A Farewell to Barbara Whitnell (17th March 2021)

 

My aunt, Ann Hutton, was the novelist Barbara Whitnell - (a name she took from her own grandmother). She was, I believe, the author of 14 published novels, and she made the Times Bestseller list. She died this week just short of her 92nd birthday. Ann was a big inspiration to me and encouraged me to write. I owe her a great deal. She was a larger than life character. She was just ten when the war broke out, and sixteen when it ended, but it often felt to me as if she was more at ease with the post war generation. She was more of a 1950s-breakout-woman, than a 1940s-war-girl; always slightly rebellious, a rule breaker, a risk taker. She lived a glamorous life - living in places like Kenya and the Turks and Caicos Islands, but it was to Cornwall, the county of her childhood, that she so often returned, and about which she would write many of her stories. She and her husband Bill retired to Fowey, a little fishing village on the Cornish coast, and is was from here that Ann wrote many of her books.

I can reveal now that Ann was the inspiration behind the character of Demelza Trevarrick in my novel, 'Not Forgetting the Whale.' (The Whale at the End of the World). One clue, for anyone with a memory long enough, was the name of Ann's house in St Austell in the 1960s - 'Trevarrick'. There wasn't much similarity between Ann's life and Demelza's (beyond the fact that both were romantic novelists living in Cornish seaside villages), but all the same it was Ann's voice that I could hear in my head whenever Demelza spoke. She had a knowing way of talking, with the allure of someone who knows everything and has seen everything. I remember Ann in the 1960s used to smoke cigarettes in a holder like Audrey Hepburn, and that too, for some reason, became an image I attached to Demelza.

It occurs to me now, as I write this, that there is a coincidence I can relate. Sometime in the 1990s (I shall guess at 1996) I was boarding a flight at Heathrow bound for Johannesburg. It was a business trip. I heard a voice calling my name. There was Ann. I hadn't met or spoken to her for several years. But by an extraordinary twist of fate she was on the same flight, off on a book tour of South Africa. She and Bill were in First Class. I was in steerage. Nonetheless, when we were in the air, she came and sat in the seat next to me and we gossiped for much of the journey. We talked a lot about writing. About the discipline, and the mechanics, and the preparation. I had written a non fiction book at this stage (The Good Zoo Guide) but I wanted to write fiction. She gave me some advice that I have often passed onto others as if the wisdom was my own. 'Just write it,' she told me. 'It may not be a masterpiece. Your first novel rarely is. But writing is a craft, and you will get better.'

Ann leaves behind her four lovely children, my cousins Lindsay, Judi, Chis and Tim - and of course her grandchildren and great grandchildren. She also leaves those books.

Please check out my website to learn more about my books:  https://www.johnironmonger.com

Why this has been The Year of the Whale: (Der Wal und das Ende der Welt and The Whale at the End of the World) (23rd February 2021)

 An odd thing has happened. ‘Not Forgetting the Whale’ has sold amazingly well in Germany. I should love to take all the credit, but in truth I owe much of the success to a remarkable German publisher, and most of the rest to the pandemic. The publisher is S.Fischer Verlag, a small but very dedicated imprint in Frankfurt. They are lovely. They are smart. They renamed the novel, ‘Der Wal und das Ende der Welt’ – or ‘The Whale and the End of the World,’ and they gave it a startlingly clever cover – an arresting orange ground with a fin whale swimming into view from the back cover. They promoted the book really well. Big displays in bookshops. Lots of press. This was in 2019. And well, we all know what happened next. Covid came along. The paperback was due to launch in August 2020, but someone at Fischer had a hunch that the central story of ‘Whale’ (a global flu pandemic) might be topical enough to justify an earlier launch. They brought it forward to March 25^th. Smart move. It went straight into the Spiegel paperback chart at No 6 – just behind Camus’ ‘Plague.’ By 20^th May it had crept up to No 3, and by 20^th August it was at Number 2. Christmas came and it was Number 1. Today, as I write this, it is still up there at Number 5. It has been in the top 10 for 49 weeks. On social media, in Germany, it has been

a phenomenon. More than 560 people have posted photographs of their copy on Instagram. I have lost count of the Twitter messages. The image above is just a snapshot of some of the hundreds of Facebook posts.

I could pretend to be wholly nonplussed. Perhaps I should. But the truth is, of course, I’m over the moon! It’s amazing! (I don't think you'd ever find a novelist who wouldn’t like to see ‘The International Bestseller’ on the cover of their book.) So a huge thank you to S Fischer Verlag, and to Susanne Halblieb, Elisa Diallo, Siv Bublitz, Petra Wittrock, and Janina Bradac, and of course to Maria Poets for her fantastic translation, and to Kirsty and Stan and Fede and  Ellie Freedman and the brilliant team at Orion Books, and to Krystyna who sold the German rights. And now, guess what, it has been relaunched here in England as, ‘The Whale at the End of the World,’ (which is curiously unsettling because now I don't know what to call it.) But it is doing ok. And it is doing well in the Netherlands too as ‘De Dag Dat De Walvis Kwam’ (The Day the Whale Came.) And it will launch soon in Italy. Altogether it has been translated into twelve languages! It is to be made into a German TV series. And it has been turned into a stage show (with music by Sting). Gosh. I'm truly stunned..

My Map Pins (3): Mevagissey, Cornwall (Posted February 2021)

 

This is a photograph of Mevagissey from the 1970s when I lived here with my family. It is a traditional Cornish fishing village on the south coast. My mother grew up here. The middle picture is of my mum and old Mr Cloke the fisherman. When my father retired from his job in Nairobi, he bought a grocery shop here. They called it ‘The Harbour Stores.’ (The third picture is my dad in Mevagissey at about that time.) I was seventeen. I thought I would hate living in a remote village at the end of the world. I was wrong. I loved it.  Years later, Mevagissey would inspire my novel ‘The Whale at the End of the World,’ (also called ‘Not Forgetting the Whale’). Mr Cloke was the inspiration for Old Man Garrow in the novel. Mevagissey is a little bigger than St Piran (the fictional town in the story), but it was the sense of community I was trying to capture. That’s a plug, in case you haven’t read the book. The What3Words (below) takes you to my dad’s shop. Today it is a bakery and an art shop.  

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3Words: panics.backers.leaky

Covid-19 / Corona Virus and Not Forgetting the Whale (12th Feb 2020)

[This was posted to my blog on 12th February 2020 when we were only just beginning to hear about Coronavirus - just in case you wonder why some of it sounds a little weird now...]

First an apology. I’m a rubbish blogger. This is my first post since my sixtieth birthday blog, and that was, ahem, five and a bit years ago. My blog history has skipped right past my third novel, ‘Not Forgetting the Whale,’ as if it never happened, and I probably ought to be thinking about blogging ahead of my next book, ‘The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild.’ But events of recent weeks (I’m thinking now about the Covid-19 Corona Virus) have reminded me of Not Forgetting the Whale, so maybe it is time, at last, for a blog.

Not Forgetting the Whale (if you haven’t read it) is a whimsical and slightly allegorical tale about the collapse of civilisation following a worldwide flu pandemic. If that sounds a little heavy, it might help to add that the story is told almost entirely from the perspective of a tiny Cornish fishing community. The fictional village of St Piran was a familiar environment for me to write about. I was seventeen when my family left Nairobi and reinvented themselves as shopkeepers in Mevagissey, a village on the Cornish coast. My mother had grown up there, and she longed to go back. My parents bought a general store in the square, right by the harbour, and I worked there, during school and university holidays, stacking shelves, slicing bacon, and delivering groceries to houses around the village. One of my regular deliveries was to the writer Colin Wilson who lived a short way out of town in a rambling old farmhouse. It was a real writer’s home – filled with books. ‘I should love to be a writer,’ I told him once, after I had carried a box of groceries into his kitchen. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you want to be a writer, then you will be. You won’t have any choice.’

I thought, at first, I would hate Mevagissey. My friends were far away, and this little town (especially in winter) was desperately quiet and remote. But, like Joe, the protagonist of Whale, I discovered instead a most extraordinary community. Within weeks I had learned the names and faces of dozens of villagers, I had made new friends, and I had started to understand the support network that every villager seemed to be part of. It was unexpected. It was a joy.

I wanted to write about this for a long time. What I needed was a story. On a train from London to Liverpool I found myself reading a magazine article by the science writer Debora Mackenzie. The title of the article was, ‘Could a Pandemic bring down Western Civilisation?’ The idea was simple, yet terrifying. Complexity theory suggests that once a society develops beyond a certain level, it becomes dangerously fragile. It reaches a point where even a minor disturbance can bring everything crashing down. A pandemic flu – for example. I had my story. I became fascinated by arcane things like … supply chains.

The whole way our civilisation works – even the systems involved in putting food onto our tables - has become labyrinthine in its complexity, involving high-tech farm machinery, refrigerated warehouses, networks of specialist distributors, and complicated packaging. It relies on the availability of fuel, spare parts for all the machines, the health and reliability of drivers and packers and dozens of other trades, the electronic exchange of currency, good road, rail, and other transport networks, and who knows how easy it would be for any one of these systems to fail. The fact that it all works amazingly well means we don’t tend to think of it as a risky process. And yet it is. A small disruption could grind the whole machine to a halt. 

This is the central thesis behind Not Forgetting the Whale. A pandemic flu, originating in the Far East, is brought unwittingly to Britain by passengers on a long distance flight, and after that, public fear takes over. Oil imports stop. Key workers stay home. Power stations grind to a halt. Shops are raided and shelves are emptied of produce. I had a quotation in my mind, ‘Civilisation is only three square meals away from anarchy.’ This quotation (from the TV Series Red Dwarf) drove the story.   

And now, here we are facing Covid-19. It’s a flu-like virus from China that threatens to explode into a pandemic.  Could it lead to the same situation that faces St Piran in The Whale?

And I suppose the answer has to be … yes.

But there is a glimmer of hope. In Not Forgetting the Whale the forecast for humanity is grim. But humankind (in general) and St Piran (in particular) defy the pundits and bounce back. They do this by, well, … pulling together and sharing things, and generally being nice to one another. They overturn all the assumptions of apocalyptic fiction that see us hunkering down with shotguns and fighting over the last scrap of bread. The flu virus, far from destroying us, ends up bringing us closer together. Maybe that should give us hope.   

Although the villagers of St Piran do have the help of a whale, of course. Let’s not forget that.