Opening a bundle of surprises
Earlier this year, writer Owen Sheers found himself being hyped as “a multi-talented literary star.”
The label was concocted by the producers behind the screen version of his debut novel, Resistance, a piece of alternative history in which the 1944 D-Day landings fail and the Germans mount a counter-invasion of Britain.
It was a label Sheers detested. “It makes me sound like an app,” he indignantly told Britain’s Independent newspaper. He still detests it today. “It’s a spectacularly ugly phrase, isn’t it?” he tells Postmedia News. He prefers a more straightforward description of himself.
“I’m a writer. I make things with words — that’s essentially what I do, and I think the idea of making things with words is very important.”
That’s what he’s done with his new novel, I Saw A Man, which uses a framework of psychological suspense for a probing examination of the nature of grief and guilt — and, in a provocative narrative tangent, the morality of drone warfare.
Still, this 38-year-old Welshman — who considers himself first and foremost a poet — isn’t as easy to categorize as he would have us believe. In fact, he’s a bundle of surprises.
For example, his experience — get this — as artistin-residence for the Welsh Rugby Union. That post saw his poems appearing in the sports pages of newspapers and in the printed programs for every rugby match, thereby ensuring him a potential readership of 80,000 with each game.
Then there’s the three-day version of the Passion Play he concocted for actor Michael Sheen’s economically stagnant hometown of Port Talbot, Wales. It unfolded over an Easter weekend, with a Last Supper consisting of pork pies and beer, Sheen’s Christ being crucified on a busy traffic roundabout with 20,000 people watching, and background music courtesy of the Manic Street Preachers, a Welsh alternative rock band.
There’s his foray into verse drama.
Pink Mist chronicles what happens to three school friends when they join the army and end up in Afghanistan. It’s receiving a major stage production this summer at the Bristol Old Vic.
And then there’s the Amnesty International award that Sheers received for The Two Worlds Of Charlie F. This play, based on the experiences of wounded combat soldiers, has toured both the U.K. and Canada.
But Sheers insists on playing down his eclecticism and emphasizing the basics of his craft.
“At some point there’s a blank page and you put words on it, so I describe myself as a writer,” he says by phone from his home in South Wales.
It was very much of a blank page that launched Sheers on the creative journey that became his new novel, I Saw A Man, published in Canada by Bond Street Books through Random House Canada.
“The whole book began with the image of a neighbour entering a house and thinking it was empty,” he says. “That was how the book started. I still don’t know where that image came from.”
But that image fuelled his own imagination and desire to draw the reader into an undefined but suspenseful situation.
“I think with everything I write, I write to answer questions. The first question here is — well, who is this man, these are his neighbours, and why is he going inside?”
The “man” in question is bereaved husband Michael, still grief-stricken over the loss of his journalist wife in a badly executed U.S. drone attack in Pakistan. He has fled their idyllic cottage in Wales and taken an apartment in London’s Hampstead district, where he begins a friendship with two neighbours, Josh and Samantha, and their young daughters. But the healing process that has begun is shattered by a catastrophic event, one directly related to Michael’s fateful entry into a seemingly empty house, and it leaves him consumed in further grief — and also a terrible guilt.
Sheers hopes a novel exploring “the fragility of happiness” can also be suspenseful.
“It’s not just about wondering what will happen next — it’s also about wondering about what has already happened,” he says. “You want that sense of a ball rolling down the hill, of it gathering momentum.”
Much of that momentum comes from the introduction of a character thousands of miles away. Daniel is the U.S. drone pilot whose bomb, launched from the quiet security of Nevada’s Creech airbase, has left Michael a widower. Daniel, a man engulfed in his own private torment over his job and its consequences, becomes an important part of the novel’s wider fabric.
Between the first and second drafts of his book, Sheers paid a visit to Nevada to watch drone tests being carried out and to hang out with pilots in local bars. British reviewers have already praised his novel for the chilling authenticity of its drone-warfare chapters. Sheers knows now he was right to have made that research trip.
As a writer who had already studied the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder on British soldiers, he was interested in how it affected drone pilots.
“I learned that the incidence of PTSD among drone pilots tended to be much higher than it ever was with fighter pilots,” he says.
Fighter pilots, he notes, don’t get a close-up look at a target both before and after an attack. Drone pilots do, and this raises questions about “the danger of being so intimately involved and having to dissociate yourself in terms of consequence and effect.”
The challenge for Sheers is to balance popular success with what he sees as his continuing responsibilities as a serious writer.
He wants I Saw A Man to provide “a really rewarding reading experience.”
“But beyond that,” he says, “I hope that its moral conflicts and dilemmas stay with people and that the book still resonates after they put it down.”