The Snow Globe (36 page)

A CONVERSATION WITH
JUDITH KINGHORN

 

 

Q.
The Snow Globe
is your lightest novel to date, a sparkling dual love story and comedy of manners set a number of years after the Great War, when time had softened its immediate impact. What inspired you to go in this direction?

A. My previous two novels are both set around the Great War and I wanted to move on from that time, and the 1920s very much appealed. I've always been drawn to that era and think the interwar years are a particularly fascinating time in history. It was a period of rapid progress and advancement for women, the beginning of the modern world, a time we're able to recognize and relate to, and yet there also remained these rigidly old-fashioned rules and customs. And I suppose it's that clash that's so appealing to write about: the struggle between the “old guard,” those of a certain age who clung onto the traditions
and fading glories of the past, and were appalled by what they perceived as a new morality; and a younger generation whose energy was reflected in the new freedoms, music and dancing and fashions. The desperation and defiance of those bright young things of the Roaring Twenties—who were determined to be seen
and
heard, to live life to the fullest—contrasts vividly with the years immediately before and during the Great War, so there's a great deal for a writer to draw on.

Q. You begin
The Snow Globe
with Agatha Christie's famous disappearance. Can you tell us more about that incident in her life? Why did you decide to start there?

A. I'd already decided to begin the novel after the general strike and in the weeks leading up to Christmas 1926 when I realized it coincided with Agatha Christie's extraordinary eleven-day disappearance. When I made this connection and read about Christie's husband's infidelity, it seemed to offer the perfect opening for the novel, the themes of which are also infidelity and betrayal.

The mystery of Agatha Christie's disappearance began on the evening of Friday, December 3, 1926, at Styles, her Berkshire home. At around nine forty-five p.m., without any warning, and having first gone upstairs to kiss her sleeping daughter, Rosalind, Mrs. Christie drove away from the house. Her abandoned Morris Cowley motorcar was later found down a slope at Newlands Corner near Guildford in Surrey, but there was
no sign of Mrs. Christie, nor any clues to what had happened to her.

The story was international news, made the front page of the
New York Times
, and for eleven days conjecture buzzed. Some believed Mrs. Christie had drowned herself, others suggested the incident was a publicity stunt, and others still whispered of the possibility of murder and pointed fingers in the direction of her unfaithful husband, a former First World War fighter pilot. Such was the speculation that the home secretary of the time, William Joynson-Hicks, put pressure on the police to make faster progress, and the celebrated crime writers Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy L. Sayers were drawn into the puzzle. Conan Doyle, who was interested in the occult, took a discarded glove of Christie's to a medium, while Sayers visited the scene of the disappearance (later using it in her novel
Unnatural Death
).

Christie was eventually discovered, safe and well. Alone, and using an assumed name, that of her husband's mistress, she had been staying at a spa hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, since the day after her disappearance, oblivious, it seemed, to the news and national furor.

The two most popular theories offered for Christie's strange disappearance are that she was in the grip of a rare mental condition known as a fugue state, a period of out-of-body amnesia induced by stress,
or
that she had planned the whole thing to thwart her husband's plans to spend a weekend with his mistress at a house close to where she abandoned her car. I tend to believe the latter.

Q. In this novel, romantic love seems almost idealized. Despite miscommunications that keep the lovers apart, their feelings for each other are pure, certain, and uncomplicated—free from the confusion and doubt one tends to find in fiction with a contemporary setting. What made you want to depict love in this context?

A. In
The Snow Globe
I wanted to place older love alongside young, untested love. The young love is ideal and pure, without doubt or cynicism, whereas the married love is about compromise, forgiveness, and understanding. I think we all start out with that pure, idealized notion of love, that it will conquer all and prevail, and through the course of life we learn that in order for it to survive we have to be prepared to make sacrifices and compromises.

In the novel, Daisy learns about love, its differing shades, and what it is and is not. She has grown up believing her parents' marriage to be perfect and longs to be
in love
. From the moment she discovers the truth about her parents' marriage, disillusionment and a cynicism she associates more with her sister Iris nudge at her. She believes—and for a while wants to believe—that she loves Stephen as a brother, but then, finally, has to acknowledge that her love for him is different. And it is the purity of that love—and her acknowledgment of it—that allows her to see clearly, begin to gain some self-knowledge and forgive. At the same time, Mabel has to forgive her husband for his infidelity in order to save her marriage and remember her
love for him. And this is Mabel's liberation also, because it frees her from anger and resentment.

Q. Each of your novels has been set around an English country estate. What draws you to such places, and why do you think they are so appealing to readers?

A. In part it's due to a love of history and architecture, but it's also to do with my love of literature. Many of my favorite novels are set in vividly depicted and often grand houses . . . Think of
Rebecca
,
Jane Eyre
,
Wuthering Heights
, and every Jane Austen novel. Some inspiration, too, comes from my childhood, when I was taken to visit such places. Many of them remained unchanged from Victorian times, and I particularly remember going to a country house sale where there was a huge rusting sleigh in a coach house, and old-fashioned clothes and shoes and tiny sailor suits laid out in a nursery, all to go under the hammer. I think those country house sales—now, like the houses themselves, a thing of the past—had a profound impact on me and my imagination.

I'm a member of the National Trust and English Heritage, and I still love to visit these places whenever I have the time. Each one has its own character, and they've all witnessed so much and have so many stories. Sometimes, I think their walls must exude a sort of whispering narrative, because whenever I come back from having been to visit one, I feel inspired and want to know more about
who
lived there. But my desire to know more isn't confined to grand country houses: I'm the same with
any old house, large or small. Buildings fascinate me because of the human stories they hold. For readers, I think films like
Gosford Park
and television dramas like
Downton Abbey
have undoubtedly increased the appeal of the country house as a setting.

Q. You describe the tumult caused by the loss of empire and new technologies. Can you tell us more about how these changes led to the demise of the English country house and a way of life, and about the financial pressures felt by the moneyed class during this period?

A. At the dawn of the twentieth century, country house life was still in its heyday. Securely landed families remained confident in the permanence of primogeniture, England ruled the waves, and one-third of the globe was shaded the pretty pink of empire. Even in the early summer of 1914 no one could imagine that those young men who sipped lemonade on lawns bathed in sunshine would be mowed down on the fields of Flanders.

The First World War changed life for everyone, particularly the upper classes, and the impact of that war on the British country house was substantial. Those houses and estates that were requisitioned were badly treated, but, more important, many of them were left without any heir to hand on to. In 1916,
Vanity Fair
declared the British aristocracy altered forever. “The whole social fabric of Great Britain has been changed . . . When the boy dukes and earls grow up they will find their formerly
important rank regarded as a quaint and curious survival of an ancient and outworn custom.”

Not only were the heirs to these places lost, but the ranks of young men required to fulfill the roles of gardeners, gamekeepers, and outdoor servants were also lost. As a result, vast numbers of these houses and their once well-tended grounds fell into neglect and ruin, and, added to this, there was also what was generally known as “the servant problem.”

Ironically, the war that robbed women of husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers had also been the catalyst in providing them with the opportunity to work in new types of employment and better-paid positions. The growth in retail and new department stores offered shop work, and new business and technologies offered factory and office work, with better pay and conditions and shorter hours. Understandably, fewer and fewer chose to go into domestic service.

By the mid-1920s, the age of the country house sale had well and truly begun. Stripped of their contents, these houses were no longer homes but expensive monuments to a faded past, and in order to avoid punitive taxes and death duties, hundreds of them were destroyed. (The total loss over the course of the twentieth century is more than one thousand.) Month after month, during the twenties and thirties, demolitions and what were then known as “smash-ups”
destroyed hundreds of country houses in what Roy Strong called “black decades in our architectural history” in his book
The Destruction of the Country House: 1875–1975.

Like many people after the war, those houses that survived had to reinvent themselves—as schools, hospitals, health spas, offices, or homes for the elderly. Some were handed over to the National Trust and opened to the public, but a way of life had ended, and with it an old order and class system crumbled. The Second World War and demise of the British Empire hammered the final nails in the coffin.

Q. The First World War ended one hundred years ago, and we're seeing in the media many retrospectives and new analyses of the war's origins and impact. The war has played a role in each of your novels. Has your thinking about it evolved?

A. Though
The Snow Globe
is lighter and more humorous than my other novels, it's set only eight years after the end of the war. Consequently, the effects of war are ever present. Every character in the novel is affected by it in some way.

Writing the book made me realize how short a decade it was when preceded by something of such magnitude—because a generation was wiped out, and because it took
generations
to recover from that loss. Watching the television coverage of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War was deeply moving. In fact, I'm more moved by it now than ever, because I realize its effects are still with us, one hundred years on.

Q. You grew up in the north of England, where the landscape was a strong influence, and you've written previously about how you were able to find your voice as a writer only after you returned
to living in a rural village. Aside from the obvious peace and quiet, what is it about the country, do you think, that fosters your creativity?

A. I think one is far more aware of the passing of time in the country, the seasons and changing light and colors. It's that sense of time—and being in the moment—that seems to allow me to tap into my creativity; it allows me to
see
and picture. From my desk, I look out onto my garden and often see deer and foxes and sometimes badgers. Depending on the season and time of day, I hear owls, wood pigeons, and woodpeckers. In the woodland beyond the garden there's a mix of long-established deciduous and evergreen trees, whose shapes and colors are ever changing. All of this inspires me.

The older I get, the more I appreciate that connection with nature. It was something I had as a child and then lost for a while, and it's something we're all in danger of forgetting. In a turbulent, troubled world, I think nature can offer peace and clarity and reconnect us with
who
we are. And I absolutely believe that that connection is healing—to the mind and to the body.

Q. Can you share any books you've especially enjoyed that are set in England during the 1920s and interwar years?

A. I've only recently reread
To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf and consider it brilliant—definitely one of my all-time favorite novels. Other favorites set around that period include
The
Pursuit of Love
by Nancy Mitford,
The Return of the Soldier
by Rebecca West,
Invitation to the Waltz
by Rosamond Lehmann and
Voyage in the Dark
by Jean Rhys; and
The
Diary of a Provincial Lady
by E.M. Delafield and
Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
by Julia Strachey are both amusing and beautifully written. And I have to add
The Cazelet Chronicles
by Elizabeth Jane Howard.

QUESTIONS
FOR DISCUSSION

 

 

1. What did you most enjoy about
The Snow Globe
? What do you think you will remember about it many months from now?

2. Who is your favorite character, and why?

3. The author has called the novel a comedy of manners. Did you find it funny? Discuss the various places that made you smile, or even laugh.

4. Did Eden Hall fulfill your expectations of what an English country estate should be? What do you think accounts for its appeal?

5. Discuss the various ways in which a failure to communicate causes conflict in the relationships. How much of this can you attribute to the way people were expected to behave in England
in the 1920s? How might people today handle the situation differently?

6. How does the men's behavior contrast with the women's when it comes to sex and love? Who is faithful? Who is unfaithful? Talk about the double standard for men and women. Does some remnant of such attitudes persist today?

7. One might argue that the rift between Mabel and Howard has its origins in the beginning of their marriage. Discuss those origins. Have you ever experienced a conflict in a relationship that you realized originated in choices or expectations that were established long ago?

8. Discuss the novel's depiction of unwed pregnancy and adoption. Why do you think Mrs. Jessop delays telling Stephen who his real mother is?

9. What did you think of Mabel's going off to Europe, leaving her family behind? Were you surprised by what happens when she returns?

10. The novel takes place several years after the end of World War I. Talk about the many ways in which its impact is still felt by the characters.

11. What does the snow globe mean to Daisy? Do you have a similar
treasure?