I have always felt as a writer that
where novels are set is vitally important. The setting does so much to convey
the atmosphere – the flavour – of the story. With The Devil in the Corner I
might have set it in London but it wouldn't have worked. I needed Maud, the
Victorian girl from London who is my main character, to feel threatened and
vulnerable. I knew she had to go to the country, to an unfamiliar landscape
that would reflect the mood of the novel, both the claustrophobia of village
life then and the feeling of being utterly alone when you ventured beyond it. I
also wanted to impart a sense of the
supernatural, of strange things happening that were beyond the characters'
control.
So
I set The Devil in the Corner in Suffolk, near the coast, in an area similar to
where I live now. I have been coming here since I was a young teenager, for
something always draws me back. To me it has always seemed a county of mystery
and magical possibilities.
On
a clear day it is beautiful. The sun glitters on the sea, the waves lull you,
the reeds gently whisper; inland, church towers look down benignly on
pink-painted cottages.
But
on a cloudy day, with dark clouds building overhead and a rising wind, you'd
better pull up your collar and run! You crunch along the shingle beach,
looking in vain for shelter in all that vast landscape. Then it is the most
forbidding place on earth and you are the smallest creature under those great
lowering skies. There is no escape.
East
Anglia with its huge skyscapes and vast open spaces has influenced many writers
from M.R. James, the great ghost story writer, to P.D. James. When I wrote The
Devil in the Corner and Maud is haunted by Sly, the strange, gibbering, doomed
youth, I thought of M.R. James, for in many of his stories his protagonists are
pursued by undefined malevolent figures through deserted landscapes. It is terrifying for Maud to see this
deformed creature, Sly, loping after her in the dusk on a endless shingle
beach. Nowadays we would feel compassion
for Sly and recognise his epilepsy, his 'tongue-tied' cleft palette. But then a
church-going Victorian like Maud would see him as an outcast, a monstrous
aberration, unloved by God and without a place in the Universe. (God had put
the rest of Victorian mankind comfortably in charge of it, of course - as long
as they had their wits.) Sly becomes to
Maud a sort of manifestation of her guilty conscience and she is not at ease,
even when he is dead.
There
have been times when, like Maud, I have walked on the duckboards through the
reeds and thought I heard someone following me. When I've looked round, there's
been no one, just an endless rustling as the wind blows through their papery
stems. It's not surprising that this is a countryside of legends. Even where we
live, within an area of three miles we have the hell-hound of Blythburgh, the
ghostly horse-drawn hearse of the Westleton Road, the drowned man of the
Smugglers' Way – not that I've seen any of them!
It's
partly that Suffolk still seems untouched by the present. It's difficult to get
at: the A12 is slow and the trains unpredictable. To imagine a village in
Victorian times, as I did for The Devil in the Corner, wasn't very difficult. I
think they probably looked like that even up to the nineteen thirties – apart from
the sewer in the middle of the street!
This
has always been an arable land and its people are still mostly farmers whose
families have farmed here for generations, their names unchanging down the
centuries. I wanted to impart a sort of Suffolk 'feel' to the book without
making it too obvious, so my characters have names from gravestones and old
books, a lane I drive past (Tiggins), a nearby hall (Potton) and some of the
towns and villages locally, like Wissett and Brundish. The isolated house where
Maud goes to live with Juliana, which I call Windward House, is very like one I
stumbled upon by accident one day, walking the dog. It reared up behind a high
wooden fence, dilapidated, but with the most amazing view of the surrounding
countryside. You could see the sea in the distance. I had to balance
precariously on a fallen tree trunk to get a proper look and there it was –
crenelated gables, endless chimneys, tall blank windows, very Victorian and
rather forbidding altogether. I had found somewhere for Maud to live!
And
so it all comes together: character, plot, setting. You cannot always say
afterwards in what order they came to you or if one is more important than the
other. But I do know that in this particular novel the setting is very close to
my heart.
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