Georgina Harding’s Shelf Life

Georgina Harding is the author of six novels: The Solitude of Thomas Cave, The Spy Game, a BBC Book at Bedtime and shortlisted for an Encore Award, Painter of Silence, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012; and, most recently, The Gun Room, Land of the Living and Harvest, which together make up the critically acclaimed Harvest Cycle. In 2021, her short story 'Night Train' was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. Georgina lives most of the time on a farm in the Stour Valley, Essex.

How and where are you?
Early morning. I have a study like a cell, a narrow room in the oldest part of our house, with an oak-mullioned window looking out over garden hedges towards the church, looking east where the sky is pink with dawn. Only I have my back to the dawn – and a slight guilt, always, that I'm in here warm in my dressing gown and not already out there in the new day.

What are you reading right now?
I've been through a spate of nostalgia. Patti Smith's memoir, M Train, which Foyle's had in the music section not in literature where it should have belonged. Because Patti is first and foremost a writer, words her creation whether written or sung. The book is both moving and funny, the portrait of her loved husband Fred, of the loss of him, then story of the near-destruction of her seaside dream-shack in a hurricane. Patti communicates a wonderful resilience. As a young woman I found exhilaration and affirmation in her freedom of expression. I still find it nowadays seeing her perform: amazing to see an older woman so alive – and unashamed to be old! The memoir also takes one back to the '70s, when travelling in exotic places – pre-phones, pre- internet, even pre-Lonely Planet – was really an adventure. My brother for some reason gave me for Christmas Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard, which was the cult book to read when I first went travelling in India and which I never read then, perhaps because I have always been wary of cults. But if I had read it then I like those other travellers would have kept it with me, for its beauty and wisdom and Buddhist calm, and the necessary Buddhist acceptance of the idea that the snow leopard may never be seen, and of the hollowness of the reality you come down to when you come down from the snows. And right now, Anne Michael's beautiful new novel Held, where people's lives are recorded in intense moments like photographs, which pass on somehow across time. A book so intuitive that it's hard to say anything that won't reduce it.

And, of course, watching or listening to, or otherwise consuming?
I usually watch a lot of films, but I've have had little time for films lately, what with travels and people to see. But I was in Rome before Christmas and went to the Sistine Chapel when it wasn't too busy, and for a moment a priest came in and silenced the tourists and spoke with such a dignified presence that it became for that moment again a place of prayer. It felt rather a Philistine thing to do but I bought a jigsaw puzzle of The Last Judgement, 1,000 pieces, which our family of 10 worked on over Christmas. In the end I thought it wasn't a Philistine activity at all as I came to appreciate Michelangelo's work more and more, the fantastic energy of it: the relationships between the figures, the occasional repeats in them where there was some angle, probably some sketch, that he liked to use again; the pain and the horror, the humanism, that element of the Classical, Charon and his boat, at the base of the ultimate Christian image. More recently I've been in Venice and for contrast I went back to the byzantine Judgement at Torcello which was the first Judgement I think I ever saw, hitchhiking around Italy after I left school, and my introduction to byzantine art. And because I was travelling by train I managed to take in the Rothko exhibition in Paris on the way home. Walking from room to room through an entire narrative of his work put me into a trance as if I'd been to a concert. As close to music as art can get.

What did you read as a child?
Everything in the school library, much of it unmemorable (and Enid Blyton was banned because of her grammar). I read continuously and felt insecure perhaps if I didn't have a book at hand – still do. At home I had few new books but many worn classics passed down from the big family house where I was born: Lang's coloured books of fairy tales; Wind in the Willows, reading again and again the chapter ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ with its moment of transcendence that wouldn't be amiss in The Snow Leopard. The Secret Garden with its difficult colonial past (identified with all the more in that my grandmother was born in Quetta) and its present in a walled English garden that I pictured more beautiful when it was wild and first discovered than when it was tamed. And my brother, who had been moving house after 30 years, also brought me a book of mine he had found, which I was given when I was nine and pored over so that the pictures in it became engraved in my mind: The Ancient Sun Kingdoms of the Americas, inscribed to me by its author, Victor Wolfgang von Hagen, a writer and adventurer of the nineteen-fifties, whom my father had met somehow in the course of his work. Not a book for a nine-year-old at all, a grown-up book with images and descriptions of human sacrifice, and one that particularly thrilled me, of a carving of a child dressed in the flayed skin of a sacrificed child, spare hands dangling. I have no idea what my father had said about me (my curiosity about the world, even at that age?) that compelled the legendary Victor W to give it to me.

Which books and/or writers have inspired and influenced you, and what have you learnt from them?
So many over the years, this is the hardest question. From Moby Dick to John Berger's To The Wedding; Conrad, Herta Müller, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Glück, Svetlana Alexievich, to name a very few. (And what do any of them have in common?) Alexievich records true voices in such a way that makes me question whether one should write fiction at all. And what it is that I am seeking to do as a writer: to investigate or imagine. There are different ways of getting at truth.

What’s the worst review you’ve ever received?
I read the reviews that come in print as my publisher sends them to me, almost never any other ones. Even the praise doesn't help. It's all too self-regarding. Though it can be interesting and sometimes disconcerting to see how others read your work, and of course gratifying when someone comes close to your intentions. I have read one review that hurt, in a childish playground way, in The Spectator of all places, by someone who not only misreported the book but was so petty and personal in her criticism that a friend wrote to ask if I'd been at school with her or stolen her boyfriend or something. I wasn't, and didn't, but I would have like to have pinched her back!

Tell us a little about your creative process.
In theory, disciplined, up early with a pot of tea and working as now with my back to the dawn. In practice, erratic, as life, marriage, household, family, get in the way. Or those news stories that I can't resist checking on my phone when I wake. So I travel to escape all of that, and often write intensely when I travel. Notebook and pencils, and even an iPad, get included with minimal hiking gear. I have notebooks where I write ideas, things that I read, occasional personal diary notes, and then some of these move into folders, or piles, as a notion of a novel forms. But the writing of the novel comes with an utterly different form of concentration, from the first line. I start at that first line, or perhaps a single image, and head on. Inevitably I will go back and chip away at it, again and again, but that's the foundation stone.

How has your experience of the publishing industry been?
I've had one publisher and editor all the way through till now, and a wonderful one. But even with a wonderful editor, I've sometimes been uneasy at being packaged the way the market seems to want me packaged – the blurbs and the covers and the promotion. I have a feeling, even now, that my books (and those of other women writers) are still sold differently because they're written by a woman, more softly or prettily, though I do think there's change in the air.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
Can't think of anything offhand. But I sometimes find deep meaning in some little thing I read and pin it to a board. Here's one that's appealing to me right now: ‘The best magic words are those which come to one when one is alone, out among the mountains. These are always the most powerful in their effect. The power of solitude is great beyond understanding.’ (An Inuit shaman speaking to Knud Rasmussen.)

What are you working on right now?
Fragments. Best not spoken about until they grow into something more.