Picnic Books

 When you were a kid – you thought that one of the marks of growing up is that you won’t fall anymore: grownups didn’t have scabby knees or scraped arms; grownups were allowed to carry the tea-tray out to the garden, because they could be trusted not to drop things. Grownups didn’t fall anymore – so that is how you’d know you’d made it: absence of falling. At least I thought so.

Later you discover that adults still fall, quite a lot actually – and they grow up a lot later than you think as a child. Really grow up – that is take responsibility for their lives.

The characters of The White Kudu all definitely fall – they fall in love, they fall into holes in the ground (not quite like Alice); they fall in and out of stories – and they certainly fall from grace. They’re a flawed bunch, in other words, but I hope real enough: two English geologists who stumble into the stories and the lives of the people in a fairly remote desert town; the farmers, the mine managers; the town gossip; the over-protected, and at least partially therefore curiously vulnerable, women of such a town. And then the small town prophet who would be ever so surprised to hear himself called that; a child who is an elective mute; a skeleton, who changes everything and an archeologist, who finds buried halfway across the world her own history. They are by no means all likeable, in fact some of them will hopefully make readers’ blood boil; others I hope will be liked, some perhaps even loved. I miss them now I am no longer writing them.       

I have written a great deal about the setting and the ‘themes’ of the novel, but not very much about the characters. They are much harder to write about in this very much more analytical way – for the author at least. I cannot tell you how I created them – they kind of emerged from too much coffee, far too many games of solitaire and too little sleep.  They were a fairly recalcitrant bunch to write about in the first place. Always convinced they knew better what would happen next and always ready to put me straight if I got it wrong. I would have liked a little more respect, really, considering that they were my creations.

However they taught me important things in the process of testing me to the limit. They taught me about stories and characters and how they develop a life of their own and a logic, which one cannot go against. So they told me their stories, as they met and spoke to one another and came to this place, where so much was at stake and encountered the story of the white kudu. Their response to it became in turn my test for them; those who did not cope with it were thrown out – or sent to the back of the class.

Gisela 

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 2:10 am and is filed under The White Kudu by Gisela Hoyle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.