Novelist Charles Palliser joins me today to chat about his newest novel, Sufferance.
Welcome, Charles. Please tell us a little bit about yourself.
My first novel, The Quincunx, became an international best-seller in 1990 and sold more than a million copies in ten languages. It was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters which is given for the best first novel published in North America.
Since then, I have published five further novels: The Sensationist, Betrayals, The Unburied, Rustication, and, in 2024, Sufferance.
I have both US and Irish citizenship but have lived most of my life in the UK. After graduating from Oxford, I taught English Literature and Creative Writing at universities in England, Scotland, the US (Rutgers, NJ) and France. I have also taught workshops in creative writing in France, Greece and Switzerland. I live in London.
Please tell us about your current release, Sufferance.
When an Eastern European country is invaded and occupied by a brutal enemy, a well-intentioned man offers shelter to a young girl from a different community. He assumes that the arrangement will be temporary. However, time passes and the enemy’s hatred of the girl’s community leads to the gradual but pitiless exclusion and then persecution of its members and anyone trying to help them. The man has put himself and his family in danger. Gradually the girl turns into a hated prisoner whose presence imperils her hosts. The wife suffers a breakdown while the girl is gradually revealed to have her own demons. Her disruptive presence opens underlying rifts within the family as the man’s two daughters come to resent her presence. None of their neighbours – nor even their friends and relatives – can be trusted not to betray their dangerous secret. As the growing threat from outside puts an intolerable strain on the family, the man eventually finds himself confronted with a terrible choice.
What inspired you to write this book?
I’ve always wanted to deal with the subject of the Holocaust since at the age of thirteen I came across a book in my town’s public library about Auschwitz and saw the photographs of piled up corpses and starving people behind barbed wire fences that are now so familiar. It was 1961 and at that time nobody talked about the Holocaust or used that word. I was traumatised by the discovery of what had happened only sixteen years earlier and it turned everything I’d assumed about humanity upside down. I’d had no idea about the human capacity for evil until that moment. It was in large part the need to understand how such a thing could occur that made me a writer. I brooded about how to write about it for decades, knowing that I had to avoid the traps that so many movies and books about it have fallen into: turning it into an adventure, finding something trivially uplifting in it, or just recycling what everyone already knows and thinks.
Works tackling the subject usually adopt the point of view of the victims or occasionally that of the perpetrators. It occurred to me that most people living in the occupied countries where these crimes were being committed were in neither of those roles but were caught up, without choosing it and at first without even realising it, in a vast and pitiless bureaucratic exercise. As they became aware of what was happening they must have found themselves faced with moral choices about how far to resist, ignore, or collaborate with what was happening. That insight seemed to me to offer a way to approach the subject from an unusual angle and in a manner that would bring out the complexity of it – the complicated mixture of motives that allowed even well-intentioned members of society to take part – wittingly or not.
Excerpt from Sufferance:
The girl came to dinner two days later when my daughter accompanied her back from school. She was charming. I thought she seemed much older than our own daughter because she appeared to be so poised—quite the young lady. I remember that as soon as she entered the living-room she crossed to the window and said: Oh, you have such a lovely view. How I envy you that. It’s true that there was a spacious prospect over private gardens and a public park and then in the distance you could just see the cathedral. However, the truth must have been that our apartment seemed small and shabby in comparison with what she was used to and so that remark was well-chosen. We were close enough to the railway line to the East for trains to be audible at night. And on this first visit—and now, of course, I see how uncanny it was—she squeezed herself into the corner and said: Look, you can just see the canal from here. How delightful it looks.
It was not at all delightful. It was just a bleak industrial waterway. But now as I hear her bright young voice uttering the word “canal”, I find myself shivering.
What exciting project are you working on next?
I’m finishing a novel called The Disruptor: It’s about an English teenager who finds himself the legal ward of a New York property developer with presidential ambitions. He gradually realizes that he himself is an innocent threat to the wealth and reputation of his guardian. He is disrupting the great Disruptor’s plans.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I first considered myself a writer only when the first copy of my first novel was in my hands. But I’d wanted to write fiction from the age of nine when I was praised by my mother and my teachers for my little stories. The flattery went to my head.
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
I have been a fulltime writer since 1990 when the success of The Quincunx allowed me to give up being a professor. (Though I had enjoyed it.) Most of the time I write five days a week from about 9 to 4. My other interest is playing Baroque music on the piano – unfortunately really badly.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I need to have a visual reminder pinned up on my wall or at least, available on my computer. It might be portrait of someone who reminds me of one of my characters or a photograph of a place similar to the one I’m writing about.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Before I decided at nine that I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be an explorer venturing into territory that hadn’t been discovered. There were still a few of those back then.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
I’ve just put a novella on Amazon as a downloadable Kindle book called The Twist of the Knife. It’s about a young governess who is accused of murdering one of her pupils in a remote country-house in England in the Victorian period. She pleads her innocence and claims the house is haunted by murderous ghosts. Is she insane or is something even more sinister going on? It should appeal to lovers of the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Links:
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