Margaret Elphinstone
Margaret Elphinstone has published eight novels, as well as short stories and poetry. Her latest novel, The Gathering Night, set among the hunter-gatherers of Mesolithic Scotland, is a story of conflict, loss, love, adventure and devastating natural disaster. This interview took place in August 2010, with questions sent in by EnCompass readers, and Reader in Residence Susan Tranter.
 Photo: Canongate
Susan Tranter: Hello Margaret, and many thanks for agreeing to be interiewed by EnCompass readers! I'd like to start by asking what you've been reading lately, and whether you divide your reaing up into 'work' and 'pleasure' piles.
Margaret Elphinstone: Susan, you have stumbled upon my guilty secret, which is that I have binges of reading Golden Age detective stories (Agatha Christie etc) most of which I pretty well know by heart. Otherwise I’m quite fussy about fiction. I go back to the 19th century a lot: Bronte, Dickens, Tolstoy etc. I also really enjoy some contemporary fiction writers, but by no means all. I read as much non-fiction as fiction; a new genre that I love is popular science – Sobel, Hawkins etc - written for people like me who got chucked out of science classes when they were twelve. When I’m working on a novel I can’t read fiction at all. I read masses of non-fiction while researching a book, and that totally absorbs me.
Celina Ishikawa: Margaret Elphinstone, since I'm a born and raised Brazilian, I wonder what motivated you choosing 'Hy Brasil' to designate a mythical island?
ME: Hy Brasil is the old Irish name for the mythical island in the Atlantic, that sometimes shows itself through the mists. It has no relation to the actual country of Brazil. I became intrigued by the number of mythical islands out there in the Atlantic. Every European country on the Atlantic seaboard has a version of the Hy Brasil legend. The fact is that people knew there were islands out there, but couldn’t identify or map them precisely until the 18th century when navigators worked out a reliable way of calculating longitude. Hy Brasil appears on charts until 1852, which I find mind-boggling. So the book is about treating a mythical island exactly as if it were real.
Celina Ishikawa: How hard is it to 'undress' yourself of 'modern thinking' in order to write books settled on ancient times and create the right mood for each era?
ME: It’s not hard to do in general terms, but I have to be very vigilant when I get down to details. Being in the right place is a good start. I look around, and try to see ‘through’ the modern accretions to the landscape as past people would have experienced it. That’s easier on an uninhabited Scottish island, for example, than in downtown Montreal, though I’ve done both. When I’m actually writing I have to be very careful about language, especially metaphor, because of course I’m always using the wrong language – modern English – for the time I’m writing about. It’s all too easy to let anachronism creep in. For example, in The Gathering Night plant names were a problem: Mesolithic hunter gatherers can’t go out and gather a herb called Good King Henry! They wouldn’t even name plants horse-tails, or cow parsley, or ragged robin. But these are details: the main thing is, I spend a lot of time imagining myself into the minds of my characters, until I start to think like them myself.
Anu: Hi Margaret. I've just started reading The Gathering Night and am enjoying it very much. I'd like to know whether you were particularly drawn to set the book in such a distant time because there has been so little fiction written about the period? Does the distance and 'unknowness' give you more freedom?
ME: Absolutely. It was the deafening silence that surrounds the Mesolithic period that drew me in. So much is written about later prehistory, but early hunter gatherers are usually dismissed in a few sentences. Also, the challenge was that we have no voices from that time – no names, no language, no words for anything. I’ve never tackled silence like that before. Mind you, it didn’t mean I could make everything up. There is plenty of good scholarship about the Mesolithic period, and I studied all I could. But in the end, I had this gut feeling that what I was doing was finding a voice for people whom later history had totally silenced.
DavidR: Does writing historically gives you more freedom when creating characters?
ME: I think historical context gives me more freedom to look at the large picture; it’s not specifically the freedom to create characters. I can consider a historical situation – the 1812 War, or the Norse discovery of North America – and think about what it must have meant to those caught up in it, and what it was like to be them. I find I can’t look at my contemporary world in quite that way. My only contemporary novel is set in Hy Brasil (see above) so I suppose setting my contemporary story on a mythical archipelago is another way of distancing the fictional world. Maybe I find it hard enough to work out what I’m doing in the world in which I actually find myself, let alone anyone else!
Finn: How much research do you do before writing, and how do you know when enough is enough?
ME: I do a lot of reading, travelling and thinking, both before and during writing. Naturally I write about things that already interest me – lighthouses, exploration, sea voyages etc – and I tend to be inspired by the places I’ve already been to (that’s how India became a major strand in Light, for example). The research I do helps me to enter the world I’m creating. I have to be at home in it so that I know what people would feel and think and do, without having to look it up in a book at every turn. But when it comes to detail, I’d say what appears in the book is the proverbial tip of the iceberg. If it’s clear you know where you are and what you’re talking about, readers will trust you enough to follow you. You don’t have to describe exactly how to make string out of inner bark, for example, just to prove that you know how to do it. Endless detail of that sort would become immensely boring.
Juiced79: Which writers have inspired you?
ME: Impossible question! Enid Blyton inspired me to read.... I’ve been inspired by fat 19th century novels, thin volumes of poetry, maps, guidebooks, herbals, travelogues, all kinds of fiction and non-fiction. The most inspiring books I read in my teens were probably Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. The most inspiring books I read this week were probably Jung: A very brief introduction and How to Store Your Garden Produce. Sorry, I don’t mean to be facetious, but seriously, it’s all grist to the mill.
Sara Cohen: I read that you also write poetry, and I was interested to know how you balance the two disciplines, and whether there is much interconnection between the two?
ME: I’ve written no poetry for about twenty years, which maybe answers your question. When I started writing in the 1980s, I turned from poetry to prose, and vice versa, quite easily, and one informed the other. Then the novels began to dominate, but I think there are places where the poetry strand creeps into the novels.
BookGirlDK: How important is the environment in your work, and do you find that a historical perspective helps get a message of contemporary relevance across?
ME: The environment is crucial. I go to all the places I write about, and write in notebooks when travelling. I’ve been interested in ecology and conservation since I was a student, and I’m an organic gardener and I’ve written about that. I don’t plan to write specifically about environmental concerns in my fiction, but there’s nothing like fiction for revealing what one is really concerned about. A few people have pointed out that The Gathering Night in some ways circles back to my first novel The Incomer in having a strong message about how to live on the land. Certainly I think that environmental issues were at the forefront of my mind when I wrote both books, twenty-five years apart. The Incomer is set in a post-capitalist future, The Gathering Night in the deep past. But I think all the historical novels address contemporary problems, even though I wasn’t necessarily aware of it while writing, and certainly never set out to write allegory or propaganda. For example, Voyageurs, which deals with a pacifist caught up in the 1812 War in North America, was written against the background of the Gulf War.
Jose: I know that several of your books have been set on, or featured, islands. What's the fascination?
ME: There’s probably some deep psychological reason, but all I know is that I love the sea, and I love islands. Especially uninhabited islands: nothing in this world has quite the satisfaction of mooring offshore, lowering the dinghy, and landing (preferably alone) on an uninhabited island. I lived in Shetland for eight crucial years, part of the time on a very small island. Islands have something about them... separate, contained, small-scale... I don’t know. But there it is.
LouLou: Do you ever fancy having a crack at contemporary, gritty realism, or is there enough of that around already?
ME: Realism is a relative term, of course. Most of what is called contemporary realism is urban realism, and I’ve never comfortably inhabited an urban world. The past was usually gritty enough, and life in what most people call remote places is often very gritty indeed. But there’s a tendency to think that because it’s far from the city it isn’t quite real. Maybe violence and sex have most impact in fiction when used with discrimination. The death of Prince Andrew in War and Peace for example, is far more harrowing than a heap of butchered bodies in fiction where you don’t care a toss about the characters. Or so I think.
Susan Tranter: Again, many thanks for taking part Margaret. Can I just close by asking what you're working on at the moment, or what's next for you?
ME: Right now I’m working on my garden, and having a good long think about what comes next.
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