Mixed Messages

Separating the writer from the character 

I am teaching the poetry of John Donne to my upper sixth at the moment (lucky them!) Often students find it hard to understand that we can’t always link a poem to a real life event or experience. ‘So did he have affairs after he was married’, they ask when we read Twicknam Garden – or (typically) ‘he really hates women, doesn’t he? (when we read The Apparition or Woman’s Constancy). I try to explain to them that the views expressed aren’t always Donne’s views – he adopts different personas in order to demonstrate a wide range of characters and scenarios, which is why his poetry is so powerfully varied.

Now that my first novel is out in the world, and my second novel due to be published next month, I worry that readers (or more specifically, friends and family) will think my characters’ views are my own. In The Oceans Between Us I have a tough–talking white supremacist, a love-starved housewife who contemplates an affair, and a wide cast of racists. Anti Semitism is a big part of book two - The Child on Platform One. Hopefully, these characters express their views convincingly (sometimes that took a lot of research!) and come across authentically as a result – but they aren’t my views, or my ideas. I am just trying to inhabit them to make them real. A critic once said it’s impossible to find out what Shakespeare really believed: was he a feminist or a mysoginist, a communist or a capitalist, a republican or a monarchist? The fact that no-one can tell is a tribute to his successful characterisation and skilled use of language. All that matters is that he can explore different viewpoints through different characters.

 I wouldn’t imagine for one moment that people would be trying to work out what I believed 400 years after my death (will Brexit even exist in dictionaries by then?) but I’d like to think I could be remembered as a convincing and authentic writer. That’s what we’re all aiming for.