In an article in the Guardian about poet and novelist Helen Dunmore, Sarah Crown points out the power of detail:
"Dunmore's great skill as a novelist is to swoop down from the historian's eyrie from which everything looks ordered, familiar, sanitised by the passage of time, and plunge into the interior of daily lives. In one of The Betrayal's most effective and affecting scenes, we see Anna after a brutal encounter with the secret police, leaning over her sink in despair, but at the same time noting that 'the tap has a crust of dirt around the bottom. You can't see it from above . . . she must clean more thoroughly.' "
This eye for detail extends to the sensual. For instance, she says, "I find the way a character eats their breakfast very telling. These things reveal your appetites: if you're with someone who will shovel down a bowl of soup while reading, without tasting it, that's interesting. Fiction in which people seem unaware of the sensory world which envelops them – after a while, I feel baffled by it; it's too thin. Read Updike, and you know his characters are in their bodies, with all their embarrassments and follies. Dickens, too: you're very aware of the physical essence. And Woolf, although she's so ambivalent about it."
And if you're a later bloomer, you may be encouraged to hear that she didn't publish her first novel until she was 40. She'd written a couple in her 20's but put them away because she knew they weren't good enough. The breakthrough was writing something that wasn't autobiographical--that first published novel was "Zennor in Darkness," about D. H. Lawrence.
Her most recent novel, "Betrayal" is a sequel to "The Siege," both set in Leningrad, around the time of WWII. I haven't read them yet but they've gone onto my Amazon.co.uk wish list.
(Note to bookaholics: a good way to delay your book-buying impulse is to put the book on your Amazon wish list for a while. Eventually you may decide to buy it yourself, or that other books are higher on your priorities, or sometimes friends and family members raid the list and order books for you.)
PS: If you enjoy this blog, please pass along the word to a couple of your creative friends. Thanks!
