Broken Country explores love in all its forms and at its extremes: first love, heartbreak, betrayal, grief, sacrifice. What inspired you to write the novel?
A moment of horror was the initial spark for Broken Country. One day, during lambing season, a farmer threatened to shoot our son’s puppy. Luckily that didn’t happen but, within minutes of talking about it, a vivid scene came into my head. I could see a farmer and his wife in their field of sheep and a boy running towards them, looking for his dog. I knew the boy reminded them of the son they had recently lost and that there was a strong physical attraction between the boy’s father and the farmer’s wife.
And so, from the outset, I had Beth, a complex character who has many different emotions coursing through her. She is a woman derailed by bereavement, a mother who longs for her son and for more innocent times, and she is fighting the temptation of being with a man who is not her husband. That opening scene in the field gave me the essence of the book – the three protagonists with all their guilt and sexual tension, and the symbolism of the newborn lambs being under attack. I saw it so clearly and it doesn’t normally happen for me like that.
Broken Country is very much rooted in the Dorset landscape. Why did you pick this time and place for the novel?
My family and I live in an old farmhouse surrounded by fields in the heart of farming country. When I was researching the novel, I spent a lot of time with farmers going about their daily lives – lambing, milking cows, harvesting. What struck me each time was how in the midst of all this toil, they would stop to point out moments of beauty – a soaring skylark or a red kite, a newborn calf, a litter of fox cubs. Through their eyes both the beauty and the brutality of the pastoral landscape came alive for me, and I wanted to try to capture that and for the setting to become a character in its own right. I also wanted to show what life can be like in a small rural village where everyone knows – or think they know – all the other villagers’ secrets. That can feel claustrophobic and sinister which made for the perfect backdrop.
I chose to make it a period novel so I could amplify Beth’s struggle, a girl born to parents of modest means, compared to the smooth and gilded path that Gabriel’s life follows. Rural England in the 1950s was a time of stark gender and class inequality and it felt like the right timeframe for the story. Beth and Gabriel are both academically gifted and they share the same aspirations: an Oxford education followed by a writing career. But Beth’s life is easily knocked off course through circumstance and snobbery, whereas Gabriel is cushioned by wealth and entitlement. I drew inspiration from two period novels which depict love across the class divide so brilliantly: The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley and Atonement by Ian McEwan.
Beth’s life as a farmer’s wife is very different to the life she expected to have as a younger woman, and in many ways the novel is about Beth’s journey to deciding who she wants to be. What drew you to having Beth as the narrator?
Broken Country is primarily the story of a woman torn between two very different men and two different lifestyles. Beth faces an impossible choice because each man ignites and connects to a separate part of her character. Gabriel is bookish and romantic just as she is, but Frank, who is far more down to earth and loving, introduces Beth to farm life and the landscape around her and it becomes integral to who she is as a person. The challenge for Beth is to work out who she is and what matters to her most, rather than allying to one man or the other. I wanted the novel to be about a woman who forges a path through prejudice and lack of opportunity and ultimately finds a far more rewarding life for herself than the one she anticipated.
Behind the idyllic village setting, dangerous secrets and rumours abound, and there is more than one unexpected twist towards the end of the book. When you started writing Broken Country, did you know how it was going to end?
I always knew that a man would die and exactly which man that was! But there’s a twist towards the end I initially dismissed as being too hard to pull off. I think I was three years into the writing of Broken Country when I realised it made sense of the whole story and was essential. Cue an utter nightmare trying to get the timeline to work out – I wouldn’t recommend it!
Many readers have said the novel had them ‘in tears’ and that it ‘lingers in the mind after the book is long finished’ – what do you want readers to take away from reading Broken Country?
Connecting with readers and hearing what they took from the novel is something I truly treasure. It was important to me to write a story that was as emotionally true as possible. Beth is a grieving mother whose life begins to implode when she is at her most vulnerable. She has a great deal thrown at her in the course of the novel and makes some bad choices, but I hope readers will understand her behaviour and find her outcome satisfying. For me it’s a hopeful ending but bitter-sweet because of the tragedy that has gone before.
I like to think of Broken Country as a love letter to landscape as well being a novel about love. Spending time with farmers helped me to see my surroundings with fresh eyes, so it would be wonderful if some readers felt that way too.
Your previous two novels, Days You Were Mine and Pictures of Him, are both tautly paced emotional dramas, though set in very different places. Are there certain themes you are drawn to exploring in your writing?
Nostalgia is a theme I explored in Pictures of Him and have returned to with Broken Country. There’s a tendency to think of nostalgia as harmless sentimentality for days gone by, but there can be something menacing and destructive about it too, particularly in times of personal turmoil. Beth is drawn back into Gabriel’s world when she is grieving and although the chemistry between them is as raw and enticing as it was years earlier, there’s a darker force at work. She wants to recapture the girl she was before heartbreak and loss altered her. With both novels I was asking the question: can you ever really go back? I always think there’s a sadness that comes with nostalgia because we are mourning something that has gone forever.
How do you approach the writing process? Do you have any tried-and-tested rituals?
I think I have tried and tested every approach out there including intense pre-planning (which I then ignore!) but what works best for me is to simply start writing and not stop until I have a finished draft. I’m a huge re-drafter, I’m not sure how many different versions of Broken Country there are but I’d hazard a guess at twenty. It’s in the editing that the novel comes alive for me and that’s the bit I love most but I have to get there first. There’s a wonderful Alain de Botton quote I repeat to myself whenever I’m starting a new novel. He says: ‘I have to forgive myself the catastrophe of the first draft.’ It is such great advice. I have learned to be kinder to myself when the writing doesn’t measure up to the initial shiny idea and to just keep on keeping on.
And finally, are you Team Frank or Team Gabriel?
I’m Team Frank but I will admit to being really torn between the two when I was writing Broken Country. In an ideal world Frank with a touch of Gabriel would be perfect!
