Good standing

I’m tempted to call Vincent O’Sullivan one of our strong silent writers. Now in his 80s, he’s written strongly across many fields — poetry, drama, novels, short fiction, biography and essays. And although he’s been a multi-award winner, Poet Laureate, Writer in Residence, he seems to prefer letting his work do the talking. I wonder if he sees himself as a public person in any way? Vincent, it’s your turn.

I’m sometimes a touch bemused when I see a writer twirl about in the expectation that she or he will be taken as a “personality” of some kind apart from what they write. It’s a piece of street theatre I find rather beside the point. Our intention as writers is a reasonably modest one. We want a book to stand up to our reading it, as a house stands when the builder has finished it. I’m not too concerned about the colour of the builder’s shirt or the writer’s taste in garden furniture.

All This by Chance, your new (and third) novel, covers more than 70 years and four generations. We go from 1940s London to 1960s Greece and to Nazi Labour Camps. We’re taken to NZ, Poland, Germany and Africa. The publisher’s blurb calls it a “saga”. Are you happy with that label?

A dicey word, “saga”; it can sound rather more ambitious than a story may be. I see All This by Chance as a number of men and women, some admirable and some not, in their attempts to make sense of their lives, to give them purpose, as a family inevitably moves from one generation to another, during a time when “freedom” in peace as well as war can’t be assumed as we might like it to be — when you have to make up the meaning you want life to have.

It’s a novel so consummately structured and written that I turned puce with envy as I read. Are you happy with it? Were you happy while you worked on it?

“Happy” might be overstating it. You’re never too sure how things may or may not fall into place till a book’s pretty near finished. “Relieved” is more the word. To get back to my writer as builder, seeing the walls in the right places is what you hope for.

I find a strong motif of searching, of various quests, in the story. “Away is sometimes the best,” one character says. Your people journey across the globe and in time as they seek resolutions. Am I right? Or am I fabricating my own story out of yours?

So many people from anywhere in the tortuous 20th century ended up, or still continue to end up, a long way from where they began. I suspect with most of us, the way our lives turn or pivot or conclude, are a long way from the straight line we might once have had in mind. When we look back, perhaps we can say “search” or “quest” but it’s likely to be more happenstance than that.

Either way, it’s a story whether we like it or not. That’s what “story” means. There always has to be something else and it’s boring, as well as unlikely, if we can guess too clearly what that’s going to be.

Histories and their elusive nature also seem to matter. The past is indeed a different country but it’s important in the book.

We become so obsessed with the present, we tend to forget that every morning when we wake up, it’s the past that’s getting out of bed.

Only once have I been able to identify the specific genesis of a book. I biked down to the end of our road and thought “I’m going to write a novel about two families in a rural valley”. I’ve tried the same route many times since, without luck. Which leads me to ask if you can identify how All This By Chance began?

The first remote kick-off may seem almost incidental to how the story turns out. When I was a boy in Westmere, living in the street where some of the novel is set, there was a Jewish family

ALL THIS BY CHANCE

by Vincent O’Sullivan (Victoria University Press, $35) down the road. As children, we’re likely to be fascinated by difference, by what we don’t know or have only a glimpse of. This was soon after the war when the bad things were coming out of Europe and what vaguely fascinated became inseparable from what appalled.

There was a lady I used to see coming out to the letterbox, a girl in a white dress I liked to look at. I suppose that is where the story “began”, on the simplest level of an image from back then.

What do you hope your novel will . . . well, do to/for its readers?

Well, when you’re writing a story, what you hope to do is avoid too many tangles, without seeming too simple or predictable. You can never say what you want it to do for the reader. You just hope the time that readers are courteous enough to give you proves worthwhile for them, and the things that interest you in the telling will interest them as they take it in. Style, narrative, characters all really add up to that.

But you certainly can’t be prescriptive. If you have designs on the reader — want them to agree with you on politics, religion or whatever — you’re probably pushing fiction towards something else. And there’s the old simple fact that you want to entertain. No one likes being preached at.