Loyalty to The Given World: Melissa Harrison, interviewed

May’s Book of the Month is Melissa Harrison’s The Given World (Si apre in una nuova finestra), newly published by Hutchinson Heinemann. In this month’s author interview, Melissa speaks to CBTR’s Tallulah Brennan about imagined rivers, our skewed relationship with the seasons, and the notable omission of farming from the nature writing canon.

Some quick-fire questions to start us off.

Firstly, I’m really interested in how fictional your characters are within the village. Did they emerge purely from imagination? They seem very believable!

Thank you! They did. I find characters easy to create: often I’ll start with a glimpse of clothing, or a gesture, a nickname, or a turn of phrase, and the rest coheres quickly around that starting point. Once they’ve stepped into the book and begun to speak I rarely have to change anything about them. Very occasionally there’ll be a character who I can’t see or hear clearly, and then I have to consciously ‘make them up’, which feels like doing work rather than just encountering them. There were a couple of those in the first draft of this book, but they didn’t make the final cut. 

Was it important to not assign this village to a real place? I’m interested in whether there’s a reason you chose not to make it ‘placeable’ or mappable and therefore recognisable?

Very much so. None of my novels are set in a defined location; I need enough wriggle room to let my imagination work freely without the feeling that someone might write to tell me I’ve ‘got something wrong’. There are a couple of locations in The Given World that were inspired by real places near my home, but given that there’s a steep hill in the Welm Valley, stone houses, and dairy farming, it’s definitely not set in Suffolk. I also really love world-building: coming up with my own names for rivers and places. It’s one of the most satisfying parts of my job.