• January
• February
• March
• April
• May
• June
• July
• August
• September
• October
• November
• December

An interview with Kate Furnivall

INTERVIEW WITH KATE FURNIVALL

Tell us about the inspiration behind Under a Blood Red Sky. What made you want to write it?

The inspiration for Under a Blood Red Sky arose from the country of Russia itself. It was only recently that I discovered I am a large-part Russian. This came as quite a shock and prompted me to explore that vast country, the Great Bear that I knew so little about, yet which I carry in my genes. So I studied its astonishing history, its impressive geography and, above all, its politics; and little by little I felt myself drawn into it, becoming a part of it. I devoured every scrap and every detail about its people and its way of life, as well as going to see with my own eyes the country where my mother was born. It was out of all this wealth of information that Under a Blood Red Sky grew. But the heart of the inspiration, the true creation of it, came from the emotional bond that I was forging with the land of my ancestry.

Which of your two female leads, Sofia and Anna, do you most identify with? What about them do you think will appeal to readers?

Sophia and Anna are two very different women, from two contrasting backgrounds. One is the daughter of a rural priest of the Russian Orthodox Church who witnesses her father whipped to death for his beliefs; while the other is the delicate and petted daughter of a doting doctor who is part of the elite society of pre-Revolutionary Leningrad. Yet despite this they have one important quality in common – they both possess remarkable inner courage. And it is this that gives them a capacity to love that is rare because of the level of commitment that they bring to it – to the point of risking their lives for each other, or facing total self degradation, if that’s what it takes to protect each other. But at the same time Sofia and Anna are both characters that are afflicted with doubts and uncertainties in a harsh and changing world. They make mistakes and need each other’s ability to use humour, or even anger, to return their distorted world to its true perspective.

It is this complex combination of strength and fragility, of determination and weakness, that attracted me to them and I hope it is this that will also appeal to readers of Under a Blood Red Sky. To me they are real people – with complicated layers.

But it is definitely Sofia with whom I identify most. I love her passion for life in all its forms, even when that passion leads her up blind alleys or into acts of questionable morality. She fights for what she believes in and for the person she loves.

Despite facing struggle and hardship, Sofia holds on to her strength and resolve throughout. What is it for you that drives Sofia on, that motivates her?

Sofia is a complex character. She is caught up in a world that has destroyed her family and incarcerated her in a brutal prison system, even though she has done nothing wrong. Her father, a priest, was whipped to death by the Tsarist forces for helping the Bolsheviks, but later those same Bolsheviks kill her uncle for being a kulak, a wealthy farmer, and imprison Sofia for being associated with him. This could have twisted her, could have made hate the driving force within her, but it doesn’t. At one point in the book Mikhail marvels that she can still retain such hope and belief in people after all the struggles and hardship she has been through.

So what gives her this inner strength? As with most of us it comes from her childhood. The loss of her mother and siblings when she was young brought her close to her father, a priest who instilled in her the power and importance of love. As an adult she may have rejected his religious teachings, but she clings to the values of her upbringing: honesty, courage, kindness. But there is steel within her. If you can survive watching your beloved father whipped to death, it does something fundamental; it alters you in some crucial way. For Sofia it put hardness, a steely determination, in her soul. She saw her father die and it made her determined to survive herself. Never again would she let someone she loves die. It is this that drives her to save Anna, whatever the risks or costs to herself or to other people. She let her father down, but she will not let Anna down.

But once in the village of Tivil her motivations are thrown into turmoil when her own desires clash with those of Anna. She is forced to choose and to question herself.

Rafik and Zenia Ilyan are key characters in the novel. What made you want to incorporate this element of mystery and magic?

It’s true that Rafik and Zenia are key characters. One of the main themes in Under a Blood Red Sky is the need within human nature to believe in something greater than itself – the desire in people to have something beyond themselves to hold on to. This may take the form of the idealism of a religious faith, like Christianity, or of a rigid political and social structure like Communism. Or it may be something less precise, more inexplicable and intangible: the superstitions that have been handed down from generation to generation from throughout all parts of the world. It is this last aspect of human belief that is represented by the gypsies Rafik and Zenia. I wanted to see what would happen when all three belief systems were forced into contact and how this clash would affect each of my characters in the microcosm that is the village of Tivil.

How do you begin the researching process for your novels? Do you decide you want to write about a particular time and place, and the story follows on, or do your characters come to you first?

My problem is that I love doing research. Once I get started on a place and a period, I could quite happily go on delving for ever. At some point I have to dig my heels in and say ‘Enough is enough’ and start writing. It feels a bit like being pregnant. Something growing inside of me for months, kicking and wriggling, pressing on nerves and keeping me awake at night, until it finally reaches a stage where if I don’t let it out I’ll burst!

As I write historical novels I read every book I can lay my hands on about the particular place or period; some fiction, but mainly non-fiction. I dig around in libraries which have some wonderful old, out-of-print books in their stacks. For Under a Blood Red Sky it was when I read about the horrors of the Gulag camps of Siberia in deeply moving accounts by writers such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn that brought the price people were forced to pay very much to life.

I need to fill my head with every detail of the time I’m exploring, whether relevant or irrelevant to my story, most of which I know I will never use. But I make hundreds of pages of notes, so that I am so familiar with it that I can move with ease through the world I am going to create. In preparation for Under a Blood Red Sky I also took a trip to Russia and travelled through large tracts of countryside where rural villages have barely changed since the 1930s. This gave me a taste of the landscape that Sofia would be struggling to cross after she escapes from the camp.

As to whether place or character comes first, it is a close-run thing. Probably the place and time come fractionally ahead, but were instantly intertwined with the character of Lydia in The Russian Concubine. In Under a Blood Red Sky it was the idea of a young woman caught in a web of other people’s conflicting belief systems that drew me into the story and led me to research the Gulags. Initially Sofia and Anna were going to be one person but I quickly realised that it was the bond of friendship between them as two separate people that would drive the book.

Under a Blood Red Sky is set in Siberia in 1933; your previous novel The Russian Concubine is set in 1920s China. What is it that interests you in this period and about Russia and China as locations?

As I mentioned earlier, my mother was a young child in Russia at the time of the Revolution in 1917 and fled to China with her mother, to Tientsin, where they stayed for six years. I was born and brought up in beautiful Wales, but even I have to admit that it rains a lot in Cymru, so while I used to sit staring out at the rain-soaked world outside I would think about the stories she used to tell of her childhood in China, a world of acrobats and sun-baked market squares, of snakes and songbirds, of jade and silkworms and wonderful coolie hats like upturned lamp shades that gave even an ordinary figure an air of mystery. It is a country and a period that sank firmly into my inner dreamworld and which, years later when I need to research it, I fell in love with all over again.

But the need to write about Russia was different. It become a compulsion and filled up a deep hole in me that I didn’t know was there. I’m part Russian and love to immerse myself in this country whose recent history was so formed by those few crucial years from 1917-1930. It’s a period that fascinates me, as if by learning about it with each book I write, I’ll be learning more about myself.

If you could invite three fictional characters to your house for a dinner party, who would they be and why?

I thought this would be a hard one, but in fact I had no trouble choosing from the immense number of possibilities out there:

1. Rhett Butler. Yes, I know it sounds like the flighty response of a fluttering southern belle, but I read Gone with the Wind in my teens, and fell hopelessly in love with him – along with millions of other weak-kneed females. He is courageous, amusing, loyal, rude, daring, passionate . . . I could go on! At dinner he would be just gorgeous to look at and what a store of exciting tales he would have to tell about gun-running, gambling, battles and shady bargains and, of course, the great fire of Atlanta . . . in full Hollywood Technicolor. Rhett would definitely be my Number One Guest.

2. Lysistrata. The original women’s lib icon; the Germaine Greer of 411BC. She led the women of ancient Greece to withhold sex from their husbands until they brought the Peloponnesian War to an end and established peace. I think she could teach us a thing or two these days, this woman of courage, passion and commitment. And I’d just love to hear the gossip zipping round Athens in those days.

3. Jeeves. Who could resist such a fish-fuelled brain? A mine of information, discreet and unfailingly polite, he would with consummate skill keep the peace between the high tempers of my other two guests. And above all he would make me laugh.

Which writers inspire you?

It is hard to pick out any specific work that has inspired me, because after a lifetime of reading I credit each single author with an influence that I may not even remember or be aware of: each author I’ve read will have contributed in some way. But there are three authors who do jump out at me as ones about whom I can say, ‘Yes, I can see the influence of that writer in my own work.’

The first is Thomas Hardy. I adore his dark brooding stories, his intense and complicated characters with their Shakespearian flaws, and the wonderful sense of place he created – the towns and villages of Wessex. In my own books the environment also plays a vital role. The second is two names really: The Bronte Sisters. When I read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights as a teenager I was knocked out by the passionate and stubborn determination of the central heroines. I can see the same quality in my own female characters – Lydia, Sofia and Anna.

The third writer who inspires me is William Gibson. Though his genre is immensely different from my own, I hugely enjoy his work, and what I learned from him was how to use the element of surprise in a story. Readers like to be surprised; it jolts them out of the path of their expectations and makes them look at something from a new angle. The insertion of off-beat oddball ideas is an element that I revel in. As always I like a challenge!

How did you become a novelist?

I became a novelist because of my husband. He has had thirteen crime novels published under the name of Neville Steed and won the Crime Writers’ Association’s John Creasey Award. Over the years I helped out with plot lines and provided a first pair of eyes to view the finished manuscript. During that process I observed the mechanics of creating a book, the patience you have to have with yourself and your material if you are ever to reach the end. Many people start novels; far fewer finish them. It’s a long haul.

So when in 2000 my mother died and my family asked me to write down the story of her life – fleeing from the Bolshevik Revolution across the wastelands of Siberia, growing up in an International Settlement in China before moving to India and finally to England with her English stepfather – I was caught. I just couldn’t walk away from it; the story was too good. So The Russian Concubine was born, a book I loved writing and feel passionate about, but inside me I knew there burned a story set in Russia itself. That’s when Sofia, Anna and the village of Tivil came to life and the writing of Under a Blood Red Sky took me to live in the land of my ancestors.

What’s the best thing and the worst thing about being an author?

Writing is an inexplicably strange obsession. I always call it the Agony and the Ecstasy. Every page is an intense mixture of both. I’m tempted to say that the best thing is when I type THE END on the last page. The sense of both relief and release is so enormous, but it also brings a huge feeling of loss and grief. Like mourning the death of a close friend. But to be truthful the best thing about being an author is that I get to live so many different lives. Most people only have one – their own. But an author has the chance to be a Russian aristocrat one day, a headstrong young girl the next, a farm manager, a gypsy, a Chinese revolutionary, a doctor, a smug apparatchik, a prison guard – the list is endless. Each day an author can play God in her own little world, exploring the motivations and aims inside whichever head she is wearing that day. It is an addictive pleasure. And don’t underestimate the excitement of falling in love with one’s own characters – it’s like having a new love affair each day!

The worst thing about being an author? That’s easy. In one word – DEADLINES. Publishers, for some unaccountable reason that baffles authors, want to know when you’re going to finish a book. They breathe down your neck, very sweetly of course, but it’s always there; that gentle breath, hot and reproachful as the Dreaded Deadline Date looms ever closer. Aaargh!

• An interview with Kate Furnivall [interview_with_kate_furnivall.doc] (0.05 MB)

Book of the Month

Read more