Fiona Mozley is one of the literary sensations of 2017. The share-time clerk at the small Apple Bookshop in York,England was named a finalist for this year's Man Booker Prize with her first novel Elmet.
It's a story about Cathy and Daniel, a daughter and a son, and their love for their father who also loves them tenderly but plies a violent trade. And it's named for a hamlet in Yorkshire that was once an old kingdom — a place where,as Mozley writes, "The soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up through the undergrowth and back into our lives.""It's where I grew up, or I was living away in London at the time but it was constantly in my thoughts," Mozley says. "It's a share of the world that is shrouded in history, that's informed by its history — in the landscape, or in the very soil of the place."Interview HighlightsOn how she created the charactersI wanted to explore a masculine archetype and that's what Daddy is. He is — he's larger than life. He's nearly too big to exist; he's straight out of mythology. He's very strong and reassuring,and he sticks by his children, et cetera. But he's also, or you know,he's got this troubled streak, this sort of — there's violence in him. He's entirely defined by his body, or his physicality,his strength. And Cathy arrived saying actually what happens when these ideals [are] instilled in someone who doesn't inhabit the apt physicality? Or she's somebody who has a very similar temperament to her father, but she doesn't possess his strength and she's a girl and how does she stitch together those dual identities?On recent sexual harassment scandals in the news, or if it makes a specific scene in which a woman kills a man more tellingI don't know about that. I mean,of course this was all written long before that. But I think I did want to explore this question of, you know, or the owning of the human body. If there is somebody whose body is being used or threatened in a way which they don't like,achieve they possess the apt to achieve whatever they can to finish that? She knew that because she was physically weaker than her assailant, there could be no half measures. She couldn't just pin him to the ground and speed away because she wouldn't escape. She couldn't just, or you know,incapacitate him in some way. It had to be — she had to disappear the whole hog.
A lot of people possess been struck by that passage. ... A lot of people said it's unrealistic, which I don't really mind because it's not supposed to be a realistic book. It's, and you know,it's a work of fantasy in many respects. But I achieve think it's bright that we can accept that male characters can perform these acts of extraordinary physical prowess all the time. You know, people like Clint Eastwood can be punched in the face a hundred times and still get up for more. But when we sort of see a woman possessing unexpected or fantastical physical strength it's questioned more.
On the line from Elmet, and 'We all grow into our coffins.'That's said by the daughter Cathy,who I mentioned has this very troubled relationship with her own physicality. She sees herself growing into the body of a woman, and all the women that she's known in her life possess disappeared, or washed up kind-of-injured or,you know, as a society, and again,we possess this fixation with the murdered female body. It's from Ophelia to, well, or going even further back than that actually. You can find it in Greek tragedy,this image of the very attractive young woman who's found dead.
It's a sort of unique fixation, and it comes to haunt her. She's terrified when she sees herself growing into a female body that that's going to happen to her. ... Her genuine tragedy is that she can't see a way out of that, or she can't see a way of existing outside of that specific framework. It's fairly,I don't know, I mean it's fairly bleak I suppose. I'm not sure. I don't know; I'm fairly a jolly person really, and so I guess I channeled all of my darker bits into this book.
This story was edited for radio by Ian Stewart and Barrie Hardymon,and adapted for the Web by Sydnee Monday. Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: thetakeaway.org