Three years after winning the Booker Prize, Eleanor Catton is adapting The Luminaries for the BBC from her Auckland home and recovering from the trauma of 2015. “I didn’t leave the house for a couple of months,” she says.
FINLAY MACDONALD: I see you’re reading The Encyclopedia of Country Living – not really what I expected.
ELEANOR CATTON: I’ve been reading a lot of dictionaries and encyclopedias. It’s been my slightly absurd reading project of the last few years. One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is how much pleasure I get as a reader in learning how to do things in fiction – reading a book where the writer is actually an expert on something that I’m not. And in order to try and give that pleasure as a writer, I realised I needed to know a lot more about practical things – like, I don’t know, tie certain kinds of knots, build a raft, that kind of thing.
Is that because you’re planning to write something historical again?
No, I’m thinking about writing something set in the immediate future, actually. I’ve been thinking in that way for a long time. I often think about how reliant I am as a person on technological apparatus, which means I never actually have to know how to do anything. So reading these homesteading manuals is quite interesting. I was just learning yesterday, for instance, how to cure olives using lye to remove the tannins. I never knew that.
Well, if you give up writing, you can at least become a survivalist.
Certainly not a survivalist; I find survivalists very tiresome. I think there is a lot of misanthropy in a lot of environmentalism that I find really grates on me. I don’t like the stance that human beings are evil, and this kind of arrogance that you’re going to be the one who survives, and lord it over all the stupid people.
So the new novel is not necessarily dystopian?
No. I think too many conceptions of the future are dystopian. Not to use utopia as the other extreme, but simply to be optimistic. To think maybe the next generation is going to do better.
Meanwhile, in the present you’re adapting your own book, The Luminaries, for television. How has that been going?
It’s been an enormous challenge. Coming into it, I was naive in basically every way a person can be naive. I had an idea that the book would be much easier to adapt than it is. It’s actually a complete nightmare.
To a reader, it certainly looks like a tricky book to adapt – experimental, multi-layered, intricate.
Well, before I even agreed to write it myself, the producer had sent it to a lot of established screenwriters, and we got a lot of rejections. It was one of the reasons why I took the project on. I think what I’m realising is that the book is such a novel: the pleasures are so novelistic, the idea that you’re always flipping back to a character chart, getting these signals by chapter titles and you’re aware of the structural forces that are giving the book this other layer of meaning. None of that can exist on the screen because people don’t watch TV in that way. They’re more in the moment, they only watch at one speed. You can’t say how long it takes to read a book. Everything is different.
How have you solved that?
The approach that we’ve taken is essentially to turn the whole book inside out. So we follow the characters Anna and Emery, the lovers, who are kind of occluded in the novel – they’re off stage much more than they’re on stage… and in the TV show, it’s just going to be the complete opposite. We follow them from the very beginning, we have pre-eminent access to their thoughts and feelings, and that kind of drives the story.
In a way, you’re having to rewrite The Luminaries.
Yeah! It’s very different and very much like an inversion of the book.
Which is kind of how your first novel, The Rehearsal, has been adapted for film – only you were not involved in that at all. Was that strange?
Yes, it’s definitely a mixed experience. I first saw it before it came out, in a little screening studio, and I was just sweating, having this very bodily reaction. I ended up having to go on a walk for a couple of hours, striding around Auckland afterward, just to shake off all this nervous energy. My whole body was trembling.
Why such a reaction?
It’s funny. This was my first book. I was very young, so it’s such a raw book for me in a lot of ways. It’s a book that probably showed more of me than I was aware that I was showing. And so the emotional risks of the book seemed very high – or they seem high when I look back on it now… I’m definitely at peace with the film. I don’t feel any kind of criticism of it. I feel emotionally complex about it, but not intellectually complex about it.
Last time we spoke you said you had no desire to write, you just wanted to read. You even established a grant to give other writers time to read. Has that worked out for you?
Yes, I haven’t written fiction since I finished The Luminaries. The only thing I’ve been doing is this adaptation. I think that is the great disadvantage of starting a publishing career when you’re a bit younger; compared to others you’re reading, life is shorter, you just don’t have as many layers of compost built up. So I’ve mostly been reading.
You hardly had time to breathe, let alone read, after winning the Booker Prize. It felt like you deliberately pulled back after that.
2014 was really a blur. I can’t remember much about that year. I travelled to many different countries and felt like I was constantly on the road. I think it does get quite taxing. I get angry at myself if I overhear myself giving an answer I’ve given before. I start feeling like a fraud, like a talking head.
Like someone you wouldn’t want to get stuck next to at a dinner party.
It’s like the line from that song: “Everywhere I go, damn, there I am.” When you’re talking about yourself a lot, that’s all time when you’re not being exposed to the stories of other people, and over time that becomes a problem, because you need lots of two-way relationships in your life to be able to flourish. So I wish that I had pulled back a little earlier.
Does that apply to what happened last year, when your comments about New Zealand’s political and literary culture caused such uproar?
That was really hard. Most of 2015 was a write-off. I became really depressed. I’ve never really suffered from anxiety before, but I still feel quite altered by what happened. I didn’t leave the house for a couple of months… It was pretty full on. There was one month when it seemed there was literally article after article, and it gets in your head. I had never received hate mail before, and I received a lot of hate mail. My family received a lot of hate mail. And that was really hard, being confronted with the comments.
It feels dangerous even talking about it now.
I said some things that were stupid; I don’t necessarily want to defend what I said. There’s this aspect to my personality that really doesn’t work at all well being a public figure, which is that I often have to talk about things to figure out what I feel about them – and I’m constantly changing my mind, and I’ll say something and then realise once I’ve said it that I don’t believe it any more.
Which makes it easy to be taken out of context.
Yeah, or that it was a position to take in a devil’s-advocate kind of way, but actually over the course of the conversation you come full circle. I think that kind of flexibility is really important for a writer, and using conversation as a kind of theatre to play out ideas is important. And so I do worry that we live in this world now where people are so punishing, and the idea of changing one’s mind is seen as a sign of weakness rather than a sign of strength.
Not to mention the instant judgments of social media.
Yes. Maybe about six months after that all happened, I deleted my Twitter account. I’d never been a prolific tweeter, but I realised how much it had been affecting how I was thinking. So, for example, if I was out for dinner with my friends and one of them said a witty thing, my tweet brain was thinking, ‘Should I tweet this? Would that be funny, would that make me look good, would it win me friends?’ It’s terrible.
And then when I quit Twitter, I remembered what it was like to read a book and not be thinking within the first 10 pages, ‘Am I going to tweet about it, advertise to the world that I’m reading this book?’ I felt this incredible weight being lifted off me – I could have experiences without telling the world that I was having these experiences.
Either way, you’ve had quite remarkable experiences – nothing you could have predicted.
I know. I mean, I bought a house: that would have been inconceivable four years ago. It’s especially amazing, given my husband’s a poet. We have this almost dream scenario. It seems so extraordinary.
In an alternative universe, of course, you could be living in a garret. You could have written a large, complex novel that didn’t win a prize and make you wealthy.
That’s true. I think it’s really important to make sure that the percentage of money you give away stays constant as you earn more. I’m trying to be strict with myself to not become too comfortable with a more secure way of life, and trying to be more and more charitable as things get easier financially.
What about the impact of success on your creative instincts or urges: the lost time, the distractions and expectations?
Well, I finally feel excited about writing fiction again. For a long time I had no desire to do that. And I was also a little bit scared – if a book has had a lot of exposure, it can mess with your head in a lot of ways, and you can end up not being able to tell if something you’ve written is good or bad. So I wanted to wait a long time until my shit detector came back.
I always know when I’m ready to start a book because I start getting furious with the novels that I’m reading. I start sighing and thinking, ‘You should have done something different, this is not the way this should go.’ That’s always a really good sign, that my defiance is bubbling up again
Listen to Eleanor Catton in conversation with Radio New Zealand
