Three interviews with Helen Dunmore on House of Orphans, Mourning Ruby and The Siege, which are all published by Penguin.

House of Orphans

After finishing The Siege I wanted to write another novel set in the Baltic area. My approach as a writer is to work from inside the fabric of history, rather than to use history as a backdrop. My characters are caught up in their times and they don't always understand what is happening, any more than we understand the times we're living through. If they are struggling to survive in the Second World War, they don't know that it will end in 1945 - they live in fear, uncertainty and hope, battling on from day to day. I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately. My aim is never to generalise but always to show the power of historical events through particular lives, moments, conversations, loves, betrayals, comedies and desires.

In House of Orphans a young girl Eeva, loses her home in Helsinki, her friends and her freedom when her political activist father dies and she is sent away to a country orphanage. Eeva appears to have nothing left and to be subject to the will of the orphanage matron just as Finland is subject to the will of the Tsar. It looks as if she will have to accept the only future offered to her: training for domestic service. She goes as a servant to the house of a country doctor, and her life appears to be mapped out; but it isn't so. Eeva's future is going to be remarkable. Meanwhile, in Helsinki, other young people are joining the revolutionary movements which Eeva knew in her childhood.

Everything is in ferment, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Finland and Russia move towards violent revolution and civil war. The Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana, struggle to infiltrate revolutionary groups, and to imprison or execute their leaders. My question is, what were these people really like, and what drove them? For example, how did small, idealistic groups of young people in revolutionary cells come to justify terror, political assassination and bombing campaigns? How did the Tsar fail so catastrophically to understand what was going on in the countries he ruled?

For me, depth of character, vibrancy of character, depth of emotion and a fascination with the way each individual's story plays itself out is at the heart of novel-writing. The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it. I return again and again to reading War and Peace and thinking about how Tolstoy achieves such brilliance of character.

Without a doubt there are parallels between the action in House of Orphans, and what is happening now in the early twenty-first century. Belief-systems are colliding around us, often with great violence. There's mutual incomprehension and hatred, fuelling struggles for independence. There are young men and women meeting at this moment, fired with a passion for their cause, working together in small cells which the security forces struggle to penetrate. There are arguments about whether or not terror is justified. There is the theory of violence, and the horrific reality of violence. If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us.

How I began to write professionally
When I was living in Finland after graduating from York University, I wrote poems which I didn't show to anyone at the time. The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was. When you are young you don't always realise how full of doubts everybody is... However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition. My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint. I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.

Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children. By the time it came to my first published novel, Zennor in Darkness, I felt that my grasp of fiction and its techniques was strong enough to match what I knew was a very powerful story.

Earliest memories and influences
I can remember being in my pram: children stayed in their prams much longer then than they do now. A big bouncy pram with black covers and a hood with metal clips that could trap your fingers. I was looking up at my sister who was sitting on the pram seat, with her back to me. The brake was off and we were beginning to run downhill. However, so much of memory is buried until it finds its way out in fiction. Whether writers record memory, or transform it, or lie about it, is another question.

I was always influenced by language. I loved rhymes and poems, stories and songs, anything that had a rhythm - a skipping game in the playground like 'Cowboy Joe went to Mexico', or an action rhyme like 'The big ship sails on the alley-alley-oh' where we all had to dip our heads in the deep blue sea at the end. I loved the things people said. I remember a primary teacher who used to scream, 'Are you deaf, or daft, or both?' at pupils who were out of order. I shrank from what she said but something in the rhythm of her words meant that I never forgot them. This teacher also told us (many times) the story of the death of George Vth. She had the wireless announcement by heart: 'The King's life is drawing peacefully to its close ...' And I remember a long talk with our headteacher, Mr McConway, about being blinded, or deafened. He had been temporarily blinded and temporarily deafened in the war. Deafness was harder, he said. He had felt so alone in it. And my father taught me 'Ooooo that Shakespearian Rag, it's so elegant, so intelligent...'

Goethe's last words are supposed to have been 'more light'. That's what I want in my books: 'more light' - enough to illuminate two lovers asleep or a child crying alone in bed at night, or a pea-and-ham soup bubbling on a stove or a woman in labour walking up and down in her bedroom, or the failed hopes of a revolution. I hope that readers will tear through my books because they can't stop themselves - and then, maybe, read them again and find new things there.

Mourning Ruby

Your early novels, A Spell of Winter and Zennor in Darkness were historical novels, as was The Siege. Your Blue-Eyed Boy and With Your Crooked Heart are contemporary novels. Which sort of writing do you most enjoy?
I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all. However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

Mourning Ruby is a very cleverly plotted novel, bringing together several different stories, and set both today and in the past. Can you tell us a bit about this sort of writing and its benefits?
Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. And each face is also a door which opens, I hope, to take the reader deep into the book. My aim is the same as that of Mr Damiano, a showman who employs Rebecca for much of the novel. He wants to create Dreamworlds. He believes in pleasure, and says that play is the best thing that human beings do. I agree with him on this. Sex is play, food is play, love is play: playing with our children is one of the most profound experiences many of us ever have. And writing fiction is also a form of play. I would like people to come into my Dreamworld and then choose to stay.

One of the themes in Mourning Ruby is the significance of personal and public history. How important do you think it is to be aware of one's own history?
I think it is vital. To try to expunge an individual's history is a terrible violation. It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed. As individuals, we are shaped by story from the time of birth; we are formed by what we are told by our parents, our teachers, our intimates. George Santayana famously said that those who fail to understand the past are condemned to repeat it. Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present. Family story and public history make sense of an individual's place in the world. It may not, however, be a sense that anyone wants to hear.

You are also a children's author and poet. Do you think that either of these have influenced your writing of novels?
Yes, I think so. Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive. Children will not pretend to be enjoying books, and they will not read books because they have been told that these books are good. They are looking for delight. Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words. Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear. I have found this immensely valuable in writing prose, and especially in writing dialogue. You have to search for the voice of each character: the things that he or she could or could not have said, the distinctive rhythm of the voice.

You have used poetry in Mourning Ruby. Could you tell us why you decided to do this?
Many chapters are headed by poem quotations. These epigraphs are another way of shining light on what is happening at this stage of the novel. One poet, Osip Mandelstam, is a vital figure in Joe's imagination, and Joe introduces Rebecca to Mandelstam's work. (Mandelstam died in the Stalinist terror, and Joe is writing about Stalin.) I certainly hope that some readers of Mourning Ruby might want to go on and read poems by Mandelstam, if they don't already know his work.

You won the first Orange Prize for A Spell of Winter, you were shortlisted for both the Whitbread and the Orange again for The Siege: What do you think of the value of book prizes?
I am with Kingsley Amis on this one. He said that literary prizes are good if you win them. I would agree. I have also judged many literary prizes, and I'm very aware that no matter how disinterested the judges try to be, it is not an objective process.

Do you think of plot first and then themes or vice versa? How do ideas for fiction come to you, since your novels are so different from each other?
Often I begin with a scene. For example, when I began Mourning Ruby, I could see very clearly the shoebox in which Rebecca was laid. In fact every detail of that scene was clear: the smell of leather and cardboard and new baby, the gusts of cooking smell from the restaurant extractor fan, the thick, warm darkness and the lights shining out into the yard. When a scene is as sharp and powerful as this, and it won't go away, then I know that there is fiction in it.

Which writers past and present do you most admire?
Too many to list, really. I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing. I also love Turgenev, and Sketches from a Hunter's Album is one of my favourite of his works. It's so sensuous, full of the smell and touch and taste of the landscape. And it's rather melancholy too, and realistic, packed with tiny stories which aren't softened at all. Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield. Every so often I like to re-read Prelude and At The Bay. I love Villette, by Charlotte Bronte, and think it contains one of the finest portraits of mental alienation and depression ever written. The image of Lucy Snowe wandering through those haunted city midnights is extraordinary.

Both Hilary Mantel and Tim Lott have written superb memoirs in the past few years, and I've read and re-read them both (Giving Up the Ghost and The Scent of Dried Roses). Other contemporary novelists whose work I really like are Julie Myerson, Barbara Trapido, Andrew Cowan, William Trevor, Chinua Achebe, Doris Lessing. I read book after book by Doris Lessing when I was twenty, lying on my bed in Finland and being knocked out by the sense of amazed recognition her work gave me then. And writers who can really do comedy and have perfect pitch for dialogue: Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, and again Hilary Mantel, who is often extemely funny. But it's invidious to name just a few names.

Which other books are you enjoying reading at the moment?
A first novel by Louise Dean, called Becoming Strangers. It's a good story, told with grace and force. I'm also reading a book of poems by Don Paterson called Landing Light. I've always admired his technique, but now it seems that his expression of feeling has caught up with it. I buy lots of books from Persephone Books too - they publish out-of-print books, mainly by women authors - and I've been re-reading Leonard Woolf's The Wise Virgins. It's such an angry, passionate, nakedly candid account of a courtship between two people who seem as if they ought not to be together at all. And it exposes Edwardian middle-class social values; the anti-semitism, the constricted lives enforced on women, the abuse of millions of lives through domestic service. You can tell from this book that Leonard Woolf isn't going to be a novelist for long. He's going to immerse himself in politics and social reform, and the long, complex marriage whose beginning is dramatized in The Wise Virgins.

The Siege

In writing The Siege, what was your inspiration for wanting to return to the past and to Russia?
I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place. I'd never thought I'd write directly about Russia, even though I 'd read a great deal [about it]. Gradually this idea of writing something came and grew. I began with this character who had an aunt who lived through the siege of Leningrad then I realised no, that it was the Aunt that I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about these people directly, not as a memory but in the present moment. I want go back to that period and to that war and that winter.

Have you visited Russia?
Yes, and I knew, in a sense, what life might have been like. It's a very big leap of imagination to leap back, it's very hard to do that. But I think there was just enough feeling, enough handholds to begin to scale it. I'm not a blockade survivor, I'm not writing memoirs, I'm not a historian but I think I've got quite a unique combination of things in me. I'm a poet and I've read a lot of Russian poetry and can hear it’s sounds. Russian poetry is so important to an understanding of the culture. I have a love for the place and you have to feel deeply about a city to want to write about it. Some people find those long winters quite repellent but I find them fascinating, exhilarating even. But then to imagine going through that long winter without the heating, without the food, without the structure, with everything crumbling. There is a wealth of fascinating historical material available in terms of work written by historians, but also people's diaries, people's memoirs, people's own experiences. It's almost a question of where do I begin, there is so much. It’s got to be a novel, so where's the narrative drive, where's the story? It was very difficult.

Was there a particular reason for having these characters, in this relationship, in The Siege?
I wanted a double story. The younger ones have grown up under Stalinism. They have to be pragmatic, they don't remember anything else; this is their only life, this is what they've got to live with, this is the material they've got and if they want to survive they have to accommodate to one degree or another. For the older characters there is the memory of all kinds of different pasts, of what the revolution could have been, of what it was, of the different twists and turns that led to Stalinism. There's the sense of loss that they may have betrayed themselves. They have stories that the younger generation don't know about. So, there is a double story and it partly consists of unravelling what's happened in that older generation. And the young people, will they survive, will they have the physical, emotional and even the moral energy to get through this siege? And, if so, what kind of life are they coming to? That was my intention for a double story and the stories echo one another.

Why are you so particularly attached to this episode of history?
It's a very emotional subject. Everybody I 've talked to who's written the history of that kind of tragic time feels that there is something you're grappling with. You cannot fully grasp it, you try to grasp it, then there's the effort of trying to make a shape out of it. A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into. After I’d finished I felt I that I couldn’t really abandon the place or the people; they still echo.

Helen Dunmore opens up on her inspiration for writing The Siege, Russian poetry and the difficulties of saying goodbye to characters.

In writing The Siege, what was your inspiration for wanting to return to the past and to Russia?
I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place. I'd never thought I'd write directly about Russia, even though I 'd read a great deal [about it]. Gradually this idea of writing something came and grew. I began with this character who had an aunt who lived through the siege of Leningrad then I realised no, that it was the Aunt that I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about these people directly, not as a memory but in the present moment. I want go back to that period and to that war and that winter.

Have you visited Russia?
Yes, and I knew, in a sense, what life might have been like. It's a very big leap of imagination to leap back, it's very hard to do that. But I think there was just enough feeling, enough handholds to begin to scale it. I'm not a blockade survivor, I'm not writing memoirs, I'm not a historian but I think I've got quite a unique combination of things in me. I'm a poet and I've read a lot of Russian poetry and can hear it’s sounds. Russian poetry is so important to an understanding of the culture. I have a love for the place and you have to feel deeply about a city to want to write about it. Some people find those long winters quite repellent but I find them fascinating, exhilarating even. But then to imagine going through that long winter without the heating, without the food, without the structure, with everything crumbling. There is a wealth of fascinating historical material available in terms of work written by historians, but also peoples’ diaries, people' ‘memoirs, peoples’ own experiences. It's almost a question of where do I begin, there is so much. It’s got to be a novel, so where's the narrative drive, where's the story? It was very difficult.

Was there a particular reason for having these characters, in this relationship, in The Siege?
I wanted a double story. The younger ones have grown up under Stalinism. They have to be pragmatic, they don't remember anything else; this is their only life, this is what they've got to live with, this is the material they've got and if they want to survive they have to accommodate to one degree or another. For the older characters there is the memory of all kinds of different pasts, of what the revolution could have been, of what it was, of the different twists and turns that led to Stalinism. There's the sense of loss that they may have betrayed themselves. They have stories that the younger generation don't know about. So, there is a double story and it partly consists of unraveling what's happened in that older generation. And the young people, will they survive, will they have the physical, emotional and even the moral energy go get through this siege? And, if so, what kind of life are they coming to? That was my intention for a double story and the stories echo one another.

Why are you so particularly attached to this episode of history?
It's a very emotional subject. Everybody I 've talked to who's written the history of that kind of tragic time feels that there is something you're grappling with. You cannot fully grasp it, you try to grasp it, then there's the effort of trying to make a shape out of it. A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into. After I’d finished I felt I that I couldn’t really abandon the place or the people; they still echo.