Suzanne Joinson

A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar, Suzanne Joinson's remarkable debut novel, is published by Bloomsbury this week. She explains how it all started with a pebble from the Gobi desert, how academic research turned into page-turning fiction and how, when the writing dried up, an owl came to her rescue

PJ: What was the seed that started this book: a love of cycling, fascination with women travellers, cultural collisions?

SJ: The actual seed was thinking about a pebble, photograph or camera that originates in the Gobi desert but ends up on a windowsill in South London. Objects in stories are magical – by which I mean they are there for a reason, to enact a particular spell whether it is atmosphere, action, memory, meaning – and most objects have stories. I wanted to get as close as possible to capturing the journey that something as simple as a leather bible or a letter can make across time and geographical distance.

PJ: And, of course, your own travels with the ‘day job’ must have been important?

SJ: Yes. Up until a couple of years ago I travelled heavily for my job in the literature department of the British Council, sometimes three or four different countries a month. During this time I began reading women travel writers, particularly from the 20s and 30s. I was interested in the fact that they could reach places that are unavailable to us today, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and so on. Through this reading I came across a wealth of material about missionaries. I wanted to find a way of connecting my own experience of contemporary travel – the sense of dislocation, loneliness and un-realness when returning home – with the missionary narratives from the 1920s but it took me a long time to work out how.

PJ: Tell us more about the historical section – I believe there was a real Eva who became a model for your own Eva.

SJ: I came across books by Mildred Cable and Francesca French. They were missionaries who travelled across the Gobi desert and China over fifty times across forty years, along with Francesca’s sister, Evangeline. I found them intriguing and read everything about them I could find.

PJ: How much time did you spend on research before the story began to emerge?

SJ: At first, I thought about doing a PhD, focusing on the female missionary experience. I accessed wonderful archives at SOAS and the British Library. As I read diaries, letters and accounts of a wider range of missionaries I noticed similar themes reoccurring: young women applying to missions after a personal crisis such as the death of a parent or loss of a loved one, much talk of yearning for freedom, travel and escape. I was looking at the inter-war period so of course the men were all recently killed in WW1 and yet at the same time the ‘Marriage Plot’ was very much alive. Women were supposed to find husbands but there were none to be had, consequently there was a surge in applications to the missions. I began to wonder: was the main motivation always entirely religious? Could it be more to do with the opportunity to live a radical, different, other sort of life? Sexuality was a common theme, as was the inevitable intensity of relationships between the women posted overseas who lived in what was known as ‘Ladies Houses’, entirely men free zones. It occurred to me that they were leading quite revolutionary lives. The more I read the more I wanted to fill in the gaps and I kept coming back to Evangeline, the sister who didn’t contribute to the books, the missing voice, as it were. I was asking so many questions, my mind coming up with more and more inventions of its own it was clear that fiction would be a more appropriate means for me to investigate these amazing and inspiring narratives. There was a lot of research before the writing began, but similarly I began weaving the story together in my head alongside the research and even right up to the final edits I was cross-referencing and checking things so the two things – writing and research – for me are very integrated.

PJ: Local details are quite specific – food, clothing, landscape – is this as much from your own travels as research?

SJ: Yes, this is from my own travels in China and the Middle East. In Kashgar an Uighur teahouse owner in the middle of the souq was kind enough to show me how the mutton kebabs were made. How they were dipped in huge ovens on metal spikes, how the ancient brick oven in the wall works, and why the men swirl tea in their cup and fling it on the floor before refilling and drinking (to sterilize the cups). Lots of details, endlessly fascinating.

PJ: So, you did go to Kashgar?

SJ: Yes, I received a grant from the Arts Council to go on a research trip. I had travelled a lot in the Middle East and felt I had an understanding of Muslim/Islamic cities in general but Kashgar was so different. It’s a Muslim Uighur city in the North West part of China, so it feels Central Asian, though there is Arabic text everywhere, the language sounds Turkish and the Han Chinese and Uighur styles and cultures clash. My trip unfortunately coincided with riots and a dramatic uprising in Urumqi the day before I landed. Kashgar was less violent but extremely tense. The Chinese authorities shut down all international communications (internet, phones etc) so I was stranded for a while. Eventually I was thrown out of Xinjiang Province as the authorities thought I was a journalist. To be fair, I was wandering around with a notebook bugging the men in cafes to explain their mutton-cooking techniques, so I don’t really blame them. It was pretty scary but it was very, very useful.

PJ: Where did the owl come from?

SJ: Good question. I was stuck, I’d just had a baby, my first son, and he was about four months old. I was exhausted but I forced myself to return to the manuscript and couldn’t remember what on earth I had been writing about pre-childbirth. It was as if what I had previously written was behind a glass wall and I couldn’t find a way to the other side. When I reach these moments I have taught myself a trick. It’s basically ‘free writing,’ side-stepping one’s own consciousness which might be on the attack (critical, collapse of confidence or, in this case, extreme sleep deprivation and anxiety). I open a document on my computer and call it something casual like Draft a or Doc4. I then just start writing anything and allow myself to not be concerned with the quality of the writing. In this case it probably went something like so knackered baby didn’t sleep ... and endless tedium of that sort. Suddenly, I started writing about a hotel in Moscow I once stayed in. In the foyer was an owl and I stood looking at it for a long time. I had never seen an owl up close before. It was tawny and quite small and serious looking. It stared at me, as owls famously do, looking wise. The memory of it blurred with the feeling of being in Moscow on my own. I’d finished a British Council project and stayed on to ‘explore Moscow.’ Various surreal and inexplicable things happened to me such as only happen in Moscow. I was suddenly overwhelmed and exhausted. I went to an English language bookshop, bought four Nabokov novels and stayed in the room and read them all, faintly interspersed with a bit of wafting around red square and trying, unsuccessfully, to avoid surreal and inexplicable things happening to me. I decided that my character would find an owl in the flat that she’d been given keys to. The owl came out of a personal symbol, I suppose, representing the sense of being lost, the wonder at finding a live bird, the mystery of owls – probably mixed up with Nabokov’s luscious prose and the feeling of flâneuring around Moscow. As soon as I put the owl in, the manuscript got going again.

PJ: Towards the end of the book Eva is asked how her book on cycling is coming along, she replies ‘I have these ideas, and memories and images, but it’s a problem. You know, sorting it into a meaningful whole.’ How did you find your structure, sort your material in three strands that became a meaningful whole?

SJ: Yes, I battled with the structure for years. I originally wrote 20,000 words of the historical part of the novel as the dissertation for the MA at Goldsmiths but I wanted to bring in the contemporary strand too. I tried sections as ‘books’, as different points of view. I rejected the notebook book-within-a-book structure then I returned to it then rejected again. I then divided the book into 20,000 word-ish chunks until finally I realised that the whole point of the book was the integration and the connection of the two stories and so I decided to flick backwards and forwards quite rapidly. In the end these sections ended up being roughly 3,500 words long, with some variations. I knew it was a gamble, the reader would be plunged into 1920s China then contemporary London and back which could be a bit dizzying, but it worked. The two narratives responded and reflected each other both narrative-wise and in terms of themes and nuances. Once this structure was in place I could think of the story as a whole in terms of plot and pace. It was a big breakthrough. After that I moved forward quickly and then it was a case of refining the detail.

PJ: What about Tayeb, where did he come from?

SJ: The third strand about Tayeb, the Yemeni character in London, was a surprise. He grew and ballooned unexpectedly and I had to jostle the narratives around to make sure he didn’t unbalance the structure.

PJ: I imagine that, in weaving the three strands into a whole you might have had to lose material, however fascinating. Successful novel writing is all in the revision – can you talk about that final revision process?

SJ: The revision process was endless, there were times when I was sure it would never end. Reaching the end of the draft, of course, is just the beginning. It’s a bit of a cliché to say so, but it’s true. To get it ready to show my agent I had re-written and revised and restructured the entire thing many, many times. She then had a lot to say, mostly about plot and the ‘readability’ of the story. I agreed with some but not all of her comments, so then revised accordingly. Next, once the book was bought, my editor had many comments, nothing hugely structural, thankfully, but a lot of pruning and honing mostly around the denouement and the ending. Then, after all that, my New York editor went through the manuscript. She was more language-focused as most of the plot/character/story work had been thrashed out, particularly regarding American readers and what they might not understand. There was a very interesting discussion about political correctness. Throughout the writing of the book I was aware of the dangers of the colonial/western viewpoint, and in fact these dangers are exactly what the book explores, so every word I used, such as ‘natives’ was very consciously done. The decisions with the American editor around this were fascinating. I had to write a robust essay explaining my choices, use of words, specifics, reasonings and politics, I had to work out where to stand my ground and where she might have a point. Once all that was done it then went through the copyediting and proof rounds.

PJ: As well as working on novel No.2 I gather you’re still work part-time, travelling for the British Council, you have young family, are doing a PhD – how do you juggle it all? How do you protect your writing time and keep up momentum on the new book?

SJ: Well, let’s just say that my poor wee babies are no stranger to a domestic crisis along the lines of THERE ARE NO CLEAN PYJAMAS AND WE’VE ONLY GOT FRANKFURTERS AND BUTTERNUT SQUASH FOR TEA. The protection of writing time is a never-ending battlefield and cause for negotiation. How much I envy those lovely Gents with their nice room and their eight-straight hours and a wife bringing them a cup of tea (I’m thinking here, I suspect, of an older generation, of Ian McEwans and Graham Swifts although I don’t know for sure that their writing life is like this – it’s just a hunch. I’m very aware that male writers of my generation juggle just as much as me). In terms of PhD and part-time job, that involves organisation and being firm about time but the writing and children combination is an absolute killer. The sad fact is that to write the kids must be banished. This brings on guilt and questions about the validity of the writing project. Is it work? Is it the same as going to an office? Why does it feel ok to leave kids in childcare when we go to a meeting but not when we are working on chapter 3? And why, if we have left kids in expensive childcare have we just wasted two hours of precious writing time piddling about on the internet? In the end, the desire to write, the desire to finish and the delicious momentum that does actually occur mid-flow overtakes everything. In truth, I basically have no social life and hardly watch any telly. That way, I just about squeeze it all in.

PJ: Which writers have most influenced you and inspired you to write?

SJ: I love with a love that is pure and true Nabokov and Woolf. Otherwise, lots of writers: Elizabeth Bowen, Stevie Smith, Ann Berg, AS Byatt, Graham Greene, Olivia Manning, JM Coetzee ...

PJ: What are you reading at the moment?

SJ: The complete Moomin works of Tove Jansson (with my four-year-old) and Tove Jansson’s adult fiction, both her short stories in Travelling Light – absolutely divine the way she writes about light, her approach to fiction is sculptural – and her novels. I am trying to learn how she achieves a lightness of touch.

PJ: What would you say to someone embarking on a research-rich first novel?

SJ: Go for it. Even if it’s the most obscure topic on earth; especially if it’s the most obscure topic on earth. Follow threads, keep a great big notebook, keep a digital notebook – I use a blog that is set on a private setting – read your notes at night so you can dream about them and they pop up in your mind first thing in the morning. If you get stuck just start from another page, or another point of view. Don’t get too fixed, too soon, remember that early draft manuscripts are flexible and fluid. It could be that you think you want to write the book from the point of view of the soldier, but in fact the soldier’s dog/sister/imaginary friend might be so much more intriguing. Remain open, psychically, and apologies if this sounds a bit cosmic, but the world throws stories at you constantly: flea markets, letters, photographs... be open as you embark on your research and the strangest things happen. Coincidences and synchronicities. At a car boot in Chichester last month I found a biscuit tin with the following: letters from a solider written in 1917, photographs from his family, death/birth/wedding certificates, a diary, official military memo notepads from the frontline with slanted handwriting. Needless to say I am writing about a soldier in 1917 at the moment. Ghosts from the past are clamouring to tell stories and there are ideas to be found everywhere. Treat your research material, even if it’s a dusty tome in the bowels of the university library, as living material and what you need, the key or the hook or the secret, will come to you if you work hard enough at it.

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

I really loved reading your book, I was interested to read about your fascination with the the 2 missionary ladies Mildred Cable and Francesca French, one of my first story books which I loved was the Story of Topsy, their writing did flash across my mind as I read some of your descriptions of Kashkar. A great read I look forward to your next tale.

Posted by: liz | 29 August 2013 at 11:42 PM

looking forward to reading the book now I've read the interview. My object would be a clump of the plant Lychnis - the white variety.

Posted by: Mary | 12 July 2012 at 07:28 PM