Natasha Solomons is the author of the new novel The Song of Hartgrove Hall. Her other novels include The Gallery of Vanished Husbands and The House at Tyneford. She lives in Dorset, England.
Q: Music plays a big role in The Song of Hartgrove Hall, and serves as a form
of communication for some of the characters. Why did you choose music as a main
theme in the novel?
A: I’m a terrible musician and a dodgy singer – and perhaps
that’s why I’m so fascinated by musicality in other people. As a writer I’m
intrigued by different forms of creativity – I’ve written about painters,
sculptors, singers, but this time I wanted to focus on a composer.
I’m really lucky to have a lovely studio in the garden with
a gorgeous view of the hill. It rises up out of the fields and I sit and watch
as the weather forms above the ridge. As Pooh Bear would say, “it’s my thinking
place.”
I wanted to explore a musician’s relationship with the
landscape. I draw my inspiration from where I live, and Fox, the curmudgeonly
narrator of The Song of Hartgrove Hall, does likewise.
He discovers the theme for his first symphony when he hears
the folk songs sung by the local shepherds and labourers. For Fox music is
as much part of the landscape as the gorse bushes dotting the hillside.
I also wanted to explore how people connect through music.
At the start of the novel the elderly Fox is lonely and grief-stricken after
the death of his beloved wife, Edie. Then, one morning, he discovers his
troublesome young grandson is a musical prodigy on the piano.
This connection becomes utterly central to Fox – they are
not only grandfather and grandson but simply two musicians, and through this
relationship he discovers the route back from loneliness and grief. Similarly,
through music, he hopes to introduce his young grandson to the grandmother he
never really knew.
Q: The book takes place during two time periods--post World
War II, and the beginning of the 21st century. Why did you pick these time
periods, and how do they serve as a contrast to each other?
A: I wanted the first part of the story – where the 19-year-old
Fox first meets Edie – to take place at the end of the Second World War.
In an earlier novel, The House at Tyneford, I wrote about
the last days of a great house before the army requisitioned it during the
Second World War. This time I wanted to see what happened when a house was
returned to the family. Frequently country houses were given back in terrible
repair and the families often lacked the funds to restore them.
At one stage it was estimated that great English houses were
being destroyed at the rate of one each week in the years after the war. In the
novel the Fox-Talbots are in a state of genteel poverty and are facing the sale
or destruction of Hartgrove Hall.
I wanted to compare this portrait of a house and family at
the end of the war with a modern view of the country house. Later in the story,
Fox once again is faced with the dilemma of selling the house. The role of the
country house has changed totally over the last century, and I provide glimpses
of the house and its owners during different times.
The other simple reason for the two time periods is that I
liked the idea of telling a love story backwards. At the start of the story we
know Fox and Edie have been married for 50 years but we don’t know how it
happened. When we first meet Edie, she’s inconveniently the girlfriend of Fox’s
rather dapper brother Jack.
Q: Is Hartgrove Hall based on a real house, and what does it
signify for the characters?
A: The house is an amalgamation of houses near where I live
in Dorset, England. The one it resembles most closely is one that used to be
called Turnworth House but was destroyed at the end of the Second World War.
It had fallen into disrepair and there was no money to
restore it, and so it was pulled down. It was supposed to have been a
particularly beautiful manor – I include the incidence of its demolition in the
book.
Fox loves Hartgrove Hall but his affection for his family
home is complicated. He realizes that if he chooses to stay and help his
brothers keep hold of the estate, he won’t be able to have a career as a
musician. While his musical inspiration comes from the landscape around the
house, by staying at home and making the house his life, he won’t be able to
dedicate himself to music.
The house, much like music, is also the glue that binds the
Fox-Talbot brothers together.
Q: What role do you see Judaism playing in the novel?
A: Edie has an uneasy relationship to her Jewishness. She
became the quintessential English Rose during the Second World War – a symbol
of patriotism. Fox feels like a fool when he realizes that he didn’t know she’s
Jewish, or that Edie Rose is her stage name.
He can’t bear the wartime ditties she used to sing – the
songs he loves are the Yiddish melodies she occasionally sings. They express
something hidden and private and also rather other.
Latterly this sense of otherness irks Fox, he feels
separated from Edie by her Jewishness. It’s a part of her that he can’t reach.
She wants to be buried at the Jewish cemetery and not in the woods – something
that he finds very difficult to reconcile.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m just starting to think about a new novel. I’d like to
write about the sea again.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m answering this questionnaire while my nine-week old
baby is being tickled by her father next door. So if my answers are a little
sleep-befuddled that’s why!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment