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A conversation with Janette Turner Hospital
Your novel has been described by some reviewers as "John le Carré meets
Virginia Woolf," and one of your colleagues at the University of South
Carolina said that your novel is like a spy thriller written by Henry James.
Do you like these descriptions? And what do you think they mean?
Since I love the work of Virginia Woolf and Henry James, I'm delighted to be
elevated to their company. I guess the comments are meant to indicate that I
have indeed written a spy thriller, but that I'm as concerned with the
nuances of the interior life as Woolf and James were.
It is about terrorism, but you had been working on it for two or three
years before the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, is that
right?
For three years before that. The idea of the novel began in l988, and I
began the actual writing in the summer of '99. I had not quite finished the
first draft, however, when the September 11 attacks occurred, and that did
have a bearing on the final section of the novel.
What kind of a bearing?
Well, not the kind of bearing you might expect. In my novel, ten hostages
from the hijacked plane which has been blown up are kept by the terrorists
as a last negotiating card. The hostages know their chances for survival are
not great, and each tells the story he or she must tell in preparation for
dying. This comes late in the novel. I had blocked out the tenor and the
mood of these stories in my mind, but I hadn't written them yet. The mood was
stark and dark.
And then, the media began to piece together the narrative of all the final
cell-phone conversations: from those with minutes to live on the hijacked
planes; from those on the top floors of the World Trade Center after they
realized that there was no way down. And that narrative was not at all what
I would have expected. It was not stark with terror or fear. The calls
seemed imbued with a kind of radiant calm. Those who were about to die wanted
to tell the people they loved just that: I love you. They wanted to make
peace while there was still time with any estranged family members or
friends.
It rather stunned me, to tell you the truth. And it made the writing of the
hostage tales in the bunker far more difficult, from a novelist's point of
view. It is so much easier to write dramatic scenes full of angst and
torment than it is to write tales of radiant calm. The scene in the hostage
bunker was hell to write. I felt that I was walking a high wire between the
risk of sentimentality and the data of authenticity: the knowledge of what
people actually said in those cell-phone calls in the last minutes of their
lives.
So how did you first get the idea for Due Preparations?
All my novels begin with the collision of an image and an idea. There's
white light, heat, fission. Kaboom: the moment of conception is like an
explosion inside my head. Not just my head; my body too. I'm in a state of
intellectual excitation. I'm riveted by an image; I'm obsessed by an idea,
and the idea always takes the form of a burning question that I feel a
compulsion to answer for myself. The novel is my search for an answer.
The image for this novel came from a TV documentary on World War II that I
watched some time in '98. There was a short clip of people huddled together
in an air-raid shelter in London during the Nazi Blitzkreig. There were
about a dozen people in a very small dark space, and everyone was wearing a
gas mask, and I was startled by the eerie sci-fi quality of the scene. You
couldn't tell who was male, who was female, you could not tell what race
anyone was, and you could only guess at who might be a big-built child or a
small-boned adult. There was something disturbing and slightly monstrous
about the figures. Sometimes, the documentary voiceover informed me, people
had to spend a whole night like this.
I suddenly found myself pondering this question: what would it be like to be
trapped and confined for a really lengthy period of time (for 24 hours? for
days?) with a small group of people, all wearing gas masks and padded suits,
all knowing that death and destruction were on the rampage outside the
cramped shelter, all knowing they might or might not get out of the shelter
alive? How would they deal with fear? What would they do to pass the time?
And if all the usual signifiers of gender and age and race were missing,
what would happen to the way they talked to one another, and to the way they
interacted with one another?
Because I tend always to think in literary paradigms, and because my own
academic training is in medieval literature, I immediately thought of
Boccaccio's Decameron as a parallel situation. Ten young people
(seven women, three men), fleeing the plague which killed off half the
population of Florence in 1348, cocooned themselves in a palatial villa in
the hills outside the city. They had been shell-shocked by the nightly death
carts, by the corpses in the streets, by the deaths of family and friends.
Both literally and psychologically, they escaped the plague by walling
themselves off from it and taking turns to tell stories to one another.
So that explains the link between gas masks and the plague. And did the
link between the plague and terrorism follow immediately?
No, it didn't follow immediately. After the dramatic and intense moment of
conception of my novels—when I feel a bit like Saint Paul being blinded
and stunned on the road to Damascus—there's a long slow period of
gestation. Very long, really. At least a year, though all that time I'm
obsessed with the image and the idea. I toy with them, I move them around
in possible scenarios, I think about them, I follow mental tangents, I read
widely. . . .
It was the idea of having ten people holed up somewhere, cut off from the
world, that obsessed me most. That and the plague. I sort of lost track of
the gas masks for a while. I guess Boccaccio just kept hanging around,
looking over my shoulder. Because of him, it was ten people from the start,
and that stayed at ten, though they ended up being ten hijacked hostages
trapped in a bunker.
But in the beginning, the nature of the "plague" remained vague in my mind.
My characters would know they would very likely die, but they would resist.
They would survive psychologically by telling stories, either to themselves
or to the others. At first, I thought that I would have each character
narrate his or her tale silently and mentally, making wild misjudgments about
the other characters which the reader would learn as he moved inside the
heads of the other characters, one by one.
I wanted a sense of powerful and awful mystery: my characters would not know
where they were. They would not even know what country they were in. They
would be in darkness. They would not know one another. I wanted to have a
kind of mythic dimension to their trauma and isolation, rather like that of
King Lear on the heath in the storm. But I definitely didn't want a
futuristic atmosphere or an aura of fantasy or otherworldliness. I wanted
their plight to be very firmly grounded in realism and in the present time.
So I read again accounts of prisoners of the Japanese, who survived solitary
confinement by retelling themselves stories, by reciting Shakespeare or the
Bible, by mapping their childhood neighborhoods in their heads. I read about
the hostages in Beirut in the '70s who survived beatings and solitary
confinement, often in darkness, by similar means. And I kept feeling more
excitement about this: Boccaccio, who himself survived the year of the Black
Death in Florence, knew what he was talking about. Telling stories is
essential to survival when one is imprisoned or trapped or blindfolded and
kept literally in the dark.
So it was the solitary confinement of the hostages in Beirut that tied
The Decameron to terrorism?
I guess so. You know, the evolution of a novel is a mysterious process, even
to the author. The gas masks had been there from the beginning, but they'd
gone underground, so to speak. Things simmer away in the unconscious at the
same time as one is pursuing another tangent at the conscious level. I
followed several trails simultaneously for a long time before the novel had
any clear shape in my head.
I followed the plague trail assiduously for a while. I reread Boccaccio's
Decameron, and then I reread Daniel Defoe's 1722 novel, A Journal of
the Plague Year, and then I reread Albert Camus' The Plague.
The first two writers had first-hand visceral experience of the bubonic
plague: Boccaccio in Florence in 1348; and Defoe in London in 1665, the
year of the Black Death. He was a child of five in that year, and all his
life he remained obsessively afraid that the plague would return, and he
wrote about this obsessively. He published two books and something like
thirty articles and pamphlets on the subject.
Camus used the plague as a metaphor for the Nazi occupation of France; but
to my surprise, I discovered not only that the town of Oran in Algeria is a
real place (and not a fictional one, as I had always supposed) but also that
there was a real outbreak of the bubonic plague there in Camus' lifetime.
And here is a very curious bit of Trivial Pursuit data that came to have a
bearing on the novel: all three of these authors were themselves engaged in
espionage at some point of their lives: Boccaccio for the City of Florence
at the papal courts in both Avignon and Rome; Defoe passed information from
and to Dutch merchants for William of Orange, and—here was a startling
and unexpected twist, given where I now live—he acted as a sort of spy
and undercover agent at the Court of King James on behalf of the dissenters
in South Carolina. And Camus, of course, published an underground newspaper
for the French Resistance.
The title of your novel is taken from Defoe, isn't it?
Yes. In 1720, the plague broke out again in Marseilles. Defoe was a merchant
(though a spectacularly unsuccessful one, I must say. He went bankrupt
several times) and he was a politically active and involved man. He had
argued forcefully for free trade with Europe and for open ports. But after
the outbreak of plague in Marseilles, against his own mercantile interests,
he voted to blockade English ports against European ships. He was so afraid
the plague would return that he wrote two books within a couple of months in
1722. One was the well-known novel A Journal of the Plague Year,
which is still used in university courses on the eighteenth-century novel,
and so is always available in paperback. The other has been out of print for
over a century. It was a nonfiction book, a how-to-survive manual, for if
the plague reached English shores. It was called Due Preparations for the
Plague. It was a kind of Red Alert of the kind now issued by the
Department for Homeland Security: this is what you can do to protect yourself
from terrorists: stay away from New York City; and if you're in the city,
stay away from Grand Central Station and Yankee Stadium and the Statue of
Liberty and Wall Street and airports and so on. . . .
And what both kinds of warning amounted to was this: no matter what
precautions you take, with terrorists, as with the bubonic plague, there's
ultimately not too much you can do to be safe. Both are like stealth
bombers. They come in under radar, and you don't know where they will strike
next.
So once you had linked the plague and terrorism, how did the CIA come
into it, and how did you find out so much about Intelligence operations?
First, I started with the idea of a hijacked plane. That seemed the most
likely reason that a group of strangers would be trapped together in a small
space and not know where they were. I had two actual models for my fictional
hijacking: it was a blend of the 1976 hijacking of the Frankfurt-Paris
flight to Entebbe, and of the l988 hijacked flight that blew up over
Lockerbie in Scotland. I read an enormous amount, especially on the Web,
about those two hijackings, and this is where the idea of conspiracy and
Intelligence agencies first came into the mental picture. In the Entebbe
hijacking, you will remember, Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service Agency,
carried out a brilliant and daring rescue of all the passengers. But what
really startled me, and introduced a fresh direction to the novel, was the
proliferation of Web sites about both hijackings—but especially about
the Lockerbie disaster—which revealed that many relatives of those who
died are convinced that American intelligence knew this was going to happen,
and that diplomatic and foreign-service people were warned not to fly on
certain routes within a certain time period, but that average traveling
Americans were given no warning.
Now, I have no idea whether or not these conspiracy theories are true, but
from a novelist's point of view, the idea was irresistible.
And how did you find out so much about chemical warfare and the CIA?
Partly from research and reading; and partly from incredibly good luck. I
lucked into an extraordinary source of information.
It just so happened that I met someone whose duty is to train recruits for
Intelligence, and to train them in the deployment of, and in methods of
defense against, biochemical warfare. He brought home for me a gas mask and
the protective clothing used. I put them on, because I needed to know how it
felt to be inside one of those gas masks.
It is horrible! Only the fear of death by incredible agony keeps people
suited up in them. Anyone claustrophobic is done for pretty fast. There's a
voice tube, but sound comes out muffled and distorted (so I knew I couldn't
have my hostages telling stories with their gas masks on, as the stories
would be largely unintelligible!).
I learned that even highly trained military personnel suffer severe
psychological (as well as physical) problems if they have to wear masks and
protective clothing for long. A lot of people vomit into the masks, and one
of the drills is for what to do if this happens, because if the vomit isn't
instantly scooped out, the wearer suffocates.
All of this is part of the lecture notes and part of the training, and my
friend lent me his lecture notes for the course, which gave me the idea for
Salamander's lecture notes.
Do you always do such intense visceral and "bodily" research for your
novels?
I do actually. And for this novel I happened to have a visceral experience of
armed attack and confinement in a small cell which was terrifying at the
time, but which turned out to be very good for the novel.
What happened?
In May 1999, I was one of four Australian writers who were invited, along
with our Czech-Australian translator, to participate in the Prague Literary
Festival for the launch of the Czech editions of our books. From Prague, we
were to travel to Budapest in Hungary to give readings at the University of
Budapest.
We took the Orient Express from Prague at midnight and were to arrive at
Budpest at about 7 a.m. the next morning. Unfortunately, although we were not
even getting off the train when it passed through the Slovak Republic on its
night ride, the guard on the train said we were supposed to have transit
visas in our passports. We had heard nothing of this. The guard said he could
"fix" things for us for a fee. We smelled a scam and a bribe, and refused to
pay.
Big mistake. At 2 a.m., at a railway siding on the Czech-Slovak border, the
doors of our sleeping compartments were kicked open by border guards with
machine guns, our passports were confiscated, and we were forced off the
train in the middle of nowhere. It was rather terrifying. We were all kept in
a cell (the same one, fortunately, crowded though it was) for the rest of
the night.
What saved us, I think, is that one of the writers had a cell phone and
called the home number of the cultural attaché at the Australian Embassy in
Budapest. Wheels were set in motion and in the morning we were released and
put back on a train to Prague. We had to pay our own fare back; we had to
pay the "fine" for not having visas; and our passports were stamped as
miscreants who were henceforth "persona non grata" in Slovakia. We will not
be permitted to enter that republic for the next ten years. At which point,
I'm afraid we irreverent Australians burst out laughing and asked, "Is that
a promise?"
Our poor translator, who had escaped from Communist Czechoslovakia under
terrifying circumstances many years earlier, explained to the armed men that
we were laughing because we were so grateful to them for releasing us. She
told us she had to keep mistranslating our responses throughout the night for
fear of further inciting the guards.
Since the novel was already forming in my head when all this was happening,
even though I was scared at the time, the novelist part of me was humming
with excitement: Now I know what it's like! This will be so useful for the
novel.
Is Salamander based on a real person?
Good grief, if he were, do you think I'd tell you? The more you learn about
how Intelligence agencies operate, the more spooked you are by them. But
Sirocco, the double agent for the other side, is very loosely based on an
Osama bin Laden type of figure. At the time I was writing this, it was bin
Laden, not Saddam Hussein, who loomed large in all our minds and in the media.
Discussion
Questions
1. What themes do the novel's motifs of plague and pestilence underscore?
2. Due Preparations for the Plague is told through a variety of
perspectives. What does each narrator contribute to the larger picture
presented in the novel? How does each help unravel the mysteries of Air
France Flight 64?
3. Lowell and Samantha find many answers in the contents of the blue duffel
bag, but what questions remain unanswered at the novel's end?
4. Guilt ravages the lives of the individuals who lost loved ones in
Operation Black Death. What are the different strategies that each adopts to
deal with the past?
5. How are the bonds of family recast over the course of the novel? Do their
discoveries of the past strengthen or diminish the power of familial bonds
for Lowell and Samantha?
6. Hypocrisy and cowardice are the vices that enable many of the cover-ups
surrounding Air France Flight 64. What are the long-term repercussions of
these behaviors?
7. Lowell's handling of his father's blue duffel bag might well be described
as paranoid. How subtle are the boundaries between reality and delusion in
the survivors' lives?
8. What might account for Françoise's attraction to Sirocco?
9. Identify the different communities to which the various characters of
the novel belong. What does each community represent?
10. Of the hostages' final hours in the hands of their captors, Homer
Longchamp remarks, "this reverence for death itself, and life itself, and
this grief for the death of strangers—how can we account for this arising
from the death of Satan and the silence of God?" Describe the emergence of
spirituality in the hostages' testimonials. Does spirituality offer solace
in the lives of the child survivors?
11. Through the novel, Janette Turner Hospital alludes to great works of
literature from throughout the Western canon, notably Dante's Inferno,
Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, Boccaccio's The
Decameron, and Camus' The Plague. What timeless themes of morality
does Due Preparations for the Plague hold in common with these works?
12. List the sins of Salamander. Is he as guilty of evil-doing as Sirocco?
13. "What can be worse than not knowing?" Samantha demands when she
initially approaches Lowell about the mystery of Air France Flight 64. Does
knowledge really bring consolation?
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