JONATHAN FALLA
About Jonathan Falla
Jonathan Falla lived in a part of Scotland oddly like Glenfarron, where he inhabited a freezing hayloft while writing a book about tropical Burma. Such incongruities are the stuff of his writing. He is the holder of a Creative Scotland award, and in 2007 was short-listed for the National Story Prize. His previous novels are Poor Mercy and Blue Poppies.
For more about the author see www.jonathanfalla.wordpress.com
An interview with Jonathan Falla
When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?
I come from a medical-academic-post colonial family. In the 1950s my father taught Early English at the University of the West Indies – Beowulf in the Caribbean. He was struck by how readily they appreciated it; Derek Walcott was one of his students (and later re-wrote Homer). My father wondered if perhaps the hard realities of Anglo-Saxon life were more immediate to people whose own lives were often precarious, than for well-cushioned British students.
I began writing professionally in 1981 after a spell as a junior famine-relief hitman for Oxfam in Karamoja, Uganda. I had kept a diary there; re-reading it in the UK I realised that it was almost unrelieved farce. I turned it into a play which was produced at the Bush Theatre in London in 1982 and has had several productions in the UK and USA since. It is the only successful comedy about famine relief I’ve heard of.
I then trained as a tropical diseases nurse. Other spells of work abroad – in Java, Burma, Nepal and Sudan – have provided a store of material, and much of what I write has concerned cultural clashes and cross-fertilisation. I’ve written a script for a Nicaraguan theatre company visiting Edinburgh, a novel about a Scottish radio operator in Tibet, another about aid-workers in Darfur, and a film about childhood and politics in 1940s Trinidad, made by the BBC.
My own degree was firstly in English literature, and then Art History. I can thank my father for a love of Chaucer and Langland; I use Chaucer as a model when teaching creative writing, while the female lead in my Tibetan novel is based on his Criseyde. Other major influences have been Conrad and Hardy, and the Australian novelist Patrick White – rather out-of-fashion just now, but to my mind one of the great masters.
Finally – and especially having spent a year as a Fulbright Fellow at a Los Angeles film school – I must say that film has been a major influence. I made myself quite unpopular when running my school film society by bringing in endless lugubrious b/w Japanese and East European dramas of the 1950s. I adored them.
Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind this work in particular? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?
Glenfarron is in three parts, and the sources are very varied. I lived for a while near Aberfeldy (Perthshire) where my wife trained as a GP. There is, at the head of Loch Tay, a hideous Victorian castle which during World War 2 served as a Polish military hospital. On the trees nearby, Polish names are carved. We heard stories of the relations between Poles and locals, which are the basis of Part One of the book.
The plot of Part Two concerns leprosy and a ‘camera obscura’. As a tropical health worker, I often met with leprosy, even in London. When I later walked the Southern Upland Way across the south of Scotland, I passed through a district where, many centuries ago, lepers had been sent into internal exile out on the moors. This became combined with a childhood memory: the camera obscura at Portmerion (North Wales).
Part Three draws on an African source, an elderly Scot I knew in Uganda who, while working in agricultural development, also collected a remarkable array of local artefacts, with the intention of setting up a museum back in the Scottish Highlands.
Each of these stories concerns cultural incongruities and mis-matches which are, however, fertile – like Beowulf in Jamaica.
My idea in Glenfarron was to show three generations of alien influence in a Highland community, set in a landscape not unlike upland Aberdeenshire (where I once lived in a freezing bothy writing a book about the rebel tribes of tropical Burma). Each succeeding influx adds another layer of personal drama and of cultural diversity, and the results can be tragic, grotesque and also times comic. In Glenfarron, the cast and the locations recur throughout, memories are passed on, but each recipient makes of these something strikingly new. Memory is seen as a haunting, and sometimes we are haunted by memories that are not, strictly, our own.
How do you go about creating your voice on the page?
By listening carefully to what I write. I am convinced that the best way to revise is to read back aloud, and I do this repeatedly. I think one can tell the writers who do something like this, because they write good dialogue: Elizabeth Bowen, for example. You can also tell the writers who don’t revise carefully, because the prose is dull and the dialogue crass.
How and when do you write?
I have a hut in the garden in Fife – a luxurious hut, well insulated and stuffed with books. I shut myself away three days a week.
What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?
A lot of travel and history, and a certain amount of poetry and plays: Chaucer and Shakespeare, Ibsen and Sam Shepherd. Recent highlights have been Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France (a study of 18th & 19th century provincial life), and Shakespeare the Thinker by A.D.Nuttall. I’ve been reading a lot about the French Renaissance, in part towards another novel and in part towards a new CD of 16th century music that I’ve been involved with. My fiction reading is rather quirky – I’ve not read a word of Martin Amis, little Ian McEwan, no Zadie Smith. But I greatly enjoy J.M.Coetzee, Ohran Pamuk, Murray Ball (another Australian), W.G.Sebald, and certain crime writers; I know the old Van der Valk novels of Nicholas Freeling almost by heart. Of modern Scottish work, I much admired Janice Galloway’s Clara. Few contemporary novelists have got as far under the skin of their subject, while at the same time writing such fine and inventive prose.
