Author Interview: 'Where Waters Meet' by John Franks

Over the summer, I was lucky enough to do an internship for a few months with a small (but perfectly formed) publishing house back in London called Alliance Publishing Press Ltd. I worked for the most part on a book called 'Where Waters Meet', written by first-time author John Franks. I asked him a few questions about his novel, how he finds inspiration and for a few words of advice for budding authors. Find the interview below, or published on the website of 'The Palatinate', Durham University's official student newspaper. (View the original article here). 

Where Waters Meet

3 OCTOBER 2013

Where Waters Meet traces the interlocking tales of three brothers, whose extraordinary influence alters the town of Watersmeet on a scale of mythic proportions. Allhan emerges from the forest – naked, confused and struggling to remember the events which led to his expulsion from the community. Alaric and Alsoph, his twin brothers, vie for power in the interweaving chapters, as the book speeds towards its violent climax. Hannah Watson chats epics, editors and expectations with the author John Franks.

Hi John, thanks for chatting to Palatinate about your first published novel. Describe Where Waters Meet in five words.

Myth; Machinations; Love; Redemption; Revelation.

Your novel has echoes of the Game of Thrones series and Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings trilogy. In what way does Where Waters Meet provide something new and refreshing?

WWM isn’t a direct descendent of fantasy epics; it mixes a fictional seventeenth century with a more ancient myth. Like fantasy tales it includes a domineering leader, a ‘wise man’, an exotic princess, and a metaphysical strand, alongside more prosaic characters struggling with character flaws and trying to get beyond their personal prisons. I’ve left a bit of space for personal interpretation, an idea which was inspired by my reading ‘2001’ for the first time and trying to figure out ‘what the hell happened?’

The title holds a clue to the book’s finale – can you give us an idea of its significance?

The book was originally called Watersmeet, a village at the centre of the story, which stands at the confluence of two rivers. But Where Waters Meet cuts a bit deeper than that, because the idea of coming together runs throughout the book.

The beginning and closing chapters to the book had me gripped. Which was your favourite scene to write?

You’re right to suggest that some parts of a book are more fun to write than others. Anyway, I loved writing the Prologue because it gets quite deep into an attitude towards nature that is important to me. To pick out two more, the evening meal at the King’s Purse with four of the major characters was great fun to put down, and perhaps best of all, the domineering lead character Alaric’s escape from his house when being pursued by an angry mob.

What inspired you to put pen to paper?

It started with a short mythical story about the twins Alaric and Alsoph, the idea being to look at how two very different archetypal characters might influence a community, making mistakes through extremism, and how those mistakes could be redeemed. Redeemed is an old fashioned word, but the possibility of moving beyond our personal mistakes into a guilt-free state of fulfilment seems to me to be a common hope or desire. I wanted to suspend disbelief, make the two story types blend and read as if they were credible: I hope I’ve achieved that.

Why would students particularly enjoy Where Waters Meet?

You’re asking me: I’m over 50! But my mind hasn’t atrophied as fast as my body, and I think I can still connect with my younger self, and hopefully with younger people now. A confounding mystery is always compelling; some admirable and/or attractive men don’t hurt; a truly erotic, exotic woman usually grabs attention; we all expect some sex and violence in a story. Perhaps students are more aware today of the traps, ludicrous expectations, and disappointments of life in our society than even my generation was.

What advice have you got for Durham students seeking to publish their work?

Regarding writing, I need to know the last paragraph before I write the first. When I’ve got that lot I write intuitively from stepping stone to stepping stone, visualising each scene like a movie. When you have a manuscript, expect disappointment: publishers and agents are drowning in scripts. Then watch out for editing. Editors know what they are doing, and the challenges they throw at you can be very personally battering. But bite the bullet: every creative has a kick-ass pragmatic professional behind them. It certainly hurts the ego, but it’s essential. Then you need a damn good publicist, and engagement with social media promotion to get the book above the parapet: tens of thousands of novels are published in the UK every year; you have to find a way to get noticed.

Where Waters Meet is published by Alliance Publishing Press on 1st October 2013

Photograph provided by Alliance Publishing Press

The Book Lover's Guide to Paris: Les Deux Magots

The Book Lover's Guide to Paris

Secret # 2

This weekend my lovely brother and sister came to visit  me in Paris, and top of my "To Do" list was going to the famous "Les Deux Magots" Café on the Boulevard St. Germain. The street is the crowning glory of Baron Haussmann's restructuring of Paris' Left Bank. Famous from the 1930s for its flowering café culture, bars and nightclubs have blinked merrily along the boulevard every night, until its heyday in the 1960s. 

             

Becoming the centre of Existentialist thought, Jean-Paul Sartre famously frequented "Les Deux Magots" with Simone de Beauvoir, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus et al. in tow. It was here that Picasso met his muse, and philosophers, authors and musicians all found their intellectual and spiritual home, spilling over into "Café de Flore" next door. 

I feel that the café can and will survive on reputation alone, so it was without embarrassment that the waiter told us that first thing on the weekend they had no 'pain aux raisins' or 'pain au chocolat' left. We made do with warm baguette and some nice toasted brioche but expect a small coffee to set you back €5.60! The atmosphere was nice, but unless you are keen on the authors in whose reputation "Les Deux Magots" basks, I'd take your custom elsewhere. If you are a die-hard fan, there is a gift shop downstairs with "Les Deux Magots" branded mugs, plates, notebooks etc.

"Les Deux Magots" is named for the two Chinese figurines who sit proudly inside.

 

If I returned, I'd be tempted to try Café de Flore next door - for now I'm content to soak up the culture and the history created by these literary icons as I stroll by.

Book Lover's Guide to Paris

I'm a Londoner, born and bred, and completely in love with my city. However, my recent move to Paris has given me a thousand new streets to explore, which I seem to patter down feeling as though I'm the first to set foot upon the time-worn pavés beneath my feet.

Despite this outrageous belief that I must be the first to discover a monument, café or shop - I was brought to a sharp realisation that I tread the same roads as millions before me when I happened across "Les Deux Magots" and the "Café de Flore" on the Boulevard St. Germain. No, I was not the first to admire the cute little brasseries sat alongside this Haussmannian left-bank avenue - Salvador Dalí, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, André Breton and Verlaine had all sat, mused, drank, pondered and yes, walked these streets before me. I felt a chill of excitement, and practically waltzed home, determined to unearth Paris' other literary gems. When I uncover them, I'll share them here in a series called:

The Book Lover's Guide to Paris

Secret # 1 

1) The Shakespeare & Company Bookshop

I felt a complete sense of wonder the first time I happened upon this bookstore by The Seine, with its fairy lights strung up outside, blinking invitingly. I'm sure it's designed so that each new customer feels like an undiscovered genius, as you are invited to use the upright piano, typewriters and desks in the rickety upstairs rooms. I sat down to a typewriter without paper or ribbon, tapped uselessly at the keys, and felt like Jack Kerouac. The bookstore is stocked with classics, with 'The Great Gatsby' being one of their best selling novels. The staff are all English speaking, and have suitably romantic stories - returning to Paris after spending a year here & hoping never to leave. 

     

They hold events in the evenings and a tea party every Sunday. You'll have to arrive early as this bookstore is one of Paris' worst kept secrets, and on the evening I tried to attend it was completely filled. The Wikipedia page does a great job of explaining its origins & some of the shop's most distinguished visitors. The secret to getting a coveted job here is apparently a lot of volunteering at the shop & a big sprinkling of luck. Some sleep in the rooms above, and George Whitman, the original owner of this incarnation of the shop reckoned that as many as 40,000 have rested their heads here over the years.*

It is definitely worth a visit!

You'll find it here - nearest Metro is Saint-Michel, nearest RER is Saint-Michel Notre-Dame

*(according to Mercer writing for the Guardian)

Mansfield Park - Jane Austen

Mansfield Park - Jane Austen

"What became of Miss Austen?" we might ask, echoing the critic Kingsley Amis, when confronted with 'Mansfield Park''s heroine Fanny Price. Compared to the sparkling Elizabeth Bennet whose opinions were voiced loudly enough to resonate with a still captivated 21st Century audience, Fanny is a little limp, underwhelming, or as Austen's mother put it so marvellously herself, 'insipid'. 

Brought into her cousins' household at Mansfield Park as a gesture of insincere benevolence towards Fanny's impoverished mother, Fanny's lack of pizzaz can perhaps be explained by the absence of warmth from her adoptive family. The novel is accurately named, as life is neatly contained by the imposing walls of the Mansfield Park estate. Guests pass each other on their way into and out of its doors like players upon a stage - and only when outside influences threaten the estate's moral superiority and stability does trouble ensue. The theatrical metaphor is entirely appropriate, as it is when Fanny's uncle Sir Thomas leaves to manage the trouble brewing on his Antiguan plantations (which fund life at Mansfield Park) that the outrageous production of 'Lover's Vows' is allowed to go ahead. Taking her cue from love interest and cousin Edmund, Fanny's sense of decorum is threatened the wild flirtation and inappropriate behaviour that will go unrestrained behind behind the theatre's closed curtain.  

Adultery is rarely a theme for Austen's novels, but at Mansfield Park it takes centre stage (ok, I promise I'll stop with histrionic puns). All manner of characters mingle here, from the deliciously annoying Mrs Norris* whose character retains vestiges of that perfect Austenian cynicism and wit, to the charming Mary Crawford whose enticing modernity, looser morals and cosmopolitan lifestyle soon catch Edmund's eye.

Enthusiasm is helpful on the part of the reader to engage with the plot's revelations and twists, which could otherwise be a little underwhelming for the modern audience for whom there is nothing new under the sun.

The novel is offers more in the way of material for literary analysis than the promise of a thrilling read, with issues such as colonialism, slavery, morality and the threat of modernity all brought to the fore. With a little imagination, critics from Virginia Woolf to Edward Said have drawn out some interesting comparisons and suggestions - not all of them immediately evident from Austen's prose. Later work has added to these lines of analysis such as Patricia Rozema's 1999 adaptation of Mansfield Park, which sets the tone of post-colonial critique with a slave-ship moored offshore in the opening scene.

My verdict: Claire Tomalin has it right when she reflects the ambivalence that many readers feel towards Fanny: "More is made of Fanny Price's faith, which gives her the courage to resist what she thinks is wrong; it also makes her intolerant of sinners, whom she is ready to cast aside." Modern sensibilities noted, I still feel that if only Fanny were a more captivating heroine, I would much prefer the novel. Even Austen's mum agreed!

*Yes, J.K. Rowling did name Filch's cat after Fanny's insufferable aunt.

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy is not a book for Grandmas. Not my Grandma anyway. I was reading it on a car journey, and before long she had taken it out of my hands and asked to borrow it. She's a magpie so it's a little miracle that she did ask me - my copy of 'The Great Gatsby' had already mysteriously turned up in her house. I'm sorry to say that I firmly refused. The novel is many things: incredible, harrowing, thought-provoking, and unsettling…but appealing for Grandmas it is not.

McCarthy's magnificent imagination sees the American continent reduced to a husk of our present day USA, after an unspecified disaster which wipes out much of mankind. The unforgiving and sinister post-Apocalyptic landscape, though so far from the skyscrapers and shopping malls of the privileged West of today, is completely believable. This is a work of fiction, but it is as though McCarthy has only had to stretch a few years into the future towards which we are all inevitably headed. Therein lies its power. The unspecified nature of the attack, the disorienting lack of geographical landmarks and the nameless protagonists make this story take the form of an a terrifyingly accurate window into the future of the Everyman, woman and child.

Though anonymous, the main characters of 'the man' and 'the boy' are completely captivating. Father and son, they could be anyone - and yet their incisive, sparse dialogue conveys such emotion that many readers have been, and will be, brought to tears. Their relationship is about as convincingly real as any I've read and the boy is childlike without proving annoying. Their familiarity breeds conversations which tend to loop and circle back around the same ideas; the boy is especially worried that they should, whilst fighting to survive in a hostile land, remain 'the good guys'. 

As the novel progresses, fixed notions of 'good' and 'bad' become a little crooked, a little unhinged. The only rules that seem to remain are 'steal to survive' and 'kill or be killed'. There are a few scenes invested with such power as to be heartbreaking: every time the son is left with a revolver and instructions on how to commit suicide if anyone should approach him; and a scene where the 'good guy' status of the man (which the reader has been counting on almost as much as the boy) is blurred. You come to realise that there are no heroes here - the anonymity of the man and child ensures no eponymous legend will be born from this tale. 

 In 2007, the novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction - what can I do but give it 5 stars!?

My verdict: It's so good! I wish I'd read this before taking my Literary Criticism exam at university, as this novel would make a perfect study for the emerging field of Ecocriticism. There is so much to say about this novel's startling vision of a world thrown 100 years into an unrecognisable future. 

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

It seems to me that of late, it has become fashionable amongst the 'literati' to turn up their noses at F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby'. At least, amongst my friends studying English at university, a certain disdain for the novel has been more confidently voiced since Baz Lurhmann's film brought the novel to an even wider audience. As the public jumped eagerly onto the Gatsby bandwagon, my friends jumped off – and the novel that had been claimed as the favourite book of A-Level English students everywhere lost favour. The fashion magazines admittedly sort of missed the point, revelling in the excesses of the film which inspired Prada's extortionately expensive 'golden, crystal-laden' party gowns. Whether Fitzgerald would quite have been turning in his grave is up for debate, as the author was admittedly, like his narrator Nick, as much 'enchanted' as he was supposedly 'repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life' in The Jazz Age.

This is a kind of manifesto in support of 'The Great Gatsby'. Possibly not Fitzgerald's most refined work (contemporary critics described him as a "a wild child dashing aimlessly about his nursery, smashing toys and breaking windows") - but I like it for all its sentences dripping with description, Fitzgerald's famous lists overspilling each line with the burden of their excess, and for the obvious joy in each line as Fitzgerald wrote what he called 'the best American novel ever written' in a fabulously self-congratulatory way.

'The Great Gatsby' tends to read like a 300 page long quote, with turns of phrases that sit so well on the tongue that you can almost taste them: bitter when Gatsby realises what "a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass", or too sweet when, before kissing the girl of his dreams, he pauses to listen to the 'tuning fork that had been struck upon a star'. It's sad, especially when the reader begins to realise that the naïve and wildly mislead Gatsby, will not, like an overexcited puppy, let go of the rags of his dream.

If you can stomach an artificial world "redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes" then dive in - but Fitzgerald's lyrical prose is not for everyone. As for me, I'll be joining the hundreds who come and 'twinkle hilariously' on Gatsby's lawn :)

My Verdict: I really like it - despite the rolling eyes I'll get from book snobs!

Out of the Shelter - David Lodge

Out of the Shelter - David Lodge

I picked up 'Out of the Shelter' in my gorgeous local library, Manor House Gardens. The blurb promised that the protagonist Timmy, who grows up in London under the shadow of the Blitz, would undergo a life-changing rite of passage when his older sister Kath draws him into her "deliriously fast, furious and extravagant life" in occupied Heidelberg. I hoped the bildungsroman would be a sort of 'Catcher in the Rye' meets 'The Great Gatsby'...and wasn't completely disappointed.

The novel is not as glitzy or glamorous as billed. For Timothy, in full bloom as a painfully awkward adolescent, drinking five milkshakes in a row satisfies the inadequacy of his life back in a London ravaged by war and rationing - almost. Only the numerous clumsy encounters with pretty girls are a constant reminder of Timothy's more immediate feelings of lack.

 Relatively untouched by war, Heidelberg graciously provides a picturesque distraction from the damage and destruction caused by Allied bombing in Germany. Certainly, for the Americans who significantly set up base there, life is a ball. The novel excels in its creation of these careless bright young things, for whom of the horrors of war are an obscure fact rarely called to the forefront of consciousness. When Lodge does bring these horrors to our attention, they leave reader all the more shocked and shaken.

I studied World War history over and over again at school, so the historical events outlined in the novel were accurate and familiar. However, like Timothy's drawings of Heidelberg, Lodge attentively sketches in a delicately detailed portrait of the immediate post-war period rarely touched upon.

I guessed at the revelatory ending, but the emotional power of the final pages where Kath reflects on her experiences was not dampened nonetheless. I felt that the epilogue by Lodge, explaining away the book's poor commercial success with the terrible editing of the first edition was a bit disappointing and unnecessary. It was interesting to learn which parts of the novel were autobiographical.

Enjoyable. A cocktail of easy reading, laced with sadness and garnished with a sprig of cringing humour.

My verdict: I preferred Lodge's Literary Criticism in 'The Art of Fiction' but this is worth a read!