Sonya Hartnett: Love and Loss

For the Australian writer Sonya Hartnett, winning the Astrid Lindgren Award has come as a lifeline. With the royalties from her novels failing to pay the bills and her house in need of renovation, she had just concluded that she would have to take on a day job when the phone rang with news of the £400,000 prize.

Hartnett has always been forthright about her ambivalence towards her writing, which at times has seemed more of a burden than a gift. Her immediate reaction upon being told she had won the award was relief that she would now be in a position to give it up. A few weeks later, though, she changed her mind.

When I sat down to do the second draft of my next book I actually felt much happier than I have felt about writing for a long time. I think it’s because now that the pressure of having to do it is gone, some of the pleasure it used to give me when it was just a hobby will come back, and is already coming back. I feel a lot better. I feel free.

Although Hartnett published her first novel in 1984, when she was just 15, she has had a UK publisher only since 2002. Her first book to be published here, Thursday’s Child, won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. In the latest, The Ghost’s Child, shortlisted for the 2008 Commonwealth Writers Prize, an elderly woman recounts the story of her life to a mysterious boy who appears in her house unannounced.

She tells him of her travels to the four corners of the earth in search of the most beautiful thing in the world and of her love for Feather, the feral young man she meets on the beach.

‘The wild child appears in my books a lot,’ explains Hartnett. ‘I spent many years as a kid wishing I’d been reared by wolves. I just like the idea of being a bit closer to nature than we are. The further away we get from nature the worse our lives become. So if I can’t go back to living that way, at least my characters can live that way. I write about the lost child and the feral child again and again and again.’

A lyrical meditation on love and loss interwoven with elements of Aboriginal and Greek mythology, Hartnett describes it as ‘a hybrid of a book. As I was writing I was just thinking, “This book is weird! I don’t know what this book is about. I don’t know who’s going to read it.” But you can’t think about those questions. It reminds me most of books like What the Birds See. Some of them just have a more intimate feel to them when I’m writing them. They’re books that aren’t eager to get out into the world and make their own way. They’re quite happy just to sit quietly there on the computer.’

In fact, The Ghost’s Child sat on Hartnett’s computer for two years; after writing the first two chapters, the book stalled. ‘The image of the boy and the old woman in the lounge room and him being the uninvited guest came to me quite a few years ago.

'I knew what was going to happen in the end, but I didn’t have the middle. Normally I don’t start writing a book until I know the entire plot. I had hoped it would just come to me, but it didn’t. And then one night I was awake in the deepest darkness of night and all of a sudden the whole thing just came to me. I turned on the light and used one of the old notebooks that I had beside my bed and wrote down the plot. I started the next morning and was finished within maybe four weeks.’

I have learned now to trust my instincts, and if something feels right I will do it. Like the scene when she’s talking with the fish. When that came as part of the idea in the middle of the night, I just thought, “What the hell is that doing in the middle of the book?”, and a lot of people did say to me, “Maybe you need to rewrite the scene; what’s it doing there?” But I said no; it felt like it instinctively needed to be in there. I don’t question the book. If that’s what the books wants, that’s what the book gets. To try to fight what the book wants is to invite grief.

The novel evokes the atmosphere of classic children’s literature of earlier eras, both in tone and temporal setting. ‘I like the idea that the people who would see it as a contemporary book are dead and that it’s a book that would speak most closely to people who are long gone. But mostly I just like it because the early 20th-century was a difficult time for people and I set the books often in times of stress just because things like the Depression make for really good settings.

'When people are under stress, strange things can happen, like a boy can start digging underground, or at least a child could escape from having to go to school. There was a time when you could fall through the cracks. The war is the same. During war, the rules of everyday life are different. So you look for periods in time when you can perhaps get away with a little bit more.

The Ghost’s Child is set in the past for all of those reasons, but particularly because in Australia they changed from natural gas to the gas that doesn’t kill you in something like 1967, so it had to be set before 1967. Because she’s 75-years-old it just pushed it right back.It was a convenient accident that she was old enough at the time, during the wars, to go and look after the soldiers. Had she been too young or too old I would have had to find something else.’

Hartnett’s fine eye for detail has prompted many to describe her books as filmic, but she thinks of them more in musical terms. ‘I won’t start a book until I hear the tune that it has to play. All my books are quite muted, their tune. They’re not very exciting tunes. Once I sit down to write a book I write it very quickly, because I can hear the tune of it. If I write a wrong word I hear it jar immediately, so I don’t waste very much time making mistakes or rewriting because it goes down the way it’s supposed to go down.’

She is proud of the fact that she managed to keep a light touch in a book dealing with heavy themes. ‘The fact that I was able to keep it on a very simplistic level in terms of the writing itself pleased me. 'You can gather that she’s pregnant and has a miscarriage without actually mentioning those words. When I can do things like that, play word tricks, it pleases me. The boy builds himself as a character while he is sitting there, in response to the things she says to him. I like the fact that sometimes people don’t guess who he is.’

Hartnett admits that she had no idea whether readers would warm to the book or not. ‘It’s often impossible to guess what the response to a book when it comes out is going to be,’ she says. ‘People bawl at the end of The Ghost’s Child. That surprised me. It actually is a sad book, though, I think. I think you can feel the fact that I was sad when I wrote it.

It’s a very final thing to have to learn and accept your fate, and when you do suddenly realise that, it’s a weighty thing to learn, because you know that that is going to colour the rest of your life. It’s a kind of loss of hope, in a way. I guess that’s what I like about the book: that it’s a weighty realisation, but I managed to keep it almost painless. To take a heavy theme like that and to write almost a children’s story about it is an achievement that I was proud of being able to do.

‘On the other hand, one must never take too much credit when you’re talking about a book like this, because sometimes the books seem like they’re already existing somewhere in space and they’re just waiting for you to come and to find them, and they just feed into your brain and out through your hand onto the keyboard. It’s quite a strange sensation.

'You feel like going, “I’m sorry it’s taken so long to get here. I was running late!” So if I take the credit for it, it’s not giving credit to the story itself.’