Fevered existence
Joad R Wren (pictured) discusses All the Colours You Cannot Name, his tale of love and loss in the plague-afflicted London of 1666
This is your first novel. Were there parallels with writing historical non-fiction, or did the process surprise you?
The writing process could not have been more different from the long library-bound slogs. I had recently had Covid and was commuting to Paris to teach at the Sorbonne. The novel was written in a few weeks, mostly on trains or in cheap restaurants. I was living a fevered, dissociated existence.
What inspired you to set the novel in London of 1666?
It’s a period I know well, and I was looking for a way of thinking about Covid, about cognitive impairment and emotional dysregulation. A love story set at this time offered every opportunity.
What sources did you draw upon to depict this setting?
The map of London attributed to Ralph Agas, first printed in 1561, was invaluable. It’s extraordinarily evocative: you can get lost in it. William Harrison Ainsworth’s Old St Paul’s (1841) was also in my mind, and Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). And hundreds of pamphlets from this time. The central characters are printers, and I use the machinery of presswork to ground their lives and keep their feet on the earth.
What atmosphere and sense of place did you want to convey?
I wanted to make London’s streets and buildings feel substantial, and I wanted to capture the seriousness of religious belief, the sense that tough theological issues, about salvation and providence, mattered. Using this hyper-realistic approach, I hoped to evoke the sense of being shaken by collective trauma and how difficult that could make processing love and grief. It’s very emotional.