Charlie and Edward Carey (Edith Holler) talk at length about the arts and the theatre in the context of his book and in general. They also talk about Norwich as Edward’s book is his love letter to the city.

Please note there is a mild swear word in this episode.

General references:
Edward’s previous episode on this podcast, number 52
Wikipedia’s article on Norwich
Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay on toy theatres is called A Penny Plain And Twopence Coloured and is available on Project Gutenberg
The downloadable theatre on Edward’s website (scroll down, on the left)
Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters In Search Of An Author
My episode with Melissa Fu, number 59

Books mentioned by name or extensively:
Edward Carey: Edith Holler
Gaston Le Roux: The Phantom Of The Opera
Jeanette Winterson: The Passion
Julian Of Norwich: Revelations Of Divine Love
Robert Louis Stevenson: Memories And Portraits
Xavier de Maistre: Voyage Around My Room

Buy the books: UK || USA

Release details: Recorded 2nd September 2024; published 27th January 2025

Where to find Edward online: Website || Twitter || Facebook || Instagram

Where to find Charlie online: Twitter || Instagram || TikTok

Discussions

01:29 The starting point of Edith Holler – lockdown, not being able to go to the theatre, and Brexit. We then move on to the fictional missing children in the book
05:22 Norwich as both a location and inspiration
12:01 Further notes on creating Edith herself, and then we discuss interpretations
18:41 More on the drawings and card theatre
21:05 The other characters
25:10 The Iron Curtain that separates theatre crew and theatre goers
29:01 The language of the novel
30:37 Was there something in particular that lead to you setting the book in the Edwardian period?
33:23 Being in Edith’s head
34:27 Beetle Spread!
38:30 Did you ever consider having Edith leave the theatre?
39:20 The undercrofts and the importance of moving the story underground. We then continue on to discuss further theatrical influences on both the novel and ourselves
47:12 The photograph of a woman at the very end of the book
48:59 Edward explains why he won’t tell us about what he’s currently working on

Transcript

Please note that this transcript has been edited for legibility and is not a 100% accurate representation of the audio. Filler words and many false sentence starts have been removed, and words have been added in square brackets for clarity.

Charlie: Hello and welcome to episode 114 of Author’s Afterword, formally known as The Worm Hole Podcast. On this podcast I talk to an author about one – occasionally more – of their books in detail. And my name’s Charlie Place and today, back on the podcast, is Edward Carey. We’ll be talking about his latest novel, Edith Holler. Twelve year old Edith lives permanently in her father’s theatre, the only theatre remaining in Edwardian Norwich. She cannot leave for the curse put upon her when she was a baby ruled that if she ever does, the theatre will fall down. Then the person who put the curse on her exploded – it did happen in a theatre after all. Now Edith’s got a play of her own in mind that she wants her theatrical staff-family to put on: she’s done a monumental amount of reading, and has learned that a large number of children have gone missing over the years and the culprit is a nasty old woman called Mawther Meg. As her father’s new fiancée tries to lure Edith out down the steps of the main entrance (she’s heiress to the Beetle Spread factory, made of exactly that ingredient) Edith attempts to outwit them all, stay away, and write the truth about what happened to the children. Hello Edward!

Edward: [Chuckles.] Hello Charlie, thank you for having me back!

Charlie: It’s great to have you on it, it is lovely. I want to ask you about the very starting point of this book and then, yeah, we’ll go from there.

Edward: Well, it was written like many, many, novels during the pandemic, and I couldn’t go anywhere so I thought I would put a character who couldn’t go anywhere as the central figure. But I was also thinking about if you can’t go anywhere, you need to imagine how to go somewhere, you need to think of other places. And I was thinking of a novel written in 1790, I think, called A Voyage Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre, who, in this book – it’s written as a guidebook to a room written by an officer who was under house arrest, so it was almost like a travel book to a room, if you imagine that a single room was a whole country. And I was thinking of those rooms, those special places that can go to places while you stay actually in the same place. So the theatre, the stage is that special room that can be anywhere and you say something, like “this is… here we are on a desert island,” and you believe it; there it is, though it’s just the same room and we haven’t travelled. So it was a yearning to travel during the pandemic as the world was going to hell, as people were dying everywhere, as we were being governed by complete morons. And it was also written out of a longing for theatre. I’ve worked in theatre a lot and I have many friends who are involved in theatre, and at that time, of course, they couldn’t work and the government was busy – the British government was busy – saying to ballet dancers, for example, “well, they must simply retrain”. And the whole idea of thinking that the arts are a luxury. No, the arts are an absolute necessity. How do we know ourselves? How do we ever communicate? How do we stop ourselves from destroying each other if we don’t have the arts? It was a passionate cry and I thought… this is a very long answer, Charlie!… but I thought also how terrible the older generations have been to the young. In America, where I live, the politicians feel it’s perfectly acceptable for children to be shot in schools and elsewhere. And also just thinking of the casual cruelty and stupidity of Brexit and of the people who voted for it and of the ignorance and of what the older generations have left the young.

Charlie: I don’t think that was a too lengthy answer. You have touched on something, actually, because you said Voyage Around My Room, which is really interesting – I haven’t read that, but I know about it. But something you’ve just said there at the end about the older generations have been terrible to the young – is this where the missing children factor comes in?

Edward: Yes, absolutely. And it’s the whole, you know, what’s happened to them in the past, what we do to them, how we silence them, how we give them rules. It’s a conservative government, but it’s everywhere – the removal of libraries and things like that so that they have no access to imagination – or of course they will always imagine – but everything that’s being created by the governments is inhibiting people’s way of thinking. And I think if you destroy the arts, you destroy creativity, and you need creativity in every field! So yes, those lost children were a sort of symbol of everything that was making me furious – and still is – during the pandemic.

Charlie: I knew I was going to enjoy talking about this book with you. I knew there was going to be so many more layers than I could pick out myself and were there. Yeah, so yeah, I mean you’ve got Edith having access to a library – that in itself is part and parcel of that then as well, yeah.

Edward: Exactly. And the library is burnt down, under suspicious circumstances, later on in the novel. And so it’s eradicating the past. Yeah. You know, the importance of libraries, the importance of having access to wonder, to being a human being, to not being stifled as a human being.

Charlie: Well, I’m gonna pivot on this subject but sort of stay on it, I suppose, because when I was doing my research and I was looking into Norwich and seeing lots of ways that you’d been inspired, or I reckoned you had been inspired, and I thought that the library… I think the library burnt down in Norwich, but it was a lot later, I think it was in 1994, I think I wrote down. Lots of dates to remember with that. But, yeah, I suppose I want to just talk more about your influences in terms of Norwich itself, because it’s obvious, in the novel, that Norwich is important to you, and I know it is, just factually. Can you talk more about that and the role there and the inspiration?

Edward: Yeah, and again in a sort of Xavier de Maistre sort of way, I was walking around our house; I had been working on another novel and I knew it was going nowhere, but I hadn’t fully admitted it to myself, and I needed something fresh in those difficult days. And I was just looking around the house and we have an old print of Norfolk. And Norfolk is where I grew up. And I miss it terribly. I was sitting in Austin, Texas, and I was thinking how can I get back to Norwich, which is the city of my childhood? How can I get back there? And so I thought, “yes, well, write about it. So conjure it. Let’s have it. Put it on stage!” As a child, I grew up in a village about eight miles outside Norwich. But we go into Norwich a lot, of course. It was like the centre of everything; Norwich seemed impossibly, wonderfully huge. The cathedral was just the most magnificent building in the world, in the history of buildings. There’s London Street in Norwich. And I thought that was London, this London Street [Charlie chuckles]. I needed nothing more than that. And I went to see my first plays at the Theatre Royal Norwich. And those, just as they say, it blew my mind. I mean, seeing theatre was, as it is for so many people – we need access to the arts – was just like, [elongates next word] “Whoa! This can actually happen,” this seemed to me absolutely extraordinary. So I was paying homage to, to the city that I love, to the castle – which is a Norman keep, which is in the centre of the city, and it’s on this huge mound. And there’s this old myth that there is an ancient king who lives in the mound with an army that will rise up to save Norwich if it’s ever under threat. The history of Norwich, which is very bloody at the time – the first ever case of blood libel in all of Europe is actually from Norwich – there’s some Nazi history – every place deserves some great history. For a while, one of its big businesses was cloth. And they used to dye cloth for this particular Norwich shawl. And they would use madder root to diet to make it red – the madder market is still a part of Norwich now, that is the name of the place – but then when they were dyeing this cloth, the river, Wensum, which runs through Norwich, was dyed red as well. And just that image was just like, “Oh, my God! Oh, my Norwich!” I longed to get back to it. And it had so many churches because all the guilds were fighting against each other; there were churches everywhere. It’s a city with great history. Horatio Nelson went to school there. It’s just, you know, that was my place. I don’t go there as often, obviously, as often as I used to, but each time I go back I find new stuff. I went there just after the pandemic lifted a bit because I needed to walk the streets to understand if I got the novel right, even though, of course, Edith is not allowed, as you said, she can’t leave the theatre. but I could. When I was there, there was something that I hadn’t realised from all the maps and everything else, is the directly opposite the Theatre Royal, which is the basis of the Holler Theatre in the novel, is the Bethel Hospital, which was a lunatic asylum, as they used to call them, and that was directly opposite the theatre, and I hadn’t realised that until I actually stood there. And that seemed to me just an extraordinary! Just dialogue between those two buildings just seems something so fascinating. So, yeah, I love Norwich! I love its stories, I love its folklore. One of the things that I didn’t know, I knew a bit about it, but I didn’t know as much until I did some research, is that it’s riddled with tunnels underneath the city, these undercrofts are actually there. And I just thought, “I’ve got to use them. I’ve got to use them in the novel.” And so I went travelling in Norwich during the pandemic.

Charlie: So this is your Norwich novel, then? Your love letter to Norwich’s?

Edward: This is my Norwich novel, yes. And it’s a love letter to Norwich, I hope.

Charlie: Yeah, yeah. I looked for the hospital; I found the Theatre Royal and I have to say, whoever writes the Wikipedia article on Norwich, please can you write more about the Hospital because I looked for it, I could not find it on there, I thought that bit you’d made up. So that’s lovely to hear about it! [Laughs.]

Edward: It’s there; now, of course, it’s turned into flats [Charlie: yeah], but it still retains the facade of the building. And it must have been an extraordinary thing that those two are close, so close together.

Charlie: I want to ask you one more question on this and then I’m going to move to Edith proper, I suppose. The story and the person of Julian of Norwich – did her life influence you as well?

Edward: Yeah, I mean I knew about her; she’s one of the most famous beloved figures, perhaps the most beloved figure of the city of Norwich. And she is just an extraordinary character. And I went back and read her book, the first book ever published by a woman, I think, in all of Europe, certainly in the English language. And just reading it during the pandemic, the sense of hope that she gives and the sense of strangeness and of wonder that she has in her writing feels incredibly fresh and incredibly exciting. And I discovered, as I was reading her, that during the pandemic thousands of people were reading Julian of Norwich, that actually she was a great, great comfort to people. She was an anchorite and she was sealed into the walls of the church, and she had one window to communicate with people. So Edith’s like a version of her, but not a sacred version, that business of Julian being trapped in that space, but happily trapped in that space, and creating something while she was trapped. She wanted to be. She wanted to cut herself off from the world.

Charlie: Yeah, reading about that, yeah, that life was fascinating. So Edith Holler herself, tell us about creating her.

Edward: Well, again, I was sort of furious about what was going on; everything seemed so desperate. I wondered what was I going to do here. And I need to backtrack a little bit because as the pandemic was starting, I was in London and the last social engagement I had for then, whatever it was a year and a half or more, whatever… [chuckles] I can’t even remember how long it was that we went through all that hell, was sitting in a cafe round the corner from the British Museum, talking to the illustrator, Clive Hicks Jenkins, who’s an amazing illustrator, and I’d just met him the night before at some book event. And we were talking about toy theatres and Victorian toy theatres, wonderful card theatres that Victorian children used to play with, and Robert Louis Stevenson has written amazingly about. I was clinging to that conversation for a year and a half [chuckles]. It was still inspiring me. Clive is an amazing illustrator, he’s just a brilliant artist. Genius, I think. And I kept thinking of Clive and his inspiration as he talked about these toy theatres, these small things of wonder, that were like lightning rods for children’s imagination, that suddenly they could put on these wonderful plays out of paper, and you could make a tragedy out of paper. But that paper could be tragic too. Art at its own level, a little drama. So once I decided I wanted to write about the theatre, I thought the illustrations would have to be a card theatre, so that you could actually cut the novel up, theoretically, and put a toy theatre together. But as I was doing this, I’d already started the idea of who would narrate this. And I was already, of course, thinking about children being silenced and pushed aside and I couldn’t get out, so I already knew that the principal character would have to be locked, would have to be stuck like we all were, but endlessly travelling in her mind, just filled with stories, just bursting with them. And so I realised that the child would have to tell the story. And do you believe everything she says or not? Well, that’s up to the reader! I always think of that line from Jeanette Winterson in The Passion: “I’m telling you stories, trust me,” [chuckles] which always absolutely adore. And so I knew it would have to be a young narrator who had been stuck, and the reader should wonder, “is this curse real?” And there’s something very suspicious about it because the actor-manager father is using the curse to maintain an audience, for his theatre. He’s actually capitalising on his daughter. And he even more insists that she can never go out. There’s something very unpleasant about that. And he also insists that she must walk around the audience, when they come, during a performance. She will walk around the foyer, but she must never talk, Never allowed to talk. And I just thought of what then, if that was this person and she was grey – she’s dressed in grey, she’s never been outside. Her skin is great. She even puts ash on her face. She’s like a miniature, youthful, Miss Havisham. And I just thought, “yeah, who are you? This is it. What would she know?” Every idea of her. She was not bought up on food – well, she was, literally – but she was brought up on stories, on the idea of you can do anything – on the stage you can do anything. You can say, “Here is Richard III, a king who died hundreds of years ago. No, no, no! There he is, alive on the stage”. And so for her, all the business between reality and imagination has all got confused and mixed up in her head. And I just thought, “Yes, this must be the narrator”. And the first illustration I did was of Edith as a toy theatre figure to be cut out, this little grey figure. And the moment I had painted that, I thought, “All right, you’re on, Edith, where are we going?”

Charlie: I like that line from Jeanette Winterson there, and I think it’s really interesting because as I read your book, I was feeling that it was up to me to decide what I thought was going on, and it’s up to another reader to decide what they think, what’s going on. Was this what you had in mind? Do you have your own interpretation? I suppose. And so on?

Edward: I went backwards and forwards and I let [the story] go in a way that felt natural to it. It has a five act structure and there’s Shakespeare quotes throughout it. And, it’s clear that her knowledge of Shakespeare is pretty impressive, that she could quote it non-stop while of course never being allowed to perform it. So, in terms of the truth, well, what do you believe? You can take it in any way. And I kept thinking, “Do I need to explain this?” And then suddenly you’ve got to the fifth act, which is almost a play. It’s set entirely on the stage – finally, we’re back on the stage, having been absent from it. And then I thought, “Well, how do we get out of this?” And in the end, the audience are waiting for the curtain call. Nobody comes. And I just thought, “Yeah, that’s it”. You figure it out. [Exclaiming] why do we have to explain everything all the time? I teach creative writing at the university here in Austin and one of the classes I’m teaching this semester is on fairy tales, to the Masters students, and we would look at these ancient fairy tales, these primal texts, and I say, “Why do we need to explain? Can’t we just see the wonder of the images, the power of them?” And then we don’t want to nail everything down because then you just don’t think about it. I wanted it to be a little open.

Charlie: Yeah. It’s interesting, actually, I often really want to know the end of a book, or at least have an interpretation that I think, “that is the one,” at least for me, and I don’t feel that with this book, which I like, I really like that I have just accepted that, “I think it’s possibly this, I think it’s possibly this, I think it’s possibly this”. But I did find it fascinating, and something you’ve said about the toy theatres reminded me, actually, and moving on to your drawings – you do have the drawings of the toy theatre; and then I cottoned on later that you had also the drawings of Edith’s clothes, and I think other people’s clothes, as the clothes that you would put on a little mannequin or a little cardboard figure, which reminded me of toys that I had as a kid with those books that you’ve got the cut-out doll and you put the dresses on. So, yeah, can you talk about, I suppose, if I say, “your employment” of your drawing aspect that you do include in your novels, into this one specifically – how you went about that?

Edward: Well, as I said, it started with Clive, but I knew I needed to build the theatre. I spend as much time illustrating as I do writing. For me, they’re essential, they’re a part of it. And for me this was really important. It was as if that sense of being a child, of playing, of imagining, you could have it together. So, yes, you can dress Edith, you can keep changing her costume. She’s got her arms out like this, so you can put everything on and each time you get a new costume for it, it’s the same thing, with her arms out. And so I wanted to make it, I wanted to have that there, but then sometimes the illustrations won’t fit the text and that’s deliberate. So you’re beginning to wonder what’s happening, whether it’s actually true. So when she’s very nervous at one point and she’s about to go and see her stepmother, the illustration for it is four views of a seascape – a calm sea, a slightly rougher sea, and then a sea in tempest. That’s how she’s thinking. And you can imagine her playing with these figures all the time. And she has played, she did have a friend that she played with these figures. And I wanted to also imagine how would it be with our lives if we had all our parents, relatives, as little toy figures [chuckles]; we could move them around and make our own bedroom a backdrop so that anything ordinary could then actually be put on stage. And suddenly it becomes… our lives are looked at as a piece of drama. And she’s so dramatic, she’s quite solipsistic, sees herself as the centre part in her own drama, but then we all do. And actually, readers can just go to my website and you can even download the theatre instructions if you feel like!

Charlie: Yeah, I love that part, actually – finding out that you’ve… I mean, you can cut it out of your book if wanted, I wouldn’t want to do that, obviously, but you can also go to your website and you’ve made it there, which adds a different dimension to the narrative, which I love. Yeah. Talking on writing, but also if I ask about the other characters first, because you’ve got the theatrical family, some of which may or may not be blood relatives to Edith – can you tell us about creating them? Because they’re absolutely fascinating.

Edward: There’s a big division, of course – when you’re in the theatre – between what happens backstage and what happens front of house. And I wanted to have the front of house part of the family being all about money and they’re in the smart part of the theatre, which is for the public, whereas backstage it’s all falling apart and messy, but that’s where all the magic happens. So I thought I could split the family. It was always that amazing thing, with iron – the iron curtain that comes down in a stage is – if the theatre is on fire, either side will be contained by the iron curtain. It always seemed like an extraordinary thing to me. But just theatres as a space; I was lucky enough to work for theatre in Lithuania and in Romania, and I was a stage doorkeeper – best job I ever had, I think – of the Comedy Theatre, now the Pinter Theatre in London’s West End. And I had the keys to the theatre! I could bike in in the morning, unlock it and go, “this is my theatre!” [Charlie chuckles.] And so I knew everybody in that theatre. And I dream about it sometimes; I know it really, really well. And so in terms of the family, I was really drawing on everybody that I’d met in the theatre in whatever country. I also worked briefly with a shadow puppet master in Malaysia. And those puppets have a sort of sacred and extraordinary spirit about them. And people believed that they contained real spirit, they were real entities. And people who were sick would ask for the puppets to come and visit them. But the theatre for me, just as a space – I knew I always wanted to write about the theatre. And when I was in Romania, I actually lived in the theatre in a city called Craiova, and I lived in the theatre as we were putting on a production. And it was just that amazing thing of never leaving it. And that, obviously, was the germ; Edith Holler was just starting there. And the actors were desperately poor, and some of them actually lived in their dressing rooms. And one night I went up onto the grid, the highest part of the stage, and there was bedding up there. So people were actually even in sleeping up there. And so understanding that sense of theatre; and I wanted that idea of that family that could be theatrical, but you’d be stuck in your one job. So maybe you were making the costumes which one of Edith’s aunts does, but she does it with a difference, so that she can add a hump to a costume if she feels like it or something like that. They all have their stations. And then of course, there’s the bloody actor-manager that you used to have, who was a sort of Lawrence Olivier type figure, and yet what’s underneath there? There’s almost nothing there; he’s almost hollow as a human, he’s just the parts that he plays – then he has personality, but without them he’s almost nothing. And then the understudy, the poor understudy he was never allowed to go on. And so I just thought that whole world of theatre is so amazing and intense. And actually being backstage when I was stage doorkeeper, for a couple of years, at the Comedy, was fascinating. And one of the most fascinating things is the theatre called the Pinter Theatre now, because it was where Harold Pinter had so much of his work. When I was there, Pinter was there himself performing, so I saw him every night. And he had such an extraordinary presence. He was incredibly generous as well; he took me out to dinner, I went to his house. Just amazing, but absolutely terrifying [laughs]. And everybody was kind of made slightly nervous by him, but he was a different sort of human being than I’ve ever seen.

Charlie: You saying here, it’s was making me think, I just do love how you’ve brought every part of the theatre to it. You go so far into the backstage, you go up at the top, as you’re saying, about the grid and everything. And you go below, I mean, even further, obviously, because of the undercrofts. And, yeah, you saying about the curtain, that’s something that I noticed seemed to be a sort of theme. And you saying here about the two halves of the theatre and it protects against fire – you’ve also got Mr Jet that’s obviously bringing in more of this whole idea. I mean, you’re saying iron curtain there and I’m thinking of other things as well going on, politics, almost [Edward chuckles]. Yeah, is there more that you can tell us about your use of the curtain and everything? I suppose if I say I was surprised to hear that it was in place at that time, yeah.

Edward: Well, because fire was obviously… Shakespeare’s Globe burned down. Fire in the theatre is something with the lights, and particularly back when you had candles, and the Comedy was a wonderful theatre – I think it’s been changed now – and it was still, I think what they called, a hemp house, which means it’s operated by rope. And they didn’t have the weight system in then, or they had some version of it, but it was a very, very old-fashioned – they’ve changed it now because it’s also very dangerous. But also the idea of the theatre is like a ship as well. And I love the fact that in Victorian England that many people worked in the theatre, moving these ropes, were old sailors. I love that. But yes, the curtain is the divide between us and them. Them is the audience. We entertain them, but they’re dull [Charlie chuckles]. They’re people of Norwich. They’re the ordinary, every day. We are the… the magic is the other side. And you put it on the moment you step on the stage, as the stage can do anything. I think there’s one part early on in the book where Edith is on her own on the stage and she can feel it, the power of it, the power of that room of imagination. She almost thinks she’s drowning in it, that she’s sinking into the stage. But that is the division, between the world that is ordinary and every day, and the world that imagines in which anything could happen. Two completely different sets of rules. And I’ve always loved it, actually, at the Comedy – and I keep saying the Comedy because it’s the theatre that I know so well, every little last bit of it. The wig room, etcetera; the laundry room; every single part of it is – it’s quite crummy, backstage, actually! And the corridors are all grey and not very nice. But then you go through the pass door, you slip through the pass door by the stage manager’s desk, then you’re suddenly in the world of the public. But it’s all smart; and it’s also so interesting that front of house you have all this gilt and the plush seats and the carpets and the chandeliers, and all that nonsense, but that’s a play in itself that you’re actually putting on that performance! Whereas backstage is kind of crummy and down to earth, and yet that’s where the performance will come from. So I love that, just that difference between the two worlds. And also that when you’re in the magnet, you sit down in a theatre, you sit there to watch something extraordinary happen, to give yourself up for it, to forget yourself for a little bit, but also to show you what human beings are. It’s there to be told. It’s just amazing!

Charlie: I don’t know anywhere near as much as you do, but I like theatre, so, yeah, I kind of get what you’re meaning. You have said about Shakespeare a few times, and something that I noted down that I wanted to talk to you about is the language. I know that when I started reading this book, there were a few lines, like a few pages in or whatever, where I thought initially there had been a printing error or proof-reading error [Edward chuckles], and then it happens a few more times, again and again, and I’m starting going, “Okay, this is a dialogue thing”. And yeah, I can’t remember it exactly; it’s kind of getting towards, I suppose you could call it, an old English thing every now and then, that the characters do. And, yeah, I just wanted to ask you about your use of language and, yeah, that really, within the text, the dialogue.

Edward: Shakespeare reigns supreme. And I think there’s lots of Shakespeare in lines that she just uses every day. She won’t even notice it then. Mind you, we are all doing that still as well. Those lines are in our heads whether we know it or not. She speaks in a somewhat theatrical way because she can only speak in that theatrical way. And so there’s lines that come out, are versions of Shakespeare sometimes – sometimes they’re direct quotes – but it feels like it’s there and it’s alive. And sometimes I try to use the Norfolk dialect as well so that that adds into it. But yes, the language had to be theatrical. It had to represent her, because she’s this very vulnerable theatrical thing just made up of stories. But she’s like a mop. She seems vulnerable, I think. But in terms of language, the idea of using language, and you’ve got to remember, she’s silenced when she’s in public [Charlie: yes]. And so when she bursts forward with words, she’s always spewing with words. And then in her silence, the way to try and make herself heard is to write her own play. Which she does.

Charlie: Yeah. Something I noticed as well; it occurred to me that you have written a monologue play [Edward laughs and says ‘yes’] in many ways. Yeah, I mean it’s incredibly long, obviously, because it’s a novel length. But yeah, there is that to it as well, which was interesting to contemplate. We’ve talked about a lot but I was just wondering if there was anything else in the fact, I suppose, that you have set it in the Edwardian period. Was there a particular thing that led you to put it there as opposed to another time?

Edward: Yeah, and yes, it was absolutely very deliberate; Queen Victoria’s just died and I wanted to think about what did that mean for Britain then? For, then, the longest reigning monarch to have gone when Britain was the empire doing all its terrors across the world. Then Britain was the most powerful nation on the planet. And this, the feeling of pomp. But it’s also I chose then because it’s over. It’s already over and everybody’s in mourning. And I chose it because of Brexit, because I despise Brexit. It was my, “What are you now?” And I wanted it to be in a slightly crummy theatre. This whole novel is set in a theatre that is actually falling apart, actually falling apart. And bits of it fall down throughout – the stage collapses, that danger. But yes, it was meant absolutely as a statement on, What are we now? What have we done? What is this now?” And the sham of the marvellous, the powerful England, all that rubbish. So, yes, and also Queen Elizabeth II was still alive then, but she was very old. So I knew that chances are she wasn’t going to be around that much longer. So I was also linking Victoria’s death to the death of Elizabeth II, because so many people would think of Elizabeth II as a way of being the face of the country and that feeling safe, perhaps, for many people, well what happens when that goes? But also of the insularity of Brexit, that we just want to be us. What the hell are you talking about? We are European, for crying out loud. And so actually to set, to sum up, England – although I love it enormously – to set the whole novel in a provincial city because the country is acting so provincially, and the small minded nastiness of Brexit. Actually, we’re European; we’re part of a much wider and more welcoming picture. So, yes, very deliberate [laughs].

Charlie: It’s fascinating. That’s not something that I saw in the novel before I’ve heard you talking about it and researching as well, which… it’s just an interesting thing. Edith – I found it fascinating because I loved every moment of this novel, and at the same time you’re also thinking, my goodness, you’ve been in her head for so long, and that’s where I suppose I’m thinking, what’s real, what’s not And you turn to sometimes thinking, “Can I work out what’s real?” Was it hard for you being in a head? Or was it just something that came naturally? Or did you ever have a moment where you’re like, “Oh, I want to move to someone else?”

Edward: I loved her. I loved her voice, I loved her guts because she’s extremely brave and kind of tough, even though physically she’s not. Yeah, but it was intense, but the pandemic was intense. She was a creature that’s born out of the isolation of the pandemic. And so it had to be her voice. And I love the fact that you said it’s almost a monologue, and I think, yeah, that’s actually it. We have her inner thinkings, we have a sort of desperation and, you know, she hasn’t even gone through puberty yet, but she’s about to, and I think that’s basically what is happening as the novel ends. She’s beginning to grow up or to have less access. The world of the imagination is also beginning to shut down.

Charlie: Yeah. It makes me want to ask, is there a sequel? And, no, I don’t know if we need a sequel [laughs].

Edward: [Laughing] No, no!

Charlie: So I do want to ask about Beetle Spread. Where on earth is this from? Basically. If I just leave it there and you say what you don’t mind telling us.

Edward: One of the things I was thinking early on, the house that I grew up in, in Norfolk, just outside Norwich, did have a lot of death watch beetles in it, it was an old house. And when you were very, very, very quiet, you could hear them clicking. And it always seems to me amazing – they’re called death watch beetles because people sitting around a corpse before it’s buried, at night, nothing else going on but sitting up with the corpse, would then hear the beetles. They wouldn’t otherwise have heard them. But it’s only under the death watch that you actually hear them. And so the more I was thinking about Norwich, the more I thought, have that sort of click in. Suddenly I thought of the theatre, it’s so vulnerable itself, it’s so close to collapsing. I just thought, yeah, well, I’ll riddle it with death watch beetles. Why not? And so everything, grew from that idea. And I was thinking of you could do that on the stage, just hearing the clicking, and you don’t have to actually even see the beetles for you to imagine them. I was think it’s just such a genius of J M Barrie in the play, Peter Pan. You don’t see Tinkerbell [Charlie chuckles] – so get that awful drawing from Walt Disney out of your head! Tinkerbell is shown by a bell someone offstage is ringing, and by a light, by a flashing mirror. And I just thought, “Oh, can I do something like that, with a clicking of the beetles?” And then I was thinking of folklore, and there’s a rich folklore in Norwich. And I wondered if I could have a character linked to the death watch beetles. And so the idea then came of Mawther Meg, that I have Norwich absolutely riddled with a plague of death watch beetles, and this old woman comes to cook them, and rather like the Pied Piper, to take them away by turning them into food. So that’s that side. And then she becomes like a mythological folklore other character who sort of never disappears. I put a statue of her next to the actual statue of Horatio Nelson in front of the cathedral. But in Norwich – I don’t think it’s there any more – but growing up, when sometime you come into Norwich, you would see Colman’s mustard factory was there and Colman’s of Norwich! And so I was also inspired by that. And in fact, I’m holding up, a little old Bovril jar. But I was also thinking of that – there’s something of Marmite and Bovril. So I just thought, yes. But I wanted to make Norwich absolutely even more distinct, so I wanted there to be a taste that would go with Norwich as well, and it would be this particular spread which has some unfortunate ingredients in it.

Charlie: Yes [Edward chuckles]. Seemed to me sometimes it’s going almost towards a Sweeney Todd. Almost. I don’t know.

Edward: Yeah! I mean but it is Grand-Guignol, as well. When I was working in Romania and this was so much in my head when I worked in Lithuania, there was a production of Titus Andronicus that was going on all the time. And just the amount of bloodletting [Charlie laughs] that goes on in that play is both hilarious but kind of inspiring. And I didn’t see the production in the Globe in which they gave the groundlings, who stand in front of the stage, they gave them cheap macs, waterproofs [Charlie laughs], because the was just being spurted into the audience so much. And that seemed amazing! It’s almost like a kind of Antony and Artos’ spurt of blood. But I just thought, yeah, but do it, do it. And so I have in the backstage in the novel, there is this huge, [elongates word] huge barrels of fake blood to be used. What’s real, what isn’t?

Charlie: Yeah, yeah [both laugh]. There’s pages of the description of that, it was quite interesting. Kind of sets you up for what you’re gonna read for the rest of the novel, which is really, really cool. So I think you’re going to say, “No”. And I think, yeah, I would probably say, “No,” but I still wanted to ask it – did you ever consider allowing Edith to leave properly at all, the theatre?

Edward: No. The moment she leaves, the spell is broken.

Charlie: Ah, okay!

Edward: So, that’s the whole business of the theatre. It’s there’s in that sacred, wonder space where magic can happen, but the moment you step outside, it’s not there. She couldn’t; that’s where it happens. And so, in terms of the novel, she would never be allowed out.

Charlie: I’m glad I asked that question, even though it was a no! That was very interesting. You mentioned the undercrofts – can you talk more about this, about the importance of moving the story underground?

Edward: Yeah, and in terms of the staging of the novel, I was also thinking about how exciting it is when you change scenes in a stage set. Not everything is just stuck on the ground level, on the floor of the stage that you can go up, but also you could go down. And I can remember just seeing, and this is not going to sound, like, “What? You’re talking about a production of this?” of Guys and Dolls that was at the National Theatre years and years ago. And Sky Masterson, the character, is going down into the sewers of New York. And they showed him on the stage lifting up a manhole cover and going down. And then they lifted the stage, it drew him up as he went down a spiral staircase onto the stage, still the same stage floor but you believed you were now in the sewers of New York. I was so excited by that image, twenty years ago or more when I saw it, that I thought, “Wow, what an amazing way of showing that descent!” So I even describe – I don’t say Guys and Dolls – but I describe as Edith tries to escape the people who are pursuing her, and goes underneath the theatre, I described that same piece of theatre that I saw in Guys and Dolls years ago, that she’s saying, you could do this on stage by doing that. So she does this; she goes under. And I think it’s also about a time of when you create. You’re on your own, you’re in the dark, you’re trying to figure out, you’re trying to get yourself back to the light by writing, by finding the place of the writing. And so one of the things that happens that’s very alarming and disturbing for Edith, is that she’s already written a play or a version of her play before she goes underneath the theatre. And what is alarming for her is that then when she’s under the theatre, she meets the characters that she’s written, that suddenly her characters come alive, appear to be alive really, and are speaking to her. So its also that relationship between a writer and their cast and their characters, or your relationship with your work. So it was important to get her to a place where she could actually evolve. And she is changing, she is metamorphosing, she is growing up, she is almost a woman as she’s down there, but she needed to escape. But also I was thinking in terms of structures, I was thinking say of King Lear or Hamlet – they go off the stage in Act 4 for a while I thought, yes, I have to do this with Edith as well. We’ll get them out of the way, meanwhile, all sorts of hell is going on up above. But unlike in the Shakespeare places, we can only ever be with this first person narrator, Edith underground. And so that was what I wanted then. To go into absolute darkness. It’s a thing. You can just turn the lights out on the stage and just think, “My God, what’s happening? What’s going on there?” And the slightest noise and you just go, “What’s happening? What is going on down there?” And Norwich has all these undercrofts and they’re there, these sort of cellars, they’re sort of riddled with them. And ‘undercroft’ is such a beautiful word, I think. And they’re all over the city and you’re just sort of bearing deep into Norwich history because it becomes prehistoric down there so there’s all ancient stuff. And Tombland is a part of Norwich, which is from a Scandinavian word, but just underneath the cathedral are huge plague pits. And I wanted Edith to actually experience the whole history of Norwich as she’s underneath the city, including meeting Julian of Norwich herself.

Charlie: Fascinating. I wondered after because she’d gone kind of under the underneath, almost. And I wondered if there was going to be something further. Yeah, it was a fascinating thing. What you’re saying – you’re bringing all these different pieces of plays in, which it obviously makes complete sense, but it’s making me think of how much you’ve got intertextuality, I think you would say that, within your novel, which is fascinating. You’re also making me think of a… I suppose you could call it theatrically life changing performance of The Phantom of the Opera I saw as a child. And I don’t know if they do it any more, but certainly that one I saw, they had the chandelier at the start come crashing down on the stage. And, yeah, the last time I saw a production of that, it didn’t do that. I was like, I wish they still did it! [Laughs.]

Edward: I’ve never seen it, the Lloyd Weather musical. I’ve never seen it. But I have read the Gaston Le Roux novel, which is a wonderful book, it’s absolutely… I loved it and actually I thought it was so exciting. And the influence of that novel is clearly in the book. But also you talked about intertextuality and sort of meta and all that – I was very excited by going back to read Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author as well – it’s such an amazing play – in which the actors are rehearsing and one day characters just appear. Characters appear.

Charlie: Right, okay.

Edward: And it’s just very thrilling. Yeah.

Charlie: I haven’t heard of that, I’ll have to look it up and I’ll certainly put a link in the show notes for listeners. Yeah, that sounds fascinating. Definitely go and see Phantom when you can, absolutely.

Edward: Yes. Yeah, it’s no longer in New York, but it’s still in the West End. I need to ask about the chandelier first though [Charlie chuckles].

Charlie: Yeah, I mean, the last time I saw it just… I think it was on the stage, well, up above the stage, just swinging. But yeah, no, it was something. It was spectacular.

Edward: Was that in London?

Charlie: No, it was actually in Southampton. Gosh, I was very young. Yeah, it was one of the first performances I saw. But it was this massive, massive chandelier they made, really Gothic. So then they brought it down and depending where you were sat it was right over your head, really low down. So yes, it left quite an impression on me, yeah.

Edward: I love that! And it reminds me of… we took our kids to see Matilda the Musical, which is also an influence on this book. And we were watching the musical, which is terrific, but at one point, after Miss Trunchbull has thrown one of the children out, a dummy descended and landed amongst the audience, or right in front of them [chuckles]. It was just genius. Yeah. Wonderful [laughs].

Charlie: Going to have to ask, then, is that Miss Trunchbull being Margaret in some way, is that where the influence is?

Edward: I don’t know, I mean, she, Margaret, belongs to a long line of characters and I guess Miss Trunchbull would be one of them. The old woman Longing to be the younger woman, throughout the Brothers Grimm, you’ll find this type of character. She’s often the stepmother. She’s been around, that character, for a long time. And interestingly, in Grimm, I always go back to thinking of Hansel and Gretel, which is one of my favourite fairy tales, the witch and the stepmother are never on stage at the same time. They never appear. The link between these characters is always fascinating. And at the end, she’s just died – the mother. And what’s also interesting is, and it always gives me kind of shivers when I remember this, that to begin with, when the Grimms found this story and wrote it down so that it wouldn’t be lost – obviously they didn’t write any of these fairy tales, they just collected them – originally the mother was not a stepmother, she was their actual mother.

Charlie: Okay!

Edward: And Jacob Grimm changed it to be the stepmother. Alarming.

Charlie: Yes, considering those fairy tales themselves are quite dark and it was darker. That’s very interesting and mildly terrifying. You have a photo of a woman at the end. What is this about?

Edward: Yes, I have it with me just here. There she is! This is actually a real photograph taken by a man called W L Shrubsole from Marketplace Norwich, and pretty much exactly the same time as about 1901 – it says, ” the Queen”, but it’s definitely towards the end of her life. I was in Norwich that time I discovered the Bethel Hospital was opposite the Theatre Royal. And so many of the churches around Norwich were too numerous to actually be active. They’ve become antique shops, basically, or cafes or the buildings are being used in a different way. As I was going through it, I was just leafing through stuff, and there was this book of old photographs, and I came across this photograph, and it made me stop because it’s exactly how I imagine Edith to be, holding a manuscript. Why is she holding a manuscript? And she looks quite pale and she’s got this rather long face and she’s been forced into a bustle and she doesn’t look comfortable in it. And she looks, in fact, quite nervous altogether. And I thought, “I will use this photograph”. And it made me think, well, this is what Edith looks like. And actually, I didn’t even need to change the illustrations because that was pretty much already how I had painted her.

Charlie: That’s uncanny and wonderful. And it’s also nice if, yeah, if you don’t know who the person is, and you’ve kind of brought her photo back into the public consciousness, which is lovely.

Edward: Yeah. There’s nothing to say about it anywhere it says who she was.

Charlie: So gonna have to ask then, what are you writing now? And/or drawing, of course.

Edward: I’m in the sort of in between stage. I am working on something, but I never talk about it until it’s finished. I’ve actually got to this stage and I’ve learned this the hard way by making so many mistakes, that when I’m working on something, I never tell anybody about it. I tell my students to do the same thing – if you’re working on a novel, if you’re working on a bigger project, keep it yourself. Otherwise you start talking about it too early, it starts to die a little. And some of its magic actually goes out into the air and you can’t get it back. And you need to keep it to yourself for it to grow, change, hugely become its own thing. And it’s a secret, the more it just belongs to you until it becomes a draft and is ready to be shared. So my wife is a novelist and we are each other’s first readers. But we never tell each other what we’re working on until we’re well into it. So years could go by and we don’t know what the hell each other has been up to.

Charlie: My word. Okay. Wow! I totally get you keeping it back. I mean, I’m very interested in that concept of Death of the Author, which you’re kind of approaching – if people hear more about it, then it becomes theirs, maybe. Yeah.

Edward: Yeah, well and you’re thinning it. You’re thinning it because you’ve already defined it then, and you’re defining what shouldn’t be defined yet, if you’re talking about it too soon. It’s still growing, it’s still changing, and it may be something completely different to what you’re talking to about that person. And it has to be private at that stage, I think.

Charlie: Yeah, no, I can totally respect that. I suppose then the question would be, on this project that you’re working, have you any idea when you might finish it in terms of publication?

Edward: None whatsoever. Some books really behave. I wrote one book in six months and it just behaved incredibly well. Thank you very much, book. Mostly, they’re absolute… they’re really different. One novel took me fifteen years to complete. Yeah. So there’s never any knowing and you can’t force it.

Charlie: That’s fair. That’s fair. What did Melissa Fu say that time? It was a few episodes after yours, I think. And she said she’s being cagey about it and that was perfectly acceptable as well. Edward this has been lovely. Thank you so much for coming back.

Edward: Charlie it has been glorious, thank you.

Charlie: You are welcome as well. Yeah, it has been an absolute pleasure reading about Edith, really, really interesting. Yes.

[Recorded later] Charlie: I do hope you enjoyed this episode. Do join me next time. And if you have a moment to spare, please do leave a rating and/or review of this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Podcast Addict. Thank you! Author’s Afterword episode 114 was recorded on 2nd September 2024 and published on 27th January 2025. Music and production by Charlie Place.

Photo credit: Elizabeth McCracken

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