For her third conversation on The Bookshelf of Jennifer Morrison, novelist Melanie Finn discusses The Gloaming, the earlier novel that Morrison read last, having worked back through her books. A story of guilt, ambiguity and Tanzania, and a frank talk about the writing life.
Guilt without a crime
The novel follows Pilgrim Jones, the young wife of a powerful human rights lawyer, abandoned by him in a remote Swiss village. She is involved in a terrible accident and flees to a remote part of Tanzania, where she meets people, and perhaps a ghost, who set her on the road to some kind of resolution. A second thread follows the Swiss police inspector investigating the accident.
Finn wrote it soon after the birth of her twins, while asking herself how to explain a world full of pain to her children. She was also haunted by a real story: a plane crash that killed many children, followed years later by a grieving father killing the air traffic controller. She kept thinking about the controller, an ordinary man at his desk, and about people who cause disasters without committing any crime, and who have no way to atone.
Living with ambiguity
Some publishers found Pilgrim too passive. Finn disagrees with the idea that women in fiction must all be fighters: Pilgrim becomes less passive as she takes on responsibility for something she did not do. She is interested in the murky margins between good and evil, and believes fiction’s role is to show that ambiguity is the norm: “Certainty is the rarity.”
She accepts a criticism from another writer, that white characters too often go to Africa to solve their problems, and admits that is why she sent Pilgrim there. The doctor Dorotha, flamboyant in a purple trouser suit, is based on a real doctor Finn knew near Lake Natron, whose struggle to save a pregnant nurse showed her how dangerous childbirth remains for most women in the world.
A writer’s lessons
Finn learned to sketch characters quickly writing for the series Red Shoe Diaries, where two people had to become real in a few pages. She also cites a publisher’s “rule of threes”: three lines, three paragraphs, three pages. Her advice to aspiring writers is sobering: give up the dream of a bestseller and write because you want to. Life, like farming or writing, “is not an accumulation of success”.