British author Scarlett Thomas talks to Stephen Jewell about the dilemmas facing authors and being inspired by the story of a Maori goddess.
In Scarlett Thomas' new book Our Tragic Universe, frustrated novelist Meg Carpenter is torn between her unfinished literary opus and the genre potboilers she writes under a pseudonym. The 37-year-old writer, based in Canterbury, England, has experienced that dilemma herself - her recent best-selling book The End Of Mr Y combined alternate realities and covert agents with metaphysical musings on the nature of reality.
In Our Tragic Universe, she weaves the Cottingley Fairies, a wild beast living on Dartmoor and a knitting pattern for the shape of the universe into an enthralling tale that explores the nature of time and the art of writing.
"Every author faces those kinds of problems but it's more complicated than it first appears because the differences between work-for-hire commercial writing and literary fiction isn't always clear," says Thomas, who teaches creative writing at the University of Kent.
"I often shock my students by telling them that the plot is not where you need to be inventive. No one is ever going to reinvent basic plot, but that's okay. It's how you layer things that count, and what you use them for."
Whatever their literary pretensions, Thomas believes that most novels are built around the same familiar scenarios. "It's either boy meets girl, rags-to-riches, a tragedy or something like that," she says. "But in commercial fiction plot is often all you get or else everything is recycled, not just the plot. That's what Meg is trying to get away from, but it's difficult. And just because a formula exists doesn't make it easy to write. Often the hack stuff is hard because of all the conventional expectations."
Meg is obsessed with "story-less stories" that have more free-flowing structures, better reflecting the ongoing chaos of human existence. "In the novel, I suggest that the traditional story is all about a hero setting off on a journey and ending up in a cave with some treasure and a princess, and a story-less story is a chaotic subversion of that," Thomas explains with a smile.
"But there is a third option because for me - and for Meg in the end - life has a plot, or a narrative, that is neither of these things. Life definitely isn't all about being a hero and attaining your goals and everything making sense, but neither is it random and meaningless. Our own plots are so intricately connected to our own and other people's pasts and presents that working out why we act like we do, or what really happened, can be incredibly complicated."
Just as university researcher Ariel Manto discovers a cursed novel in a secondhand shop in The End Of Mr Y, Meg is intrigued after she is mysteriously sent a popular science text, which claims to unlock the secret of time. "I'm really fascinated by books, particularly when I get to create them," says Thomas. "When I was a kid, I used to hang out at the library hoping to stumble upon the book which had the answers to everything. But in real life, the best books have more questions than answers and in fiction you can create powerful books that, as in The End Of Mr Y, can take you to other dimensions because they have answers that don't exist in real life. Of course, real life books can change your life in very tangible, practical ways. I learnt how to play the guitar and how to knit from books."
The End Of Mr Y was inspired by New Zealand author Samuel Butler's under-rated 1872 utopian satire Erewhon. In Our Tragic Universe, she compares Maui to other mythical tricksters and recalls his fateful encounter with Hine-nui-te-po, the Maori goddess of the Underworld.
"My partner is a New Zealander and he told me their story when we were out walking one day," says Thomas. "At the time I was teaching a lot of narrative theory with lots of stuff about heroes going to innermost caves and so on. I loved this story where the 'cave' seems to be a vagina with teeth and the hero doesn't get his prize because the birds laugh at him. It seemed to resonate with something I'd been trying to express in the novel and so it eventually found its way in."
Thomas is halfway through a MSc in ethnobotany, as part of the research for her next book The Seed Collectors, which will form a thematic trilogy with The End of Mr Y and Our Tragic Universe. "It's all about plants and biology and the basic stuff of life," she says. "It's impossible to consider plants without thinking about the whole system of life in which they, and we, exist. So there will be a lot about environmentalism in there but there will also be some love stories, travel and adventure."
Our Tragic Universe (Text Publishing $35)
