Tom Watson, the former deputy leader of the Labour party, has been having a busy lockdown. Signed up to write a political thriller called The House, he and his co-author Imogen Robertson have been rapidly rejigging their novel to reflect a post-COVID-19 world.
Their near-future setting now includes a national inquiry “about what’s going on in the background,” where characters — if they meet socially — “choose not to drink out of glasses and they wipe the bottle before they drink,” and undergo temperature checks when entering public buildings, “which everyone is used to by then,” says Watson, who is finding life away from politics as a newly minted thriller author “a relief.”
Watson and Robertson have had to decide: will there be a vaccine, in their vision of the future?
Photo courtesy of Amazon
“To be honest, we still haven’t quite worked out whether we’re going to have one or not,” he says. “But whatever happens, people are not yet safe in that near future, but they’re kind of over the worst. It’s not a dystopian, post-civilization world — we’re in a slightly weird world, where things have changed, but not completely.”
While there have already been numerous announcements of novels purposefully set during the lockdown — Avon has already snapped up Love in Lockdown, about two neighbors who meet on their balconies, while Hodder & Stoughton has acquired Stay Home, in which a married woman breaks lockdown to find her lover murdered in his living room — many more writers are in Watson and Robertson’s boat, making tweaks and adjustments to reflect our current situation, rather than big changes to plot or character. After all, who among us knows what our future will look like?
‘MASSIVE ELEPHANT’ IN THE ROOM
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
“I’m finding it incredibly difficult to work out what to do,” says Holly Watt, author of To the Lions, winner of last year’s CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. She is working on her next novel, the third in her series following investigative journalist Casey Benedict, which was due to be published in the summer of next year.
“I’m trying to work out where we might be. Might there be a vaccine? Will getting on a plane feel wildly anachronistic? Will journalists working from an office seem weird? How interesting can a book actually be when everyone is sitting in their sitting room in their pajamas?” Watt asks. “It feels odd to be writing about people hopping on trains or popping to the pub, but focusing on [COVID-19] might make it date hideously. But if you don’t mention it, it is the massive elephant in the room.”
Anatomy of a Scandal author Sarah Vaughan was recently writing a scene where two characters meet in a dingy London pub full of tourists.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
“I started putting the tourists in face masks, then describing the character’s discomfort in the insalubrious surroundings; then realized that actually she’d be more likely — for a novel published next year or in 2022 — to have her meeting, perhaps with a takeaway coffee, along the Embankment,” says Vaughan, who scrapped the pub “because who knows if this will make my novel feel anachronistic.”
“But there’s a more substantive point: I can’t make my characters exist without interaction,” she says. “While, for instance, I can edit out cheek kisses because this may no longer seem the norm, my characters need to meet, to row, to fight, to make love — and in a thriller, to murder. There will be insufficiently little exciting plot, in other words, if they can’t interact as they did pre-COVID.”
Many writers have decided to shift their novels to the near past to avoid the pandemic entirely. Romance novelist Romy Sommer was writing a contemporary romance set in a Tuscan vineyard, but has agreed with her editor to put it on hold until Italy’s situation stabilizes.
Photo courtesy of Amazon
“Maybe I’ll set it in the past, maybe I’ll incorporate [COVID-19] once it’s blown over. Certainly can’t set it now,” she says.
And Harriet Evans has moved her next novel, the follow-up to The Garden of Lost and Found, back to 2018, “to give clear blue water between the action and our reality.” The coronavirus is not entirely absent, however.
“There’s one bit where a character is talking about various projects opening in 2020 and she says, ‘I’ll be traveling all over the world come 2020: Singapore, Abu Dhabi, New York,’” says Evans. “Since she’s rather grand, I hope the reader will like that as a nod between us all that no, she won’t.”
Jenny O’Brien, a nurse whose debut thriller, Silent Cry, has just been published by HarperCollins, is now planning to leave a gap in her detective series from January until a still-undecided future date.
“I think conducting a crime investigation under lockdown rules would be a mammoth task, throwing up all kinds of unimaginable difficulties, which I doubt would be particularly interesting to read,” she says. “As a writer, I like to make a good attempt at ensuring that my books are well researched. I think I’d fail unless I sought advice from officers working through it — that would be inappropriate in the current climate.”
WHEN REALITY ECHOES FICTION
Others authors who were writing novels about illness are now facing a unique dilemma. Like Lesley Kelly, whose Health of Strangers series, which she started writing around five years ago, is set during a pandemic similar to COVID-19. Watching reality echo her fiction has forced her to reassess where her writing will go.
When TV presenter Samira Ahmed recently tweeted: “To anyone thinking of writing a novel about their midlife crisis, set against the backdrop of the coronavirus, please don’t,” Kelly replied: “But what if you’ve already written a novel about a pandemic, set against the background of your midlife crisis?”
“When I started writing I was able to make up everything to do with the governmental and societal response to the virus,” she added. “Now all my potential readers are armchair experts on pandemic responses. Do I nudge my world into reacting like real life, or do I continue with my own way of doing things? I can’t really complain, because never has an author been handed so much inspiration on a plate. I could fill 30 books with new angles on the virus that I hadn’t thought of.”
Claire Fuller, winner of the Desmond Elliott prize, is 15,000 words into her fifth novel, which was, up until recently, set in the near future and dealing with an illness.
“It’s taken a lot of thought about how to deal with the pandemic in the world of the novel — I don’t think it’s possible not to reference it, and also I’m sure we will all, including governments, behave differently towards future threats,” says Fuller, who has found her own solution: the book is now set this year “with a slightly different reality, without COVID but with an alternative illness”.
But some authors are making a virtue out of necessity. Suzy K Quinn was writing The Bad Mother’s Wedding, the latest in her Bad Mother’s Diary series, when the pandemic struck. The novel became The Bad Mother’s Virus, following single mother Juliette Duffy as her world is sent into chaos by the coronavirus crisis. It was rushed out on Sunday, with all profits going towards research for a vaccine and healthcare funds.
“I’ve been up at 4am most days and working seven days a week, whilst trying, and often failing, to home school the kids. It’s been great having a project during all this, because I have felt quite sad and worried sometimes,” says Quinn. “Being able to do something positive and write a charitable book has felt amazing.”
And Fiona Woodifield, the author of the balcony-romance Love in Lockdown under the pseudonym Chloe James, faces a unique challenge: conveying the severity of the crisis in an ultimately positive tale about how love can always find a way — even in a pandemic.
“At first it was easy to hope that perhaps we could just ignore the pandemic and bury ourselves in romantic fiction, far away from the reality of this awful situation,” she says. “However it seems this lockdown and social distancing is going to be here to stay for some time. People need to be able to read relatable fiction about a very confusing and potentially isolating time. I hope it might make some feel less alone, and give people a sense of hope in a way that love, community and kindness triumphs over all.”
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
Perched on Thailand’s border with Myanmar, Arunothai is a dusty crossroads town, a nowheresville that could be the setting of some Southeast Asian spaghetti Western. Its main street is the final, dead-end section of the two-lane highway from Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second largest city 120kms south, and the heart of the kingdom’s mountainous north. At the town boundary, a Chinese-style arch capped with dragons also bears Thai script declaring fealty to Bangkok’s royal family: “Long live the King!” Further on, Chinese lanterns line the main street, and on the hillsides, courtyard homes sit among warrens of narrow, winding alleyways and
RSS