House of Orphans by Helen Dunmore

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Interview

About Helen Dunmore

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House of Orphans

» Helen Dunmore

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Paperback : 01 Feb 2007

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Synopsis

In her historical novel, House of Orphans, prize winning author Helen Dunmore tells the story of a young girl trying to forge a life for herself after her family has been ripped apart during the brutal reign of the Russian Empire in Finland.

Finland, 1902, and the Russian Empire enforces a brutal policy to destroy Finland’s freedom and force its people into submission.

Eeva, orphaned daughter of a failed revolutionary, also battles to find her independence and identity. Destitute when her father dies, she is sent away to a country orphanage, and then employed as servant to a widowed doctor, Thomas Eklund. Slowly, Thomas falls in love with Eeva…but she has committed herself long ago to a boy from her childhood, Lauri, who is now caught up in Helsinki’s turmoil of resistance to Russian rule.

Set in dangerous, unfamiliar times which strangely echo our own, the story reveals how terrorism lies hidden within ordinary life, as rulers struggle to hold on to power. House of Orphans is a rich, brilliant story of love, history and change.

'Outstanding, a sheer pleasure to read. Dunmore is a remarkable storyteller’ Daily Mail

‘Every character is richly drawn and makes for compelling reading…top-quality fiction’ Daily Express

‘Richly ambitious…there isn’t a dull page. A remarkable achievement, firmly established Dunmore as among the best living novelists’ Scotsman

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, Mourning Ruby 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:

‘It is an extraordinary novel. [The] landscape and its people are as lovingly and hauntingly described as Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. It is lyrical writing…’
Guardian

‘Beautiful and poignant…sumptuously written, crackling with emotional electricity"
Telegraph

'Dunmore's new novel is outstanding....[it is ] elegantly written, unfailingly intelligent and a sheer pleasure to read'
Daily Mail

"Outstanding... Dunmore is a remarkable storyteller. She has a wonderful ability to conjure utterly convincing detail, with each of her characters beautifully realised. This novel is elegantly written, unfailingly intelligent and a sheer pleasure to read."
Daily Mail

"House of Orphans is vibrant with detail... all seem to rise naturally from the narrative rather than being imported furnishings. Equally she does not allow facts to obtrude, but simply illuminate the story... Finland in 1901 lives again."
Penelope Lively, Sunday Times

"There isn't a dull page. The double theme is handled with dexterity and intelligence; Thomas and Eva are memorable characters. This is a novel in which scarcely a single wrong note is struck... It is a remarkable achievement and one which firmly establishes Dunmore as among the best living novelists."
Scotsman

"This novel… shows that Helen Dunmore is back on dazzling form… Dunmore is one of our most intelligent and provocative writers, and everyone should read her work."
Independent

"…executed with the graceful verve and precision that are the trademarks of her writing… the narrative of Thomas Eklund’s wrenching, one-sided and painfully innocent affair with Eeva is extraordinary a narrative that combines a luminous delicacy of observation with raw emotional power to haunting effect."
The Sunday Telegraph

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Interview

An interview with Helen Dumore on House of Orphans. This is an edited extract of an interview with Helen Dunmore published in the March/April issue of newbooks magazine.

House of Orphans is Helen Dunmore's ninth novel in a career notable for its prodigious output. Threaded through her work is a fascination with history and how it forms us. House of Orphans moves further back in time than previous works, digging deeper into the history of the Russian empire, explored from the Soviet aspect magnificently in her 2001 novel The Siege, about the siege of Stalingrad. Though focused on Finland, House of Orphans shows how the Romanovs contributed to their own downfall.

"The Czar didn't realise how close to the edge he was in terms of history," Dunmore explains. "How the Romanovs were about to fall over the cliff's edge." Czar Nicholas II failed to realise that his role as "father of the people" was not only anachronistic, but hated. Though in his eyes a Finnish petition demanding autonomy was a minor issue, it contributed to his downfall, reflecting Dunmore's conviction that the events that shape our destiny are usually those of which we are unaware.

"You are almost buried in your own history," she says. "It is precisely the things that we don't notice and completely take for granted that people will look back on and be amazed by." In The Siege, the action of which centres on a starving Russian family, there is the same sense being buried by events. Though the family despairs that the Nazi blockade will end, we readers know that the Germans face defeat.

It is a perspective that fascinates Dunmore. "I am not writing about history from the mountains of knowledge, from which you can survey the plains of ignorance, because that is a very annoying way of writing," she says. Her use of metaphor is typical: she has the poet's craving to paint word pictures.

As with The Siege and her debut novel Zennor in Darkness, which focuses on a young girl's relationship with the writer D. H. Lawrence and his German wife during the First World War, House of Orphans deals with subversion and the reaction of state and society to those it regards as threats to the status quo.

In House of Orphans the young revolutionaries and the reaction to them has clear parallels with our own so-called War on Terror. Dunmore agrees. "All the debates we have about terrorism and what is and what is not justifiable, were debates we had over 100 years ago," she points out. Russia's struggle to hold onto its empire, involving questions of how to define "Russsianness", be it nationality, language, geography, ethnicity or culture, are questions taxing the leaders of the US empire now.

"Russian history is a constant story of expansion and contraction, of it trying to hold onto all the parts that keep flying away. Does it hold onto that with a relaxed grip or does it tighten it really hard?" Dunmore asks almost to herself. The more repressive the grip, the more the revolutionaries react, she adds. "That was true then, and that is true now."

This is an edited extract from an article by Danuta Kean (http://www.danutakean.com) published in the March/April issue of newbooks magazine.

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.