This was published 7 years ago
Burial Rites author Hannah Kent's passion for the past has created a big future
Hannah Kent went back to 1820s Europe to find the source material for her first two novels – a move that has paid off handsomely for the up-and-coming Australian writer.
The young novelist works from home, and writes full time, so requires absolute discipline. Routine is everything. She rouses at 6.30am, feeds the pets, then makes a pot of coffee, which she takes white. She has breakfast with her partner, a high-school English teacher, kisses her goodbye at 7.30am, then heads to the study with its bookshelves of fiction, shabby desk, and single window to the left.
Elska the cat sleeps on the spare chair. Myffy the Bulldog naps at her feet. They both snore soundly in the yellow morning light while Hannah Kent, 31, taps away at her dark historical fiction.
Hannah Kent.Credit: Damien Pleming
She tries to punch out at least 1000 words a day, and resists the urge to edit until the phrases flow swiftly. Kent believes in the truism that it is easier to steer a moving ship than one in dock, so she allows only modest breaks in momentum. Even those are regimented. A phone alarm tells her to pause at 10.30am for a stretch, and at 1pm for lunch.
"It's a bit school yard-y, I know," she says, meeting me during one such extended break. "But it's a good reminder to tear your eyes off the screen, go outside and see that the sun's still shining."
Kent is the creator of sad, stunning books, and despite any clichéd perception that writers do their finest work in passionate flurries when inspiration strikes, this is the way she best plies her trade. It has served her well. Kent is the award-winning author of the smash-hit debut novel Burial Rites, and an eagerly anticipated sophomore effort, The Good People.
Her work ethic is integral. Rebecca Starford, her collaborator on the literary journal Kill Your Darlings, says she knows she cannot call Kent between 8am and 2pm, because her friend will be in lockdown. "You have to protect your time and space," she says, "and Hannah takes that very seriously."
Music is the sole permitted invader. While writing the climactic scene in her first novel – about the last woman executed in Iceland, in 1829 – Kent played a single Radiohead song on repeat. For her new book – about strange events in Ireland in 1825 – she played Gaelic music. (She enjoys Swedish radio, too, for the reassuring background babble.) "Silence can be oppressive," Kent says, sighing. "Even intrusive."
Totems and desk mates change from project to project, but there is always a collage of photos, maps and sketches on the wall, to remind her of the world she is trying to create. "Thatched roofs, misty horizons, miserable people," she says, laughing. "Not really."
She doesn't write anywhere else in the house – partly so she can lock herself in, partly so she can step away later and disassociate. She concedes, though, that there are almost no moments she is not thinking about character, landscape and dialogue.
"That sounds sort of dramatic, but there's always a pot slowly boiling in the background," she says. "I can get very … 'obsessed' is not the word I would turn to, but it's the closest one. I can be very preoccupied."
Today is a nice distraction. We meet in Carlton, near the University of Melbourne at a community library – another working haunt. We sit outside in the first spring sunshine, wishing we had worn sunglasses, listening to the rumble and squeal of trams in the distance. This is her first stop on another arduous book tour.
"I actually enjoy it," she says. "The fact that you write something and people read it is pretty miraculous of its own accord. Then the fact that you rock up at a bookstore and people take the time out of their evening to come and hear you speak – basically talk about yourself for an hour – it's so generous."
I felt a huge amount of pressure writing this book. I was contracted, I had to deliver and I didn’t want to disappoint readers.
It's still slightly surreal, but she has experience. In case you don't know how Hannah Kent became the Hannah Kent, here is the cribbed version.
A girl, 17, goes on exchange, leaving a 40-degree Australian summer for an Icelandic winter, where each day is 20 hours of darkness. The homesick teen discovers the tale of an executed murderess, Agnes Magnus d' Óttir, and eventually writes an historical novel imagining her life and death. At 26, she wins a $10,000 unpublished manuscript prize, including mentorship from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Australian author Geraldine Brooks (who marvels at her mature writing, including a "mastery of tone and voice, her ability to capture the detail of the period without overburdening the storytelling").
"Scandi noir" is big at the time, but that doesn't remotely explain the way offers pour in from global publishers, including big "pre-empt" bids to snatch the work off the table. "We knew there was this world buzz," says her agent, Pippa Masson. "But it took off like wildfire." Kent secures a two-book deal worth more than $1 million – virtually unheard of for a first-time author, and Burial Rites goes on to become a book club darling – popular at independent bookstores, Dymocks and Big W – selling more than a quarter of a million copies and earning a slew of awards.
"It was completely disorientating," Kent says, smiling widely, "in the most wonderful way possible." Overnight success allows her to give up a patchwork quilt of post-grad employment as a research assistant and tutor – running creative writing workshops, editing academic publications and penning freelance reviews for $20 a piece. She can afford a car with airbags, and finally has that crucial, longed-for luxury: time and space to write.
Kent grew up in Aldgate, a little town in the Adelaide Hills. Her dad, she recently wrote, was the embodiment of "old-fashioned country masculinity" – a natural athlete who could skin a rabbit. Her upbringing was outdoorsy.
Her little sister Briony remembers roaming the paddocks together on eight acres, with a dam and a sheep and a swing in an old oak tree. "My memories are of building cubbies with sticks, and pretending we were witches," Briony says, "making potions out of leaves and rocks and whatever we could forage."
Hannah wanted to be a dancer, painter and bricklayer but also, clearly and early, a writer. For birthday gifts she crafted moving poems. At the Royal Adelaide Show she bought the stationery show bag. Her mum was the school principal, so she often holed up in the library after hours, reading Enid Blyton and Paul Jennings. At 13 she started her own magazine, The Owl, and for two years produced monthly issues filled with editorials and articles, illustrations and recipes, puzzles and petitions, and serialised short stories. It perhaps explains her versatility.
As she showed in both her debut novel and the follow-up, Kent can render anything from the arrival of a stillborn baby to the slow unravelling of a good woman: A kind woman. But perhaps, she thought, we are good only when life makes it easy for us to be so, maybe the heart hardens when good fortune is not there to soften it.
She has an innate sense of the malevolent power of gossip and of things turning sour over misunderstandings: It was only later that our tongues produced landslides, that we became caught in the cracks between what we said and what we meant, until we could not find each other, did not trust the words in our own mouths.
She sees the way memories can be so clear and strong – yet so weak and deceiving: It's the glaze of ice over the water, too fragile to trust.
I wonder, though, how does she write so well about cold hearts and suffering, given what she describes as her "charmed life"? Kent says the actor Emily Watson once answered a similar question, after inhabiting an unhinged role in a typically cruel Lars von Trier film. The stability of her life, Watson said, allowed her to become unstable in her work. "And maybe there's something in that, because I'm in such a secure, supported, lovely life, it allows me a safe space to explore these things," Kent says. "Empathy is the key. But writing for me is about forgetting myself. Totally."
Yet when Burial Rites was first released in 2013, it earned Kent universal acclaim and also an unexpected tag: feminist author. This is perhaps because the book portrays Agnes almost as a martyr – her crime an act of self-defence or mercy. Now, with a second book featuring strong, misunderstood women turned criminal in a difficult setting, I wonder how she feels about the label.
First of all, she is a feminist, in that she believes in equal rights for both sexes. Second, she writes what interests her most – stories that are absent from the record. Third, inevitably, too many women are among those absent stories.
My question, in a way, says more than her answer. "I think it indicates the patriarchal world we live in," she says. "A woman can't write about women without it being an attempt to further feminist causes?"
She is absolutely right. The assertion also ignores the fact that there are strong male allies and weak women in both her books, that her characters – like you and me – are complex, contradictory and flawed. "Look at Lolita, for goodness sake," she says. "You might feel a bit ambivalent to Humbert Humbert, but you're still on his side sometimes, and that's what's so powerful about that book. You're like, 'Oh my god, I'm sympathising with a paedophile.' "
I'm curious, too, about her seeming fondness for describing windswept and godforsaken places. But she didn't choose those settings. She stumbled across one true story in Iceland, then another from Ireland – the latter born while researching the former. One day, she says, she grew tired of translating Icelandic sources, and so spent an afternoon indulging in her version of procrastination – reading foreign historic newspapers. "And I came across this very short article about a woman convicted of a fairly ordinary serious crime, but her defence was so extraordinary that it just appealed to me. The same little bells went off."
Voilà . Her new book was set in a poor corner of County Kerry in 1825, a setting where superstition reigned. It led her to write about a place that seems bound to the supernatural, where lakes turn dark mirrors to the sky: Staring at their silvered surface on that first night had felt like stumbling across a rare vision of holiness. It filled her mind with terror.
She quotes the American writer Ron Rash who said "Landscape is destiny" – something never truer than in history, when lives were mercilessly shaped by the environment. "Landscape loomed large," Kent says, "weather loomed large, and I think to attempt a certain accuracy in historical fiction you need to acknowledge that."
The voices of characters she finds perhaps the hardest component to nail, particularly in first drafts, when she doesn't yet know them well enough.
I mention the English writer Hilary Mantel and her technique of inviting characters into her home, offering them a chair and asking them questions. Kent smiles. She does something similar – imagining hers in specific situations. How would they react without shelter in pouring rain?
"It's intuitive, but the more I do it the more that intuition becomes accurate," she says. "Then I know what they're going to say."
I see Hannah Kent again eight hours later, in a nearby bookstore. She is wearing the same dark jeans and powder blue jumper as in the morning, and is interviewing Kate Mildenhall about her debut historical novel, Skylarking.
For an hour in front of 20 people, they talk about the common goal of telling "an emotional truth if not a factual one". They mention the inherent bias of history, and how their books are almost acts of emendation. They laugh over a shared love of reading rooms, poring over spidery handwriting and drowning in research.
The Good People is based on two newspaper articles and little or no biographical information, so it is largely imaginative, but there were still reams of research. Kent visited the Flesk River (central to the grim events), took trips to Irish museums, read dense academic articles about 19th-century midwifery, books on fairy lore, and tomes about herbal medicine and the power of foxglove to poison or heal.
How does she fill the gaps? Sometimes, she says, through dreams. She struggled to describe the home of one character, for instance, until she had a dream and saw it. She sees it still. "The stain of the smoke on the wall. Where the fire sits. When writing I always have my fingers crossed that I'll have as many dreams as possible to help get me there. I can't control it, but it's a wonderful thing."
Then she folds her intuitions and details and dreamscapes together. Her editor, Mathilda Imlah, says Kent has a witheringly authoritative store of knowledge, but on the page it lives in the shade. "Her books wear their learning so lightly. There is no exposition for exposition's sake," Imlah says. "Hannah stands alone for that kind of delicacy." The result is transportive. The author John Purcell, head marketer for Booktopia, described Kent on Twitter as an #oldsoul. He also (perhaps) identified the reason she's so good: "@HannahFKent," he wrote. "if you keep writing such books people will soon discover your secret ... you've invented a time machine."
Publishers like two-book deals, because they can lock in a known quantity and build an author as a brand. For the author, the security is great, as is the show of faith – but it creates expectation and pressure. And writing a book is hard. "I compare it to childbirth," says Starford. "You forget what it felt like the first time, which is why you're happy to do it the next time."
Burial Rites was written over many years, with time to examine the work from a distance, but on The Good People Kent faced a deadline. "I felt a huge amount of pressure writing this book. Who wouldn't?" she says, plaintively. "I was contracted, I had to deliver and I didn't want to disappoint readers. I'm human. I felt all of that."
It was tough year, too. She broke up with her former partner, and while the writing became a sanctuary and distraction, the words were not untouched. "Oh, you should have seen the first draft," Kent says, smiling ruefully. "Everyone died. It was a just a bloodbath – I had to rein it back." She wrote one iteration after another, leaving thousands of words in the trash. She grew anxious, lost in characters and subplots and the complexity of making third-person views harmonious and consistent. She handed it in at the start of this year, embarrassed.
You know what happens next: it was masterful. Thematically similar to Burial Rites, says Imlah, but where her first book fosters a creeping sense of malignant dread, her second builds a fog of weighty claustrophobia. "The foreshadowing is amazing," says Imlah. "Hannah is able to do incredible things with the human heart, with such a light touch. It's stunning."
For all the praise, Kent remains grounded. Masson says it doesn't always happen like that: "I keep waiting for Hannah's diva moment, but it never comes," she says. "It may never." And yet she has every right to flaunt a little. What's she up to next? Oh nothing, just waiting to hear what will come of Burial Rites … the movie. Did I bury that lead? Sorry. The book has already been optioned. Gary Ross (The Hunger Games, Pleasantville, Big) is attached to direct. There's also this actor, Jennifer Lawrence, set to play the lead. "That's happening," Kent says, nodding. "No timelines yet."
She's also stretching her collaborative wings by developing a film script with two peers for a Gender Matters Screen Australia project. The psychological thriller will be set in contemporary South Australia.
After a handful of years enjoying Melbourne's literary circles, she's heading back to the Adelaide Hills – that beloved pastoral setting of cool climate pinor noirs and deciduous trees. "I often have a yearning to get back into a more natural environment," she says. "I hear traffic every day and I'm still not used to it, and I'm looking forward to having a bigger veggie patch."
Her love of all things organic reminds me of a favourite passage of mine from her first book, when Agnes finds comfort in the annual slaughter on the farm, offal in pails, the fire high, and a croft thick with the smell of boiling fat, suet and rye: This is my life as it used to be: up to my elbows in the guts of things, working towards a kind of survival. The girls chatter and laugh as they stuff the bags with the bloody mix. I can forget who I am.
How would she write about home, I wonder? Kent says she would mention the colours in autumn, the smell of wood smoke. On a recent visit she walked to a stand of old pine trees and spent an age at their feet, cutting a glut of saffron cap mushrooms from the forest floor.
I watch her wobble off on her bike now, in a puffy black jacket and orange helmet, riding off into the wilds of the northern suburbs, and remember something she said about the importance of experiencing the world intensely – her sadness that we are all less in tune with the earth than we once were. It makes me think of her back on the land, up to her wrists in the mushroom harvest, scrunching the dirt between her fingers, smiling as all that tactile knowledge makes her heart swell with truth and belonging.
The Good People (Picador Australia, $33) is out now.