Book of the Month: How Pale The Winter Has Made Us by Adam Scovell (Influx Press)
The Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month in February is How Pale The Winter Has Made Us by Adam Scovell, published by Influx Press. Our very own Josephine Lister interviewed the author about the book and its resonances.
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How Pale The Winter Has Made Us, Adam Scovell’s latest novel, follows Isabelle, a young British woman, immediately after she learns of her father’s suicide back home in London. Isabelle decides to remain in Strasbourg, living in her partner’s flat after he departs to travel South America, rather than returning home to sort out her family life and take up a new job role at a university. We remain inside Isabelle’s psyche throughout the entire novel, a fever-dream of a story that tracks Strasbourg’s history as we explore Isabelle’s grieving mind.
‘The novel really came about by chance, I began regularly visiting the city of Strasbourg from 2017 onward as I ended up in a long distance relationship with someone who lived there,’ explains Scovell. ‘It was my walking around there for long periods of time that initially sparked off the idea as it’s such an evocative and historically rich city. I usually café hop when working and so having a base there meant I could get to know the city and its rhythms properly. Coupled with the political dread I was feeling at the time, the book began to seem like a feasible project.’
As the novel started to take shape, Scovell used old photographs of the city to bring the story together. ‘A final push came in the form of hunting for photographs in the markets there and also the discovery of an old curios shop called Recto Verso right opposite where my partner lived. That’s when a lot of the atmosphere became fixed.’
The amount of research gone into the novel is clear early on in the narrative. Isabelle herself is a researcher and she pieces together the city much in the same way Scovell did. ‘All of the research was incredibly rewarding and the character’s discussion of her research and how she finds out about things is essentially real.’ The true challenge of the novel was how to distribute this information from a fragmented protagonist, as Scovell explains, ‘It took awhile to edit it as seen from the broken perspective of the narrator. As a character, Isabelle came about pretty quickly once the scenario was set. The research allowed me to then bounce off the history and make my own so I could reflect her mental state and life as much as Strasbourg’s actual past. That’s certainly where the book takes a stranger turn.’
That ‘stranger turn’ comes from the brilliant weaving of Isabelle’s mental state with her surroundings, european history and gothic folklore – particularly the visits she receives from the Erl-King. It would’ve been easy for this novel to rely on gothic genre conventions, especially considering the inclusion of the ‘Erl-King’ and the ancient architecture of Strasbourg, but Scovell was careful to balance the novel to still feel like a contemporary realist tale. ‘I wanted to avoid it being too gothic whilst still using some of its imagery. It’s more of a modern city novel with some darkness seeping in. I was very inspired by Teju Cole’s Open City on that front. I like macabre imagery and ideas, but I don’t always like how they become easy shorthand for certain styles and how they build in a lot of assumptions about what a book is going to be.’
Scovell distances the novel from the genre conventions one might expect by making it heavily psychologised, so that his writing is more in line with Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher or Thomas Bernhard’s Extinction. Scovell explains he was inspired by ‘novels whose main character is totally broken and wandering, where the streets end up mapping what’s inside the skull of the narrator. That break in the psyche definitely leads to weird, macabre elements but they’re all still ultimately linked to earthly things.’
Considering the novel follows a Brit in a European city, it’s impossible to ignore another major influence – Brexit. ‘Certainly, a powerful drive when writing came from a need to document the dread of the last few years as it unfolded,’ agrees Scovell, ‘but abstractly so and definitely not polemically. This dread took on a very unusual flavour personally as it was exasperated by being in Strasbourg and seeing things beyond the noise of the UK which, at the time the book was drafted, was frantic with the initial fallout of Brexit. Seeing what was happening from a city whose own tagline is the “Europtimist”, the place that houses the European Parliament, the European Council and the European Court of Human Rights, heightened the sense of looking on at something awful unfolding in the distance even if I was only in the city for fragments at a time before having to return.’
The desire to run away to a new land when everything seems to be burning in your homeland is something that anyone from any country can relate to, it’s a natural reaction to what is happening in the politics of a country. However, it’s easy to say you want to run away to a new country, another thing to realise that wherever you go, your personal problems go too. In this sense, the novel takes on a cautionary air. ‘Isabelle’s story highlights the fallacy of the “grass is greener” mentality that certainly became a more prevalent characteristic in me at the time, and many others too in post-Brexit Britain,” adds Scovell. ‘Whatever darkness Isabelle finds in the city during her time there, it’s certainly related to what she’s carrying within herself as much as our current period of history. She only momentarily acknowledges the general problems facing Europe as her grief manifests in such an all consuming need to research the city’s past. Fleeing temporally or geographically, you still cannot escape your own inherent collapse.’
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How Pale The Winter Has Made Us is published by Influx Press on 13th February. Buy it direct from them here.
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