Hilary wint de Booker Prize
Peter Breedveld
Foto: Lalla Essaydi
If I hadn’t been lucky enough to have a good education, then I think I might have become very much like my character Allison in Beyond Black, because of my experiences as a child. I think I might have become the prey of the irrational. But then, if you have an education you have something to offset. You have a reasoning process to set off against this experience. So you can say it’s just a metaphor, just something I use. It doesn’t dominate my whole life. The problem for Allison is that her talent is undisciplined. She can’t stop the dead talking to her.
I think there are quite narrow lines between being an artist and being psychic and being insane. But these are very important lines and it’s a question of control. I am not one of these people who say that your characters take over. Because they don’t. That’s not straight thinking, when people say that. What does happen when you’re working on a book, you’re working on it unconsciously, the whole time. And something erupts into consciousness and it seems as if it comes from nowhere, as if you snatched it out of the air. But really you’ve been brooding on it, dreaming about it.
It’s not an inexplicable process. But of course, sometimes it feels like a gift, like inspiration. I think your task as a writer is to try to be the kind of person that is not afraid of these processes, to give them access, allow them to come out into the outside world. It’s difficult for me, because I’m a quite controlled, logical thinker. In order to become a writer at all, I had to go against my instincts.
Hilary Mantel heeft de Booker Prize gewonnen, en terecht. Twee jaar heb ik haar geïnterviewd, een dik jaar heb ik ermee geleurd om het te slijten aan een redactie, totdat Vrij Nederland eindelijk toehapte. Bovenstaand fragment komt uit het ruwe materiaal.
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