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- Subheading: Extract from an interview with Garry Disher
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- Article Title: Extract from an interview with Garry Disher
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Garry Disher: The Sunken Road is a so-called literary novel. I find that I’m a bit typecast, Garry Disher the crime writer or Garry Disher the children’s writer. A lot of the fiction I’ve written is so-called more literary in nature. This is my big book, up to date, if you like. It’s a novel set in the wheat and wool country in the mid-north of South Australia where I grew up. It’s a story of the region and of a family and of a main character called Anna Tolley. I tell this story in a series of biographical fragments around a theme like Christmas, or love, or hate, or birthdays. And each fragment takes a character from childhood to old age. And I repeat this pattern right through the book and certain secrets are revealed or come to the surface through this repetition. So at that level I suppose it’s a linear story, but the structure’s not all that linear. In terms of structure it’s an advance for me, or an experiment.
Sherryl Clark: How long have you been working on this one?
GD: I spent a year and a half writing it but I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. I made a shot at writing it back in the seventies and then again in the mid-eighties, but it just didn’t work; it didn’t come together. I thought what I was trying to do was write a book like Alice Munro’s story collections about small town, small farm life in Ontario. I thought I’d like to do that in an Australian setting, because I’m very familiar with it. That’s where my family lives in wheat and wool country of South Australia. But in the end it turned out to be a novel based on biographical fragments. I felt like l was walking on a tightrope while I was writing it. That one false move and the whole thing would fail.
SC: The setting has obviously had a lot of importance for you in terms of where the novel’s come from and where you’ve situated it. But it sounds like the characters have come to the fore and taken over.
GD: Yes. The initial impulse for the book was to write about a place and a way of life. But I found I couldn’t do that. I had to write about a character. We read fiction for the characters. We like to get to know a character, to hate or love or admire them, whatever that might be, or be carried along by their hopes and fears and desires and mishaps. So that was the only way I could tell the story, even though I’m at the same time telling the story of a region and of a way of life, and a strain.
SC: How have you found writing something like that – and at the same time you’ve got five Wyatt crime novels out now. Do you find it difficult to move from one to the other, or can you separate them precisely?
GD: I can separate them pretty well. I think for me whether it’s a children’s book or a crime book or a so-called serious literary book, the craft aspects are the same. I don’t shift gears all that much. I’m aware of slightly different audiences, I suppose, like a crime novel is formulaic at one level, and a children’s novel there might be some sort of – I wouldn’t call it writing down, but being aware that these are children you’re writing to. Ultimately the craft aspects are the same. They’re just as challenging. It’s just as hard to write a crime novel or a children’s novel as it is to write anything else, but people assume that if it’s a crime novel or a children’s novel it must be therefore easier to write, or that you only write those things because you are a bad writer, or not a good enough writer. And I would strongly challenge those notions.
Sherryl Clark prepared the radio interview from which this extract is drawn for JCR.
Garry Disher is the author of the Wyatt crime novels of which the latest is Port Vila Blues. His fiction for adults includes Flamingo Gate, The Stencil Man, and The Difference To Me. Books for younger readers include the award winning The Bamboo Flute. He is also editor of the Personal Best anthologies.
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