Writing Putney
The inspiration for writing Putney began to take hold when my two daughters were teenagers. It was a time when the news brought apparently endless stories of men charged with child sexual abuse.
Shocking numbers of these accusations dated back decades and especially to the 1970s – the era when I was growing up in London. Yes, in Putney! I saw how much had changed since my youth, and it was striking to recall what men got away with.
I was intrigued by the idea of examining the grey zones of an illicit relationship where a 13-year-old girl believed she was in love with an older man; Lolita given her own desires and above all, her own voice. This was not in any way to justify such a relationship, but an attempt to understand how it might happen.
Putney has three main characters and moves between the present day and the ‘70s. Ralph is now a celebrated composer approaching 70 who has cancer. To help himself through the hospital treatments, he thinks back to his ecstasies with the young Daphne.
He believes he would never have harmed her; it was love, even if it was secret and unconventional. Daphne is now 50 and the single mother of a young daughter. She is an artist with a day job in a travel agency and has settled down after a rackety life marred by drink and drugs.
Even decades later, she thinks back fondly to her youthful ‘love affair’ with Ralph. The third main character is Jane, Daphne’s old school friend, whom she has not seen for many years. As an awkward teenager, Jane was inspired but also jealous of Daphne’s glamorously Bohemian family. It is the adult Jane who condemns Ralph as a child sex abuser and tries to persuade Daphne that he should be reported to the police.
The chapters alternate between the viewpoint of perpetrator, victim and witness. As a passionate girl experiencing first love, Daphne tells her own story, but I also wanted Ralph to tell his. I was unwilling to paint him in the brash, black and white of “baddie.”
He is an appealing young musician when he first becomes friends with Daphne’s parents: Ed, a successful writer; and Ellie, a Greek lawyer turned activist. It is through them that he has access to Daphne and is easily able to start what we now call ‘grooming.’ Ralph brings little secret gifts for Daphne and takes her out for treats. Daphne’s parents both love her, but they are caught up in their own lives, work and love affairs.
They are delighted when Ralph offers to deliver their daughter to relations in Greece for the holidays. He whisks her off on the hippyish Magic Bus (3 days from London to Athens), believing that she now wants the same thing as him and that they will finally sleep together.
Daphne’s maternal family is Greek and I was keen to include this element in Putney. I have lived on and off in Greece since I was an anthropology research student in the late 1980s, my husband is Greek and our two daughters are bi-lingual and bi-cultural. My deep attachment to the place meant it was both a pleasure and something natural for me to weave it into the novel. I used the beauty of Greece as a backdrop for Ralph’s seduction of the 13-year-old Daphne. Later, she has a disastrous marriage to a Greek tycoon, and her mother’s country continues to play an important part in her life in various ways.
The topic of child sexual abuse is horrifying in so many ways. As the mother of young daughters, I was inevitably emotionally engaged and worried by the dangers, but I was also relieved to see how much was changing.
These days, we are all more aware of the risks and there must be few men who now believe they can ‘get away with it’ as many did in the past.
On the other hand, I’m interested in how muddy these waters can be. ‘Love makes no difference’, a social worker told me, when it comes to a man having sex with an underage girl. In legal terms she is unable to give her consent, so whatever she feels or says, it will count as abuse if not rape. Nevertheless, it often takes many years, if not decades for women (and men) to come forward with accusations of ‘historical child sexual abuse.’ This can be because it takes this long for traumas to be processed, but it is also because society has changed. Victims are now taken seriously in a way they definitely were not in the past when the events took place.
As a former anthropologist, I was well aware that different societies view sexuality in amazingly diverse ways and I believe this helped me walk around the subject with a relatively open mind. When I was researching in Greece for my PhD thesis, I used the technique of ‘participant-observation.’ This meant involving myself in the lives of my subjects, but also standing back from an issue and examining it from different angles.
This approach stood me in good stead as a writer of non-fiction as well as fiction. I enjoy this changing of perspective, where I feel myself into the beating heart of a character in my novel and then take a longer view of what they are doing. This tension is what I think holds Putney together, allowing the reader into dark places and then pulling them out into the sunshine again.
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Sofka Zinovieff was born in London, has Russian ancestry and has lived in Greece for many years. She studied social anthropology at Cambridge and has lived in Moscow and Rome, working as a freelance journalist and reviewer for publications including The Telegraph Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, The Financial Times and The Spectator. She is the author of three non-fiction books: Eurydice Street: A Place in Athens; Red Princess: A Revolutionary Life and The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me. Her first work of fiction was The House on Paradise Street and her latest book is Putney, an explosive and thought-provoking novel about the far-reaching repercussions of an illicit relationship between a young girl and a much older man. Sofka is married and has two daughters.
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PUTNEY
In the spirit of Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal and Tom Perrotta’s Mrs. Fletcher, an explosive and thought-provoking novel about the far-reaching repercussions of an illicit relationship between a young girl and a man twenty years her senior.
A rising star in the London arts scene of the early 1970s, gifted composer Ralph Boyd is approached by renowned novelist Edmund Greenslay to score a stage adaptation of his most famous work. Welcomed into Greenslay’s sprawling bohemian house in Putney, an artistic and prosperous district in southwest London, the musical wunderkind is introduced to Edmund’s beautiful activist wife Ellie, his aloof son Theo, and his nine-year old daughter Daphne, who quickly becomes Ralph’s muse.
Ralph showers Daphne with tokens of his affection—clandestine gifts and secret notes. In a home that is exciting but often lonely, Daphne finds Ralph to be a dazzling companion. Their bond remains strong even after Ralph becomes a husband and father, and though Ralph worships Daphne, he does not touch her. But in the summer of 1976, when Ralph accompanies thirteen-year-old Daphne alone to meet her parents in Greece, their relationship intensifies irrevocably. One person knows of their passionate trysts: Daphne’s best friend Jane, whose awe of the intoxicating Greenslay family ensures her silence.
Forty years later Daphne is back in London. After years lost to decadence and drug abuse, she is struggling to create a normal, stable life for herself and her adolescent daughter. When circumstances bring her back in touch with her long-lost friend, Jane, their reunion inevitably turns to Ralph, now a world-famous musician also living in the city. Daphne’s recollections of her childhood and her growing anxiety over her own young daughter eventually lead to an explosive realization that propels her to confront Ralph and their years spent together.
Masterfully told from three diverse viewpoints—victim, perpetrator, and witness—Putney is a subtle and enormously powerful novel about consent, agency, and what we tell ourselves to justify what we do, and what others do to us.
Buy Putney HERE
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing
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