Rook (37 page)

Both
The Devil’s Music
and
Rook
are closely tied to the landscape of Sussex where you live – do you think you would be a different writer if you lived in the city? Do you think writers are products of the landscape they grow up in?

Details of landscape and my response to it have become part of how I understand and see myself, but it’s not as straightforward as being a ‘product’ of where I grew up, since my connection with landscape has deepened through writing. Simon Schama suggests that landscape is ‘the work of the mind. Its scenery built up as much from the strata of memory as from layers of rock’, and it’s true my attachment to the seascapes of Sussex is rooted in memory. I grew up in Bexhill, East Sussex, where we had a beach hut. Often we’d be there in all weathers, from breakfast until bedtime, and my childhood memories are mostly of being outside, barefoot under broad skies; of running on pebbles, climbing breakwaters, exploring rock pools, building huge sandcastles with crowds of other children. I also lived for thirty years in the Witterings in West Sussex, writing
The Devil’s Music
in a house just across the road from the sea.

I’ve learnt recently that the word ‘landscaef’, brought to Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers, meant a clearing in the forest with animals, huts, fields and fences; a place carved out of the wilderness; a place made ‘home’. Choosing a Sussex beach as the primary setting for
The Devil’s Music
was, I expect, a way of providing myself with a place to feel at home when everything about the process of writing my first novel was challenging and unfamiliar.
Rook
ventures a little further inland, along a creek path, across wheat fields. With novel three – which looks as though it might be set in forests on the Downs – I’m getting really adventurous!

Who are your key literary influences?

I began to love the idea of writing when I was about nine or ten after reading Catherine Storr (
Marianne Dreams)
and Alan Garner (
The Owl Service).
Since then, I’ve continued to be influenced by each encounter with a writer whose work thrills me in some way. There are many, so this list is not exhaustive, and I have to include poets: T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence when I was a teenager; contemporary poets such as Vicki Feaver, Helen Dunmore, Stephanie Norgate, who I came across in my thirties. Later, fiction writers like Jeanette Winterson, Michael Ondaatje, Maggie O’Farrell, Julie Myerson, Patrick McGrath, Jon McGregor and early Ian McEwan; more recently, Evie Wyld, Sarah Hall, Katie Ward, Deborah Levy and the poets Philip Gross and Esther Morgan have delighted me with what they’ve achieved with language and form.

First published in Great Britain 2012

This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © 2012 by Jane Rusbridge

The excerpt on page vii is from ‘A Herbal’, taken from Human Chain

© Seamus Heaney. Reprinted with kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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