Gothic delight
Author Kate Morton at home in Brisbane. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen Source: The Australian
Australian author Kate Morton describes what it’s like to have become a publishing sensation
WHEN news broke that Kate Morton’s first novel had been bought for a huge advance, the young Brisbane writer experienced a strange out-of-body-reaction. It was as though, she says, the expression “beside yourself” came literally true.
“That’s what it was like for me, like watching someone else have this wonderful thing happen to them,” Morton says. “I knew writers, and I knew they didn’t make much money, and if you got an overseas sale once in your life, it was something to be celebrated wildly, so it was completely unexpected.”
The Shifting Fog, about what one reviewer dismissively described as a “doomed love, a large staff and a wide selection of flapper dresses”, was published in 2007 as The House at Riverton in Britain (because the English couldn’t come at a romantic title referring to something as despised as fog).
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It was followed the next year by The Forgotten Garden, set again in England, and containing the same “gothic tropes”, as Morton calls them: a secret, a house in which that secret lies hidden, waiting to be called forth by someone haunted by memory and nostalgia, and, most significantly, a gentle teasing collusion with the reader who is willing to be drawn into a not-quite-real past world.
Three million copies later, and five years on from when she felt disembodied by the acclaim that swept her into the international publishing world, Morton, now 34, has completed her third novel. The Distant Hours is just as gothic, even more intricately plotted and, she says, the one she is most pleased with to date, “because we went through so much together”.
It comes as a surprise, the idea that this elegant woman, mother of two little boys, with a sweet husband (Davin, a jazz musician and composer), living in a lovely house in a near-city Brisbane suburb, adored by readers delighted to be swept along by her lush prose, has had a hard time producing this novel. Morton, who speaks with a polished accent as a consequence of years of training, is not complaining: rather, she wants to make it very clear how important writing is to her, and what a joy, despite the blood, sweat and tears it takes to do it.
The story of how Morton became one of Australia’s most famous and highly paid authors is also a story about the way publishing has changed. While there have been commercially successful writers coming out of Australia for a while now, Morton is the first to tap successfully a vein of desire for what she calls the contemporary gothic, combining romance and mystery with period atmosphere.
She acknowledges the “happy timing” of her career thus far, her manuscript offered up by her Sydney agent Selwa Anthony at just the right moment, when publishers were looking for a change of pace, a slight shift in direction, something to excite and entice that part of the book-buying market wanting to sink right into, and indulge themselves in, an atmospheric mystery novel.
While she has done brief tours in Britain and the US to coincide with the publication of her first two novels, this is the first time she will set out on an Australian tour; the first time, then, that Australian readers will have a chance to see and hear the writer so many people have now read. For an introvert — albeit one trained in public speaking — this is going to be a testing time, but there is something of the evangelist in this woman, and you can be sure she will take every opportunity to further the cause.
That cause, which she states with conviction, is reading.
“I’m a book lover, a reader,” Morton says, “and my writing is an extension of being a reader, that’s where it is coming from. I want to capture that feeling of living inside a story. Everything else matters, too: it gives me great pleasure (and torment) nutting out the structure, and of course the characters are where the book starts. But the story has to feel like a place you can live inside.”
As a child, Morton was smitten with the kind of book that takes you into its pages (a kind of magic is how she describes it).
Many of her books were selected more or less at random from the dusty back shelves of second-hand shops while her mother, an antiques dealer, fossicked for collectables in another part of the store. She still has, on a shelf in the light-filled living room of her house, her collection of Enid Blytons in 1950s editions.
The family moved about a lot when Morton and her sisters were young, eventually settling for a while in the Queensland river town of Maryborough when she was ready for school, then a little later on Tamborine Mountain, a spectacular, moody part of Queensland, in the Gold Coast hinterland (home for many years to poet Judith Wright).
On Tamborine, she met Herbert and Rita Davies, who were to be hugely important in shaping the woman she would become. Rita, a former repertory actor, gave drama classes in the little studio on the couple’s property, and Kate began learning there. Later, she also took classes with Herbert, a wiry Welshman who had formerly been head of drama at the BBC in London. The Davieses had moved first to Adelaide, then to Tamborine Mountain. Kate was 12 when she met Herbert, and she knew him for 20 years until he died a few years ago, aged 93,
There’s a Herbert in The Distant Hours, in homage to the real-life Herbert: a kind, funny, knowing man who helps the heroine, Edie, at crucial moments. Morton even gave the fictional Herbert a dog just like real Herbert’s, but stern comments from her editors about “going off on tangents for your own enjoyment” convinced her to lose the dog. (The novel is, nevertheless, replete with the paw prints of other, less tangential canines.)
As much because it was something to do on the rather isolated mountain, Morton progressed through the Trinity College of London’s course, taught by Herbert, until she had gained the grand-sounding licentiate in speech and drama. “It was very old-fashioned,” Morton says, “but it was helpful, too. You had to stand up to speak about things, so for a natural introvert it was helpful.”
She did so well that her thoughts turned to an acting career, and she took herself off to London to do a Shakespeare summer course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. “Great fun, and if I could have mapped a career in the Royal Shakespeare Company, that would have been the pinnacle,” Morton says, swooning over the memory of speaking, and being enveloped by, Shakespeare’s words.
But in the middle of her time in London, an offer turned up for a scholarship to do a masters degree at the University of Queensland. Her pragmatic side kicked in. “It was an income that seemed princely at the time,” she says. “That’s when I started writing.”
She quickly realised what she had loved in drama was magnified tenfold in writing: “I could do it all myself and be right with that world.” Her thesis was on the novels of Thomas Hardy, one of the late Victorians she so admired. “I feel like the people in those novels are very much like we are now, with just a few vital differences, so I can sense them, touch them.”
At UQ she met Kim Wilkins, who writes erotically charged horror novels as well as teaching creative writing. It was another important relationship for Morton. “I’d be a terrible teacher, because I don’t know how it works,” Morton says. “Kim is one of those rare people who is able to quantify what she is doing. Where for me it’s just a feeling where the chapter should end, Kim is able to put that down in digestible steps.”
Morton sat in on classes Wilkins gave around town, including at the Queensland Writers Centre, “just for fun”, and picked up strategies for getting that all-important first manuscript done. It wasn’t publishable, she says, but it was the apprentice piece she had to write, to give her the momentum to continue. It also gave her a kind of courage, although she baulks a little at the word. Through the discipline imposed by Wilkins’s methods for shaping otherwise unruly ideas into a coherent novel, Morton found the voice that proved so beguiling to her agent, to publishers, then to millions of readers.
The Distant Hours begins with a prologue quoting a (fictional) classic tale called The True History of the Mud Man, written by the father of three spinster sisters living in the crumbling Milderhurst Castle in Kent. Then, the story’s narrator, Edie (who Kate admits is in many ways much like the author), begins her part of the story.
“It started with a letter,” she writes. “A letter that had been lost a long time, waiting out half a century in a forgotten postal bag in the dim attic of a nondescript house in Bermondsey.” Going on to muse about the sighing of thwarted messages and letters that eventually “make their secrets known”, Edie then laughs at herself, pleading with the reader: “Forgive me, I’m being romantic.”
“It’s not a self-conscious decision to write the way I write,” Edie’s real-life creator says. “It’s what I like to read, so it’s very natural to me. Before The Shifting Fog I’d written pretty crappy manuscripts, but when I wrote that one, I had no expectations of publication. I’d just had a baby (Oliver, now six), and I can be very honest, my thoughts and expectations about publication had dried up.
“As I was writing it, I said to Davan many times, “This is really fun, but no one is ever going to want to read this. It’s for me.’ “
Why the third book turned out to be so much harder, less fun but ultimately more fulfilling, has a lot to do with the way publishing now works — the deadline pressure on the back of marketing campaigns planned with military precision — but also a lot to do with the serious-minded, and a little self-punishing, character of its author.
Morton had just given birth to her second child, Louis, now three, when the edited version of the second book, The Forgotten Garden, landed in her mailbox. “It was a fraught and busy time,” she recalls, “and everyone advised me against it, and I don’t know why I did, but I put enormous pressure on myself to start the next book, to keep going, to strike while the iron was hot, telling myself, ‘you can do everything’. Crazy, madness, but I couldn’t see it at the time.”
The upshot was she wrote a synopsis for the next book, and signed the contracts, without that crucial element: her heart wasn’t in it.
“It didn’t feel good, it didn’t sing to me, and I thought, ‘Well, you’re a professional, just keep going. It’ll be fine.’ ” Morton is a pale woman, but she blanches still more as she remembers that “horrible, really difficult time”. What came to the rescue was what pushed her towards writing in the first place.
“Thank God for the unconscious mind,” she says. “There was this other idea that had been brewing, and I should have sat back and let it happen, but I had to learn.”
That other idea involved sisters, grown old, one thwarted in love when young, and a castle, the family seat, both loved haven and delimiter of freedom. Eventually the characters for the originally contracted novel were put on hold, “cryogenically frozen”, as Morton puts it. The sisters demanded to be heard and Morton was exhilarated to discover she was able to allow the story and characters to pull her along. There is a very late twist in the plot that she only discovered in the final stages of writing.
“That’s one of the most invigorating parts of the process,” she says, “not knowing how it’s all going to work out — but it does.”
As she prepares for the tours to launch The Distant Hours, Morton says she is in a fallow period, where it is important for her not to start churning over the same ideas. She does, however, have some plans brewing about a novel set in Australia rather than England, provoked partly by her memories of the slow brown river in Maryborough, and partly by the old pub that her parents have recently moved to, on Tamborine Mountain.
“One of my favourite parts is this big old swimming pool from the 1920s,” Morton says. “It would have been so grand and glamorous, the place wealthy people would come where it was cooler. I can see this hazy overlay of people in costumes of the period, and now it’s muddy and belongs to the ducks and geese.
“I love that, because the layer from the past is still there.”
Sue Green reviews The Distant Hours next week.T he book is published this week by Allen & Unwin.
