Interviews
A Q & A with John Boyle
1. What prompted you to write a book about World War I?
I was watching a news report about a town in England that was dedicating a new monument to soldiers who had lost their lives in the Great War. A group of their descendants were there to mark the occasion. But there was a second group present, descendants of young men who had either been shell-shocked in the trenches and deserted—and been shot because of it—or who had declared themselves conscientious objectors and also been shot by their own side. These young men had never been allowed to live their lives or fulfill their potential, but it was as if they had been entirely forgotten, erased from history. I immediately became interested in the idea of the conscientious objector, how difficult it would have been for someone to have taken on the mantle and how it would have affected his family. I thought there was something very brave about declaring an objection to war in the face of the great task that the rest of society was undertaking and that this in turn could be interesting territory for a novel.
2. What writers inspired you while you were working on this book?
Naturally, I have read a great many writers over the years who have written about the Great War, from Erich Maria Remarque to Pat Barker, but I try to keep influences away from my novels, particularly my historically based novels, as much as I can. I wanted the voices of the two young men at the heart of the story—Tristan Sadler and Will Bancroft—to sound completely authentic, to have their own voices, characters and opinions, and not be extensions of the characters that I have read about in other novels set during 1914 and 1918.
3. The Absolutist vividly captures the atmosphere of the war and its aftermath. How did you research the setting and go about creating it?
I spent a lot of time at war museums—for example, the Imperial War Museum in London—researching trench warfare and the effect that living in those conditions had on the young men at the time. A lot of this was done through letters: letters written by soldiers at the Front, letters written from their families back to them. In those letters I could identify consistent themes and ideas about warfare that are often missing from the vast amount of nonfiction that is available on the subject. They were also very helpful in delving into the psychology of the soldiers, into learning what their preoccupations were at such difficult moments. Naturally I read about the training grounds and the field operations too, but at some point, however, any novelist writing about the past needs to put all the research to one side and simply rely on his or her imagination.
4. What did you intend for The Absolutist to say about homosexual identity during World War I? Does this theme resonate with contemporary issues?
At the time of the Great War, homosexuality was illegal in England but of course there were as many gay people then as there are today; they simply had no outlet for their desires and a great deal of fear about them being exposed. They could not be honest about who they were; they were doomed to lead lives of solitude and frustration. However, in the intimacy of the trenches, in the horrors of that war, it seemed obvious to me that relationships must have formed at times. Clandestine relationships, of course, but relationships nonetheless. I think this does have a contemporary resonance when there is still debate about gays in the military and the voices on the right wing—those terrified, cowardly, hate-fuelled voices who espouse freedom and then deny everyone the right to experience it—are so outspoken with their prejudices. While watching one of the Republican presidential primary debates I saw a soldier in Iraq asking via Skype a question of the candidates. The audience cheered him upon his arrival on screen, then booed and hissed when he revealed his homosexuality. Not one of the candidates offering themselves for the position of Commander-in-Chief had the humanity, the decency or the courage to stand up for that soldier, which, I think, tells you everything you need to know about those men and their ideologies.
5. Do you identify with any of the characters in particular?
I don't think it's a novelist's job to identify with any one particular character. The job is to create characters with whom the readers can engage, in whom they can believe. Naturally there is a little of me in all the characters but it's not always a deliberate act. More often than not, it arrives subconsciously in the fiction. It's always interesting to me when friends tell me that they can hear my voice in particular characters, but I make an effort to create people who I don't fully understand, who only become clear to me as the story develops.
6. The novel deftly moves backward and forward through time, without giving away too much information or spoiling the ending. How did you decide to structure the narrative like this, and was it difficult to achieve?
I've been playing with structure and time since my first novel, The Thief of Time, was published in 2000. I find it very interesting to tell a story in a nonlinear way, to allow later scenes to take place earlier in the novel and then return to earlier points in the story to examine how that moment was arrived at. I found it particularly interesting to do this in The House of Special Purpose, half of which is written “forward in time” and half of which is written “backward in time” so that the two halves of the story meet at the end. In The Absolutist, I thought it was important that the character of Tristan should sound different in the prewar and postwar sections, that his tone would be markedly more somber and distressed after 1918. It was difficult to achieve but that is what rewriting a novel is all about. Regarding the ending of the novel, it becomes clear to the reader early on that Tristan is carrying a great deal of shame and remorse, that something has taken place for which he cannot (and will not) ever forgive himself. I hope when the moment of revelation comes for the reader, it is a surprise.
7. Throughout the novel, Tristan Sandler is forced to make difficult moral choices. How do you feel about the decisions of your main character? Do you think Tristan achieves a kind of redemption for what he chooses to do?
Tristan is a very damaged soul, a man who can never achieve redemption. He carries so much guilt within himself that it entirely overshadows his life. However, the decisions of a character in a novel are not necessarily the same decisions that the author would make. One must create conflict in order to make a character interesting. Sometimes one must create characters who hold completely different opinions than one's own. I wanted to make Tristan as complex as possible so that there would be moments when the reader would sympathize with him, moments when one would despise him and moments where his suffering would evoke empathy.
8. Have you discovered any great books lately?
I haven't “discovered” these books as such but the books I've enjoyed most over recent months include John Irving's powerful novel of sexual outsiders, In One Person, which is not only narrated by a rare figure in American literature—the bisexual male—but also explores the AIDS crisis that began in the 1980s (and continues today), a subject that also receives scant attention in fiction; Laurent Binet's HHhH, the story of one of the Third Reich's most powerful figures but written in a way that makes the reader question the artifice of the novel form. I was also filled with admiration for Nathan Englander's stories What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. And Dave Shelton's short novel A Boy and a Bear in a Boat is a complete delight, surreal, funny and moving.
9. What projects are you working on next?
I write fiction for both adults and young readers, and my next novel, which will be published in the States in January 2013, is a children's book, The Terrible Thing that Happened to Barnaby Brocket. It's the story of a family who believe that everyone should be the same. They despise difference of any sort, so when their third child, Barnaby, refuses to obey the law of gravity and floats, they are embarrassed by him and send him into exile. It's a novel for young readers about difference, about those who are terrified of difference and those who are willing to embrace it.
