Lauren Bufferd

After years of looking for a place to belong, Daniel Rooke’s keen intellect and interest in astronomy won him a place on the 1788 First Fleet voyage to the British colony of New South Wales, now known as Australia. While his fellow seamen struggled to control their cargo of convicts and seek out the natives, Rooke was permitted to build an observatory that he hoped would lead to fame and fortune back in England.

Kate Grenville’s stunning new novel, The Lieutenant, follows Rooke to his isolated post on a distant shore, where his careful notations of the stars and changing weather are overshadowed by a burgeoning interest in Aboriginal languages. After Rooke meets a young woman whose linguistic gifts parallel his own, their singular friendship inspires him intellectually and empowers him emotionally.

Grenville is one of Australia’s most respected authors and her last novel, The Secret River, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book. She recently answered some questions from BookPage about the true stories behind The Lieutenant and how film, nature and Australian history inspire her.

The Lieutenant is based on real events when the First Fleet landed in what was then New South Wales in 1788. A young Lieutenant named William Dawes, who was also a gifted astronomer, left behind written records of his contact with the indigenous people, one young woman in particular. How did you come across his story and what made you decide to transform it into fiction?
While I was researching The Secret River I came across Dawes’ story in a book called The Birth of Sydney. The editor quoted some of Dawes’ language notebooks, particularly a few conversations between Dawes and a young Aboriginal girl called Patyegarang. The intimacy, trust and playfulness of these conversations leapt off the page at me—they were a side of early black/white relations I’d never imagined was possible.

Rooke has some social characteristics that in the 21st century might be labeled as autistic.  Was there something about his real-life counterpart that made those attributes part of his character? If not, what do you think that adds to his character?
Some of the other early settlers were interested in Aboriginal people, in what we’d think of today as an anthropological way. Dawes’ relationship with them—as recorded in the notebooks he left—has quite a different flavour. There’s a kind of artlessness or innocence about the conversations he records, a respect for the people he’s talking with, and a sense of fun, that made me think he must have been an unusual fellow. There was no sense of him patronising the Aboriginal people or thinking of them as lesser—these were just people whose company he really enjoyed.

I saw Rooke, and perhaps Dawes too, as having the kind of cleverness that often makes kids outsiders among their peers, and imagined that his relationship with the Aboriginal girl was a kind of emotional awakening for him—here was a world in which he could enjoy simply being himself. This isn’t a sexual relationship—Rooke and Tagaran are companions, friends, and equals, as I think Dawes and Patyegarang probably were. He’s free of the social straitjacket of his society, in which he’s so uncomfortable, and can discover aspects of his being that he never dreamt were there.  

I understood Rooke’s journey, in part, to be about the growth of empathy, but I know that’s not the only one. How would you compare Rooke’s emotional journey to his physical one?
What those 18th-century travellers did is almost beyond imagining for us, for whom the world is so known, so small. Rooke (like Dawes) plunged off from his narrow world in Portsmouth into a hemisphere where very few Europeans had travelled. In many ways we know more about Mars than they knew about the place they were going. Rooke, with his scientific interest, was more open than most to the wonders of the new place—he set up an observatory to look at the relatively unknown southern stars, kept meticulous records of rainfall and temperature . . . this was a journey of eager adventure for him.

The emotional journey was also one of opening up to the new, and recording an inner climate. But as well, it drew him into a conflict in which his new emotional awareness came head-to-head with his duties as a soldier. In that terrible moment, when he has to make a decision that will affect the rest of his life, he discovers the universe of morality. It’s not enough to be clever; it’s not even enough to discover an emotional life. Somehow, he has to feel his way through an impossible moral and human dilemma and come out the other side.

Years ago when we were looking for a nanny for our son, we hired a Polish woman whose English was still rudimentary but she was able to make a joke (in a mixture of Polish, English, and hand gestures) that both my husband and I understood. We thought this made her a good communicator. I thought of this a lot as I was reading your book, especially as Rooke comes to understand the difference between the precision of grammatical translations and true communication. Is that one of the things you were trying to capture?
Where there’s goodwill, intelligence and mutual respect, truthful communication is possible even without many words. In fact, the more words you have, the better you can lie. Rooke is struck by his friend Silk (based on the real writer about early Sydney, Watkin Tench), writing an account of his time in the colony in a style of great wit, charm and charisma. Silk comes across in his own work as irresistibly attractive (to the point that modern historians are inclined to take everything he says at face value). What Rooke comes to see is that Silk’s version is appealing, but not always quite true.

One of the things I was interested in with this book was the question “how do we know what we know?” The conversations in Dawes’ notebooks are truthful, in the sense that they seem to have been recorded verbatim, as if by a tape-recorder. But their deeper truth—what was going on between the lines, in the silences before and after the verbatim record—is open to interpretation. My version of the context of their conversations is only one of infinite possibilities. Silk’s urbane text is a different kind of challenge to simple ideas of truth and fiction. At what point does a storyteller’s urge to shape his material turn it into invention?

This, of course, is a big issue for writers of historical fiction, so the novel can also be read in terms of the current debates about fiction, history and all the kinds of writing that occupy ground between those positions.

Rooke notices that he and Silke are different in that Silke’s impulse is to transform the strange into the familiar and his is to wallow in that strangeness. As a writer, what do you think your impulses are?
I’m definitely a wallower in strangeness. It’s what I love so much about being a writer of fiction—to explore utterly strange worlds like the one that occurred in 1788 on the shores of Sydney Cove. But I also love to find the strange in what seems to be familiar. In many ways I know Sydney Cove and Dawes Point (where the story takes place) so well that they’re invisible—they were virtually my backyard when I was growing up in Sydney. But by going back two hundred years, looking at the place through the eyes of my characters, I could feel the unknown place beneath the one that was so familiar. Just by standing still, in a place known to me in every cell, I could take a journey into the utterly unknown.

The descriptions of the land and seascapes are so intense in this book—almost like separate characters. Can you talk about the influence of the natural world on your writing?
I seem only to be able to write if I can set it in a specific, concrete place. The reality of a place—of landforms, plants, rocks, even the weather—seems to be necessary, even though I’m writing fiction. It’s as if I need to acknowledge the real before I start to build a superstructure of invention.

I spent the first 12 or so years of my life in a fog in which I only saw the natural world if it was within arm’s length—I was short sighted, but nobody picked that up until I was in high school. When I saw the world for the first time, courtesy of glasses, it was a revelation—everything was so beautiful! I think that sense of wonder has never left me. I can still be stopped in my tracks on the way to post a letter or buy milk by a sky full of clouds. 

I read an interview with you that mentioned your background in film—one of the things that is so remarkable about your writing is the vividness of the imagery. Do you think your experience with a visual medium had an impact on your writing?
The film experience was fundamental to my writing, I believe. I worked mainly in editing, and mainly in documentaries. Working in documentary—without a script—is an exercise in finding the story in the material you’ve got, rather than starting with the story and then making the images fit it. Editing a documentary is an act of faith that a narrative can be found in disconnected bits and pieces. That’s always been the way I write. I start with fragments and live for a long time with uncertainty about how they’ll add up to a story. For me, it’s a way of keeping a sense of discovery in the writing process. Any time I’ve tried the “write-to-a-plan” technique, I’ve ended up with writing that’s cautious, bland and uninventive—low energy. For all the risks involved in writing out of a muddle of bits and pieces, it’s the only way that seems to work for me.

You really found a balance between what we experience as human beings and the way nature exists outside of subjective time. (I love the line "Time had no intention and no judgment.") How do you think Rooke came to understand that that balance, and what do you hope the readers take away from Rooke’s experience?
Dawes was an astronomer, so I looked at the stars a lot when I was writing this book. I was struck by the fact that I was looking at exactly what he’d looked at so long ago. The Southern Cross, with its faint fifth star, is just as he’d have seen it in 1788. So when I set out to invent a fiction from his story, that sense of the stars was a continuous background hum to the book—you could look up every night and there they were, the past and the future calmly crossing the sky in an eternal present. I came to see that I was trying to tell a story that reflected that. It was a story about two individuals in a particular time and place. Their lives were finite, their ends in some ways sad. But they’d made something that transcended their own lives. They were part of that enormous cosmic story, and nothing they created was wasted or lost. A spark of human understanding had leapt between the two of them, and would go on forever, like those stars.

The book has a huge appeal in Australia; after all, it’s about the very beginnings of your country as a colony. What might you say would be the novel’s appeal for a US audience?
It’s a story about how two people managed to make a bridge of understanding between their unimaginably different worlds. The human urge to see the world as “us” and “them” is very deeply rooted. Difference is so often a trigger for obstinate refusal to try to understand, and that leads so easily to a pointless cycle of conflict. The real story of Dawes and Patyegarang, and the fiction inspired by them, is a push in the opposite direction. Here’s one moment when difference didn’t disappear, but was respected and valued and turned into understanding—what people everywhere on the planet are hoping for.

What are your plans for your next novel? Are you going to continue to mine Australia’s history or are you going to focus on something contemporary—or neither one?
I’ve just started working on another work set in the past—so many of Australia’s astonishing stories haven’t been told. There are still a lot of silences in our past, things we’re not quite sure how to look at. For a novelist, those silences-waiting-to-speak are irresistible.

Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville, Tennessee.

Novelist Pearl Abraham was brought up in a Hasidic family and raised in New York and Jerusalem. A thorough knowledge of spiritual and religious tradition informs all of her work, and in her three previous novels, she has depicted the tensions between the secular and the spiritual within observant Jewish communities. In American Taliban, however, Abraham turns her considerable gifts of observation to explore the attraction of militant Islam at the beginning of the 21st century.

Loosely inspired by real-life events, American Taliban follows the intellectual and divine quest of John Jude, an 18-year-old surfer dude with a penchant for Rumi and Walt Whitman. As John’s interest in Islam grows, he leaves his family, his girlfriend and all vestiges of secular life behind, traveling to New York, Pakistan and ultimately Afghanistan in a quest for total spiritual immersion.

Abraham recently took the time to answer some questions about religious extremism, the impact of the real-life story of John Walker Lindh on her novel and whether or not fiction can help us understand political or moral complexities. 

First off, I want thank you for writing such an astonishing and brave work of fiction. Astonishing, because of the trajectory of the novel, brave because of how sympathetically you portray a character whose model is still a pariah in our society.
Thanks so much. It’s good to know there are readers willing to go with me. This story still gets a rise out of people, nine years later!

American Taliban is obviously based in part on the experiences of John Walker Lindh. What appealed to you as a writer about his story and how did you alter it for your novel?
Lindh’s story haunted me long after the headlines ceased. I kept thinking about his unfortunate timing: In the ’60s and ’70s, his journey might have taken him to India and Buddhist life, and he would have come away with an alternative experience, but he would have been relatively safe. I worried that in the 21st century, these spiritual and intellectually formative journeys—the picaresque in literature—would become an endangered aspect of human experience.

These journeys of becoming are especially significant in the making of American individuality, and I wanted to place them in our historical context, with Whitman’s celebration of the self and Emerson’s Transcendentalism, to show how important these experiences are to the American story. That’s why John Jude’s story, unlike Lindh’s, is inspired by his experiences as a “soul surfer,” that peculiarly American form of spirituality that evolved alongside other 20th-century bohemian cultures, such as Beat and Hip. And it’s why philosophical ideas about the importance of becoming rather than mere being give shape to this novel, and finally become John Jude’s legacy.

In many ways, John’s path seems to be about surrender—spiritual, sexual or psychological. Do you think that surrender is a necessary part of religious experience?
Surrender or submission is an experience that’s part of nature, of life and not only religious life. Like it or not, we surrender and submit every day though we don’t always admit or understand that this is what we’re doing. Mothers, for example, sacrifice their personal needs and desires, even their physical bodies, for the sake of their children. Employees submit to the needs of the corporation. Soldiers submit to risk and dying for their countries, for the nonsensical “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” We submit to the pleasures and torments of love. When we dance, if we’re good at it, we surrender ourselves to the music and rhythm. Surrender makes certain athletic feats possible: for example riding a wave or riding a horse or tango dancing with a partner, though there’s a yin-yang complexity in the idea of surrendering while still holding onto your core of stability at the same time. Our lives are filled with the compromise of surrender. Really, finally, what choice do we have against nature and growing old, dying? Even if we refuse with Dylan Thomas to “go gentle into the night,” we still go.

Most of American Taliban follows John on his intellectual and spiritual journey, but there is a shift to his mother’s point of view at the end that is written very differently, much more emotionally. Why did you separate the two narratives and why did you choose to explore these characters using two different styles?
You’re perceptive to pick up on the emotional quality of the novel when it shifts view. Although Barbara presents herself as the secular skeptic, the rationalist psychotherapist, she is sentimental, while her son, who embraces spiritualism and religion, is not. This defies expectations, but it’s true to my experience. I grew up in a Hasidic family and didn’t come to know Jewish sentimentalism and nostalgia until I left the rigor of that world and encountered American Jewish literature and secular American Jews, which is packed with, as we say in Yiddish, schmaltz, meaning fat. Of course Barbara has good reason to be emotional: she’s a mother whose son is missing. John, on the other hand, at that age when one feels most invincible, can be coolly unconcerned.

But I’m very aware that this decision to end on Barbara and not with the happy return of John Jude or even his unhappy incarceration puts this book outside the mainstream traditional novel, with its Freudian masterplot that defines the trajectory of every story along the lines of the male experience—with a beginning or arousal, a middle or complication that moves toward crisis and climax or eruption, and on to the end which is satiety and repose. The female experience doesn’t have this strict pattern: women can stop, start, finish, restart or keep going for as long as they like. Susan Winnett, writing about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, makes the point that since a woman’s experience is nothing like the male one, she may consider alternative plots, ones without the, after William Empson, nonsense of an ending. And closed endings really aren’t true to life, especially American life. Think of Elliott Spitzer and soon Tiger Woods. The worst scandals end in a comeback, a restart.

Early in the novel, we see John surfing the net for information about Islam and using an Arabic name to chat with others in an Islamic chat room—both ways in which technology has changed the way we find out information about religion and politics. What do you think are the pros and cons of this way of communicating?
Just as the printing press changed the world—reading became a private, solitary act and oral storytelling in the town square became a thing of the past—so too the Internet. But though we lost the communal, oral aspects of storytelling, I wouldn’t want to go back to a time before books. And I also wouldn’t want to return to the days before the web put incredible amounts of information at our fingertips.

The Internet has been blamed for the long reach it provides terrorist recruiters, but it’s just an easy target. Those who are quick to shut down democracy in the face of fear begin with a bent in that direction already: they’re not comfortable with the transparency and freedom that our Constitution guarantees. These kids go looking for these sites, whether seeking adventure, or on behalf of Islam—they’re the ones who make the first contact. In the past year, 30 Americans have been arrested for these activities, so we have a problem. It’s easy to blame the Internet but it doesn’t help us figure out what’s really wrong with or missing in our world, in American life.

John’s sympathy for the underdog and interest in fairness is evident right from the start. How do you think this character trait affects his decision to pursue Islam?
You know, he’s at just the age when a kind of purity rules: things are either fair or not; true or false. Intelligent as he is, he accepts no ands/ors/buts, no nuance. Compromise and complacency are near crimes. I could argue that we need this kind of young purity to remind us of who we were, what we once believed in. This purity puts him on the side of the underdog; he’s for the victim of the powerful mainstream establishment, which does predispose him to taking the persecuted Islamic side against the historical imperialism of the west. The young age of many of these recruits, for example the recent five kids from the Virginia area, points to this [as a contributing factor], but I don’t want to simplify their motivations. It’s a mixed bag. They’re also seeking adventure, engaging in something bigger than American life has offered them, etc.

What do you think a fictionalized or imagined account of a real-life person or event can tell us that a book of nonfiction cannot?
If you believe, as I do, that imaginative empathy, which demands stretching yourself, is one of the most powerful ways to understand the other, then a fictionalized imagined account has greater access to that understanding. Facts often tell us very little, and sometimes, perhaps I should say often, they turn out not to be factual, as we know from our study of historical accounts. When the victor writes the story then that story will be shaped by the mythic triumphant heroism—propaganda in other words. This is a subject I’m interested in, and will probably engage with in my next novel.

You grew up in a Hasidic community and have your own experience with religious orthodoxy. Do you think your background makes it easier to understand people who shape their lives around their religion?
I do understand people who grow up with the intellectual rigor and ascetic disciplines of religion but I confess that I find it difficult to sympathize with newcomers who seem largely to be seeking community, a sense of belonging and safety, rather than knowledge. Perhaps the desire for safety seems to me infantile, because it’s a false notion that there’s safety in numbers. Have you seen the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, with its myth surrounding the inner sanctum of the innermost rabbi? It’s good.

Perhaps all this is based in personal experience: I grew up belonging and found it stifling. It seems difficult for people to understand my stand for individuality over community. I enjoy and have come to need solitude, though I’m not the hermit my friend Jonathan Freedman likes to call me.

Your previous three novels all have Jewish characters. This novel has none and though it’s about religion, is not specifically Jewish in any way. Can you still be a Jewish novelist without addressing Jewishness specifically?
You’ve turned the question that’s usually asked (Can a woman write a man’s novel, or a man a woman’s?) backward, which makes it more interesting. I think you’re talking about sensibility: Is my sensibility and point of view still Jewish even when I write about Muslims? Perhaps, but besides being Jewish, I’m American, a woman, a professor of literature, etc, and these aspects of who I am don’t cancel each other out. I’m teaching a class in women’s literature and halfway through the semester, we read As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner and ask a similar question: does the work have to be written by a woman to qualify as women’s literature? So no, you don’t have to be a woman to write women’s literature, just as a woman can write a male novel. And we have examples of non-Jewish writers taking on Jewish subjects and Jewish characters, though Jewish writers may hate them for it. Henry James’ anecdote about the making of a novelist can inform us: All it took for a young, inexperienced woman to write about the military, he said, was seeing a soldier’s regiment as she walked past them in a hotel lobby. She had her “donnée” and could fabricate the rest.

You are from a family of nine children. Did that influence you as a writer? Has your family been encouraging of the work you do?
The smart teasing banter between siblings might be good training for sharp dialogue. And the Yiddish language with its particularly cuttingly precise turns of phrase may also have helped. Some of my siblings are supportive of me, if not of my work; perhaps on some days they’re even admiring. My dad, however, complains about my choice of topics and audience. I could accomplish more, he argues, if only I would limit myself to teaching Jewish children. The operative word here is limitation.

What other novelists do you think write well about religion or religious experience?
I’ve always loved the way Borges references the mysteries of the Kabbalah, and puts it to work in crime or murder stories. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins is/was a miracle. Reading for American Taliban, I immersed myself in Arab Andalusian poetry, in Hafiz and Ibn Arabi and more. Treasures. So I see I’m not naming fiction that explores the religious experience. Perhaps I’m not interested in reading about religious experience so much as in the spiritually inclined one. My pet peeve in writing about the religious experience is the overdone, over-explained work, which is really clumsily addressed to the reader. The characters who live in the religious world wouldn’t tell each other about it. Borges, writing about translation, made the point that Hitti in his history of the Arabs doesn’t ever mention the camel because he doesn’t have to. He takes the presence of the camel for granted. It’s possible that you can only take for granted what you’ve truly lived.

Is it true that you do most of your writing in bed?
I’m in bed right now, typing on my laptop! I like working early mornings, with my brain still quiet, my thinking clear, but I don’t always want to get out of bed at 5 or 6 a.m., so working in bed (with coffee) helps. Really, it started one winter when my NYC apartment wasn’t getting heat and I did most of my reading and writing for The Seventh Beggar in bed. But I’ve always loved reading in bed, summers too, though it’s bad for my back.

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Read a review of American Taliban.

In her fourth novel, an acclaimed Canadian writer transforms a stranger-than-fiction experience into a memorable coming-of-age tale.

Mexican director Carlos Reygadas cast you in his film Silent Light, which was shot in much the same way as the film in Irma Voth. How did that experience shape the novel?
I wouldn’t say that my experience with Silent Light shaped the novel, but it was certainly the source of it. I had never been in a film before and I was unfamiliar with the whole process, which at times seemed utterly chaotic. I couldn't always follow what was going on. Often the crew would be conferring in a Spanish I couldn’t understand, often I’d be off to the side waiting as big decisions were being made . . . it was easy to extend my own unfamiliarity and bewilderment to the character of Irma Voth. Here’s this young girl, raised in a conservative Mennonite encampment in a remote part of Mexico, suddenly surrounded by men and women smoking and drinking, talking about sex openly and whose creative pursuits and their ways of getting there are wildly exotic. She comes to respect the director’s vision though. In a way, it’s only her interior landscape that finds affinity with that incoherence and chaos. I think all her actions are pretty logical though.

You grew up in a Mennonite community and wrote about that world beautifully in A Complicated Kindness. In previous interviews, you’ve said that you weren’t going to write about Mennonites again. What about this story made you return to this subject?
I think I said that during a couple interviews in the whirlwind of promoting A Complicated Kindness. But that was presumptuous of me because one can never truly say what settings and characters will appear in future novels. So many authors return time and again to the communities they know intimately; there they find the stories that are universal to all of us. My Mennonite background is a big part of who I am and it’s an identity I can work with and explore in various ways, directly or obliquely. Everyone in this world defines themselves against some kind of authority, whether religious, familial or social. For a few of my characters, that authority has turned out to be Mennonite fundamentalism. Obviously this is not to suggest that all Mennonites are fundamentalist.

Irma Voth is about a young woman in the process of finding herself, and writing is an important part of her journey.  She keeps a journal and embroiders subversive words on the inside of her clothes. Why are words so important for Irma?
Words wouldn’t be so important to Irma if she had a husband she could turn to, or a father who was not so authoritarian. It’s her circumstances that make words so vital to her. She lives in the desert, she looks after cows, she has no stimulation. She’s not a particularly literary person or anything, but words are the only tools she has access to and she writes more out of desperation and urgency than anything else. But then she discovers herself through them: by trying to memorize a poem that Wilson has recited to her, for example, or by changing words until she begins to impose her voice—her style—over top of reality. By inventing her own way of weaving words, she is turning real, lived experiences into imaginative experiences, and this gives her the courage she needs, especially when she and her sister are traveling up to Mexico City with a baby, not sure of where they’ll stay or how they’ll survive.

There are many references to art and making art in the novel—from the filmmakers in the desert to the fascination Aggie has for the Diego Rivera murals in Mexico City. How does art assist your characters on their journey?
Irma and Aggie find their authority—God, the Bible, the religious men with all their injunctions—at home, in their Mennonite community. They find another authority in the artistic community, and it’s one that gives them more space to decide on their own beliefs and behaviours. Irma quickly sees it’s not a loving community, hypocritical like any other, but she spots the possibility of personal redemption of some kind, through art, and it's transformative powers.

You write so thoughtfully about the positives and negatives of growing up within a religious community. With the popularity of Amish fiction and TV programs like "Sister Wives," it's obviously a topic of interest in the culture at large. Why do you think these stories are so fascinating?
I think you’re referring to the curiosity people have, not so much with religious communities, but with utopian communities. All of us have considered renouncement of the ugly, duplicitous world at some time or other, so these people who have removed themselves from the world can seem attractive. So often though, human beings cannot live up to the founding ideals of these utopian communities. Even so, they remain attractive, especially for people who have trouble navigating the “real world.” You don’t have to think so much, constantly consider your values and assess situations and make decisions. Instead, you just obey, let decisions be made for you, kind of like joining the army. That’s pretty appealing.

What do you hope readers will take away from Irma Voth?
I’m genuinely excited for friends and readers to pick up this book and engage with the ideas. You read to feel less alone but you also write to be less alone. It's a continuing conversation with readers, a connection that somehow hopefully softens our aloneness, if I can use that word, even if we never meet face to face.