Mourning Ruby by Helen Dunmore

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Synopsis
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Interview

About Helen Dunmore

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Mourning Ruby

» Helen Dunmore

Penguin
Paperback : 27 May 2004

£7.99

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'Heartbreaking, unsettling and profound'
Independent on Sunday

Read an extract from: Mourning Ruby

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Synopsis

Mourning Ruby is a powerful and moving novel that explores identity and the maternal ties that bind from bestselling author Helen Dunmore.

Rebecca was abandoned by her mother in a shoebox in the backyard of an Italian restaurant when she was two days old. Her life begins without history, in the dark outdoors. Who is she, where has she come form and what can she become? Thirty years later, married to Adam, she gives birth to Ruby, and to a new life for herself. But when sudden tragedy changed the course of that life for ever, and all the lives that touch hers, Rebecca is out in the world again, searching. . .

‘Moments that bring the reader to tears…a fascinating – often brilliant – novel’ The Times

‘Bold and unusual…miraculously written, Dunmore’s drama of loss and regeneration pieces together shattered lives’ Daily Mail

‘Emotionally restrained, beautifully observed’ Daily Telegraph

Novelist and poet Helen Dunmore has achieved great critical acclaim since publishing her first adult novel, the McKitterick Prize winning, Zennor in Darkness. Her novels, Counting the Stars, Your Blue Eyed Boy, With Your Crooked Heart, Burning Bright, The Siege (Shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002), The Betrayal, A Spell of Winter, House of Orphans, and Talking to the Dead, and her collection of short stories Love of Fat Men are all published by Penguin. Helen also writes for children, her titles include The Deep and Ingo.

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Reviews

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Critic Review:

‘Moments that bring the reader to tears … a fascinating – often brilliant – novel’
The Times

‘Bold and unusual … miraculously written, Dunmore’s drama of loss and regeneration pieces together shattered lives’
Daily Mail

‘Emotionally restrained, beautifully observed’
Daily Telegraph

‘So richly textured that you feel that you are reading it with all your senses on high alert. A sad, tender novel suffused with its author’s emotional intelligence and steady-eyed candour’
Sunday Times

‘A tale of unbearable tragedy … prose and plot-lines as taut as hawsers. Dunmore is the most gifted novelist of her generation’
New Statesman

‘Beautifully told, intricate, powerful’
Independent on Sunday

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Interview

Helen Dunmore on 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.