When Characters Break Free and Authors Become Scribes
I was recently in a book group discussing my novel, Between Two Rivers, set in then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) between the 1950s and the 1970s. One of the characters disappears towards the end of the story. (Spoiler alert.)
The character is Beatrice, Shona maid to English wife and mother Jenny in the suburbs of Salisbury (now Harare). Beatrice is haunted by the ancestral spirit of her grandmother, Mbuya. Her inner turmoil reflects the chaos of a country being engulfed by war, and a household shattered by domestic violence. Finally, Mbuya comes for Beatrice on a hyena ‘to take her to the land of the ancestors’:
She would follow Mbuya through the sky, past those houses where people were sleeping, past those countries she had never heard of, those mountains and rivers and lakes she had never seen, those oceans and snow-covered lands that she could not imagine, those lives that had been and those lives that were still to come. On and on Beatrice would go, through time and space, through love and hate, through ancestral realms populated by the ancient dead, and she would not stop until she found her son, her only son. (p. 364)
‘What happened to Beatrice?’ asked one of the people in the book group. The question perplexed me. ‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘She disappeared.’ I realized afterward that I had instinctively adopted Jenny’s POV. ‘She didn’t really ride away on a hyena,’ another said. Didn’t she? I don’t know. They all started guessing and I was intrigued by their suggestions. I realized that Beatrice had become so real for them that they wanted to know more about her life outside the story. But Beatrice doesn’t exist outside the story, and she has no future beyond her disappearance from the book.
Yet that’s not a satisfactory answer, because characters do escape the covers of the books in which they appear. As a young teenager I was enthralled by the Angelique novels by Anne Serge Golon, and for a while I went through life trying to mimic the mannerisms of a seventeenth century French aristocrat. When I taught university courses on religion and literature to students from different religious and cultural backgrounds, I used Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov to encourage them to imagine themselves deeply into a text by asking which characters they most sympathised or identified with. It brought our theological discussions to life because we were exploring them through people’s stories rather than through scholarly debates and arguments.
There is a mysterious process at the heart of novel-writing, which for me comes when characters break free from authorial control and acquire independent lives. I always start with a sense of the beginning and ending of the novel I want to write, but the way the characters populate the story and sometimes redirect it, is a journey of discovery. There is a point at which I feel I have become their scribe rather than their creator. They sometimes shock me, and I have to steel myself to write what they are revealing to me. That was especially true of the character of the cardinal in my novel The Good Priest, and it was also true of some of the scenes in Between Two Rivers.
There is alchemy at work in this process. I suspect it can be attributed to the habitual practice of close observation that is essential to writers – a sense of always being a little on the outside looking in, detached enough to be a meticulous observer but engaged enough to want to know what people are feeling and thinking, paying minute attention to their gestures, their involuntary tics and twitches, their ways of speaking and moving. This is enigmatically described by Olga Tokarczuk in her novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead:
In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind – that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences; in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality – its inexpressibility. (pp. 51-52)
The three main protagonists in Between Two Rivers – Beatrice, Jenny, and Scottish Jewish doctor Morag – are woven out of threads of memory, encounter and imagination from the many years I spent in colonial and postcolonial Africa (Zambia, Kenya and Zimbabwe), but I don’t understand the catalyst that transformed these disparate elements into unique individuals. Morag’s character and that of her first lover David are shaped by my memories of growing up as the child of Scottish parents in Zambia. Perhaps Morag is Jewish because in childhood we had close links with the Jewish community in Lusaka, and as an adult I’ve developed a keen interest in Judaism through my Jewish friends. As an atheist Jew, Morag views the world through a different lens from that of her second lover – a Catholic priest (another spoiler)!
A particular challenge was the creation of the novel’s African characters. As a white colonial child, I grew up on one side of a racial divide that never invited us to learn about the lives, languages, histories and beliefs of the people we lived among. Much of that experience informed the creation of Jenny, who knows hardly anything about Beatrice’s life. In white households like hers, the servants are often witnessing to the most intimate details of domestic life even as their employers sometimes know next to nothing about them. In Beatrice, I had to feel my way into beliefs about the ancestors which remain significant for many African communities, as well as trying to understand how witchcraft continues to exert a powerful influence. What about the guerrillas – terrorists to their enemies, freedom fighters to their supporters? Could I really penetrate their worlds enough to bring them to life?
Whatever the answer to such questions (and it is for readers to decide), the fact that those people in the book group wanted to know what happened to Beatrice left me feeling strangely consoled. Maybe our fictional characters are like our children. In the words of Kahlil Gibran’s meditation On Children:
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
I’m glad that Beatrice lives on beyond the trauma which drove her into fictional oblivion, even if only in the imaginations of the people in the book group!
—
BETWEEN TWO RIVERS
“Rhodesia is sleep-walking towards its devastating civil war. Three women become entangled in that war and in relationships that harbour the seeds of tragedy. With great sensitivity and insight, Tina Beattie tells a haunting story of love and war that will long linger in the mind.” (Kay Powell, author of Then a Wind Blew).
“Msasa trees provided dappled shade for Jenny’s tea party. April sunshine dribbled through the leaves onto suntanned arms. The frangipanis were in bloom …”
This is the scene that greets Scottish doctor Morag soon after her arrival in Salisbury in the 1950s. Jenny is an English wife and mother trapped in an increasingly violent marriage and secretly in love with another man. Soon, Beatrice will come to work as Jenny’s maid and nanny to her children. Over the next twenty years these three women will form deep bonds of affection, but can their loyalty to one another survive as the façade of white suburban life is shattered by war?
Jenny finds it increasingly difficult to hide her desire for the man she loves, but what will happen if her husband finds out? Why does the ancestral spirit of Beatrice’s grandmother come back to haunt her, and what terrible revelation will she make to drive Beatrice into the abyss of madness and beyond? Why will Morag flee through the night from an event so horrifying that it will traumatise her for the rest of her life, and why must she forever hide the truth of what she has witnessed?
“A compelling and captivating read. The story is a fascinating weave of black and white characters. I loved it despite scenes that deeply disturbed me, having been through those times. Tina Beattie has captured an essence of the time with precise and knowledgeable detail.” (Angus Shaw, Zimbabwean writer and war correspondent)
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