Authors have different ways of dealing with the often repetitive nature of interviews. One can revert to standard lines, answer an entirely different question, or simply make stuff up. I’ve probably done all three. What I’ve never done is drug a journalist, tie to him a bed, feed him through an intravenous tube, and keep him prisoner in my home as I transport his spirit into the novel I’m working on, allowing him free will, and then employing his actions as the basis for my manuscript. But that’s just me; I was raised well.
It is, however, how renowned author Augustus Fate treats Jaime Lancia, who has come to speak to him about his latest novel, only to be told that the book needs more work before suffering the indignities described above.
Fate’s novel-within-a-novel moves from Victorian era Oxford through 1920s central Europe to a London of the future, and sees Jaime, along with Rachel – also comatose in Fate’s upstairs bedroom – trying to break out of the narrative and return to the real world.
If that sounds like a bizarre premise for a novel, it’s because it is, and yet somehow Sam Mills make it work through a combination of dizzying writing, engaging characters, entertaining dialogue and a full commitment to suspension of disbelief.
Author Maggie O’Farrell: I had a teacher at school who took the register, called my name and said to me, ‘Are your family in the IRA?’
Gambling Man by Lionel Barber: A lively account of the rollercoaster life of SoftBank’s billionaire founder
My Animals and Other Animals by Bill Bailey: Tales of the comedian’s feathered, furred and scaled friends
Poem of the Week: Gó gan Ghá/Unnecessary Lie
Some sections work better than others – I struggled a little with the Carpathia chapters – and perhaps it’s a little long to support the weight of the central conceit, but there’s an audacity to The Watermark that allows it to overcome any minor flaws.
Heavily influenced by the Babushka doll novels of David Mitchell, Mills invites her imprisoned characters to search for ways out of Fate’s fictional landscape, even while an editor from Random House is phoning its author begging for the book’s delivery, which cannot happen until they perform in such a way that he has an actual story to tell.
The Watermark is barking mad. By rights, it shouldn’t work. But in a literary world where replication, conventionality and formulaic writing are too often celebrated, it’s something different, at least. The sort of novel readers will either rhapsodise about or be unable to finish. For me, it was the former. Occasionally, a little eccentricity can prove very welcome.
