Peter Ho Davies
The transition from short stories to his first novel was a long one, Peter Ho Davies tells Time Out's Richard Cooke
Ho Davies' work deals with an imperfect continuity
Named one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists before his first novel, The Welsh Girl, was even completed, the half-Chinese half-Welsh writer had already won a host of awards (and a coveted creative writing post) on the back of short story collections like The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love. The Welsh Girl has already been long-listed for the Man Booker prize.
Writing The Welsh Girl took you seven years. Was that because of the level of extensive research that you had to do, writing a historical novel? It's down to a number of things. Certainly the research phase of the book took a while, but I was teaching full time, and there's also that transition from being a short story writer to being a novelist, and writing a first novel. There were a lot of things to learn, and there were a lot of false starts and mishaps, and it took quite a while to deal them. I think that the book needed to take the time that it took, but I'd like to hope that another novel would go a little quicker than that.
What were some of the pot holes that you stumbled into along the way? As a short story writer I'm given to sort of writing fairly short and discreet bursts. You know I can get a draft out over a couple of days or over a week and then maybe not actually write that story, or not work on that story again for another month, and return to it and pick it up and you press on with it again. That funny kind of discontinuous, herky-jerky writing pattern works quite well for short fiction, for me at least. But it's not a good way to write a novel, and it took me a while to figure out that I was going to have to be... just a steadier worker on the novel. And it was very important to have contact with it every day. There's always a feeling with a short story, you know, that it aspires to the kind of perfection where every word counts... but you know it's got this sort of economy. Perfection with a novel I think, when I first started writing, it seemed much further away, over the horizon essentially, and it took me a while actually to realise that perfection is not really the goal of the novel. The novel is a more life-like form, but in that sense more imperfect.
It's a bit like music - if it becomes too technically perfect, too metronomic, then it loses that human element you're talking about. That's a really good comparison actually, I like that.
You returned to Wales for your first novel. Being Welsh, or half-Welsh, were you going back to what you knew for a major undertaking like this? It's the half-Welsh part that's the key here, and that I think speaks back to something that I didn't know completely. I'm not sure if I would have written this book if I were 100 per cent Welsh, or felt completely confident and sure of my Welsh identity. I wrote the book to try and figure some things out about being Welsh, to try and understand it better, and to understand a place that's part of my heritage.
There were plenty of people in places like Ireland who effectively barracked for the Nazis during the Second World War. And it seems like a similar kind of ambivalence that you were talking about in this book. Yes - and there are a lot of things that spike your interest in a particular subject when you're writing a novel, but I think one of the things that drew me to this material initially was some things about Welsh nationalists and some Italian fascists just before the war. I think some of the sympathies there are completely based on "the enemy of the enemy is my friend", and when I thought about that, I began to think about the comparison between Welsh nationalism, the form of nationalism that I sort of grew up with, something that was there to preserve Welsh culture, and the other types. It still feels like a largely very positive force and I've always been interested in the idea of, you know, this area of north Wales, this real hot bed of Welsh nationalism, and the people in this community are there rubbing shoulders with German soldiers, who are represent the most evil form of nationalism we can think of in the 20th century - National Socialism.
As you did research did you find that they had more in common than you first thought or did they become more distinct? They probably became more distinct, I would say. They're really sort of opposite sides of the same coin, though we sometimes - and I think rightly - think of nationalism and patriotim as very positive forces, they are also forces that are very easily perverted. I don't think those questions were important to me as I started writing the novel, but particularly in the aftermath of September 2001, writing this war time novel that I had started in 1999 or 2000, but writing it as we began to move it into a war-time period ourselves, these questions of what it was to be patriotic became important.