A NOVEL IS A LIVING BEING
A novel, or a book of any sort, only comes alive if it has readers.
Imagine the best written book in history, but no one has and will never read it. Can it truly be the best book ever?
The reason for this ambiguity is that a novel lives for its reader. Its purpose is to entertain, to reveal new truths perhaps; to take the reader into a new world that engages his or her emotions and, book by book, changes and enriches lives. That is the writer’s task.
A novel is not like a set of instructions for a microwave cooker. A novel is a story, bound into the very fabric of the personality, ideas and experiences of its author, and also the lives of the people the writer draws on as inspiration for its characters. For a writer, your life, your memories and experiences, goes into the novel. For the reader, you are transported into the world of the novel; you become part of that world. The novel becomes real, releasing emotion in the reader’s mind. It can bring tears to your eyes. You begin to care about the characters, their fates.
Throughout INVASION and my second novel (in progress) there are many incidents and ideas which my characters think about or experience. Some are not direct ‘copies’ of my own life but, rather, are adaptions of (quite often) small incidents which my brain has seen fit to store away, often from long ago. The most vivid memories endure through the years. And when you write, and are absorbed in the world of the story and its characters, these incidents can ‘pop out’, quite without intent or expectation, as if from the deepest recesses of your memory. Ideas may seem to come from nowhere but, I suspect, they reemerge from a hidden store called ‘life’, and are recycled in one way or another.
Klara, alone by the fjord
To take an example, I once disembarked from close to the front end of a S-Bahn train on the S1 line in Berlin, travelling north. This line travels largely overland, but there is a long underground section which includes several stations. The train was leaving the well-lit platform and, for some reason, I stopped and turned to watch it disappear into a dark tunnel. Seated in the last carriage was a girl/young woman, dark-haired, alone. In my manly imagination, she turned briefly and met my eyes. In fact, she stared ahead, into the empty carriage.The train, by now accelerating hard, quickly disappeared into the tunnel, the lit carriage vanishing instantly in the darkness, the sound fast receding.
That set in my mind the idea of seeing someone, making a momentary connection, and then there was only…nothing, a dark tunnel. I would never see that person again or know anything about him or her, except what my imagination could concoct.
Of course, this is the experience of a city hundreds of times over in a day. But my experience that day in Berlin was different, because the person was alone, close by in a lit carriage, and I followed her with my eyes as the last carriage disappeared, quite suddenly, into the black tunnel, and vanished. Gone forever. Just an empty black tunnel and silence was all that was left. What happened to her? Where did she go? Who did she meet? (Maybe this is Chapter one of Novel3?)
Now, back to Oslo, 1940. INVASION. The story reemerges, in a new way. Thomas has just stopped at a kiosk to buy a newspaper. He watches a tram rattling by and sees a young girl, probably just a child, looking out through her melted peephole in the icy window. He imagines what she thinks:
A thinly filled tram rattled by. A young girl, her features shrouded by the iced window - just her eyes bright and clear - looked out through her peephole melted in the frost. Moments later she was gone - the girl with no name - and the rattle faded, merging into the whistling storm careering through the city. She would mention to her mother the man she had seen, his newspaper shredded in the wind as she watched, his eyes picking her out through her secret spyhole, and she might wonder, when she was older, if their paths would ever cross again and, if they did, how they would ever know they had actually met before, fleetingly, today, the 24th February 1940.