Amy Sackville: reliable narrator

Hotly-tipped author Amy Sackville has just released her second book, Orkney, a creepy tale of marriage and obsession. The last time we caught up with Amy, she had just won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

Since then, she has gone on to be longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. With her star rising, we thought it was high-time we caught up with Amy. We talked about Orkney, second novel syndrome and unreliable narrators.

Hello Amy, where do we find you today and what have you been up to?

I'm in France at the moment, spending the winter in the Alps. I'm a bit ill today so am mostly lying around reading Raymond Chandler.

The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize gave The Still Point a real boost The last time we spoke was just after The Still Point won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2010. What have you been doing since then?

The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize gave The Still Point a real boost, and I've done readings at some fantastic festivals and places in the last couple of years - Hay, Paris, and Budapest were highlights. Apart from that I've been writing Orkney, obviously, and also teaching at the University of Kent in Canterbury, which I am enjoying very much.

Tell us about Orkney. About the reason you wrote it. About its central relationship. And about the Orkney that looms large in it?

I wanted to work on something quite different to The Still Point, in terms of form and structure - to do something that felt more distilled. Thematically there are some similarities - the interest in relationships, and in the way that stories and language shape the way we understand those relationships, being one of them. Here, that has taken on a darker shade, perhaps. The importance of place, and setting, is also something that links both books. I was drawn to Orkney as a place in which history, story, and myth are overlaid, just as the land, sea and sky seem to interpenetrate and change by the hour. I visited Westray early in the writing process and felt that I had absolutely found the right place to set this story - a place of fluid borders and edges.

...obsession is certainly one of the driving elements of the narrative...Orkney seems to be to be about obsession and self-delusion, and about the difference between physical and emotional intimacy. Would that be fair? What, tonally and emotionally, were you trying to achieve with it?

Yes, obsession is certainly one of the driving elements of the narrative, and a kind of willed self-delusion, too. As I've said, like The Still Point it is in part about the desire to know another person, to find a way to fix them by telling their story, but in this case there is a possessiveness about it; it becomes more about ownership, about power, and I wanted there to be an increasing sense of claustrophobia as the story progressed. I am aiming to unsettle.

Richard falls into that great literary tradition of the unreliable narrator. Are there any favourite unreliable narrators you've read?

I wonder if all narrators are 'unreliable'; they can only tell you what they know, or think they know, or want you to know or think worth knowing. But I certainly look to Nabokov as a model, in this regard - Lolita, and the long line of besotted Nabokovian narrators of which Humbert is a part.

We never get much of a sense of the wife. Only of Richard's opinions and mythologising of her. Did you write her with an idea of who she was in your head?

I never thought of her as a rounded character in the realist tradition. I'm interested in the idea of gaps and absences, and she is the greatest of these. From the outset, the idea that interested me was that she is, in effect, a textual creation - not exactly that she doesn't exist, but that by the end of the book, she may as well not have.

Second novel syndrome - did you suffer from it?

Yes. It was a struggle. I knew I wanted to push myself and try to do something different and perhaps difficult, but found it very hard indeed to work it out. It's a short book and most of the words were written within perhaps 18 months, but it took another year or so of reworking and restructuring.

...a greater willingness to murder my darlings.What is the one thing you felt you've improved on from writing The Still Point?

Perhaps a greater willingness to murder my darlings.

What are you working on now?

I'm just starting to research a third book, and doing lots of art history reading, as well as 17^th century drama, amongst other things. I don't want to say much more, because I haven't quite worked out yet what it will be, except that it will centre around a court painter, that it will be a fictionalized version of history, and that I hope it will be long, labyrinthine, populous - all the things that Orkney isn't. A new formal challenge.

What are you currently reading?

Aside from the aforementioned research, and The Big Sleep, which I have turned to today for page-turning comfort, I'm reading Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson. The first paragraph is a beautiful description of Baltic waves coming into shore - I couldn't resist it.