Ghosting Page 17

  My first resolve was to try to write from the inside out. The first novel was written from the outside in, in the sense that it is overly schematic and as a result lacks what might be called narrative truthfulness. It is sacrificed to the ideas it contains—everything from a homily on the categorical imperative to a description of life inside a white ant colony. This is hardly a surprise, for the book was written, if not exactly to order, then certainly with the customer in mind. And the customer in this case was not the reader, but the soi-disant author. Contemplating this new venture I felt curiously depleted, emptied of the will to repeat the exercise. If I was to commit to another novel, I would have to move away from what I saw as the flat, two-dimensional, soulless canvas. It had to be something layered and fully imagined, something more from the heart.

  Then again, whose heart? Can one write from another person's heart? I am not sure it can be done. You can get all kitted out, only there's nowhere to go. Personal experience, which includes the imagination and what feeds it, is essentially the base from which people write. And personal experience is highly specific, each take on the world unique. You cannot write another's experience, only your own. Of course you can try, but it will always be in some sense attenuated. Without a doubt there is something intrinsically contradictory about ghosting a novel. It is of course possible to fake fiction, but it is difficult to see how it can be meaningful or eloquent. You have to write from inside your own skin, otherwise there is too much of a psychological struggle. It's like trying to fake sincerity.

  Writers often say that they know a lot about their book before they begin. An idea has come to them some time before—perhaps it is no more than a faint humming in the head—but it is then stored away for a lengthy gestation period. At this point the writer's internal processes start to work. The idea is fed and nurtured, perhaps jottings are taken or notes of conversations heard on the bus. For a long time, perhaps even a year or two, the writer is responsive to everything that resonates with the idea, receptive to the smallest observable bits of daily life, the tone of someone's voice, the way the light falls on a building. It is a time, so it is said, of heightened sensitivity. This process allows the idea to grow and take on different features. Writers generally agree that this stage cannot be rushed or forced.

  In the ghosting process there is no time to wait for the humming in the head. An idea has to be plucked from the air, and you have to run with it. The ghost is generally preoccupied with getting the job done, as I had been first time round. According to Martin Amis, a writer's life is all anxiety and ambition*, and the two are scarcely distinguishable from one another. I believe the ghost-writer is similarly afflicted, perhaps to an even higher degree because the work is done under greater constraints. The ambition is not publicly realised, because all honours accrue to the credited author, but there is plenty of personal ambition involved in trying to do the job well. Anxiety follows naturally from ambition and becomes part of it.

  Being intent on getting the job done makes you concentrate on the technical problems, but it leaves no room for the spirit of the thing. You report for duty each day and you hope that the target number of words will be written. You consider the architecture of the book, the dramatic structure; the characters, the voice. The trouble is that you don't believe the voice, and you don't quite trust the characters, and you certainly don't suffer with them. This time I wanted to change all that. I wanted the writing to be alive at the centre, not just a technical exercise. I wanted it to be something that sprang from my own energy. I had to write about something that moved me.

  In 1987 I read Ian McEwan's The Child in Time, a chilling piece of fiction that starts with the disappearance of a young child, Kate, while on an ordinary shopping expedition to the supermarket with her father. The assumption is that the child has been snatched, but there are no clues, no leads, no ransom demand. No body is ever found. When I was reading The Child in Time, my own beloved Kate was just seven years old, and this no doubt led me to identify even more closely with the story. The book addresses larger political and social themes, but over time I forgot them. What held me, and continued to hold me, was the personal story of grief and anguish. I was struck by the way in which happy lives can be turned by a single moment in time into the bleakest of landscapes. Ian McEwan's spare luminous prose is perfectly honed to capture the essence of despair and the concomitant disintegration of ordinary lives. It is a consummate execution of sorrow, perhaps the cruellest sorrow of all. It seemed to me that the grief was almost too sharp to be borne. I was tormented by the book, and it went on haunting me for many years.

  In those days I thought a lot about how life could be turned upside down without warning. Lives could be thrown into disarray by a single decision acted upon, a simple choice made, a mad moment. This is not to say that the choice is always wrong, or the decision irrational. Reasons can be found for anything after all. It is rather to say that the choosers or deciders are generally caught up in something that has altered their normal vision, and they forget for a brief time that actions beget consequences. They are fleet-ingly freed by dint of passion or misery or some other driver from the normal shackles of cause and effect. A friend snubbed, a promise broken, a secret told, a lover taken, a family abandoned—any one of these can leave a trail of wreckage, unintended, unimagined in the mind of the prime mover. I believe this is an empirical truth.

  The empirical truth that really worried me, however, indeed possessed and obsessed me for years, was not the terrible things we do to one another, but the random bolt from the blue which nothing can prevent. At a day-to-day level, so I persuaded myself and still do, we may to some extent affect what happens. With the people we love and those we meet, we can choose to make things better or worse, make a point of being kind or not kind; we can even alter the pattern of our existence, or make small adjustments to the way we live. But against the big blasts, the hammer blows, the freak accidents, there's nothing to be done. Once you sign up for this way of thinking it is but a short step to imagining unspeakable things beneath the murk, something nasty lying in wait at the bottom of the pile, ready to pounce. It is also an observable fact that there are no fair shares where suffering is concerned. There is no master plan to allot a precise amount of pain to one person and then move on to another. The sheer prevalence and casual concentration of suffering are proof against such a notion. Alas, it's all utterly, stupefyingly random. Tempting to think otherwise perhaps, but ultimately self-deluding. This baseless anxiety of mine gorged on The Child in Time and reinforced itself. The snatching of a child—how could it be borne? How could one go on? How might one go about surviving a loss ofthat order? At that point, in 1987, during the immediate aftermath of my marriage breakdown, I felt stripped bare by events and had the instincts of a nervous animal protecting its young. It was difficult to dislodge a vague sense of calamities to come. I could drive myself mad with imagined tragedies. They arrived in my mind in no particular sequence, and no effort of will seemed strong enough to keep them at bay. It felt like continuing to throw up long after you believed you'd finished.

  Eight years on, I sat in the cool blue light of the studio on a hillside in the Dordogne, and as I looked beyond the trees and back in time, the scent ofthat fear came wafting back. It had lost its sharpness, but I knew it was still fetid in the memory trenches. I decided to go back there and smell it. I would start Tiger's new novel with the disappearance of a child and see where it led. I opened the laptop on the desk and typed the first paragraph.

  The summer's afternoon when it happened was to be etched, as if by a splinter of glass, in the hearts of all those who were there. The memory was validated by pain and the sharp sounds that broke a perfect Sunday in two. It was like a pencil snapping, and its jagged edges stuck out, waiting to snag anyone who came near.

  I had only the vaguest idea of where these opening sentences might lead. But already I had received a fax from the design manager at the publishers asking for background information so
that the illustrator could get to work on the book cover. It was clear he had been told that the book was finished and that I was in the process of copy-editing it. Where and when is the book set, he asked, and what do the women look like? Did I agree that they should be naked on the jacket? And was it a lesbian relationship? Straight questions, yet I didn't know the answer to any of them. I hadn't the first idea of what the women looked like, nor yet whether they should be naked on the jacket. Replying to him was therefore quite a challenge. As was the blurb for the dust-cover which had to be written before even the first few pages were complete. The world of blurbs is of course renowned for imprecision and exaggerated claims, but the blurb that is written before the book is properly begun is a rare arsy-varsy sort of specimen. It is a neither-fish-nor-fowl piece, relying heavily on generalities. Thus:

  This second novel is substantial and ambitious, subtle and intricate, with a strong moral dimension. The author shows great compassion for his characters, and by examining a critical point in their lives, he illuminates their qualities and frailties. It is a novel of melancholy with gentle comic touches, and although dealing with loss and sorrow, it also shows survival and the triumph of the human spirit.

  It was, you might say, a blanket blurb. Though it was true that I didn't know at that stage what shape the book would take, I already had a feeling that the ending would be optimistic and humane. There was a desire to wander over the territory of loss, but despair would not prevail. This was a good thing, for I could now happily tick off triumph of the human spirit from the blurb list. And all would surely be well, provided I could mix together frailties and qualities and bake them in a moderate oven of compassion. This was only the beginning, and already a mild craziness was taking hold.

  I spent the next few days trying to shape the narrative in my own mind, trying to ground it in something real. Of course it would be an account of something that hadn't happened, at least not to me, but the underlying drift would be that loss is generic, universal. The story would be a means of confronting the beast, looking at fear, and thereby taming it. The initial event, sudden and unforeseen, would trigger an immediate outpouring of grief, and this would be the catalyst for a range of hitherto dormant emotions. It would not be a detective story or a police investigation into the child's disappearance; rather it would be a study in bereavement, the tragic event acting as a means for probing fragile family relationships. I imagined two families, related by blood and marriage, coming to terms with the loss of one of the children. The shock and its aftermath would produce a sort of anarchy in which the normal constraints on family relations would give way. Perhaps this framework would allow for rather unorthodox entanglements—at the back of my mind I had the idea that the emotional chaos following the event would somehow accommodate Tiger's requirement. Beyond these initial thoughts about the book, I knew very little.

  There was a near liturgical observance of the pattern of the days in the Dordogne. Each morning there was a market in one of the neighbouring towns, and we went to them all. On Mondays it took place in Les Eyzies, a town famous for its pre-historic caves, and on Tuesdays it was in the nearby village of Le Bugue, situated on the river Vézère near its confluence with the Dordogne. The market there has been held on a Tuesday by royal decree for nearly seven centuries. On Thursdays it was market day in the bastide town of Domme and on Fridays in Le Buisson. Each Wednesday and Saturday we went to Sarlat, the largest centre in the vicinity. Sarlat is an almost wholly unspoilt medieval and Renaissance town with an abundance of culture, elegance and charm. It has the grandeur and simplicity of the Old Town of Edinburgh whose architecture the French copied and improved upon. The centre is a wonderful maze of narrow streets and wynds and split-levels. In the town square there is a statue of La Boétie, the sixteenth-century anti-royalist, idealist and beloved friend of Montaigne, the Dordogne's most famous literary son. Tiger loved to hear the story of how Montaigne was drawn to La Boétie from their very first meeting and continued to love him as a brother till his untimely death. His spiritual affinity with La Boétie famously defied analysis and when asked to explain his love Montaigne could only answer: “Parce que cétait moi, parce que cétait lui.”—“Because it was me, because it was him.” Tiger's eyes moistened at these words.

  I came to love the French open-air markets, and in particular the market people—those who sell the produce, grow it, bake it, bottle it, cure it. Their passion for what they do is unmistakeable. It is a place of sensual pleasures—the ancient sounds of people trading with one another, greeting each other, the rich aromas of fruit and flowers, garlic and Gauloises—all played out under a gentian blue sky. Everything strokes the senses and warms the spirit. The marketplace is also full of interesting characters—men in berets, hands in pockets, jackets buttoned up, assuming a je pense done je suis attitude. And somehow French women know how to be sexy at any age, even women with baskets of hens or strings of onions. I loved just standing around, taking it all in. But it wasn't ever possible to linger for long. Tiger liked me to keep up, and he became ill-tempered if I didn't. If I strayed even a few yards or stayed in one place too long he would upbraid me under the guise of concern for my safety. “I got so worried,” he would say, clutching his skull as if to stop it exploding with the worry of it all. “Don't wander off like that.” I was never convinced by this. What actually bothered him was the slightest show of independence.

  There was very little flexibility in Tiger's timetable, and virtually no room for spontaneity. Even a stroll in the grounds—“taking the air” he called it—was planned ahead and allotted a time-limit in advance, making it impossible to relax. The days seemed to be divided up according to an externally determined set of rules. They were measured out in quarter hour spans in such a way that the next event was always anticipated and never allowed simply to happen. He kept up a running commentary on how the day would progress—we will do this, then we will do that, and afterwards we will drink some tea, and so on. Nothing was allowed just to happen by itself. Thus when we were eating lunch he would always announce the arrangements for dinner, or when we were at the market in the morning the shopping would be brought to an abrupt halt for no obvious reason, and we would have to sprint to the car as if fleeing from gunfire. The gardienne and I would exchange looks of sisterly sympathy as he clapped his hands and called to us “Allez! Allez!” As soon as we were in the car he would calculate our arrival time back at the house to the nearest two minutes. He consulted his three watches with grievous frequency and not at all in the reserved way of the British, who tend to glance at the time with a discreet flick of the wrist. Tiger's arm movements were exaggerated and unequivocal, like those of a policeman directing the traffic. And he would invariably announce his findings, often in a kind of what-on-earth-happened puzzlement. Thus: “Let me see, what is the time now? OH, MY GOODNESS! It's seven minutes past eleven. I don't believe it!” I never got used to this element of his behaviour, and I never found a good way of coping. What exactly is it you don't believe?—I wanted to scream. That three whole minutes have passed since you were last surprised? He was also obsessed with punctuality—punctuality in his lexicon meaning being early rather than on time. He himself was never ever late, and he regarded lateness in others, or just-on-timeness indeed, as iniquitous.

  What was it about, this unsettledness? Why was he fixated on time-keeping? Why was he afraid of things just taking their own course? Was it an attempt to beat time at its own game, show it who was boss? Once over dinner I tried to get him to talk about it. I told him that during philosophy tutorials at university we used to discuss the different theories of time, which have puzzled philosophers since the fifth century BC. He showed polite interest at first, so I explained that Zeno held that the appearance of temporal change was illusory, while Aristotle took the so-called “dynamic” view of time, arguing that the future lacked the reality of the past or the present. Tiger did not appear to subscribe to the Aristotelian view. “Me, I can't wait for the future,”
he said. “I am not the same like Aristotle. Oh, no! I love the future.”

  And he did. Indeed he managed to project onto the future a reality that was absent in the present or the past, at least for him. He was never completely in the place that other people inhabit, but always halfway elsewhere, with only one foot on the ground, the other dangling fretfully in the air, trying to feel its way towards the next ten minutes. From the outside, it seemed an unenviable, tortured state. There was no time to pause and look, no time to tune into the deeper rhythm of things, no focus to set him firmly in the world or nourish the soul. There was a gap between him and the moment, so that the present was already part of the past and the future hadn't yet begun. It could have been one of Dante's circles of hell.

  On another occasion, just for something to say, I touched on the logical feasibility of time travel. I mentioned the familiar thought experiment where the time-traveller goes back in time in order to murder his grandparents and thus prevent his own birth. At this Tiger became curiously uneasy. He found this sort of discussion sinister and threatening, and he immediately changed the subject. He felt himself on much safer ground planning the next half hour and checking the time obsessively. Inside his restlessness I wanted to believe there was a serenity trying to get free and bring itself into being. One day perhaps he would discover the joy of dawdling, of allowing the day to take its own course. Meanwhile there was an institutional regularity about the way of life in the Dordogne, and it could not be challenged without incurring a significant risk of miff or tiff.

  Writing is hard and uses up a lot of energy. I think it is nearly always hard, though it is possible to forget in between times how hard it is. When a chapter has been worked and reworked into a finished piece, it is easy to lose sight of how it came to be that way and how long it took. Some afternoons I went to the studio and nothing happened at all. I would stare into space or look through the windows, letting my mind drift, hoping an idea would take hold, persuading myself that this is what real writers did. At other times I concentrated on removing tiny insects and bits of dead skin from the spaces in between the keys of the computer keyboard. There are moments of terrible bleakness with the creative process, when you question what you are doing and why you are doing it. Ghosting, which is just a job after all, ought to offer some protection. But for some reason it doesn't.