The Idea of Home (5 page)

I did not speed home that day and call the
Wall Street Journal
to tender my notice, run up to my garret and start writing a novel. I went back to my work covering modern catastrophes. But the story of that ancient time of crisis was on my mind. I would use the conduct of the people I was covering as a template to imagine it: did the villagers of Eyam act like this? Did crisis bring out their best selves, or their worst? Did one of them answer disaster with the kindness of that Kurdish man, the grace of that Eritrean girl? Did
another become as vicious and morally lost as this Baathist torturer, that Somali boy-soldier?

The questions nagged at me until I started hearing voices. Or one voice, at least: the voice suggested in half a line from one of the Eyam minister's few surviving letters, written just after his wife has died of plague. In it, he mentions that his maid has survived and is attending to his needs. That brief mention was all there was of that maid in the historical record; there was nothing more of her to be found, not even a name. Yet her voice was very clear to me. And how she sounded told me who she was. Who she was told me how she would act, and that, in turn, set the plot of the novel in motion.

Something similar has happened in all my novels. Someone rises up out of the grave and begins to talk to me. Until they do, I do not have a book. Often, the voices that speak to me are the voices of the unheard. The maid who was illiterate and who did not get to set down how she felt about caring for that minister, how she grieved for his wife. The enslaved woman on a Virginia plantation, when teaching slaves to read was
against the law. The puritan minister's daughter who
had
been taught to read, because it was good for her to study her Bible, but not to write, for women were not believed to need a tool to communicate outside the boundaries of the family. Which is one reason there are no female diaries from colonial America before 1700, and no good ones until 1750.

So where do you go to hear their voices, to imagine how they might have expressed themselves, what issues might have occupied their minds? Well, sadly, you go to court. You will find her there, in every era. Accused of being a witch, because she was poor and alone, or a scold, which meant she had been overheard criticising a man in public. And if the English assizes or the Massachusetts Bay Colony's religious tribunals took down verbatim transcripts, you will be able to read what she had to say. And you will recognise her — her anger, her sense of injustice, her awareness that she, as a woman, is getting a crook deal. Some critics have complained that my narrators' voices are too modern, too feminist. I urge them to go and read some seventeenth-century court transcripts.

If one definition of home is a destination, then I have reached it at last, as a fiction writer who draws inspiration from the past and nourishes it with experience garnered as a foreign correspondent. I do not think I would be able to write the books if I had not had, as prelude, those years of covering catastrophe. A foreign correspondent enters people's lives at the worst of times and mines them for the most terrible details. You write the story, hoping someone who matters will read it and give a damn. And then you try to forget about it so that you can go and do it all again; some other war, some other person's desperate sadness. You try to clear the cache. But you can't. You can't drag and drop your memories into the void.

So, I try to use the experiences that I have had, in the withered fields of famine-racked Ethiopia or the desolate, shell-shattered market places of Bosnia. I try to make the suffering I witnessed count for something. I believe fiction matters. I know it has power. I know this because the jailers and the despots are always so afraid of it.

In Israel, I interviewed, and later befriended, a fifteen-year-old Palestinian after he stoned my car on the road to Hebron. Not long after, his militancy landed him a five-year sentence in an Israeli jail. Because he had told me he loved English books, I tried to bring him a copy of Hemingway's
The Old Man and the Sea
, thinking the story and the spare language would be accessible to him. The jailers would not allow it. I thought of that boy when Major Michael Mori, the US marine attorney for David Hicks, recounted
how he had been barred from giving Hicks a copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird
. He also noted that in the few letters Hicks was allowed to receive, the word ‘love' had been redacted. These stories enrage me, but they also get me up in the morning.

I am glad the jailers fear the power of fiction, the power of words. It encourages me to try harder, to give them something new to worry about.

The contours of my work life are very different these days from that of the young woman whose bag was always open in the cupboard, ready to receive items from a packing list that included both a chador and a bulletproof vest. These days, my workday begins with a short walk up a dirt track from my house to the main road, where I wait with my younger son for a yellow school bus to come to a halt in a strobe of flashing lights. It is odd that in the United States, a country that so deplores any hint of the nanny state, this most nannyish and levelling institution is ubiquitous and embraced. My son climbs aboard, the stop sign folds back, and I wave. By the time I reach the house, I am already at work. I pause in the kitchen
to brew a fresh cup of coffee. As I wait, I pull a poetry anthology off the shelf and let the book fall open. I read whatever poem my eye falls on and, pump primed, climb the stairs to my study and step back into the past.

In his 1936 classic for children,
A Little History of the World
, the Austrian author Ernst Hans Gombrich describes the business of writing about the past. It is, he says, like lighting a scrap of paper and dropping it into a bottomless well. As it falls and burns, it lights up the sides of the well in the same way that our memories light up the past. The deeper it falls, the less is illuminated. Living memory gives way to archives, archives to cave paintings, cave paintings to fossils, until the light goes out and everything is dark. But, as Gombrich writes, even in that dark silence, we have not yet reached the beginning of the human story. Behind every beginning, no matter how long ago, there is another beginning. Every generation has its Once Upon a Time. Your grandmother, her grandmother, your grandmother's grandmother's grandmother … and already we are back several hundred years. And
every one of these women probably telling stories that started with some version of Once Upon a Time.

I don't know why I am, as a novelist, so attracted to the stories of the past. It might be a case of symbiosis. Because I was an Australian of a particular time and place, I yearned to know the world, to travel and adventure abroad. In my travels, I met a man who never wished to leave his own shore, who would have dwelt contently in the archives that can be found in the Boston–Washington–New York corridor. That man loves history. Because of me, he travels the world. Because of him, I travel the past. Moral, if any: it's fun to sleep with foreigners, but be warned — this can change your life.

And now, as I make my home in literature, in a particular genre of fiction that explores the places in the deep well that the burning paper has left unilluminated, I think of that mathematician, and her search for a more perfect description of the world's swoops and curves. What can I know, after all, that is true about these people who lived and died so long ago; lived and died, as Henry James asserts, with a
consciousness different from ours, a consciousness formed when more than half the things that make our world did not yet exist for them?

But I believe that consciousness isn't shaped by things. You can move the furniture about as much as you like; the emotions of the people in the room will not change. Consciousness is shaped by fear and joy, hatred and tenderness. This is what I know: they loved, as I love. And that is as good a starting point as any.