To view the latest edition of the North Melbourne Books newsletter, click here. To sign up for our monthly newsletter, click here.
North Melbourne Books talks to Peter Cochrane
North Melbourne Books: It's 1806 and a terrible flood wipes out ex-convict Martin Sparrow's crops. He's chronically in debt and years of hardship lay ahead. Martin is talked into “bolting”, making a run for the other side of the mountains where myth has it that a lush, Eden like place exists. When he does bolt, he unwittingly leaves a trail of destruction. Where did you get the idea for the story?
Peter Cochrane: The history of that early frontier was dramatic and I knew it quite well. Everything about that early period on the frontier invited a fictional rendering, freeing the writer to explore that world in ways that you can’t in history. Various features of the river community caught my attention – illicit distilling, the flood-prone river, the back-breaking work, the brutality of the garrison, the convict ‘dreaming’ of a better world on the other side of the mountains; the plight of ‘put-upon’ women; the menacing presence of the indigenous people, much violated but not vanquished at the moment I chose to write about – 1806. So, they’re just a few key pointers and the idea for the story came out of them, and more. It also came from the notion, which emerged from the first exploratory jottings, that a conventional story with a rather upright, invincible hero was nowhere near as interesting as a story which chose to explore how a bit of a no-hoper - not a bad guy but rather a timid, hopeless fellow, a sad-sack, something of a vacuum so far as morality and purpose and courage was concerned - might survive or even prevail on this brutal frontier. From there it was Martin Sparrow who took over, so to speak. The idea for the story didn’t happen all at once of course. It evolved as the writing progressed.
NMB: The novel has some amazing violence in it, almost darkly comic. What inspired your vision of such a dark, Hobbesian early Australia?
PC: I’m a great fan of various writers in the ‘dark’ realm, eg Cormac McCarthy and Daniel Woodrell (Winter’s Bone). But I also love some of the great literary exponents who can mesh the comic with the tragic, or who find the comic in everyday life that is otherwise quite sad. I’m thinking, for instance, of Graham Swift’s masterpiece, Last Orders. And then there’s the wonderful amalgam you find in something like HBO’s Deadwood which can be hilariously funny and yet full of dread. Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove also comes to mind. These writers (and script writers) I find quite exhilarating. But I also believe that kind of amalgam has to come out of one’s own literary wellsprings – it’s either there or it’s not. It must conjure itself in your imagination, somehow; and that conjuring must mesh with the language you find to render it on the page. It’s a bit mysterious. Family might be a bit of an influence too, my mother seemed to find comedy regularly lurking in human affairs while, at the same time, taking a generally dim and suspicious view of the world beyond her front door.
NMB: Martin Sparrow is a true portrait of a weak, cowardly man. We feel pity and sympathy for him. Why did you want the focus of your book to be on such a flawed character, rather than a heroic one?
PC: In its first iteration, this novel did have an heroic character at the centre and I persisted with it for a short while, but it didn’t work, not to my satisfaction. I realised I was writing somewhere in the virtuous convict makes good genre and it’s been done before and, anyway, it just didn’t have the same fascination for me as did the vast challenge that a Sparrow-type character might have to take on if he’s to make his way in the world and somehow prevail or, at least, survive. The contrast is what got me – on the one hand, there he is in the most brutal and cruel of times, the first generation of colonial settlement when so much of the dirty work, in every sense, has to be done. And on the other hand, what has he got in the way of capacities – not much. To remake himself, or just to survive, is going to take something special. How will he prevail? That fascinated me, because a Sparrow cannot call on the heroic qualities that a ‘better man’ might call upon. He’s a bit of a midge in a whirlwind.
NMB: The novel has a broad range of characters and its plot is quite complex. How did you plan and write it?
PC: I didn’t plan it. You can plan a novel down to the last detail and that is probably the safe way to go. I wanted to ‘live’ the novel the way we live our lives – going forward, reassessing as circumstances change, adapting, making hard decisions as we go. The great American novelist , E.L. Doctorow had a useful view on this: ‘Writing a novel [he said] is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ I was quite comforted when I read that, because that’s what I was doing, and I found that as you go you conjure where the road is going and what’s going to happen, what you might see and what’s to be said, next. It’s like life – you live it forward, with nothing but what you have in the form of accumulated experience and what you can make of the moment, of the circumstances that present; what your characters might make of that moment, and so on. I could have planned the novel from beginning to end, at the outset, but had I done that I would not have The Making of Martin Sparrow. I’d have something very different, or perhaps nothing at all.
NMB: What books are you enjoying reading at the moment?
PC: I’m reading The Shipping News again; and V.G Kiernan’s masterpiece The Lords of Human Kind. Kiernan’s book was one of the inspirations which led Edward Said to write Orientalism so, it’s a very important book.
The Making of Martin Sparrow, by Peter Cochrane. Published by Viking. $32.99
