Spanning 100 years and nine floors of an Edinburgh tenement building, Luckenbooth is dazzling readers with its literary ambition and wickedly good storytelling. Jenni Fagan tells us about the 20 years and wall-spanning plans she poured into her third novel.
By 16, the novelist had lived in more than 27 placements within the Scottish care system. She recalls the stories she created to survive and how books became her lifeline
Jenni Fagan
Saturday 12 August 2023
The car windows are tightly closed. A cardboard lemon spins under the mirror. I only want two things in this life. Hair long enough to put it into bunches with bright coloured hairbands and the Incredible Hulk to rip this car roof off and save me. He is my only hero. There is a click-click of an indicator light. I kick tiny brown scuffed shoes against the front seat until the person driving tells me to stop. The world is very fast outside. It runs away from the car. The government take me from place to place. They pay people to keep me. I must be very dangerous. Other children stay in the same houses for ever with people who know them. I don’t know what the Incredible Hulk would make of that. I never know the people I go to live with. Each new person opens a door like a bird’s wing and I have to go into their nest.
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| Jenni Fagan |
The follow-up to Jenni Fagan’s critically acclaimed The Panopticon, The Sunlight Pilgrims (Faber & Faber, £12.99) is a novel set in a Scottish caravan park during a freak winter in 2020. Men have frozen to death in the Sahara Desert, the Thames is overflowing and a Norwegian iceberg is threatening to arrive off the coast of Scotland. Stella, a transgender child, strikes up an unlikely friendship with Dylan, a giant from panic-stricken London, and the book follows the pair as they attempt to survive a devastating winter that reaches -56 degrees.
Sarah KackettWhat inspired you to portray a transgender child as one of the central characters in The Sunlight Pilgrims?
I started writing this five years ago when the trans community was not getting this recent kind of coverage in the media. I didn’t sit down to write a trans character – she just happened to be one. I did research among trans writers I knew and by reading lots of great books by trans authors like Gender Outlaws, or e-mailing Kate Bornstein. I thought a lot about my own experience as the “other”: growing up in the local authority care system for 16 years and also being part of the LGBT community since I was a teenager. There is no one right way to be trans, to be alive, to be human. I wrote her as an individual rather than a demographic and that’s the foundation for all of my characters. Personally I have had to fight hard for my own identity for a multitude of reasons and that partly drew me to Stella, but I was mostly taken by her one-liners and goth-chic. Her transition is a part of the novel but it isn’t the main focus of it.
How important was it for you to create a balance between the resilience and sexual identity of women in the novel?
A woman can be asexual, monogamous, straight, gay, bi, trans, gender fluid, queer, promiscuous or saintly — or an amalgamation of all those things. None of them guarantee or define resilience. It’s how we deal with every single area of life that combines to create resilience. Relationships, work, politics, religion, social expectations, community, family, financial obligations, ideas of what is or is not accepted or beautiful, ideas that women even have to be beautiful or that being “nice” or “kind” is their most important virtue, love, bereavement — growing into oneself is a lifetime’s journey and every facet of life influences the development of resilience. I have always met resilient women and some were not in touch with their sexual identity at all. Constance happens to be a mother who is very much in touch with her own sexuality and as a survivalist she is exceptionally resilient but she does not represent all women, only herself. I do tend to shy away from wishy-washy depictions of females as they hold little interest for me and rarely accurately portray the multifaceted personalities of most women. Even the shyest and quietest are not one dimensional.
To what extent did your own Scottish upbringing contribute to the setting of the story?
I am drawn to vast landscapes, I spend a lot of time walking in nature and so that informed a lot of the writing. I also used various locations that I knew and merged them with wholly fictional ones as well. Clachan Fells region needed to be directly across from Norway geographically. I lived in a caravan park when I was a kid for about six years so I understood the oddness of being a small community on the fringes of another small community. I also watched the areas of coal mines being made into industrial parks and motorways snaking through countryside, a city dump put into an area of rural beauty – I grew up around all that for a while.
There is a recurring theme of absent fathers in the novel; how much does this absence influence the growth of the characters? Or does it hinder them?
I think the characters come to their own conclusions about what a family should be. The combinations that make up any family life grow more varied and hopefully more accepted all the time. I don’t think the characters grow into themselves as a direct result of absent fathers – they are going to do that regardless of what parental figures they have, although of course it is part of their life story. I was more aware of the trio of unconventional mothers, Gunn MacRae, Vivienne MacRae and Constance Fairbairn. Both Stella and Dylan bond fairly instantly and it is in part due to their shared experience of being brought up by women who are regarded as non-conventional in their lifestyle, career, sexual choices or personality.
Is The Sunlight Pilgrims a dystopia?
The Sunlight Pilgrims is not a dystopia at all. It’s a story about individuals living through extreme circumstances; that sums up life for most people in the world today. Also, climate change is not something that is going to occur in the future – it is happening right now.
What message does the book convey about the threat to the planet as a result of global warming?
The book touches upon the divide between individuals and the bodies that govern them. In some demonstrations there are protesters saying corporatocracy is a crime. The scientists that are consulted publicly during the acceleration into an ice age blame it on a planet rather than humans destroying the environment we have to live in. The public don’t buy that though. They see these government scientists as agents on the payroll of big businesses. Stella is young but she wants to draw up a human-life contract, where each individual is legally bound at birth to commit to being a caretaker of the planet for the short time we live here. It may seem a naive idea in some ways but the way we live on earth clearly has to change, both in how we interact socially and how we treat the planet. The book follows what happens when vast amounts of freshwater from melting polar caps are dumped into the ocean: salinity dilutes, the North Atlantic Drift is put completely out of balance. These things are all scientific and well explored. It mentions freelance environmental scientists being murdered and big business owning the state so it can remain unaccountable. In the novel all of these factors contribute toward the destruction of our environment socially and geographically. I met with meteorologists while researching and I really enjoy that part of novel writing. However my main fascination was with the fact that we live on a planet and people rarely seem to engage with what that means. We don’t own this planet in the slightest and our time here is incredibly brief. What gives us the right to destroy it while we are here? Why not be better caretakers for our short time here and lay the best foundations we can for future generations, regardless of any other social belief system, religion, cultural differences, etc? It should be a fundamental common goal. I think many ordinary people wish they could find more ways to help make that happen but they feel effectively disempowered by the vast systems that govern society and the challenges involved in just keeping afloat. Stella, Dylan and Constance are just trying to survive this. It has got to a point where it seems it might be too late to change things but they do not give up hope of doing so, neither do the swathes of ordinary people who go out onto the streets to say enough is enough.
You were recently selected as one of Granta’s best young British novelists of the last 10 years. What does the future hold for you?
I am writing novel three and four at the same time. Novel three is essentially the last chapter of novel four. I am working with Sixteen Films on the film adaptation of my debut novel The Panopticon. I’m very quietly concluding a PhD so I will be Dr Fagan at some point in the near future. Mostly I am just creating a body of work and if I am not at least a little terrified, or continually growing, or taking risks as a writer, then what would be the point?
Tell me about your former role as Lewisham Hospital’s writer in residence.
I worked as a writer in residence with the neonatal unit at Lewisham for a year. It was a really great challenge to find a way to create work that could practically contribute to such an important unit. I have done residencies and collaborations with blind associations, women in prison, universities, with teenagers from all kinds of backgrounds. I like to get out into the world and take part. It’s just as important as the time I spend working on my own in some ways. Mainly though, I just go back to the words. For me it begins and ends with typing away, hour after hour, day after day. It’s a way of life and I would not change it.
Sarah Hackett
BIG ISSUE NORT
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| Jenni Fagan |
Pond, Claire-Louise Bennet (Riverhead Books)
Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut novel captures our attention in whispers more than it does with bells or whistles. It’s not a “loud” novel. It doesn’t explain or announce itself. What action there is, is retold from the distance that memory provides—a distance bridged by way of second-guesses and digressions. Pond is the expression of a delightfully melancholic voice, as serious as it is funny, strange yet so very familiar. Readers will rush to find suitable comparisons—mine was Samuel Beckett—but Bennett successfully squirms away at every turn, and achieves something singularly her own. It’s a funny, smart book, that will relocate you for a time in the rural headspace of Bennett’s unnamed narrator, where you too will find yourself diving into the grimy ground of the everyday.
–Brad Johnson (Co-Manager Diesel Bookstore)
You Will Know Me, Megan Abbot (Little, Brown & Co)
The Olympics start the first Friday in August, which means gymnastics will soon play an inexplicably prominent role in my life. I can’t say that I’ve ever watched a set of parents watching their daughter watch herself on the balance beam and thought, “somebody should set a murder mystery in that world,” but now that Megan Abbott has, with You Will Know Me, it strikes me as the best decision any writer has made in quite some time. Abbott is the author of The Fever and Dare Me, two favorites of literary-mystery lovers. Nobody captures the tortured relations between teens and adults quite like her. The high-tension world of competitive tumbling ought to be a perfect muse. And in any case this is the book that will help us all steel ourselves for that terrible, shimmering moment when the Károlyis first step onto the mat.
–Dwyer Murphy (Lit Hub contributor)
The Sunlight Pilgrims, Jenni Fagan (Hogarth)
I can’t wait for Jenni Fagan’s The Sunlight Pilgrims. The Scottish author’s debut novel, The Panopticon, gave us a world in which the most destitute among us were forced into imprisonment. With this new work, Fagan once again offers a critique of our planet, this time from a more geological perspective. Different regions of the world are experiencing the worst winter on record. Our most vital social systems—economic exchange, healthcare—are barely in operation, and people are dying in the streets from the cold. It’s against this setting that Dylan, a refugee from London, must determine the best way to survive. If this book is as good as her first, we’re in for a thrilling and elegant work of post-apocalyptic fiction.
–Amy Brady (Lit Hub contributor)
Vaseline Buddha, Jung Young Moon (Deep Vellum, trans. Jung Yewon)
Jung Young Moon’s Vaseline Buddha is a book about the act of writing. It opens with the narrator “unable to sleep, thinking vaguely that [he] would write a story.” In that first scene, he startles a would-be thief who is climbing up the gas pipes toward his bedroom window. The narrator wonders if it is his fault that the thief fell, wonders if there are some things in the world for which there is no fault. This opening “trivial” happening sets off a series of discursions, which some might disparage as literary navel-gazing or recollective free association, but which I found utterly fascinating and driven by an engaging voice. The book plays directly to the central questions of the act of writing: Should writing be driven by order or chaos? Should it structure the universe or reflect its seeming randomness? Is the imposition of form a virtue of a vice? On that front, it feels akin to writers like Gombrowicz and Beckett. Or maybe I’m just free associating? (Which I think the narrator of Vaseline Buddha would appreciate…)
–Tyler Malone (Lit Hub Contributing Editor,
The Scofield founder & Editor-in-Chief)
Multiple Choice, Alejandro Zambra (Penguin Books, trans. Megan McDowell)
I’ve never seen a writer attempt to structure a novel as a multiple choice test. Maybe it’s been done, or maybe Chilean author Alejandro Zambra is the first. Either way, it seems the perfect next step for an author who has always specialized in short, lyric works and who has increasingly embraced a hybrid genre of fiction that sort of acts like a novel but kind of looks like a short story collection. So, yes, he should further muddy the waters by turning this latest book into a standardized test that is made up of multiple choice questions that are in fact tiny, deconstructed narratives.
–Scott Esposito (Lit Hub contributor)
