Books: Interview

By Jackie McGlone

FIONA McFARLANE was six-years-old when she wrote her first novel – "or what I called a novel as a very young girl," she laughs. Before that the award-winning Australian author had been turning out numerous short stories, so she feels as if she has been writing all of her life.

"I grew up in a family with a lot of books," says the Sydney-born-and-bred 38-year-old, whose impressive debut novel, The Night Guest (2014), became a critically acclaimed international bestseller and, according to the Los Angeles Review of Books, promised “literary greatness”.

“My mum, Lyn, worked in a bookshop before becoming a librarian so there were always stories being read or told at home,” explains McFarlane. “I always had an awareness that books were written by real people, that they weren't all dead or living in England, because my mum organised author events for children. There is so much pleasure in the stories we first encounter as children. As a child, for me, part of the charm of existence was being read to; I also think that gave me a love of the well-placed adjective.”

Both of her parents – her father Ian, now retired, was a biochemist – read bedtime stories to McFarlane and her older brother and younger sister. "Fairly early on they read the Narnia books to us. I have very strong memories of mum sitting on the end of our beds and reading, and me loving that because we got a chapter a night. It was the highlight of the day.

“There were all sorts of books in our house, not just literary fiction. Because of dad's job there were his reference books and we had a subscription to National Geographic. My parents are Christians and take their faith very seriously though I am not religious. You encounter narrative through faith and I grew up with stories from the Bible and the richness of that language. We were surrounded by printed matter."

She has just produced more printed matter of her own, a terrific collection of short stories, The High Places, a baker's dozen of powerful stories written over the past ten years. “I like to let some stories lie dormant,” she says.

The oldest of the 13 stories in the collection, the unsettling Unnecessary Gifts, is about lost boys in an enormous, empty shopping mall. The newest is Buttony, which centres on an apparently innocent children’s game and a golden boy. “What a lovely story!” many people have remarked, much to McFarlane’s mystification since it’s actually deeply sinister – she has a penchant for the macabre, the magical, the mysterious. “I am very interested in how strange the ordinary can be and, conversely, how ordinary the strange can be," she confesses.

Buttony was published by the New Yorker in February. Another story, Art Appreciation, is hooked to a lottery win in 1960s Sydney and was inspired by a story McFarlane's father told of her grandmother once winning the lottery, albeit not a large amount. It begins, “Henry Taylor had always known he would have money one day...” and was published by the magazine in 2013.

“It is wonderful to see a story you have written in that font and in those columns, an experience beyond anything I could have imagined. Surreal!” she says, speaking from her parents’ Sydney home, although she now lives alone in the city. She returned a while ago after 11 years in England and America, as well as visiting Edinburgh, where she spent a month finishing The Night Guest, which she had begun after abandoning a long historical novel that was collapsing beneath the weight of endless research.

"I was drawn to Edinburgh because we had lived there for a year when I was three-years-old,” she says. “In 2012, I felt the need to go somewhere, to be alone and just get my head down and finish this very quiet novel, which I honestly didn’t think would ever get published because I thought that the subject matter – dementia – would be of no interest to publishers. I loved Edinburgh, just loved bring there, it was a wonderful place to write. I'll be back!" Scotland has a special place in her affections anyway. Her father's family emigrated to Australia from Glasgow five generations ago, although they are not aware of any living relatives.

Since The Night Guest came out, praise has been heaped upon McFarlane. She has won a shelfful of prizes, including Australia's prestigious Voss Literary Prize, as well as being shortlisted for a number of other major awards. “It’s been published in so many languages across about 16 countries. It’s in Japanese! Which still surprises me. I never expected so much noise about such a quiet book.”

In the novel, widowed, 75-year-old Ruth senses a tiger stalking her New South Wales beach house – a bigger, far more terrifying beast is, however, about to invade her life. A beautiful, compassionate tale of ageing, loneliness and the shifting sands of a woman's mind, it began as a short story after McFarlane witnessed the effects of dementia on both of her grandmothers. Although Ruth’s story is not based on either her grandma or her nanna – her mum’s mum – the novel is a fine tribute to them.

And, of course, with the publication of The Night Guest, McFarlane fulfilled that six-year-old's “naive dream” of one day becoming a writer. “It only took me until I was 35, although the plan always was to be published by the time I was 30,” she says ruefully, "I think that my six-year-old self would have been asking, 'What kept you?'"

Academia is what kept her. "A lot of young Australians travel to England to work in pubs in London. I did my own nerdy version of that and came to do a PhD in Renaissance palaeography at Cambridge University. [She read English at Sydney University.] It was so stressful; it entails interpreting Renaissance handwriting. I abandoned it, which caused a bit of fuss, and opted instead for nostalgia in American fiction. I was feeling very nostalgic anyway, suffering intense homesickness because it was the first time I had been out of Sydney on my own. All my emotions were stirring.

"I don't think it's an accident that many of the stories in The High Places also deal with nostalgia." She dips in and out between temps perdu because she listened carefully to her parents and grandparents speaking of the past. Her stories also engage with “Australianess, how it’s formed, how it’s come to be and the American presence and influence on us. I think the stories in this collection are in conversation about time, memory, history, all of which fascinate me.”

Her own history took her from Cambridge to writing residencies in Provincetown, Massachusetts and Exeter, New Hampshire, before studying for a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction at the Michener Centre for Writers at the University of Texas, Austin, where teachers included Peter Carey, Richard Ford and Scottish novelist Margot Livesey. “I loved the academic life but I found it hard to write in English departments,” she confides.

Now working on a new novel and still writing short stories – “I enjoy doing two things at the same time” – she’s intensely private and protective of her work. She does, though, show it to her close friend, acclaimed Australia poet, Emma Jones, “who reads every word first,” and to whom she has dedicated The High Places.

She and Jones, who recently moved to St Andrew University to teach poetry, have been best friends since they met as 11-year-olds. “We grew up together, wanting to be this improbable thing – writers – and now it’s real, this unreliable dream that we shared as children. It’s astonishing,” she marvels.

The High Places, by Fiona McFarlane (Sceptre, £18.99)