

KK: My family heritage is from south-western Victoria, so setting this story thread there felt intuitive. My great-great-great-grandfather was captain of the Thistle, the shipwrecked schooner that lies offshore at Port Fairy beach in Eastern Maar Country. The character Abby, Rory and Paddy’s mother, pays homage to my Irish convict ancestor, Abby Desmond, a young woman who arrived in chains but managed to prevail and raise a family here. It was a joy to spend time researching and establishing settings in and around Port Fairy, and the boys’ story evolved quite naturally. It was also easy to imagine how challenging life would have been for a woman like Abby in this beautiful, rugged region.

Castor and Pollux

AC: There are several links—some surprising—between the French and Australian stories. I especially liked the use of the mythological figures Castor and Pollux, and I’m wondering whether the Paris zoo elephants named after those figures might have inspired that link.

KK: My mother, Zant, is an identical twin, and her star sign is Gemini. Her Irish father, who loved astronomy, shared the story of Castor and Pollux with his twin daughters. Mum shared her father’s stories with us. She loved to point to Orion’s Belt in the night sky and show us the twin stars that meant so much to her. So it felt natural that Rory and Paddy’s father, an ocean fisherman, would share the story of Castor and Pollux, the twin gods who rescued shipwrecked sailors. When I learned of the tragic fate of the Paris Zoo elephants, I was moved by how their story seemed to resonate with the wartime experiences of Rory and Paddy. It was a link between France and Australia that emerged serendipitously.

Researching a paradoxical world

AC: I was distraught on reading the fate of the elephants—so emblematic of Paris’s inequities: obscene excess at a time of desperate hunger. Which is a roundabout way of leading in to a question about the turbulent, paradoxical world Marie and her mother Noemi lived in: on the one hand, war, revolution, starvation, persecution; on the other, the flourishing of French culture. It’s a daunting historical canvas. How did you go about your research?

KK: It certainly was a paradoxical world and quite the minefield to research. I read numerous accounts of the Franco-Prussian War and the oppression of the Paris Commune and how the rise of Impressionist art cast a veil of light and colour over a chapter of violence and darkness. Louise Michell, the revolutionary leader, was a rich source of inspiration. Her first-hand accounts of the Siege of Paris and the crushing of the Commune richly informed the novel. I discovered other first-hand accounts written by Parisians at the time and a collection of illuminating letters between Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (George Sand) and Gustave Flaubert during the final days of the Commune. Lucy Hooper, an American journalist based in Paris, wrote regular columns on art, culture, and the day-to-day life of Paris in the 1870s. I also read the work of art historians Hollis Clayson, Gabriel P. Weisberg and Jane R. Becker, as well as George Moore’s memoirs of his life as a young art student at the Académie Julian in Paris.

Being there

AC: I know you had the opportunity, during your extensive research, to visit Paris and other places inhabited by your characters. Can you tell us about the experience of ‘being there’ and whether it had an effect on the development of the novel?

KK: Yes, the experience of ‘being there’ was such a privilege. Walking on the same cobbled streets Marie would have walked on during her lifetime and standing in the space where Chloe was painted. Soaking up the vibrant atmosphere of the Passage de Panoramas, the glorious glass-roofed arcade where the Académie Julian was located. One of the most pivotal and inspiring moments was exploring the paths and sepulchres at Montmartre cemetery. The black charring on tombstones evoked the fighting that once took place there, and I was awestruck by the voluminous mausoleums, the realisation that a fugitive could easily have made a home in one. Visiting the Somme region was equally important, especially experiencing, albeit vicariously, the terrible claustrophobia and the sounds and sights of First World War trench warfare at the Musée Somme 1916 in Albert. And, of course, seeing Chloé in all her glory at Young and Jackson’s was an extraordinary moment.

Recuperating the past

AC: Katrina, this is your first novel for adult readers, and your first foray into historical fiction. Do you see yourself continuing to pursue stories of the past?

KK: Yes, I do, absolutely. I am passionate about recuperating women’s stories, especially stories of creative women who have been ignored in the annals of history. It’s exciting to be researching and laying down the bones of my next novel. This story will explore another fascinating and surprising link between Australian and French art history.

Chloé is published by Echo Publishing
Follow Katrina on Facebook or visit her website

Photo credits: author photo J.J. Gately Photography; Katrina and Chloé photo Dave Kell; Jules Joseph Lefebvre photo public domain; Jules Lefebvre in his studio (1882) photo by Émile Bénard, public domain; Barricade de la place Blanche, défendue par des femmes pendant la semaine sanglante (Barricade at place Blanche, defended by women during the bloody week), lithographie, Musée Carnavalet, public domain; soldiers climbing onto the roof of Young and Jackson Hotel, World War 2, photo Robert Bruce Irving, Australian War Memorial Collection AWM065557, public domain; Arrest of Louise Michel in May 1871, Musée d’Art et Histoire du Saint-Denis, public domain; Montmartre Cemetery sepulchre photo by author

On this last day of the year…

I’ve read a lot of books this year past—more than in previous years—and if I was into ratings, I’d be scoring nearly all of them very highly indeed. I abandoned only one (and I won’t be naming it or its author here).

It was my great pleasure to interview three authors with new releases on the blog this year—three standout novels that I highly recommend. If you missed them, do please take the time to read these interviews, and I’m sure, as a result, you’ll be adding the books to your list:

Simone Lazaroo, Between Water and the Night Sky

Robyn Cadwallader, The Fire and the Rose

Angela O’Keeffe, The Sitter

I hope to be bringing an interview with a debut WA author in the first months of the new year!

In my last newsletter, I wrote about some of the other fine Australian books I’ve read:

Fiction: Mirandi Riwoe, Sunbirds; Eliza Henry Jones, Salt and Skin; Molly Schmidt, Salt River Road; Jackie Bailey, The Eulogy; Michael Fitzgerald, Late; and Shankari Chadran, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens

Non-fiction: Gemma Nisbet, The Things We Live With (how I loved this beautiful book!); and Laurie Steed, Love, Dad

YA: A.J. Betts, One Song; and Graham Akhurst, Borderland

To which I will add, from my reading earlier in the year, Gail Jones’s award-winning Salonika Burning—one of my favourites for the year and a war novel unlike most others I’ve read.

I took another foray into Irish fiction during the year, with four fabulous novels that gave me much to think about: Louise Kennedy, Trespasses; Jan Carson, The Firestarters; Olivia Fitzsimons, The Quiet Whispers Never Stop; and Nuala O’Connor, Nora.

Other international titles I admired, as a reader and a writer, were Barbara Kingsolver’s epic Demon Copperhead, and the latest from the brilliant Donald Stuart, Young Mungo. Although so culturally and geographically different, I couldn’t help but see parallels between these two grim stories of boyhood/early adolescence and the kind of rough and careless upbringing that is more a matter of surviving than growing up. Something that amazes me about these two novels—testament to the skill of the authors—is that what I remember most about them are the threads of love that wind through the squalor.

I finished the year with two of Australia’s biggest names in fiction—deservedly so—Charlotte Wood and her quiet, contemplative Stone Yard Devotional and Melissa Lucashenko with her broad historical sweep across what is now called Brisbane, Edenglassie. Both are destined for shortlists throughout 2024. Both touched my heart.

∞∞∞

Looking back at my last New Year’s blog, I see I wrote hopefully that 2023 might be a better year than 2022. Unfortunately, that wasn’t to be, for me, but I do remain hopeful for 2024.

And wherever you are, I wish you…

’Tis the season…

History repeated…

I loved doing a session this year with Damien Hassan (State Records Office of WA) and Sam Longley (ABC Radio), one of the Friday afternoon ‘History Repeated’ segments on ABC 720.

We talked about use of the State Records Office as a source of both inspiration and research for my novel The Sinkings, and the kinds of records that helped to illuminate events in the novel and the character of sandalwood carter and former convict Little Jock King.

Little Jock was the victim of a horrific murder in 1882, near Albany in WA’s South West, and Damien spoke about the murder map held among the SRO’s treasures—a macabre but fascinating artefact that was created for the 1883 Supreme Court trial of John Collins for the murder of Little Jock. The map is shown, courtesy of the SRO, in an earlier post here.

The combined resources of the State Records Office and the State Library have played a part in nearly everything I’ve published so far, as well as my current work in progress, and I’m deeply grateful that such records have been preserved to enrich our understanding of the past.

The ’History Repeated’ segment can be found on the SRO website here—just scroll down the list to find The Sinkings.

Three new releases from WA writers

Laurie Steed
Love, Dad: Confessions of an Anxious Father
Fremantle Press
$32.99
Memoir

You don’t have to be a father, or a son, to enjoy Laurie Steed’s witty, self-deprecating memoir of love, family and contemporary masculinity. I was especially taken by the parts of the narrative that speak of the creative process—made particularly challenging, in Laurie’s case, by the competing demands of fatherhood and the need to earn a living. Having said that, I think Love, Dad would be an exceptionally welcome gift for fathers and sons alike—infinitely more stimulating than socks and barbecue tongs.

A must-read for all new parents, Love, Dad explores what it means to be a father in the twenty-first century.

The father of two young boys, Laurie reflects on how his own experiences have defined the kind of man he is and the kind of parent he would like to become. His stories—triumphant, funny and sad—draw on Laurie’s own childhood experiences and important relationships with family and mates, alongside the challenges of trauma and mental health shared by many men. This memoir openly shares how Laurie strives to overcome challenges—from breaking generational cycles to maintaining joy in work and parenthood—and how others fresh to parenting can learn from this authentic story of a new dad and his family.

Molly Schmidt
Salt River Road
Fremantle Press
$32.99
Novel

Coming soon (October) from Fremantle Press, Salt River Road is the most recent winner of the City of Fremantle Hungerford Award, again showing the value of this longstanding unpublished manuscript award in introducing fine new writers and exciting new books. Molly Schmidt consulted with Elders of the Menang and Goreng people in developing a story—both authentic and ambitious—that reaches far beyond its premise of a family whose grief is tearing them apart, bringing in a wider view of careless, systemic racism in a rural town in 1970s Australia. Once again I’m struck by the way a work set in the past can have so much to say about the present.

Introducing an exciting new voice in Australian fiction: Molly Schmidt, winner of the 2022 City of Fremantle Hungerford Award. Salt River Road is a compelling coming-of-age novel about grief and healing set in a small town in the 1970s.

In the aftermath of their mother’s death, the Tetley siblings’ lives are falling apart. Left to fend for themselves as their family farm goes to ruins, Rose sets out to escape the grief and mess of home. When she meets Noongar Elders Patsy and Herbert, she finds herself drawn into a home where she has the chance to discover the strength of community, and to heal a wound her family has carried for a generation.

A.J. Betts
One Song
Pan Macmillan
$19.99
YA fiction

Good YA fiction written for young adults may equally be enjoyed by those a bit (or a lot) older—and A.J. Betts always writes good YA fiction. It’s easy to be drawn into the story of Eva’s obsessive quest to win Triple J Unearthed High, and the perils of having to rely on a band of teenage musos yet to gel as a band. The action takes place over a single weekend, in a single setting, and you can feel the tension, smell the aromas of sweat, angst and pepperoni. An engaging, well-paced read about friendship, desire, creativity and resilience.

Aspiring singer-songwriter Eva has one last chance to enter Triple J Unearthed High and break into the music industry.

But after three failed attempts, she needs some help.

Cue the band: perfectionist Eva, charismatic Cooper, easy-going Ant and moody Ruby. Plus fly-on-the-wall Mim, who’s filming them for her school Media project.

Five people who have nothing in common but music. One emotionally and creatively charged weekend.

Can they record the most important song of their lives?

Talking (new) fiction: Angela O’Keeffe’s The Sitter

I was blown away by Angela O’Keeffe’s Night Blue when I read it last year, and not at all surprised when it went on to be shortlisted for the 2022 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction.

Angela and I met at Varuna last July, where I was working on my current novel and, in the next room, she was finishing the manuscript of her second novel.

And that manuscript has just been published. I loved The Sitter as much as I did Night Blue and was thrilled when Angela agreed to take part in this interview series.

Angela O’Keeffe grew up with nine siblings on a farm in the Lockyer Valley, Queensland. She completed a Master of Arts in Writing at UTS, and her first novel, Night Blue, was shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing, as well as the Prime Minister’s Award. She was the recipient of the 2023 Varuna Eleanor Dark Fellowship, and the 2023 UQP Quentin Bryce Award for The Sitter.

Paris, 2020. A writer is confined to her hotel room during the early days of the pandemic, struggling to finish a novel about Hortense Cezanne, wife and sometime muse of the famous painter. Dead for more than a century, Hortense has been reawakened by this creative endeavour, and now shadows the writer through the locked-down city. But Hortense, always subject to the gaze of others, is increasingly intrigued by the woman before her. Who is she and what event hides in her past?

Heartbreaking and perfectly formed, The Sitter explores the tension between artist and subject, and between the stories told about us and the stories we choose to tell.

Art as story

AC: Angela, this is your second novel and the second involving art. Where does this fascination for art come from? Are you an artist yourself? An art historian?

AO: I am neither! But I am asked this a lot. The attraction had to do with the artworks, of course, but also, and perhaps more so, at least initially, it came from the stories that surrounded them. So it was narrative that drew me in. Blue Poles was hated by so many Australians. Why? Hortense Cezanne looks so unhappy in the portraits, and she was disliked by Cezanne’s family and friends. How did she feel about that? But the stories never felt to me to be separated from the artworks. As I wrote, the artworks were an insistent presence.

‘Travelling and speaking through time’

AC: In the present of the narrative, there are only two characters, both of them compelling even though one of them is dead. A writer—at first unnamed—is in a hotel room in Paris, where she is writing a novel about Hortense Cezanne (1850–1922), the wife of French artist Paul Cezanne (1839–1906). Hortense is the other character—ghost, spirit, presence, shadow, figment of the writer’s writerly consciousness? She seems, during the course of the novel, to inhabit some of these nuances, or an indescribable other. I have two questions concerning Hortense. First, could you please talk about the creation of this unique character—what it was that drew you to this woman from history, and your decision to have her enter a contemporary story.

AO: I knew I wanted to write about Hortense when I saw some of the portraits in Paris in 2017. As already mentioned, it was the story surrounding her that drew me in. She was from a working-class family. Cezanne hid her and their son away from his family for many years out of fear of losing his stipend (on which all three survived) from his banker father. Their friends found her shallow. She sat for 29 portraits, and he was a painstakingly slow painter. In the portraits she looks dejected. I knew I wanted to write from her point of view, to explore how she might have seen all this. Bringing her into the present was an attempt to trace, or make visible, the invisibility of art travelling and speaking through time, how art latches onto the present and becomes something it wasn’t before. So I put Hortense and a contemporary writer in a room together in Paris. Could I conjure a situation in which their individual stories might somehow collide? And what might come of such a collision, what new thing might be born? These are the kinds of questions I was asking as I worked. I couldn’t articulate them then as I can now. But on some level I was aware of them through feelings of curiosity and fascination.

‘She would not defend herself’

AC: And my second question about Hortense: I imagine there were many writerly challenges in bringing Hortense to the page so convincingly. I am thinking, for example, of the issue of corporeality and how she manifests her presence in the contemporary character’s world; and also the question of desire—the needs and wants of the departed. Could you please talk about the challenges you faced and how you handled them?

AO: I have this memory of Hortense being really present from the start, that she was such a strong force that she landed quite easily on the page and I didn’t have to think about it. However, that can’t be true, because I also know that I wrote a full draft of the manuscript that I then discarded. Hortense was somehow wrong, or false in it, and I couldn’t use any of it. Then the pandemic came, and it shifted the book’s orientation, and suddenly Hortense came alive. She was just so present, and all I had to do was sort of feel my way along with her. I realised that she was not going to refute the terrible things that had been said about her. She would not defend herself. Instead, she would inhabit those things, and I would see what came of it. I remember feeling huge excitement at this.

Honouring blanks in the canvas

AC: I love the way Hortense, in life always the observed (the model for 29 paintings by Cezanne), becomes the observer in death. Was it your intention to give agency to this woman who appears to have had so little?

AO: Yes, that was one of my intentions, for sure. But I realised quite quickly that I couldn’t—and didn’t want to—make her whole. There are blanks in the canvases and blanks in her history, and I came to see that it was more interesting—for me, for the book—to honour those blanks, to see what an ‘unwhole’ character might do in this situation. The writer, too, is ‘unwhole’ in the story about her own past.

Hidden things

AC: You have devised a graceful way of telling the stories of the two women. The point of view is essentially Hortense’s—as both observer of the writer’s present and the teller of her own memories—but the writer’s point of view is also given voice when, in Part II, a new narrative is introduced, in the form of a letter from the writer to her daughter. Given that the two women are brought together by the writer’s narrative intention to write Hortense’s story, I wondered whether you were ever tempted to include also that developing narrative (aside from the one brief passage in Part I).

AO: Yes, I considered that. In the first attempt I mentioned earlier, there were some of those passages from the book. But there was something off about it. I can’t say what, really. It just didn’t work. And so when I came to write it again, that book is talked about rather than shown. It’s one more thing that is hidden in a novel about hidden things.

Holding two women in a room

AC: The narrative in the present is set in a significant time, March 2020: one year on from the Notre Dame fire in Paris, just after the catastrophic bushfire season in Australia, and the first month of a global pandemic that changed the lives of us all. All of these events are woven into the novel, and Covid plays a major part, in ways I can’t raise because they involve spoilers. But may I ask at what stage of the writing you were in March 2020? That is, did you set the novel then because of what happened and the opportunities it presented, or did you have to rethink a novel already in progress?

AO: As mentioned, I was at the stage where I was starting from scratch again. I had the two characters in a hotel room in Paris. I wanted them to be there for a while, but I couldn’t find a good reason. Was it jet lag? Probably not. And then the pandemic came and not only did I have the reason but the characters, both of them, came alive in new ways. It was such a wonderful thing to discover in that uncertain and terrible time.

Life mirroring art

AC: Did you write some or all of the novel in Paris?

AO: I couldn’t get to Paris because of the closed border. I had been there a couple of times, and I decided that that would be enough. It added to the sense of urgency, in a way. It was a sort of mirroring of the writer’s difficulty in returning home.

The Sitter is published by University of Queensland Press
Follow Angela on X/Twitter, Instagram, Threads (@angelaokeeffewriter)
There are many online reviews; this one by Lisa (ANZLitLovers)

Talking (new) fiction: Robyn Cadwallader’s The Fire and the Rose

I’ve been a great admirer of Robyn Cadwallader’s writing ever since her bestselling first novel, The Anchoress, was published in 2015. The Anchoress tells the story of a seventeen-year-old girl who chooses to renounce the world and become enclosed as a holy woman of prayer (my review here). Robyn’s second novel, Book of Colours, paints a vibrant, compelling portrait of medieval life and the lives behind the illuminated manuscript pages of that time (Robyn talks about Book of Colours here). Both novels were award winners and gained a huge following in Australia and beyond.

Robyn is a novelist and poet who lives in the country on Ngunnawal land outside Canberra. Prior to working as a researcher, academic and writer, she describes an eclectic early career: ’as a teenager, in retail, selling jewellery, women’s underwear and records (when they were popular the first time round); as a petrol station driveway attendant; and, during uni break, in the Kiwi factory, filling and packaging shoe polish, bleach and fragrant toilet blocks’. Sounds to me like a solid background for studying human life!

Robyn’s new novel, The Fire and the Rose, has been described as ’a heartbreakingly timeless tale, richly imagined and wondrously alive’ (Nigel Featherstone) and ’a beautifully written, thought-provoking exploration of prejudice towards minorities‘ (Canberra Times). I was thrilled to have the opportunity to ask her about it…

England, 1276: Forced to leave her home village, Eleanor moves to Lincoln to work as a housemaid. She’s prickly, independent and stubborn, her prospects blighted by a port-wine birthmark across her face. Unusually for a woman, she has fine skills with ink and quill, and harbours a secret ambition to work as a scribe, a profession closed to women.

Eleanor discovers that Lincoln is a dangerous place, divided by religious prejudice, the Jews frequently the focus of violence and forced to wear a yellow badge. Eleanor falls in love with Asher, a Jewish spicer, who shares her love of books and words, but their relationship is forbidden by law. When Eleanor is pulled into the dark depths of the church’s machinations against Jews and the king issues an edict expelling all Jews from England, Eleanor and Asher are faced with an impossible choice.

Vivid, rich, deep and sensual, The Fire and the Rose is a tender and moving novel about how language, words and books have the power to change and shape lives. Most powerfully, it is also a novel about what it is to be made ‘other’, to be exiled from home and family. But it is also a call to recognise how much we need the other, the one we do not understand, making it a strikingly resonant and powerfully hopeful novel for our times.

That moment…

AC: Robyn, where did The Fire and the Rose come from? What was the moment when you felt: This is a story I have to explore in fiction?

RC: While I was doing research for Book of Colours I came across a reference to the Jews being expelled from England in 1290. I read the sentence again; I was horrified. I’d never heard of this expulsion, so I read a little more. How could a group of people who were part of the fabric of a country be so summarily expelled? That question stayed with me, even when I dismissed the idea of writing a novel about it because it seemed too hard. Each of the three novels I’ve written has begun with an insistent question.

An intimate sense of the past

AC: You are well known for your re-creation of vivid, authentic worlds from a distant past—far more distant than I have ever attempted with my historical fiction. Has your background as a medieval scholar given you that strong sense of time and place, or do you use research methods that would be familiar to any writer of historical fiction?

RC: Both, I think. I consider research as a way of educating myself about a time and place, not simply gathering information to add into the story.

As an academic I studied medieval literature, and that necessarily involved understanding the history of the period. But the literature also gives a more intimate sense of the people: what they believed, what made them laugh, what gave their lives meaning, how they spoke about love or pain or desire. I think I soaked that in and became more familiar with people in the Middle Ages as a result.

When I begin a novel in a particular setting or period, I need to do more focused research. I read everything I can about the historical context, of course, but I’m also very interested in the material culture: physical location and topography, housing, food, etc. But I try to go a bit deeper still and ask myself the implications of whatever I learn. This might involve aspects that we take for granted; for example, I read and think about how people engaged with the senses; how they understood art, or beauty; how they understood their place in the world.

A novel of her own

AC: While your three novels do not form a series, there are crossovers from The Anchoress to Book of Colours and also to The Fire and the Rose. I think the protagonist of The Fire and the Rose, Eleanor, plays a role in all three, although she is only referred to in Book of Colours. What is it about this character that has had such a pull on your imagination?

RC: Oh, Eleanor was such a curious, clever and determined little girl that she refused to let her story end at The Anchoress; I think she wanted a whole novel of her own!

When I wrote The Anchoress I had no conscious sense of extending Eleanor’s story. In that story the anchoress wants to teach her to write, but because neither of them has access to parchment and ink, she shapes letters in Eleanor’s palm.

Even after the novel was finished, I thought about the implications for Eleanor of such a profound experience, discovering a whole world of words in such a sensual way, through the skin. I wondered how she would manage in a small village where so few people could read or write. Would the village become too limiting for her? Would she become restless? Would those around her resent her skills? Those questions were the seeds of her story in The Fire and the Rose.

Making sense of their world

AC: There are aspects of the human subject that are commonly considered universal, but people from the past did not necessarily think as we do today, and I imagine the further back in time we go, the more different those world-views would be. Is it a challenge to negotiate such differences when you create a character from the thirteenth century, or do they present an opportunity?

RC: I think the remarkable thing about investigating people from the past is just how similar they are to us, and at the same time, just how different they are. When I write, I try to hold those two ideas together.

Through the process of writing these three novels, I’ve slowly discovered that limitations or differences are a challenge, but often a good one that pushes me to take a story further. Of course, it means more research in order to understand the beliefs and thinking of the time. My primary interest in writing stories set in the Middle Ages is trying to understand how the people then made sense of the world they found themselves in, and I think that’s true of anything I write in a contemporary setting as well.

We do people from the past a great disservice if we simplify their thoughts and motivations and experiences. For example, when I began writing The Anchoress, the challenge was to write meaningfully about a woman who chooses to be enclosed in a stone cell for life, there to pray and read and ‘suffer with Christ’—something I would never do. As I grew to understand Sarah more closely, I recognised that my initial assumption that she was a very committed and holy woman was much too simplistic. Our motivations are never so simple. Once I began to consider Sarah as a full person, I could begin to explore the fears, desires and dreams that led her to choose enclosure.

Writing the other

AC: The brutal treatment of Jews by the English drives The Fire and the Rose, and in your Author’s Note you describe your position as a Gentile writer writing of this painful history as coming to the work ‘with a bowed head’ (after Colum McCann). More than once you have Jewish characters telling Eleanor, a Gentile, that her own experiences of marginalisation do not give her the right to think she understands theirs. Does this impossible gap between empathy and understanding reflect, in some way, the challenge for a novelist trying to write of the other?

RC: This is a very interesting and somewhat tricky area.

Even though Eleanor is, at times, rebuffed by Jewish people, I’m not suggesting that there is an impossible gap between empathy and understanding. I think Eleanor grows into a profound understanding of the situation of the Jews and their struggle, but I was exploring some of the implications of extreme prejudice.

In the novel, the Jews have been attacked again and again, forced to retreat, relying only on one another for support and comfort. The times that Eleanor is rebuffed are most often moments of grief and stress for the Jews, and their rejection of her attempts to understand their suffering is a product of their marginalisation and the attacks. When they are treated as ‘other’, the divisions are enforced, and in the emotion of the moment, Eleanor is on the other side. However, the relationship between Eleanor and Asher demonstrates how love—the commitment to another through hardship and struggle and delight—can overcome such divisions. The deep bond between Eleanor, Hannah and Marchota is another example.

I recognised that the profound impact of prejudice on Jews and their culture could have implications for my writing, and I spent some time debating and investigating whether I should write this novel, or not. I was warned by a First Nations Australian woman that I shouldn’t attempt to write about a group of people if I didn’t have ‘skin in the game’ because if I made mistakes in my portrayal, it is they, not me, who would suffer as a result. However, a Jewish woman commented in response that if I didn’t tell the story, others would never know it. I knew there was a risk of offending others, but I made several strong commitments: to research as deeply as possible, to seek help and opinions from Jews (I had three sensitivity readers, and another three Jewish readers), and to write only from the point of view of a Gentile character; I would not assume to write from the Jewish point of view.

I think that a writer always seeks to get inside the experience of another person, so in theory, it should be possible to write about others who have a very different experience and outlook from the writer. However, I don’t think that means a writer should just assume that they can write anything. There are areas of sensitivity and marginalisation that need to be carefully considered, but I am heartened by the Jewish woman’s encouragement to write the story so that others would learn of it.

An eternal witness in stone

AC: The walls of the city of Lincoln are given a voice in the novel. These poetic sections, headed ‘The Walls Speak’, provide a chorus of Lincoln’s history, the physical embodiment of its memory, and a brief, eloquent commentary on the timelessness of persecution. It occurred to me that the personification of the inanimate in this novel and also in Book of Colours (the gargoyle) might spring from the same intense experience I have felt during site research—feeling the past in brick and stone. Could you please talk about this aspect of the novel?

RC: Yes, you’re right. I have always loved stone, with its long, long formation in the depths of the earth, its endurance, and the huge range of ways we transform it: into protection, memorial, worship, beauty, foundation and so on. It’s everywhere in Old Lincoln: castle, cathedral, street paving, houses, walls. I knew that the stone would need to speak in some way. I imagined the city walls that completely surrounded the city in the Middle Ages would have stood guard, silent witnesses to all of life in Lincoln, from the joys and celebrations to the suffering, struggle and death. That would include the persecution of the Jews. It’s also ageless, and I found it easy to imagine it as an eternal witness. Even the Bible, in both Old and New Testaments, describes the stones or the walls crying out when people remain silent.

Finding a title

AC: I always find book titles interesting—I think because I’ve had the experience of being wholly certain of what a title should be, as well as the opposite. And when it comes to publication, settling on a title can sometimes be a battleground! Was The Fire and the Rose the first and only title of this novel?

RC: Oh, I’m no good at finding a title at all. I had several. The first one was ‘Not less than everything’, taken from T.S. Eliot’s line in ‘Little Gidding’: ‘A condition of complete simplicity / Costing not less than everything’, because I felt that Eleanor and Asher’s love would, in some ways, cost them everything. However, my agent and my publisher both said it was too vague to communicate well—though it’s interesting that there are quite a few novels now with titles that are phrases. We didn’t battle, because I trust their experience, but I struggled to find another title. My agent suggested The Fire and the Rose, and I discovered that it did suit the story.

Perhaps I’ll call on you for the title of my next novel, whatever it is! [Best not, I think!]

A life goes on

AC: Might we anticipate meeting Eleanor on the page again?

RC: Never say never, but I suspect not. She is someone I would love to meet; wherever her life goes, she will be fascinating and never dull.

The Fire and the Rose is published by Fourth Estate (Harper Collins)
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Read a review by Lisa (ANZ LitLovers)

Happy Anniversary, Meggie!

What a shock to realise that Meggie Duthie Tulloch, red-haired gutting girl of the North Sea, came into the world, bookishly speaking, 10 years ago today.

It just doesn’t seem so long ago to me. I still have my Elemental corkboard on the wall of the studio, with its herring and puffins and girls elbow-deep in farlins of icy fish; its shawls and creels and fishing boats; its sea-boots and gannets. They are as real to me now as ever they were, as alive as Kate’s studio in Montparnasse, as Little Jock’s family in the slums of Glasgow, as the world of the novel I’m writing now. (Which is a good deal hotter than any I’ve ever lived in, in words or in life.)

Thank you to anyone who has ever listened to Meggie’s voice on the page, to those who took her into their hearts. And to Terri-ann White and UWA Publishing, who believed in her enough to publish Elemental.

Meggie, recalling the place of her birth:

I am seeing with the eye of a bird. There’s a coastline, there are canvas sails, wee boats painted blue. Coming in closer, the boatie shore, the long stony sweep of it, and the soles of my feet are tingling. Everywhere, skinny children, barefoot on the shingle. I am blown from the shore, up the slope to a grid of four streets. Tiller Street—my street—crosses through them, rows of stone houses with their backs to the North Sea. The wind is a howl the likes of which I have never heard since. And in the air, a sea tang, fresh and sharp and rotten all at once, spiced up with old bait, fish guts, plumes from chimneys where the fish are hung to dry and smoke. I can see the stiff striped aprons of the women, the wifies. My mother’s face.

If I spoke these words to you now, lambsie, they would sound shivery-strange, all shirred up on invisible threads, clipped of the Aussie vowels my voice began to grow when I came down here to this place from the top of the world. My ink is turning to water, briny and blue. I look at her, that girl I was, at all those people with her, and I see how easily it breaks, my will to walk away from them lean and free. Because when it comes to family, you can walk from the top of the world to the bottom and still not be free.

In concert

I love the way artists of different artforms and genres draw inspiration from each other in the creation of new works, adaptations, reinventions, collaborations. Think of the many paintings inspired by Tennyson’s poem (itself drawn from Arthurian legend) ‘The Lady of Shallot’; a print of probably the most famous, by John William Waterhouse, adorns the wall of my studio. My car playlist includes a musical interpretation by Loreena McKennitt. And there is a potent intertextuality, at the levels of direct reference, metaphor and theme, between the poem and one of my favourite novels, Tirra Lirra by the River by Jessica Anderson.

Art, sculpture, dance, music, poetry and film have fed into my own writing in various ways, and I have been thrilled on the occasions when something I have written has influenced the creation of new art by others. The Sinkings, for example, inspired an art installation by South West artist Annette Davis. Film company Factor 30 has optioned the novel for development as a six-part TV series, so it might find its way to the screen someday.

The story ‘Paris bled into the Indian Ocean’ (published in Inherited), inspired by the brilliant impressionist artist Kathleen (Kate) O’Connor, gave its name to a spectacular exhibition of paintings by Fremantle artist Jo Darvall, which in turn, in a circuitous way, led to my work of creative non-fiction, Kathleen O’Connor of Paris.

And now, I’m beyond excited that Perth Symphony Orchestra is staging a concert featuring music reflecting Kate’s life and times, interspersed with extracts from Kathleen O’Connor of Paris and images of Kate’s work.

I can’t help thinking that Kate, so enchanted with artistic culture of all kinds, would love this kind of collaboration.

Art & Music: The Life & Art of Kathleen O’Connor will be presented at the Art Gallery of Western Australia on 30 June and 1 July, 7.30pm. Tickets available here.

Precious…

My father died recently, and I have spent a lot of time among the personal possessions he left behind, sorting, gifting, recycling, discarding, and thinking about what makes something ‘precious’—precious enough to keep, to hold on to for years, decades, perhaps for a life. In my experience, it rarely has anything to do with monetary value.

I remembered a guest piece I wrote for another writer’s blog some years back. The brief was to choose an object of literary value that was precious to me, but, as I prefaced my piece then, I chose an object that was neither precious nor literary…

***

Many years ago my father hired a metal-detector and went on a camping/prospecting trip to the Eastern Goldfields. He didn’t discover gold, but he came home with lots of stories. And this—a ring unearthed on the site where the gold-rush town of Kanowna once stood.

It’s made of thin brass, with a red ‘stone’ of some manufactured origin—the cheapest kind of trinket. But it fascinated me. Who had bought it, worn it, lost it, abandoned it? Did it mean something to them? How did it find its way into the red dust of the goldfields?

Years later, I went to the site of Kanowna myself—not to prospect for gold but because, by then, I had read a lot about what the town had been like at the height of the gold rush, a thriving place with a population of 12,000, far exceeding Kalgoorlie in municipal importance. I was keen to see for myself what was left.

I was shocked to find that the reality of an Eastern Goldfields ghost town is nothing at all like I’d been led to expect by Hollywood westerns. Our ghost towns are bare earth, razed to nothing, everything of value carted away.

But you can’t erase history as easily as that. Stories remain.

My first (and so far only) ghost story, ‘Rush’ (published in Inherited), came from thinking about these things, and I suspect this humble little ring has many narratives it could tell. But it’s precious to me for what represents. It inspires curiosity. It reminds me to dig. It makes me question absolutes like ‘deserted’ and ‘empty’ and ‘worthless’. It whispers ‘what if?’ What a writerly little thing it is.

Which I guess qualifies it, after all, as precious and literary.

***

Now, of course, it has become infinitely more precious to me—a bearer of the spidery kind of memories that spin personal and communal histories together, that summon a face.