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The novel opens with an unforgettable scene of a child witnessing her mother’s departure. Was that scene always your starting point?
Yes, that scene was always the starting point. I wrote it eight years ago and, apart from a word here or there, it hasn’t changed at all. It’s always been very clear to me that the moment of abandonment is the catalyst for everything that subsequently happens to Lucie and the person she becomes.
I think the train station setting adds some drama: it’s public and impersonal, but at the same time acute; and there’s something horribly final about doors slamming, whistles blowing, engines thrusting and Ruth being whisked from Lucie’s life.
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Lucie is abandoned at such a young age. What interested you about exploring childhood through her perspective?
Lucie is seven at the start of the novel. It’s young, but it wasn’t unusual for a child of that age to be sent to live with family by expat parents, or to boarding school. Just two years later, hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied children were evacuated from British cities to live with strangers. It was a different time, and a very rich one to explore as a writer.
Seven seems to me the sweet spot: too young to fully grasp the subtleties and complexities of what is happening, but old enough to remember the wounding details that resonate for years. She tries to rationalise her mother’s departure, and the answer is seemingly that Lucie has been selected to be left; sentenced in these unfamiliar terms, manipulative and unscrupulous, and not worthy of being loved and kept. It’s an extreme conclusion, a childish one, but in some ways prescient.
Of course, Lucie doesn’t stay seven, she grows up. I want the reader to share that process, and to get to know her as her perspective is compounded.
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What does home ultimately mean for Lucie?
Home for Lucie is the shadow that she can never step on. She longs for the conventions of permanence, parents, siblings; or for her own family.
However, she has been formed from being left. She’s forged by loss and longing. Searching is in her clay.
I don’t want to pre-empt the readers’ experience and what they take from The Ruins, but I wonder if someone like Lucie ever satisfies her notion of home. Denied as a child, she searches for something with equivalent meaning. The Ruins? Clifford? Books? School and her friendships with Clem and Ursula? Marriage and children? Possibly she finds elements of home in some or all of these places, but her instinct to search for something she believes exists is often stronger than her instinct to be happy with less.
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The story spans three decades and crosses continents. What drew you to this particular period of history?
The Second World War is inexorably disappearing from living memory. Lucie would be ninety-six now, and I’m sure could share some fascinating stories of her almost-century. World War Two wrought extraordinary things from ordinary lives. The conflict wasn’t created by people like Lucie and Ruth; the women and children were collateral in the world of men, which I find a compelling idea.
I hope I’ve achieved an epic quality in the span of the novel. My intention was to write the sort of book that I love to read: one in which the characters are encompassed by the sweep of history, circumstance and coincidence, and they must claim agency and root courage.
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What was the biggest challenge in writing your debut novel?
I’d have a different answer on any given day!
Writing a novel is hard. Finishing a novel is very hard.
A huge challenge was keeping the size of the novel in check as Lucie took on a life of her own. My initial aim was to write a ‘whole-life novel’ taking Lucie from seven into her seventies; along the lines of William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies, or John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany.
When I’d amassed over two hundred thousand words, was flailing in the narrative, and still had a long way to go, I had to take stock of my beloved but unpublishable monster. I drew a line at a hundred and twenty thousand words; which was the maximum that HarperCollins was prepared to consider. It felt brutal, but it also felt perfect as the axe fell at the point where a significant person walks into Lucie’s life pushing a bicycle. The opening departure juxtaposes the closing arrival. It’s an ending and a beginning. And the rest is book two …
