The Dark Mountain is certainly compulsive reading—what first gave you the idea for this novel?

The Dark Mountain is dedicated to Kim Johnston, a friend of mine who first alerted me to the Atkinsons’ story. She had been hired to renovate the woodwork at Oldbury, and had to complete a conservation report as part of the job. In the process, she did quite a bit of historical research, and was fascinated by the history of the house—so fascinated that she wrote to me about it. I borrowed her copy of Louisa Atkinson’s biography, and went on from there.

How long did it take you to research and write? Which was the longer part of the process and which do
you prefer?

To be honest, I’ve forgotten how long it took me to research and write—probably more than a year altogether, what with my visit to Orange and the Southern Highlands, and scrolling through page after page, year after year of The Sydney Gazette. The writing definitely took longer than the research, though there was an intervening stage—the plotting and structuring—which ate up quite a bit of time as well. Tying all the historical threads together into a satisfying narrative was neither a quick job nor an easy one, though it’s the part that I enjoyed the most. It was like putting together a puzzle.

The book’s cast includes the first Australian-born woman novelist, the first Australian children’s book author, and the first ‘serial killer’ in Australia—it’s almost too interesting a line-up  to be true, yet you’ve endeavoured to stick to verifiable facts wherever possible. How much does this interfere with the creative process, or is it helpful?

It was a difficult trick to pull off, but all the more gratifying as a result. The fact is, I thought this story was so amazing, and so worthy of being told, that I was desperate to stick to the facts as much as humanly possible. And I believe that the challenge of trying to fit someone’s entire life story into a tidy narrative gave me the most complex structure I’ve ever achieved: I had to fold Charlotte’s life back on itself, in a funny sort of way. So you could say that the necessity of sticking to verifiable facts honed my creative skills.

There is some ambiguity with regard to central events in the story, which presumably were not verifiable. Were you tempted to avoid this ambiguity by creating your own ‘facts’?

I did create my own ‘facts’ on two occasions, because there didn’t seem to be any way of disproving them: as far as I’m aware, George Barton’s eventual fate is a complete mystery and the reason why Charlotte’s first engagement failed is also a mystery. So I indulged in a little bit of novelist’s licence. But the central mystery of the story wasn’t something that I wanted to solve, because this ambiguity is part of Charlotte’s life-long problem. It’s also part of our problem when we try to delve into past events: sometimes there’s just no way of knowing what really happened, because the records are incomplete.

There are many interesting characters here. How did you decide whose point of view to use and why?

It quickly became apparent to me that of all the Atkinson children, Charlotte was, in many ways, the most interesting: she was obviously rebellious, and her extraordinary marriage suggested that she must have been deeply affected by events at Oldbury. When I started researching the Atkinsons, she was the one whose behaviour really seemed to demand some sort of explanation. There was also a romantic quality to her story which made her a good subject for historical fiction. And her life had a nice thematic structure to it, because it seemed almost to revolve around a single event—or at least, it could be made to revolve around a single event, without too much tweaking.

Your narrator, in speaking about the novels of her sister, seems to view them as thinly veiled portraits of their family. As a novelist, what do you think of this view of fiction? Did you use the novels as ‘factual’ evidence for your characterisations?

I did, to some extent. If you read Louisa Atkinson’s work, there are moments when a description of something will absolutely leap out of the standardised Victorian schlock, and you know that there’s reality behind it. Let’s not forget, too, that Louisa was a journalist and naturalist before she became a novelist— and that her own mother’s book was a thinly veiled portrait of the family. Furthermore, some of the situations in Louisa’s books (like the mother deprived of her children by cruel executors) were just too close to her own history to be anything but examples drawn from real life. I do think that Charlotte—as I portrayed her—was perhaps reading too much into Louisa’s writing, because of her own exaggerated sensitivity and abiding resentment. But I also think that Louisa had a tendency to make use of her own experience when  writing fiction, just as she did when she was writing as a journalist. Personally, I think that viewing fiction as thinly veiled fact depends very much on what kind of fiction you’re reading. The Dark Mountain itself could be viewed as thinly veiled fact. In my next children’s novel, I’ve decided to include some actual friends, under their real names, and weave a fantasy around them. On the other hand some writers are adamant that real life is only the raw material for their books, and get very cross when readers claim to recognise themselves in the text. In my opinion, it’s extremely hard to separate fact from fantasy. Half the world’s problems are caused by people’s inability to do just that.

This article from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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