THE LIE THAT TELLS THE TRUTH

It is said that “fiction is the lie that tells the truth.”  It’s one of my favourite quotes, although I believe it was originally applied to visual art, not the art of fiction.

I would say though, that it is not completely true. A lie is a lie, because the person it is told to is not complicit in the deception. It is a lie because the other person thinks it is the truth. Fiction is a lie that the audience is aware is a lie. The audience enters into a pact with the author to be momentarily deceived. The intention with fiction is not to hide to the truth for devious reasons, but merely to entertain the audience.

The writer is like the jester called before the king. Within the social convention of the king’s dinner entertainment the jester is allowed to tell truths and poke fun at the king in a way that would never be accepted outside that clearly defined space.

Humans need things that are not true. I have also heard it said that “humanity cannot bear too much reality.” All humans from all cultures create fiction. It is one thing that binds us together as members of the same species. If the creation of fiction is an ability that exists in all human groups, it is possible that it might have some evolutionarily helpful purpose.

Personally, I think fiction helps alleviate the pressures and stresses of human life. Making up stories, you can open up a trap door in the attic of your psyche and enter into another reality, free from the decisions, pressures, and restrictions of other people. It is the one place where you can have complete control over your world.

Fiction is not completely a lie either. When you see a good actor performing a role, you can tell, that for that moment, at least, the actor is totally one with the character, their believing and feeling what the character does, imbuing the fiction with his or her real essence. The fear and pain expressed in fiction has a real impact on the psyche of both the actor and the audience. In that way the story has a real effect on a person whether it is made-up or naturally occurring.

Part of experiencing fiction is being able to hold two seeming mutually exclusive things in your mind.

In the moment of experience the imaginary world feels real, but when you think about it after, with your nose out of the book you are well aware that it is fictional.  However, regardless of momentary reality or unreality of the experience, the emotions and memories of it you carry with you after exposure are no less real than emotions caused by anything else you experience in life.

Adira Rotstein has studied literature, writing, and film at the University of Toronto and the University of Southern California. Her creative output includes novels, screenplays, films, paintings, comic books, and illustrations. She lives in Toronto.

Look for the novel to hit shelves this June – and you won’t want to miss the book signing with Jill Downie at 1:00 pm on Thursday, June 9, at The Avid Reader Bookstore on Division Street in Cobourg. In the meantime, read on for some insight into the author and her work.

Tell us about your book.

Daggers and Men’s Smiles is a mystery set on the Channel Island of Guernsey just off the French coast. The Channel Islands were the only part of the British Isles occupied during the Second World War, and the murders that Detective Inspector Ed Moretti and his partner, Detective Constable Liz Falla, must investigate have much to do with the long shadows cast by that war, both on Guernsey and in Italy. 

How did you come up with the title?

The title comes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “There’s daggers in men’s smiles.” The murderer always uses some kind of dagger. And it’s fair to say that, in most mysteries, there are human beings who can smile and smile, and be villains!

How did you research your book?

Researching the book was a pleasure – a strange and unlikely thing to say about a mystery that involves murder most foul and a terrible war. But it required revisiting Guernsey, where I lived for about ten years and where I was at school before going to university. The island has changed a great deal since I was growing up there because of the arrival of the offshore money business, which has replaced the tomatoes and the freesias and the greenhouses. But the beauty of the island, with its spectacular coastline, is unchanged, and the relics of the occupation have now become a tourist attraction. In La Valette Underground Museum, set in a huge U-boat refuelling bunker, you can see the stilettos, the whips, and the rubber truncheons used against the slave labour who built not only the bunker but the underground military hospital for the many wounded young Germans expected in the final push at the end of the war. It was never used, and it is difficult to imagine any wounded man doing well in such damp, dreary, and terrible surroundings. 

But the pleasure for me lay in revisiting this magical island where I had been happy in an unsettled childhood, seeing again the people and places I remembered. The ugly facts of the Nazi occupation were there back then but suppressed and submerged, like the museum and the hospital, until many of the generation who had suffered were gone, and their enterprising descendants saw that it was a story that should be told.

Who did you read as a young adult?

Books contain worlds and lives into which one can escape, and so it was for me. As an older teenager and a young woman I read the great story-tellers – the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, and Dickens, who took me into the past to live among a wealth of characters in a multitude of settings and circumstances. I devoured the Canadian Mazo De La Roche – only later would I discover that her novels were more a reflection of England than the Ontario I would soon be living in. And I read every book by every author of that great Golden Age of the classic mystery I could get my hands on – as I write this, in my mind’s eye I can see the distinctive cover design of the Penguin paperbacks of the era, who published many of them. Edmund Crispin, John Dickson Carr (one of his noms de plume), Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, and, of course, Agatha Christie. My personal favourite was Sayers, and her aristocrat-detective, Lord Peter Wimsey – not quite as wonderful as Jane Austen’s Darcy, but running a close second. 

And with them, in my book, the greatest of them all, Georges Simenon.

What are you reading right now?

Right now I am reading The Man in the Wooden Hat, by Jane Gardam, a prequel to Old Filth. I am a huge admirer of her books. I have just finished time-travelling back to first-century B.C. Alexandria in Stacey Schiff’s Cleopatra – what an experience! I am about to start The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund De Waal. And I shall be looking out for the latest P.D James, and the latest C.J. Sansom, and the latest Lindsey Davis, and the latest Louise Penny, and the latest Don Easton, and…

BookCrossing is an online community of booklovers and book-sharers. Members release books into the wild and give other members clues about where to find them — a bit like a booklover’s treasure hunt! Once a member finds a book, he or she visits the site, records the find, and enjoys the book. When done, he or she releases it into a new location and waits for another member to pick it up and take it some place new.

Self Condemned against some stately ivy

This year, we wanted to release Self Condemned, a satirical look at wartime Canada by Wyndham Lewis, set in a fictionalized Toronto at a fictionalized UofT. So, I took a trip to the hallowed, ivy-strewn campus of the University of Toronto (or, to Wyndham Lewis, the University of “Momaco”) and found the perfect release spot for this book.

Will you go on the hunt for it? I can’t wait to see who finds it and where they take it — I’ll let you know once we learn where it goes. For our beloved blog readers, though, I’ll offer one more pictoral hint:

Good luck, blog buddies!

Nightshade was inspired by my first visit to Quebec City in 2004. My wife noticed a sign for a detective agency on the Grand Allée, and I put this together with a scientific conference and an art exhibition that were happening then in the city. My detective, Ottawa-based Sam Montcalm, was suggested by the family history of a relative of my wife’s who worked for C.D. Howe in Ottawa in the 1950s. He and his family later moved to California, with tragic consequences.

Writing Nightshade I found myself attempting to update my hardboiled hero, to place him firmly in some real environments, and to avoid jocularity and parody in favour of a more in-depth look at a very proud man– intelligent and embarrassed by his failures– a man who is a bit of a dinosaur, but also acutely conscious of the present.

I’m already at work on a second Sam Montcalm novel and this one will be partially set in Los Angeles. That seems a good template—part of each Montcalm novel to be set in Ottawa and other parts in world cities with which I’m familiar.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received as a writer?
I started writing before creative writing workshops became ubiquitous (although I founded the fiction workshop at Carleton University and taught it for ten years), so I took my advice where I found it. In England, I heard a wonderful interview with Graham Greene, who confessed to a love of plot and melodrama. And E.M. Forster (somewhat reluctantly) admitted that “oh, dear, yes, the novel tells a story.” I love the up-front story-telling of the mystery novel, which as Simenon and others have shown, needn’t undermine the seriousness and depth of the fiction. My children’s novels all have good stories, and I’ve been a bit disappointed that this seems to be no great virtue in the eyes of some Canadian reviewers. Of course these are often the same reviewers who miss more artful components, such as the mythical resonances of my YA novel, Demon in my View or the retelling of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” in Doom Lake Holiday.  (Kate Jaimet of The Ottawa Citizen, on a panel, was a big exception!)

In the mystery novel, plot has a special necessity: the writer is playing a game with the reader, and it’s very important that the “guessing game” (the “whodunit” part) doesn’t distort the natural flow of the plot.

One of my biggest discoveries in writing novels is that the characters “speak because they want to speak” (as an academic analyst puts it). That means that once you have a character of any dimension in your story the character tells you, the author, what he or she will or won’t do. If you force such a character to fit into a preconceived plot the novel crashes. The writer has to listen to his characters. They’re far more important than the critics or reviewers!

What’s the most memorable response you’ve ever had from a reader?
When I was trying to market Coming of Age in Arabia, a very well-known American literary agent (president of U.S. agents association) called me and told me how good he thought the book was. Unfortunately, he didn’t think he could sell a lot of copies and didn’t take it on. After the book was published by Penumbra Press in Canada in 2004, a very distinguished Stanford fellow and senior professor at the University of the Americas in Puebla, called me from Mexico to congratulate me on the book, which he called one of the best books he’d ever read on a British colony. In a quite different but equally important realm, two young people thrilled me with their enthusiasm—a high school girl who approached me rather shyly at a reading and told me: “I have to tell you that I loved Mercury Man.” And a 12-year old reader in Indiana who wrote ( just a few months ago) a wonderfully intelligent and upbeat on-line review of Doom Lake Holiday. Nothing trumps the enthusiasm of youth! And it’s very inspiring to writers—to me at least!

What did you read as a young adult?
I read historical novels by writers like Dumas, Joseph Altsheler, and Kenneth Roberts, and in my teens I discovered the Russian novelists, including fairly obscure ones like Ivan Bunin, and the Scandinavians, including Johannes V. Jensen, Knut Hamsun, and other Nobel Prizewinners. I also read a lot of quality American literature, from Poe and Hawthorne to Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Hemingway and Faulkner. (Radio drama was also a huge influence)

What is your next project?
I am just finishing The Boy from Left Field, a novel about a group of Toronto kids who find Babe Ruth’s lost 1914 baseball, and I am well underway on the second Sam Montcalm novel, which carries Sam to Los Angeles in search an unusual woman caught in the centre of a bizarre international political and emotional tangle.

Tom Henighan’s numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry include The Maclean’s Companion to Canadian Arts and Culture, The Well of Time, and the YA novel Viking Quest. He lives in Ottawa, and teaches at Carleton University.

Tell us about your book.
Locksmith tells the story of 12-year-old Lewis Castorman who can pick any lock, no matter how complicated it might be. His talent comes to the attention of the chemist and industrialist Ernst K. Grumpel, whose mixtures can affect incredible transformations and who wields tremendous wealth and power. It turns out Grumpel desperately needs a locksmith, one who can open a most unusual lock, and when Lewis refuses to help him, threatens to kill Lewis’ father whom he is holding hostager (Lewis’ mother died one year earlier while working on a mysterious project). This task requires Lewis to travel to northern Alberta’s Yellow Swamp, the scene of a mysterious and horrifying environmental disaster one year back, just at the time of his mother’s death. Lewis is accompanied by his best friend Alfonse, together with Alfonse’s sister Adelaide, two frogs (who have been transformed by Grumpel’s chemicals) and a very odd creature whom they meet within the swamp itself. After a number of hair-raising adventures, Lewis and his companions eventually solve the mystery of Yellow Swamp, only to discover they must save the world from Grumpel’s scheming ambitions.

How did you come up with the idea for this work?
The initial ideas occurred to me in the late 1990s. First, I had been toying with a story about magic and talking animals, but Harry Potter appeared on the scene and the use of magic no longer seemed so original. At around this time I watched a documentary on the human genome and announced at one point to my son that chemistry and magic seem to have a lot in common (to neophytes like myself). I was struck with this observation and revisited my old ideas, only chemistry would be the operative element instead of magic. Second, my family and I had rented a house at this time. Besides the modern lock on its front door, there was an old-fashioned one that we were not supposed to fiddle with. One of us did fiddle with it, the result being we were locked outside (on a bitterly cold night in January). Not wanting to call the landlord, I set about picking this lock and actually managed to work the lock open. This experience led to the second element in Locksmith.

How did you come up with the title?
It was suggested to me by an experienced reader of children’s novels. The original title was the much more cumbersome Adventures at Yellow Swamp.

Describe your ideal writing environment.
It depends on my mood. Sometimes I love to write in a busy café – I know all the cafes in my part of town. Then there are times when I like to close the door to the ‘office’ in my house and bang away at the computer. Overall, because I have three children and spend a good part of my day teaching high school (history), I have learned to work with noise and bustle around me.

What was the hardest part of writing your book?
The plot is a complicated one and I had to piece it together rather painstakingly – I made a number of false starts in the process. Locksmith involves several animal characters and I wanted to avoid ones that were too cutesy-pie and saccharine. And then there was the writing itself. It always amazes me how difficult the process of stringing interesting, colourful sentences and paragraphs can be. Still, the fact writing can be maddeningly difficult is the very aspect that makes it so appealing.

What inspired you to write your first book?
I discovered I wanted to be a writer when I was cycling by myself in Greece one summer. At first I started keeping a journal, then the entries became more and more fictional in tone, and finally I realized I liked the process of stringing wild ideas together and decided to make a life-long habit of it. As far as novels are concerned, I am long-winded by nature (as you can probably tell from this blog) and therefore book-length pieces are more suitable to my frame of mind than are short stories or poems.

In your own work, which character are you most attached to, and why?
I published an adult novel, Dead Man’s Float, two years ago. Its central character, Nathan Gelder, is still closest to me because I invested so much of myself in him – not that I’m anything like the character. I also made the poor guy miserable and, strange to say, this makes me feel he is in some sense a part of my flesh.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received as a writer?
There are two pieces of advice I’ve received. First, a writer must be consistently writing or thinking about writing, no matter how many distractions s/he is faced with on a daily basis. To be sure, we have families to raise and jobs to attend to – and we cannot fail others because of our writing obsessions – but some slice of the day should be devoted to our writing. Second, one is writing even as s/he thinks about a story or novel. I used to think I was writing only when I was seated before a piece of paper or a computer screen. It took me a long time to realize that the best strategy to follow when the words/ideas refuse to come is to stand away from the desk and take a walk or involve myself in something else, to provide myself with ‘distance’ from the problem.

Who did you read as a young adult?
Until grade four I read comic books – I preferred Marvel to DC. Then my teacher (Ms. Daniels) read the myth of Echo and Narcissus to the class and I was permanently hooked on Greek mythology (to such a degree I wound up writing a doctorate on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey). On our household’s shelves was a huge collection of classic children’s books – Little Men, Little Women, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and the like – which I read from the first volume to the last. We also had a collection of books on world history for children, and the Time Life series on ancient history. For a long time these were my favourite books as well.

And it is. Not only am I revisiting an old manuscript (working title: Up Where We Go), but I am revisiting the person I was 25 years ago. The experience is not unlike looking at an old photo album, or rummaging through a chest of toys you had as a child. The writing is youthful and lyrical and, admittedly, derivative (of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck). And the characters — naive and idealistic compared to the grizzled and world-weary characters I use today — are refreshing, even though I know that life will beat them down, even during the progress of this story.

But I shouldn’t project too far into the book. I haven’t reread it in all these years, and although I have a rough idea of how the plot unfolds, I am constantly being surprised by what happens next. I have no recollection of writing certain scenes; odd, because sometimes I’ll remember precisely the next six or eight words that complete a sentence I haven’t seen in a quarter of a century.

I’ve also noticed that I use “free indirect style” (a species of third person narration in which the narrator possesses some, but not too much, of the attitude of the character over whose shoulder he is looking). I was just reading about this technique several weeks ago in James Wood’s edifying How Fiction Works, and didn’t think I’d ever heard of it before. Well, in fact, I hadn’t. I just used it in ignorance back when I was beginning to write, before I settled down with more conventional forms of narration.

I’ve just completed Chapter 1. I’ve changed a few things here and there, but I haven’t tampered with the spirit of the story. That would be a mistake. So far, I’m having fun. And I’m very excited to see how it ends.

In any case I haven’t read it since. Nor did I ever submit it again. But a few months ago, I told my girlfriend, Karen, about it, and she asked if she could read it. When she was finished, she said, “This is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever written,” which was a very nice thing to say, but a very depressing thing to hear, because she’s read everything I’ve written since.

I know what she means though. She likes its youthful lyricism, its unjadedness. She likes the fact that it’s a story about a family. She likes the fact that it’s not a murder mystery, that it’s non-genre.

So my next project is before me: to revisit Country Music (alternative title: Up Where We Go) and decide whether I think it’s as good as she does. If I think it’s salvageable (like an old shipwreck still rocking on the ocean floor), I will commit a year to rewriting it. I hope to begin reading it this week. I am looking forward to experiencing again the scenes I worked so hard on a quarter century ago, and I am looking forward to a judicious application of those skills that I have developed in the process of writing six subsequent novels — one of which I never submitted for publication, four of which have been published, and one of which is currently awaiting my editor’s attention — to what may seem to me a callow manuscript.

But part of me hopes that Karen is right. Part of me hopes that it is the most beautiful thing I’ve written.

Next Installment: An Update on Country Music

When I’m not working on a book — as is the case right now — I still have to keep my tools sharp.

READING – One way to keep my tools sharp is by reading; I read the New Yorker Magazine religiously and recently picked up James Wood’s How Fiction Works, Drew Gilpin Faust’s The Republic of Suffering, and John Updike’s The Centaur and In the Beauty of the Lilies.

WRITING – Another method is to write other things — diary entries, a log, letters, or, as I did for a number of years, book reviews. Although I don’t do it anymore, I used to write reviews for Books in Canada and the Kingston Whig-Standard Magazine. The advantage of writing reviews is that it forces you not only to analyze another writer’s work, but to articulate that analysis. Writing about writing can be very instructive.

EDITING – A third way is to edit other people’s writing: at the moment, I am reading my son’s novel in manuscript; he hopes, as all writers should, that an objective eye will help him improve his book. A long-time friend of mine, Roderick Jamer, who was for many years a staff writer with TV Guide, has asked me to take a look at his murder mystery-in-progress; and I am also participating in the evolution of a film script by another friend, Peter Blendell; the script involves a Stanley Cup victory by the Toronto Maple Leafs (some of you will suggest that this project be categorized as fantasy), and Peter hopes that I will be able to help with the scenes that deal with hockey itself. (I have a long history in the game, first as a player — my career peaked when I was 13; it’s been all down hill since then — and as a fan — the Leafs are what I have instead of religion, or more correctly, they are my religion; sitting down to watch a game is, for me, what going to church is for other people. And although I may bleed blue, at least I can say that the only violence associated with my religion is restricted to the arena.)

TEACHING – Although not all writers have the opportunity to teach, those who do know that teaching another writer’s work is an edifying experience. I taught Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises at least thirty times over my 25-year career as a high school English teacher. I know the book like the back of my hand — its strengths, its flaws — and may even have become more familiar with it than Hemingway himself, who wrote it in nine weeks. Hemingway said that studying a still life by Cezanne taught him as much about how to write as anything he read, and, similarly, I have learned as much about how to write from teaching The Sun Also Rises as I have from anything else.

BLOGS – Writing this blog also helps me keep my tools sharp, because I can write about whatever interests me, and I can do it whenever I feel the urge — every writer’s dream. Now if I could only make it pay …

Next Installment – Salvaging a Novel I Wrote in 1983

But I did, and a couple of  years later, I began my second novel, Men in Groups, which was about teachers and teaching. When it was finished, however, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t like it and never submitted it.

Recently I reread both manuscripts and have decided to see if I can’t resurrect them. As soon as I’ve completed one more revision of my Campbell Young mystery,  Black Tupelo — which should happen within the next week or two — I’m going to start with the teacher novel.

The prospect of retyping these manuscripts (I only have hard copies of them, nothing on disc or floppy or memory stick, let alone hard drive) was daunting, so I was mightily relieved when the proprietor of the local printshop agreed to try to scan them onto disc for me. I gave him the 500 pages of Men in Groups, and a week later he gave me –  for the very reasonable price of $85 — a disc with the novel on it in both Microsoft Word and Word Perfect. There are some glitches (the scanner read “home” as “horne”) but they will just make the process of rewriting the novel more challenging.

Because the novel is set in 1983, one of my first decisions will be whether to keep that setting and, if so, how to make the novel into a period piece. I’ve never written a period piece, but the idea of the research involved appeals to me. I could, I suppose, move the setting to the present day, but I haven’t been in a high school classroom in almost ten years and have no idea what teaching is like today. However, I do know what it was like back in the good old days, when I could not only choose what literature I wanted to teach (The Sun Also Rises, The Sound and the Fury, the poetry of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, for example) but the students actually read it.

Next installment: Finishing Black Tupelo

“What Mestern does best is paint evocative pictures of the lovely rural area in the rolling hills between Fergus and Collingwood, and Shelburne to the east.

The book is worth reading for this alone, especially if you are familiar with the area.”

Alberta History on David Elliott’s Adventures in the West: Henry Halpin, Fur Trader and Indian Agent:

“Books like this, dealing with the personal side of the fur trade and Indian Affairs do not come by very often. This one is certainly worth having.”

Joseph Howse of The Chronicle Herald on one of our more recent Voyageur Classic titles, Benjamin Drew’s The Refugee:

“Through its abundance of firsthand testimony, The Refugee provides a long and heart-wrenching glimpse into a chapter of both U.S. and Canadian history.

The eloquent narratives reveal the courage and ingenuity of men and women who first succeeded in escaping the physical and mental torments of slavery, and then built livelihoods from scratch in a different frontier land…

Regardless of the choice of edition, The Refugee is an emotionally powerful and factually detailed nonfiction classic — essential reading for anyone who wants to hear and understand the voices of slavery survivors, and early black settlers in Canada.”