I can’t remember how many times I’ve had an opportunity like this. Sam Taylor came to me with a great idea. We here at the blog would read his three books, The Republic of Trees, The Amnesiac, and the forthcoming The Island at the End of the World, and wrap it all up with an interview. Reading all of an author’s work you really get to see the process rise and fall, especially the growth of a writer. I knew a little about Sam Taylor before I read his books, but reading them one after other, I think I’ve learned a lot. My wife read The Republic of Trees first, and went bananas over it. I sat down and read it immediately.
Jason Rice: First of all, I wanted to find out what it’s like to live in a remote part of France and be a full time father, and spend so much time writing, and most recently receiving great praise for your work. The Amnesiac was hailed by quite a few people here in the States as a real work of genius. Where do you fall on the acceptance/success side of getting published? Do you ever come over here to the States to do readings? You sound a little bit reclusive…is that accurate?
Sam Taylor: I probably am a bit reclusive. In my twenties I was a journalist for The Observer in London, and that was a job where I was generally surrounded by people, constantly reading newspapers and magazines, listening to new music, travelling, talking on the phone, filled with adrenaline… It was a great job in many ways, but I’d really had enough of it by the time I was 30. I’d tried writing a novel while I was still a journalist, but had got nowhere. I just felt like my head was too full of noise. The white noise that James (in The Amnesiac) can hear all the time: what he calls ‘the tinnitus of modernity’. So I quit my job and moved with my family (my kids at the time were aged between 1 and 4) to the middle of nowhere in southern France. It’s very rural here, and our house is quite isolated. The nearest neighbours are a mile away, and we’ve got about four acres of woodland behind the house. It’s also very very quiet – sometimes you can go outside and actually hear what silence sounds like. I love that. Some of my friends have come down from London and been freaked out by the absence of noise and action, but for me it was a huge relief – and that was the key, I think, to me being able to write fiction: that solitude, that peace, that silence.
As for ‘the acceptance/success side of getting published’, it was a big thing to me. Part of that was financial – I’d quit my job and I had no other source of income, so I really needed to make some money out of it – but a bigger part was personal. I remember thinking, when I was still waiting (during the summer heatwave of 2003) for a publisher to make an offer for The Republic of Trees, that my life could divide into two different paths: one was getting published, and the other was not getting published. I knew I would survive and accept whichever path I took, but I also knew I would never feel as happy and fulfilled if I had to walk the second path. It was a huge relief when Faber said they wanted to publish it. I believed in myself and in the book absolutely, but it’s quite exhausting to believe that hard, and it also makes you difficult to be around. I became monomaniacal at that time. If you read the section in The Amnesiac where James is waiting for a phone call from Harrison Lettings, daydreaming positive outcomes, that was based on my experience of trying to get published. The line about hope – ‘It’s like juggling eggs: the hope is the shell, and inside is despair. A single crack and the despair might spill everywhere, stain everything’ – came to me during that long hot summer.
But no, I’ve never done any readings in the States. I’d be open to the idea though. Not that I enjoy readings particularly, but I love certain parts of America. I lived in Raleigh, North Carolina for a year when I was a student; I also worked there, and did a road trip with a couple of friends. Those southwestern states – Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico… wow. They’re so awe-inspiring. So I would love to go back to the States and do readings, meet readers, travel around, all that – if anyone wants to make me an offer! Which returns us to the beginning of my answer: am I a recluse? I am, most of the time, because it’s the best way to write, but I also love breaking out of my bubble and seeing the world.
JR: I know that being a father reflects on your writing a great deal. In The Republic of Trees you take a group of kids and throw them into the woods. I see this pattern emerge again in The Island at the End of the World, but to a much smaller extent, the narrative in that book is very tight. In Republic you essentially blow the lid off of the kids in novels stereotype. They’re very sophisticated, sharp, intellectually handicapped and mad as hell at the world for treating them like kids. Where do these kids come from? They talk like adults, but they’re just kids…essentially forbidden in current literature. Many people would say, “kids don’t talk like that!” At least that’s what I’ve been told.
ST: The characters in The Republic of Trees are adolescents, rather than children. I think there’s a big difference. As an adolescent, you’re essentially an adult who doesn’t know the kind of adult you want to be yet. You’re like a liquid adult – you don’t start to solidify until the age of 18-22. Most adolescents probably aren’t into history and philosophy, but some are – I was – and in the book, it’s really only Louis (and Joy) who know or care anything about the French Revolution etc. The others just go along with it because of Louis’s force of personality. For me that book, however implausible and strange its premise/plot, is psychologically realistic. It didn’t really come from fatherhood, though: my children were still quite young when I wrote it, so the characters were based much more on my own memories of being adolescent. The Island is the first novel I’ve written where the experience of being a father was crucial to the content.
JR: I was shocked at the beauty of Republic, the sheer gravity in which your sentences fly into the air and soar like fireflies around this wonderful story. Michael and Louis are traumatized by their Aunt Celine, and eventually I think that’s why they leave to start a new life in the forest. Along the way there is a wonderful scene with a chicken where heads are removed through a traffic cone. I knew right away you were painting this story with incredibly vivid moments, and that each chapter the intensity would be wrapped tighter. What were you thinking when you wrote this? How did this novel get its start?
ST: It’s always difficult to remember or pin down where novels come from. I have a vague memory of staring through the back window of our kitchen at the woods behind our house, and wondering what it would be like for a child to escape there…but that was in many ways just an echo of something I’d been feeling ever since I was a child. The description of Michael staring at a distant patch of woodland in the first chapter of Republic – and ‘feeling sad and excited at the same time, and a little afraid, though I don’t know why’ – that was based on one of my earliest memories. I always wanted to run away and live in a forest. But I never did – until I wrote that book.
JR: There are moments for little boys that are forever etched in our minds, whether it’s the death of a parent, as it is for Michael and Louis, or the rites of passage that come our way at the most unlikely times. You write so candidly about Michael’s sexual desires, and match them with his coming of age, especially when he’s climbing the trees for the first time, I wonder why you made these parallels? Did this just happen organically?
ST: Parallels? Between treeclimbing and sexual desire? I’m not sure it’s a parallel really, just… Michael is at that halfway age between childhood and adolescence, when his desires are both ‘innocent’ (treeclimbing) and ‘uninnocent’ (sexual desire). Both are real, though, to him, and both are – in truth – innocent. I had real difficulties writing that book to begin with, and I remember it only came to life in my mind when I wrote the chapter called ‘The Bathers’: it was being frank, being honest, about adolescent sexual desire, that stopped the book being just words on paper and turned it into something alive. Truth is good for that.
JR: Isobel is very stereotypical, meaning, she’s full of sexual desire and seems to want to try it out on someone, and she’s learning the power that she holds, her sexual power. Typical of an adolescent, or girls at that age. Things end badly for her in the novel. When you were thinking these characters up, did you see this end? I guess I want to know if you thought it all the way through, or the ending of Republic came to you naturally, and evolved as the characters did. Sitting down to write a novel doesn’t always happen like we think it will, often things change. What you once thought was going to be an ending turns out to be the middle of the story, and you end up writing another 200 pages. The ending you get is nothing like you’ve imagined.
ST: OK, the first draft of Republic was very different, much longer, and more hopeful – but yes, Isobel still died. (PLOT SPOILER ALERT!) But when I started writing the book, no, I didn’t know she was going to die. In fact, I loved her, and I wanted to save her. One of those moments when the book took shape, perhaps three months into it, came when I wrote – on a scrap of paper – the three fateful words: ‘Isobel must die’. During the French Revolution, this was a much-used phrase – ‘X must die for the State.’ Well, my version was similar but not quite the same: ‘Isobel must die for the story.’ The whole thing became much darker, heavier and more meaningful once I made that decision.
JR: Can you talk a little bit about the French Revolution and its weight in this story, and the overriding social structure of the ruling class that Michael seems to have a tight grip on?
ST: I must admit, I look back at Republic now, five years after I finished writing it, and I think: why did I have to drag the French Revolution into it?! But I’d never written a book before, and the process was very un-thought-out. I was reading – for my own interest and pleasure – about that period in French history at the time, and about Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose political handbook Le Contrat Social Robespierre carried about in his jacket pocket, but whose novel La Nouvelle Héloïse was Marie Antoinette’s favourite – and I found that fascinating: that one writer could be beloved of the two most iconic and opposed characters of the entire period. Revolution is also a very adolescent theme – an adolescent desire (I was a socialist revolutionary as a teenager) – and somehow it all seemed to coalesce in my mind. The result is very strange, but it has a kind of irrational logic, I think.
JR: I thought it was really odd to add Joy to the mix more than half way through the story. What were you thinking about? Why did you think this was necessary?
ST: I’m not entirely sure that you’ve understood Republic, Jason. You might want to go back to the chapter ‘The Long Sleep’ and read it again, very carefully. (Sorry – I sound like a patronising schoolteacher there!) Joy is perhaps not all she seems. Taking her on face value, though, nothing would really have happened in the story without her. She is the catalyst for everything that occurs in the second half of the novel.
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