At the end of my edition of Rachel Joyce’s latest novel, The Homemade God, there’s a short chapter headed: Exclusive new material for this edition. (Who doesn’t love a free extra!) But… usually, you’re gifted the first few chapters of the next novel. (‘Go on! Pre-order it!’). Or perhaps a map delineating, in bold factual strokes, the current novel’s setting which, up until now, you’ve simply drawn in your head. Or a glossary. Or notes. Or knowledgeable commentary explaining you really haven’t at all grasped what the author was trying to do.
This is different.
In this slim chapter, Rachel Joyce takes us to a France of some 20 years ago, where three sisters are helping their mother bring home the body of their father.
It’s summer: a severe drought; rainfall conspicuous by its absence; thirsty earth gasping under temperatures of well over 30°C.
The women (Rachel is the eldest of these sisters) know each other inside out, upside down. And yet here, in this alien landscape of death, they are near-strangers. ‘More feral, more primitive,’ she writes.
It’s not just that the actions they are performing are (quite literally and metaphorically) foreign – ordering a coffin; filling in endless forms; queuing at a cashpoint to pay for a repatriation flight that won’t accept credit cards.
It’s because everything they have ever known has changed. Like musical chairs: ‘Where you are running around three chairs, until there comes a moment when one is removed and there are three of you and only two places to sit… Free-falling.’
Don’t get Rachel wrong. She and her sisters laugh, too.
At anything. Almost hysterically. Almost as if it’s the only thing they still remember how to do.
When she gets back home, her head is filled with… what? With the sound of four pairs of rubber shoes on white-hot stone.
As if that sound, in some odd way, defines all they have been through.
Slap slap, slap slap.
And there and then, she sits down and writes: ‘That was the summer they wore flip-flops.’
Rachel hoves into view on Zoom from her home, based near Stroud.
‘I’m admiring your fairy lights,’ she says, peering into my kitchen.
I laugh. ‘And I’m admiring your much more classy room.’ She must be able to see my plastic kettle; I, on the other hand, can see an ancient inglenook fireplace; oil paintings (I think) above it; shelves to the right, bursting with books.
‘It’s gone really glum this afternoon,’ she says. ‘We’ve got fairy lights in our kitchen and I’ve just said to Paul [Venables, the actor; her husband], “Will you please put them on!”’
Glum.
What a great word for the weather. So much more expressive than dull or overcast. As if the day itself is having a bad day.
In theory, much of our conversation should be glum. In the sense that Rachel’s novel, The Homemade God, is about grief. Yet this book zips along (Thriller? Romance? Family saga? All of the above?) with sparkling dialogue, complex relationships, emotional wisdom.
And, deep at its heart, several kinds of mystery.
Such as the mystery of stories families tell themselves about each other.
The mystery of why each member actually believes those stories.
And how those stories are torn apart when parental death rips through homes like a tornado.
‘I wrote what became the first page of The Homemade God almost the summer my dad died. I was aware there was something there I wanted to explore.’
(Gosh – so that was way back in 2005.)
That ‘something’ was the period of lawlessness in families after any traumatic event: ‘But especially the death of a parent, when something essential is removed, meaning so much is up for grabs.
‘And even though between my sisters it was very loving and kind, I was aware there was the potential for anarchy.’
Other people she’s spoken to have confirmed her feelings. The sudden discovery that complex puzzle-pieces of relationships you thought inextricably interlocked were, in fact, lightly glued; and that glue was the parent no longer there.
‘Something gets broken for good: some link in the chain that means it can be easier for people to renounce a sibling than work with the difficulty that’s left.’
That’s certainly true of The Homemade God. Vic – a widower and highly successful artist – drowns in the lake beside his Italian villa… yet how can this be? For it’s a lake he knows so well! (Its dangers; its vicissitudes; its shallows; its depths.) Clearly, there’s more to his death than meets the eye…
And that ‘more’ is surely Bella-Mae: the mysterious woman wealthy Vic met online – a woman who is decades his junior, and whom he recently married after a whirlwind romance.
But, like reflections in the lake itself, the picture ripples and fractures with every breeze that blows; with every sunbeam that sparkles; with every position of the viewer: high in the bedrooms or down by the shore.
As Vic’s four grown-up children begin to air suspicions, it slowly dawns on them that – perhaps – doubts should not be so much around Bella-Mae, but around their father, whose omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence they took for granted. Their homemade god.
Rachel did a curious thing the other day. (Her description, not mine.)
‘I’ve never done this before in my life. I picked up somebody else’s case on the train…
‘Yeah… And I found that…’
She momentarily lapses into broken sentences; as if even thinking of the loss robs her temporarily of both her ‘stuff’ and her usual fluency.
‘So I had a period of about five days – waiting to see if my suitcase turned up anywhere – where I didn’t have my things. And I found it really disconnected. Very unrooted.’
I can imagine how awful that was. (‘Root’ is a word she uses often in our chat.) Way beyond the inconvenience of losing your M&S underwear.
‘In theory,’ I say to her, ‘what we pick to go in our suitcase, in that very small space, is very significant…’
‘Very significant!’ she readily agrees. ‘Your favourite things; the things that you rely on. That somehow become part of your identity. For some people, it would have been a small problem. But I really noticed how it discombobulated me, for want of a better word.’
It’s a good word.
Was this her characters, in some mysterious way, taking revenge? For they so often, wittingly or unwittingly, find themselves on journeys. Unassuming Harold Fry impulsively walking from one end of the country to the other to see a former work-colleague dying of cancer. Miss Benson, who jacks in her predictable life for an expedition to search for a fabled golden beetle of New Caledonia. Vic’s adult children, travelling to Italy to try to understand the death – and life – of their dad.
‘I always intend to keep them at home and then they’re always packing a suitcase!’
In fact, Harold has hardly stopped to draw breath since his debut in 2012. Three years ago, his pilgrimage was turned into a film starring Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton.
This year, he starred in a West End musical, adapted by Rachel, with music by Passenger.
‘He’s done everything but a board game!’
‘I still feel it would work as a board game. Somebody was saying to me only today: “How is it now that it’s actually finished in the West End?”
‘And I said to her that it’s been amazing, the whole thing – but it’s like I don’t have to worry about him now.
‘All the time the show was on, some part of your energy needs to be looking after it; that’s the best way I can describe it.’
How strange, though, to see a man she knows so well portrayed by others, in film, on stage. Especially in something as radically different as a musical…
‘If I hadn’t been involved in the process, it might have been a shock; but because I wrote it and have been working on it for so many years, by the time it gets to the theatre, it’s a joyful thing.’
Nor does she feel possessiveness when her characters become an actor’s vision.
‘I’m always interested in what other people suggest. If I disagree, I’ll say that. But coming from an acting background [she and Paul met when both were working actors], I’ve got nothing but respect for actors; I love seeing what they bring. Even if it isn’t what I imagined, I love the way it can go.’
Indeed: when characters she’s writing about prove elusive, she’ll often climb inside their skins; such as trying to work out how an inexperienced traveller might fare. ‘When I was writing Miss Benson’s Beetle, I woke in the middle of the night. We were in France and there was a hammock in the garden. I thought: “For god’s sake, go out and try and sleep in a hammock. Just see what it’s like”. And it really made me laugh.
‘Because I did get into the thing and fell straight out.’
Painful!
‘It was! But I thought: “How do you manage a hammock in the dark?” And all that went into the book.’
So Harold went on a pilgrimage. Now we’ve got a homemade god. Coincidence or something in her psyche?
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t a conscious thing, but I am interested in that area. What feeds us; what we worship. What ritual becomes and what belief becomes in a society where we don’t, as a whole, have a Church.
‘I was speaking to someone the other day and one of us said: “The thing is: humanity needs a religion. We need the bigger thing and we create it”.’
So does Rachel never, ever long for a Harold Fry moment?
‘I’m probably a typical introvert in that I need to be rooted; that’s where I get my energy: in a peaceful, quiet place with the things I know. Whereas I know other people – my husband, actually – who are really sustained and invigorated by the experience of the new.’
She loves a good walk; preferably one that starts from home so she doesn’t even need the car.
Yet her characters would tell her she’s wrong…
‘I remember when I was writing Harold Fry originally – this is way back, as a radio play – my dad was really ill. And somebody saying to me: “Don’t you long to pack a suitcase and go to the airport?”
‘And I thought: “No. I don’t have that need…”
‘If you’re a creative person, you’re lucky. Because you escape through whatever it is you do that maybe some people have to get through travel.’
Her next ‘escape’ is her most demanding yet.
‘I don’t know what I was thinking of!’ she says. ‘My next novel covers a life from 1939 to 2026, and a relationship over that time.
‘It’s by far the most ambitious thing I’ve written, but it’s where I wanted to go: to look at the movements, the politics, that have influenced the time I live in.’
As always, research is key.
Piled beside her are six books from the library on Korea: ‘Because the Korean War is part of British history: our involvement.
‘Then I’m reading Look Back in Anger, for language, dialogue…’
Another incredible journey in the making..
The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce is available now in paperback from Transworld Publishers, priced at £9.99.
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