Anna Smaill

Edinburgh International Book Festival

8/4/2015

In a stroke of very good fortune, I'm soon going to be in Edinburgh for the International Book Festival, a trip that includes the brilliant promise of hearing Colm Toibin, Rachel Cusk, Benjamin Wood, Hermione Lee, Marina Warner, and many others speak. I'll sadly miss hearing Marilynne Robinson by a few days...

Event details

THE KOBO WRITING LIFE EVENT

SEAN MICHAELS & ANNA SMAILL Sat 22 Aug 7:00pm - 8:00pm Baillie Gifford Corner Theatre £7.00, £5.00

Born in Stirling, Montreal’s Sean Michaels won the Giller Prize (Canada’s Man Booker) for Us Conductors, a novel about electricity that tells the true story of Russian inventor and spy, Lev Termen. New Zealand’s Anna Smaill has penned The Chimes, set in a future London where music has replaced written words and memory is forbidden. Two debut novelists to keep an eye on.

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A Few Things I Remember

12/8/2014

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So far, putting together an author website reminds me most of the bath-interview scene in The Commitments. This seems unavoidable. In any case, here is a shamelessly rambling answer to a question posed by an entirely imaginary interlocutor.

How long have I been obsessed with memory? Well, the predictable paradox there is that I have no idea: I can’t remember. A long time, though, I know that. When I was at primary school one of my teachers read Flowers for Algernon out loud to the class. Or perhaps I got it out of the library and read it myself in my room. Or, maybe I borrowed it from a friend and turned down the page corners and never returned it. Whatever actually happened, I vividly remember the impression the story made. I remember the narrator’s slow slipping backwards into forgetting, and I remember how full of bleak pity that was. I remember the special ache of knowing, as a reader, what the narrator had unwittingly lost. That irony, which I didn’t have a name for then, is probably one of the things I find most seductive in narrative as a writer now.

From teenage years, my diaries are full of embarrassingly earnest exhortations to remember stuff: random details, specific emotions, odd adolescent idealisms. I appear to be terrified of losing my memory, which is an odd preoccupation for a teenage girl. One of the first stories I wrote is about a mute, hospital-bound child who must remember an elusive crucial detail in order to escape. But he wakes up each morning with the memory teasing the edges of his consciousness. (I probably actually used the phrase ‘teasing the edges of his consciousness’.)

So, when the world of The Chimes arrived in my head - a place where memory is jeopardised and people are forced to carry mnemonic devices around at all times, lest they forget who they are - it was not exactly foreign to me. What I had not thought about at all, however, was the huge narrative stumbling block I had thrown down for myself. The first forays into the world were a heady rush. They were intense and encompassing and all about trying to catch Simon’s voice. It was only when I needed to negotiate plot, and backstory, and how the book was actually going to be put together, that I realised what I had gotten myself into. Fiction is built out of memory, just like human identity. Plot and character live off it. How do you write a novel with a first-person narrator who is suffering from some sort of analogue of anterograde amnesia? Each day of the book had to be lived through as if it were his first. How to reveal information? How to use Simon’s impaired awareness to show the reader what was actually happening?

I tried so many solutions. I got lost so many times. I arranged and rearranged Simon's memories. I moved events from real-time, to memory, and back again. I studied the enviously lucid use of amnesia as a plot device in Christopher Nolan’s Memento. In the end there was no single moment of breakthrough. Rather, there were a series of them - moments of epiphany, and moments where I had to learn the world and its rules like a second language: through sheer graft. But by a strange piece of luck, the book, or the idea behind the book, felt wiser than me, as if the components were all there and, given enough patience, could be discovered.

The strange thing is that writing The Chimes was itself a kind of plunge into amnesia. In other words, I was basically recreating my worst fear. My grasp on the plot oddly mirrored Simon’s own. Everything was initially very cloudy and obscure, full of doubt and paranoia. There were objects and events that I kept bumping into and a nagging sense of a correct path that I was meant to follow. But it was this stumble through darkness that made the world of the book so real to me, and the lift into clarity so much brighter.

I suppose in Simon’s enlightenment I get a chance to rewrite the downward spiral of Flower for Algernon’s narrator. And, perhaps, to confront the fatalism of my teenage self. But I still find memory and its weird sleight-of-hand operations, its pleasures and pratfalls, a huge unremitting mystery. At present this is salted with the sleep deprivation that goes along with raising a young child.

I can't help agreeing with Nabokov, in the end. Mnemosyne may be a Titan goddess and all, but she's also proven herself 'a very careless girl.’ I can't exactly say that I trust her.

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Touring

Man Booker 2015 Long List

Edinburgh International Book Festival

The Bad Fairy at the Christening

A Few Things I Remember

Anna Smaill

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