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Michael
Ondaatje's The English Patient is a novel
cherished by readers for its lush, subliminal prose. At the end of
World War II, four characters find themselves in the remains of a
deserted Italian villa. The enigmatic English patient, burned beyond
recognition, speaks through a morphine haze. His young nurse, Hana,
suffers from her own emotional shell shock. Kip, a Sikh soldier in the
British army, dismantles bombs left by the Germans. And Caravaggio, a
thief turned spy for the English, sets out to reveal the English
patient's true identity. While the book's imagery lends itself to film
- a plane crashing, its pilot falling from a desert sky in flames; Kip
hoisting himself up a rope, lighting flare after flare to gaze at a
fresco of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba; Hana playing the piano in a
bombed out room - the narrative in the desert, the time at the villa,
backstories told in flashbacks, the English patient's diary, are the
stuff of literature. Therefore, it is with great anticipation, and some
cynicism, that the novel's readers, all of us enamored, await the film
version.
Willem Dafoe
met Michael Ondaatje on the film's set in Rome during the first few
days of production. It was important to Willem, being one of those
enamored readers, that the film and his being cast as Caravaggio in the
film, had Michael's blessing. Willem said, "I don't pretend to know
him, but we had some wonderful walks in Rome where we would
wander...into a church or a cafe for coffee. They were long walks and
it was great to have Michael on the set." They met this past October in
New York to discuss the novel's transformation to film. They're both,
by the way, very happy with the film, not because it replicates the
novel, but because it has become its own story.
WILLEM DAFOE:
Let's start with The English Patient. Why didn't
you want to do the film script?
MICHAEL
ONDAATJE: I spent six years writing the book, the last two years of
which were spent creating the only structure I thought it could have.
So to turn around and dismantle that structure and put the head where
the tail was... There's no way I could have been objective and known
what should go, what should stay.
WD: Were you
involved in the initial script development?
MO: Quite a
lot. Anthony Minghella, Saul Zaentz and I met every time there was a
draft, and I think we worked well and adventurously together. The
script felt "new," and was not a "shadow" of the book. Because all
three of us were working on something new it was a much more exciting
project. I was amazed, right from the beginning, how Anthony got the
voices, when Barnes meets Katherine and says, "Of course, I know your
mother," that sense of class knowledge of each other was caught
perfectly. In any case, each time there was a new draft, we would meet
up. It was a real education in terms of how a script gets tighter and
tighter. Film is much tougher. I don't think I could write a great
chapter and then give it up because of the book's overall time
limitations, as you sometimes must do with entire scenes in film.
That's like a bad joke for a writer.
WD: I run into
so many people who, when they hear I'm involved with the film, say,
"Oh, I loved the book." And I get this sinking feeling, not out of
disrespect to the movie, but that somehow they're not going to see the
book, not even a version of the book. They'll see something that grew
out of it.
MO: I feel the
film has become something quite distinct, with its own DNA.
WD: It's a
book that people have very personal reactions to. People either sat
down and read from page one to the end, or it was so rich for them that
they could only read three pages at a time. I was the three pages at a
time guy. Are some of the things that struck you about the process of
working on the film still percolating in your head?
MO: I have
made a couple of documentary films, and I edited those films, that was
what I really enjoyed. The precision of 24 frames a second - you can
cut it frame seven, or frame 21. I really enjoyed that kind of
microscopic timing.
WD: How is
that different than working with words? Particularly in poetry.
MO: I do do
that in poetry, and coming out of poetry -- which is what I wrote
before I wrote novels - I try to edit novels the same way, obsessively
-- taking a sentence from over here, and putting it over there, so the
whole thing topples over into new suggestiveness.
WD: Is there
anything you consistently notice about a piece when it's done? How do
you know when to stop working? I read your novels before your poetry,
and when I went to the poetry, it was so precise. When you talk about
this long editing process with the novel, I can't
imagine it.
MO: I do take
very much care. Once I finish a story, which takes around four or five
years, it's all over the place. The order is not necessarily the order
it ends up in. So the editing stage then begins, shaving it down, until
you've got a cleaner line of the story. What more can you remove
without losing the story? I have a tendency to remove more and more in
the process of editing. Often I'll write the first chapter last,
because it sets up the story. The last thing I wrote in Coming
Through Slaughter was "His geography,"
almost like a big landscape shot, with buried clues you can pick up
later.
WD: As you
edit, how much does it shift around? Particularly The
English Patient where you're dealing with so many points of
view. How much do you fall in love with different characters? Or do you
discipline yourself to maintain an overview right away?
MO: I go
wherever it takes me. I try everything. I completely test it, jostle
it, so I'm not locked into the rhetoric, or the order I wrote it in. In
a way this is what Anthony and Walter Murch did in the last stages of
the film, taking a visual from one scene and putting it in another
scene and creating something different. It is collaging and piecing.
WD: Do you
usually start out with a few rough ideas, central images?
MO: I don't
have a rough idea. It's usually an image.
WD: Reading
the book was a revelation. And when we were shooting, I felt it deeply
in my body, my mind, and my soul. When I was in a room shooting with
the other characters, Kip, Hana, the English patient, and my character,
Caravaggio, I thought, what a great story that can possibly contain all
these people. It's a very special world.
MO: There's
something about that story - half of me wants it to be a long,
nine-hour TV thing: thirty years of Carravaggio's history and twenty
years of Hana's history, and they all come together in that moment in
the room. The book began with the plane crashing, and it began with
Caravaggio. In fact, the very first thing I wrote was where he steals
the photograph of himself in the dark room. And Hana was there. Hana,
Caravaggio and the English patient, but I didn't know how they were
linked.
WD: And Hana
comes from any place in particular?
MO: Hana was
in one of my previous novels, In the Skin of a Lion. But
the nurse in The English Patient was there
before I discovered she was Hana. I don't like repeating characters,
but Hana seemed so different, like a new character.
WD: Does the
process of flushing out a fantasy become somewhat personal, a
self-revelatory process? Even if it's not about you, it's about your
taste, what you're attracted to. So you've got this wonderful mask...
MO: Yeah, and
that's a sort of costume. It's what you have as an actor as well, this
ability to reveal yourself through the character much more amazingly
than you could by yourself.
WD:
Absolutely.
MO: I can do
things in fiction that I couldn't do in a poem, for that reason.
WD: I'm
getting to the point where I only really love films from other
cultures, and the classics, much more than any film that comes from my
culture, these speak to me. I think it's because I'm dealing with them
through such a heavy mask. The irony is that the story hits me all the
harder, because it's not about me. I'm like some schoolboy that's drawn
to the exotic, to the other. And I find myself there, almost to the
degree that I project myself as that. I feel it so deeply, it's better
than any movie or place I've ever seen in my life.
MO: It is a
learning process. It's why I'd rather read a book that is completely
unlike something I could do, in the way it's written, than read a book
that's very similar to my habits or style or subject. William Maxwell
-- I couldn't write like him if I had a gun to my head, but I love a
book such as So Long, See You Tomorrow.
WD: This is
embarrassingly academic, but what's the connection - is writing really
an extension of reading? Why did you want to start writing, did that
desire come out of what you were reading?
MO: The reason
I'm a writer is that I read like mad all through my teens. And I'm sure
it was mostly trash that I was reading....
WD: And the
first things you wrote, were you imitating what you'd read?
MO: No, it
kicked in when I went to University, when I started to study poetry. I
had just arrived in Canada, I was living alone, I was starting a new
life. After reading Robert Browning I started writing these dramatic
monologues. And that was it. It wasn't really connected with the
reading I had done, that reading kicked in later on, as some sort of
influence. There's a huge connection, but I don't know how it in fact
literally influences you.
WD: But when
you started writing, did you have the impression that this was how you
were going to live your life?
MO: No, no, it
was a private, secret act. I never really admitted to anyone in the
real world that I was a writer. It took a long time to get over that...
thing. So I wrote, got involved with small literary magazines where you
could fall flat on your face and no one would notice. If I had been Jay
McInerney who had such huge success with his first published work, Bright
Lights, Big City, I would have been completely fucked up.
WD: Look, I'm
amazed at anybody with terrific literary success, that they can write
another good book.
MO: Yeah,
well, I went into a tailspin after The Collected Works of
Billy the Kid. I won an award for it in Canada and I went
into this hole. So I wrote Coming Through Slaughter, which
was a huge fury about fame. It was on a very small scale, but it was
big enough. I mean, the thing is to continue to avoid being
self-conscious. To write and forget that you wrote other books. Because
I don't think it becomes any easier, it becomes more difficult.
WD: And you're
reading the same author -- you.
MO: Yeah,
that's probably why I don't reread my books once they're published.
WD: I never
see a film once I finish it. I see it when it goes to press so I can
talk about it, but after that, there's no real reason to go back. And
particularly for that reason: you don't want to be self-conscious, you
don't want to reflect on it. You've made the gesture and there's no
taking it back. But my memory is so bad about how stuff happens, and in
the end, the only thing that matters publicly is the performance that
people see. Everything else is deep dark secrets that I will only
access if I'm forced to
MO: In that
last editing stage, I am outside myself. I'm looking at it much more
clinically and saying, okay, get out of this scene quicker. There's
that element of technique and dramatics and timing and "lighting" in
those last stages. Punctuation and paragraph. But I don't at any point
say: What is this book really about? It's unsaid. I worry instead that
it's cloudy over here or the brambles need clearing. And there are
links between the books. There's a scene in In the Skin of a
Lion where Ambrose dies, it's only about half a paragraph
long, and perhaps that is really the germ for The English
Patient's plot in one half page. I just recently realized
that each book is a re-writing of what you didn't quite get to in the
previous book.
WD: That's
charming... Yeah, I think so.
MO: I saw a
documentary about a New York artist, and when he had almost finished a
painting he had someone hold up these boards at the edge of the
painting, so he could see where the painting might possibly end, as
opposed to where it did end.
WD: Just
framing what he did differently.
MO: Yes.
Recognizing a new arc. That goes on a lot in the final editing of a
book. And watching how Walter Murch and Anthony Minghella edited the
film, you could see it there too. When you came on to the set as
Caravaggio, for The English Patient, how much of
your character was prepared before you got there?
WD: Very
little. You meet something that isn't you halfway, and you make a third
thing. That's always the process of finding what you're doing. Ideally
you want stuff to work through you, and you believe that you're an
everyman; and framed properly, in good faith, you put yourself in a
place where you can receive the adventure, then the character makes
itself, I think. That's the philosophy. Practically, there's stuff that
you have to do: impressions you may have to make; things you may have
to accentuate or play down about what comes off of you as a separate
persona -- because you've seen pictures of yourself, and you recognize
certain innate talents or deficiencies. But as far as finding the
character, it's all pretty mysterious. And really, it's all pretending.
It sounds a little cute and glib, but you can't prepare entirely for
that. Preparation only gives you the confidence, the authority, to do
the pretending. Because philosophically, you are all things, all things
are in you, right? If you buy into that as an actor, and I do, then
it's about making yourself available to the story, and the story will
use you. It's the way you participate when you read a poem.
MO: When I was
writing The English Patient, what became really
interesting was how the patient evolved. At first, I didn't know if I
liked him at all. I wasn't sure if he was a villain or what. And after
about three years, I discovered a voice for him, and once he had a
voice... I guess, with acting, you were doing things, as I was with
writing, that you were not at all aware were in you. At one point, the
patient talks about an aerodrome, as opposed to an airport, and, bang I
realized I was in another era, writing alongside him. So, a simple word
like that, or a gesture, throws you into the character.
WD: What are
you working on now? Various things, or one thing?
MO: I'm
working on, I guess, a novel. I hedge my bets as long as I can. I'm
working on poems as well. I really wanted to go back to writing poetry
again after finishing The English Patient.
WD: There are
different demands, right? You don't have to live with a poem all the
time, you can keep revisiting it, you can do your work and then you can
go away. But I imagine writing a novel stays with you all the time.
MO: Also, in
the last stages of a novel, the last couple years of writing a novel,
you're writing at a different level, you're shaping it, you're aware of
a scene in the context of this big are. You are not just creating a
moment. And you cannot write lyrics when your mind is like that. So I
had to get away from that huge thematic thing, into something that was
just a moment. Describing an emotion, seven lines long, or ten lines
long. That was important for me, to get back to writing the small
scene. Because that's how my novels get written. Small scenes that
build and merge, and then you recognise the larger context.
WD: And in
that last process, does the story complete itself for you, and then it
becomes an obligation to order it properly so you can have other people
read the story?
MO: There is
this stepping back so you can see it as someone who doesn't know the
story. That's why I give it to others to read, to get that kind of
reaction, which is often quite simple, like, "What happened to this
guy? He was very interesting and he doesn't appear for a hundred pages.
Those are very real problems, as opposed to the "Theme," which I don't
think about.
WD: People
really look for interpretation, particularly if you do personally
charismatic and mysterious work. The English Patient is
mysterious, partly because of how it's structured, and partly because
it's so rich and the narrative is fragmented. Because you jump around,
people want to be reassured that their reaction is all right. I think
so much of, even criticism, involves that impulse. And the extension of
that is wanting to find out who you are, so they can interpret the work
through your personality.
MO: Some
things are too important to share. It's not even about protecting
myself, it would just be spoiling the book.
WD: So you
don't complete it, you leave enough air for that participation from the
reader we were talking about. That mystery is so important. In a
puritanical, Western culture, there's a prejudice that if it's not a
familiar form, or if it can't be reduced to a certain kind of meaning
for everybody, then it's obtuse. That's the prejudice against art.
MO: Yeah.
WD: Now you're
going to be the guy who wrote the book that this movie came from. How's
that feel?
MO: I feel
responsible for what's out there, and yet I'm not responsible for it.
WD: It happens
to actors all the time, of course. You're not an actor, you're that guy
from NYPD Blue... It will be interesting to see
how the movie affects you.
MO: It's a
great guard for me. Now people ask me about the movie. And that's fine.
I say, "Well they're in Italy, they're in Tunisia."
WD: Are you
collecting stuff for a novel?
MO: Yeah,
well...
WD: From The
English Patient, to Coming Through Slaughter, and
In the Skin of a Lion, I have this fantasy
of you taking trips, going places to get a historical perspective. And
then you rip on into the writing.
MO: That is
what I do. I live a life where I go to work in one era, or place, or
historical moment, and at the end of the day return to another. It's
schizophrenic, but it's a constant thing. I'm often uncertain about
what I'm trying to make. The clarity doesn't click in until somewhere
near the end. Let me ask you, the career you have as an actor on stage,
and the career you have as an actor on film -- is there any parallel
between that and say, my thing with poetry and fiction?
WD: One's more
public, one has more cachet; the two are in different places in
society. One's lonelier, one's more celebrated. The biggest difference,
particularly working with The Wooster Croup, is that my
responsibilities are so different than they are in a film. In film, one
is constantly interrupted, it's so fragmented although the activity is
basically the same. And the big thing about theater is of course the
timing. Do you perform your poetry much?
MO: Yeah...
WD: Do you
enjoy that?
MO: Yes, I do.
But Willem, you obviously like this kind of theater. It keeps you very
sane in some ways.
WD: The
theater work predates film for me, and I don't have a lot of control
over film because it is a collaboration with many more people, and
often I do it with strangers. I love doing films, but because of the
theater, for better and for worse, I feel outside the system, which
always raises the question: you're cheating both worlds. You should
make some sort of decision. Often people envy me, being able to go
between the two. It's weirdly lonely that way, because you're a man
without a country. And I admit, I can only do it because the people in
The Wooster Group allow me to leave and come back. It's a good
situation. Things take a natural balance you know... It's the old
story, the grass is greener. When you're working on a film, towards the
end, you long for that different experience of performing in a theater
and vice versa. The English Patient was quite a
huge success... Do you feel the pressure of that, meeting people who
say, "Michael! When's your next one coming? We're starving baby. Loved
your latest. Come on, get on with it brother. What's wrong...?"
MO: Yeah, that
happens a lot.
WD: It's
awful, isn't it? I mean, some truck driver will pull up, who's seen an
action picture two or three years ago, and he'll say, "Hey baby, what's
happened to you, don't you make movies anymore?" And I'm like, yeah, Tom
and Viv.
MO: Well, in
the book trade, there are these guys who finish a book, and they're on
to the next one the next weekend. I am completely exhausted by a book,
and I have to take a major break and change my vocabulary. My role
models are those writers who take 17 years between books. Truly.
WD: But that's
a different kind of activity when people turn out books like that. It's
like an actor I know, he's a good actor, but he works all the
time, and I think his power is diminished by his availability. It
doesn't have the same kind of gravity because you see him so much. That
transforming magic takes a little while. You've got to go away to come
back. That's what I tell myself.
MO: I know who
that actor is.
WD: Do you?
(tape
recorder shut off)
WD: You went
back and forth on the shoot. What were you doing when you were on the
set? Were you just hanging out?
MO: I was very
interested in how it worked, not so much in what the words were saying,
but the blocking and the lighting and how things were put together. The
director is creating the thread between actors, how someone feels, an
emotional state. I haven't necessarily written that. And so, although
film is done in little bits and pieces, what you're really watching is
how the points are joined to make another kind of thematic sense. I
find it fascinating.
WD: How
quickly do you give over to that transformation? As a writer, you've
given your character a face, and you know that face. Then to have an
actor come, and have it radically changed. Can you accept that pretty
quickly? Do you forget the old face?
MO: I don't
have a face for people I write. I'm inside Hana's
head. I don't know what Hana or Caravaggio really look like.
WD: Can't you
not help but see them in the world? Or have a model for them? Or not
really, because you're inventing the world.
MO: During
script development and in rehearsal I got a sense that we were all on
the same wavelength about what qualities there were to the characters.
What was very interesting to me as a writer was what happened in the
screenwriting. For instance, the patient needed a scene where he talked
about the desert. And I said, "I think he has to have an aria, where he
explains the desert to Katherine... It's got to happen right here...."
And Anthony took off, and then wrote a scene that was not point M, but
at point C, and about something completely different but that solved
that problem. He was very good at not hitting everything on the nose,
but he was able to solve it, subtlely.
WD: You work
from a central idea, or image, and it sounds like you do a certain
amount of research. How does research lead to invention and where does
it get in the way of invention?
MO: That's
still a very difficult thing to know. You can always fuck up by having
too much research. You can paint yourself into a corner by finding out
everything about 1926. Or you can hear someone on a bus say something
that happened to somebody, and that's enough to keep you going for 50
pages. It's difficult to know what's right and wrong. The kind of
research I do, as a result, is quite intentionally random.
WD: But do you
go when you feel the need to? Oh, I've got to take a trip to North
Africa, or do you say, Oohhh, I'm going to get a good atlas and look up
the names?
MO: Yes... (laughter)
WD: I always
think of this writer, very popular German guy that wrote novels about
the American West. He never went there. And many a German boy grew up
learning about the American West from him. We wrote these terrifically
detailed stories, and he got all his information, as I understand it,
from other books. (laughter) And just making it
up.
MO: And there
are those great spaghetti Westerns by Sergio Leone. On the first novel,
Coming Through Slaughter, I couldn't afford
to go anywhere. I was stuck in London, Ontario; sending off letters at
that time to archival libraries. Often what happens with research is
that what you really want to find out cannot be found. You can't find
the photograph or the person you want to find. So then you invent the
photographs and the photographer. Often the best stuff comes out of
staring at a brick wall.
WD: In theater
pieces, all your greatest creative things come out of practical
solutions for getting stuff on its feet.
MO: Sometimes
it's not real research, but an invented research. With The
English Patient, I did go to the Royal Geographic Society
but I didn't spend that long there, a couple of afternoons actually.
They weren't very friendly. "What specifically do you want?" they
asked, and I didn't know what I specifically wanted. I went away and
came back and said I want to find out about something or other in the
desert in 1935, and then they let me in. And once I was in, then I
could look around in a more random way. It is a defensive kind of
research, I don't want to know everything about the desert in 1935. I
needed space to invent, choreograph. Similarly, I limited myself to
knowledge of bomb disposal up to about 1941. That was the early period,
where they were literally using hammers and ropes. In this way you're
writing and learning at the same time, and that's the best for me.
You're writing about building the bridge and you're also reading about
how the bridge was built, with how much concrete and wood and mortar.
So it's a simultaneous learning about it and getting it down fast.
WD: Where did
you get the central image of the plane crash, do you even remember?
MO: I just got
the image and it was there. The artist, Joseph Beuys, was in a plane
crash in the far north, not in the desert, but I already had this image
in my head. It was one of those things where I'd heard about Beuys and
his obsession with felt and that worked its way in too. That was
enough. I didn't need to know anymore. The medicine man...
WD: Yes, where
did that come from?
MO: That was
an adaptation of something I'd seen in Cairo. I was there in 1978. You
pick up a gesture or an image from a long time ago. You put yourself in
a position where you come up with those more subliminal references, and
you have to keep writing in order to find those sorts of things.
WD: Were there
ever points in the actual filming, let's say something like the man
with the bottles, that did not jive with what you had in mind?
MO: The art
direction was interesting to witness because while most of it seemed
dead on, it was more dead on than the book. It really bugged me when I
heard from the art department that they had gone to the Royal
Geographic Society and were welcomed with open arms. I said, "Weren't
they difficult?" And they said, "No, they were so nice." What's
interesting is if I'm writing a scene in the patient's room and it's
from Hana's point of view, I see about three feet, as if with a small
light. She's reading a book and she sees the floor. And the patient's
over here and Caravaggio is over there. But I never really get a sense
of the whole room and everything in it. It's almost black and white
spotlights in an odd way. Suddenly I was in that set, and the whole
room, the exact kind of stone floor that would be right for that period
or a fresco that was created...Everything was there. That was a shock
to me.
WD: That's not
decided in your head when you're writing, it remains liquid and
instinctive.
MO: I build
the aspects of the room as I write over a period of years. And then
there's a stage when you're editing when you start erasing stuff. You
have dressed the room completely, but it might be getting in the way of
the story. So how much can you remove of the background so that the
reader is concentrating on Hana's emotional state? I think a lot of
historical novels get too involved with art direction. If it's set in
Germany in 1943 they know the exact kind of cigarettes that were smoked
and the length of the leather jackets. But that is what we were talking
about earlier on, everything is liquid, where any aspect can come into
the story. I don't write with a plan. Most people do write with a plan,
but I tend not to. I tend to...
WD:...feel
your way around.
MO: It's an
emotional thing when you're writing. The problem for me with novels is
when I sense the writer's talking down to me. Like a puppeteer. Too
sure of what is about to happen. I thought Juliette Binoche was
wonderfully instinctive as an actress, she allowed things to come out
of the blue in the middle of a scene. When you were both in the kitchen
and she started weeping in the middle of your speech. It was quite
wonderful, I don't know what it would be like for an actor to work
against that.
WD: It doesn't
matter. It's happening.
MO: I love
those moments - a curtain opens for a second. You get a further glimpse
into a truth.
WD: People
have this notion that in writing or any other art form, you get better,
you improve, that it's cumulative. And it's just not true.
MO: In fact,
it's more difficult to write the eighth book than the first book.
WD: Have you
ever started something and then had to finish it where the spirit
wasn't really quite with you?
MO: No, but
I've stopped books like that. When I wrote In the Skin of a
Lion I began it from the point of view of the millionaire,
it was about what happened to him when he disappeared. I wrote 200
pages of the thing and realized I hated the guy. I was just plodding, I
was forcing myself to write. It was dead. So I stopped and left it for
a couple of years. And went back to the minor characters who were just
starting to emerge and they became the main characters. I think people
want to believe that artists know what they're doing, and that there's
a solution at the end of all that. But when I write a book, I'm sitting
down to discover what the story is, as opposed
to telling the story. I don't have that story yet.
WD: I feel
that so much as an actor. As I get older I feel more and more shamed by
opinion. I believe more and more in stuff happening, and I participate
as things happen. As an actor, it's the fundamental difference between
doing things and showing them. On the other hand, if you've been doing
something long enough you accumulate, you revisit certain things enough
that you get an instinct that almost becomes a technique. But it isn't
necessarily connected to cognitive intent.
MO: In terms
of skill, I'm never sure that I've learned anything. And I don't think
about "style" when I'm writing. Writing is a kind of tunneling, that's
what it feels like.
WD: How did
you come upon Herodotus?
MO: I had
already read some of him. Then there was a reference to him in one of
the explorer's desert journals; one guy who said, "I was responsible
for our library on one of our expeditions. But our library was only one
book, Herodotus" And I thought that was great, because he was an
historian writing about a place where these guys are many hundreds of
years later. The idea of a contemporary history and an ancient history
that links up... These explorers in the 1930s were out of time. I love
the idea of them checking out sand dune formations. I love historical
obsessives. And I kept thinking of writers like Charles Olson and
Robert Creeley in some odd way. Creeley in his toughness, brittleness
and lovely guarded lyricism was a clue for me about the patient,
Almasy. And this wonderful, heroic era of exploration that was then
ignored, while the twentieth century became more mercenary or
mercantile. Also Herodotus' sense of history is great because it's very
much based on rumor. If he heard a story in the desert, he wrote it
down. Anyway, I liked the sense of people reading books within the
novel. That there is a library in the villa. And then the other thing
that came up was the Rebecca spy code. I originally found out about
Almasy through a friend of mine's parents who were in Cairo during the
war. Rommel had sent a spy to Cairo to send information back to the
Germans. And he used a copy of Rebecca by Daphne
du Maurier as the code book. Ken Follet wrote a book about it called The
Key to Rebecca. The spy was finally captured by the
British, and my friend's parents were involved with his capture. So I
was asking them about it. And in a non-fiction book about the episode,
there was this paragraph of how the spy got to Cairo. He was taken
across the desert by Almasy, an explorer. Almasy seemed much more
interesting to me than the spy. Who was this guy? What was he doing
there? So I found out more about him.
WD: Writing
not in contemporary times frees you up a lot.
MO: Yeah, it's
wearing that mask.
WD:
Particularly if it takes you six years to finish a book. (laughter)
A country in Africa may change its name before you
finish. Sorry.
MO: I know, I
know. So that's how I got interested in this man. And it opened up a
whole world of explorers, and a way of seeing the world. What was
useful in the Royal Geographic was not so much the information, as it
was their manner of writing; very low key, not at all
self-aggrandizing, or chest beating, or beautiful sunsets or flies. No
complaints. No praise. It was just, you had to get from here to
there... So many kilometers. There's a waterhole here. That kind of
laconic Robert Creeley voice. But these were all fragments I collected
or wrote down over a five year period. One gets really interested in
map making or bomb disposal, this relationship here, you're constantly
learning and you're not quite sure if it will hold together, if there's
a whole ship.
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