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Linda Davies In the front of Linda Davies' new novel Into the Fire, you'll find a quotation from Tennyson's "Ulysses" that says as much about Linda herself, as it does about her writing: No, I always had a horror of leading what I suppose I think of as a conventional life. I knew I didn't want to follow a normal track - although, of course, that's pretty much what I ended up doing! I suppose going to Oxford and going into the City appear quite conventional. But getting to Oxford wasn't conventional for me or for my school, and going into the City wasn't conventional for women then. It was a horrifying number of years ago - fourteen years ago - that I went into the City as the first woman employed by this particular American bank in London. But it was really when I left the City and began writing my book that I found myself doing what I'd always wanted, I think. I'd always wanted to write but I'd never figured out how to do it, quite. Until suddenly, one day, when I was sitting at work, bored and annoyed, I began wondering how much damage I could do from my trading desk - if I were a criminal, what would be the perfect crime? And much to my amazement this idea popped into my head about what I'd do and I thought, "My God, I could make hundreds of millions of dollars doing it!" So that's how that came about. I had a sort of profile for the kind of life I wanted to lead but it was equally about serendipitous jumps, taking risks. You've said before, "I love instability." Do you trust in the forces of fate and chance? Quite a bit, yes. Yes a lot of my life I've lived like that, doing things on the spur of the moment. I mean, I left my job on the spur of the moment even though I had been planning to carry on doing it for another year. I knew one day I'd want to run away - and probably on the spur of the moment as well - so each year I'd been saving up my running away money. And I'd come close to it in the past, but I thought "Well, save your money, get your bonuses at the end of the year . . ." Until one day I was sitting in my boss's office and he asked me about my goals for the next year. Suddenly I had this epiphany and was thrilled and horrified to hear myself saying, "To go!" And so I left. I got married, not quite on the spur of the moment, but I was engaged six weeks after meeting my husband and married six weeks later and then we moved to Peru two weeks after that. And so, basically, I had eight weeks notice that I was going to go and live on the other side of the world. So off I went and came back just about unscathed! But I do believe in chance and serendipity and fate but I think you've got to be receptive to it. I remember reading Machievelli on "fortuna", as he calls it - only the wise man can ride fortuna. He made it sound like a horse, riding your fate, and that's how it is. Does this closeness to your characters make it hard for you to pull yourself away from them? Yes, it can be hard. I was saying to someone the other day that I write as if I'm a actor - and I can't act at all on a stage, but I can for my writing. I have to put myself completely into the part, and I do that for all the characters in my book, not just the central ones. But it's quite strange playing the part of a drugs baron or an assassin! And I've got this wonderful new baby at home and it's weird walking out of my study where I've been this assassin and then walking into my baby's room and playing with him. You know, it's a very schizophrenic, peculiar thing. But then a character such as Helen is a wish-fulfillment for me - she's my heroine too. And that's the great thing about doing it, that I can have this great wish-fulfillment. My "barometer" is always "Would I do that?" If I would then I know I've got an authentic character. To be honest, I think there's a lot of me in my heroines, I can't really get away from it! How much of your own experience transfers into what you want to write about? A lot, especially having lived in Peru for three years. A lot of my life out there was research - and often I didn't have to go out looking for things because they came to me. One night there was a gun battle in our garden; it was horrendous, the most terrifying, surreal thing that's ever happened to me. At the end of it I was shaking violently, standing there and I turned to my husband and said, "I'm going to write this up tomorrow." And when I'd written it, I knew I had to make it happen in my book because it was so strong. But, as I say, it's as if the whole of my life there was researching - even in the details of daily life, like living in the same area as the narco barons, like having a permanent bodyguard driving you and walking five paces behind you everywhere you go. But Peru is so staggeringly beautiful as well and I went to all the places mentioned in the book - the jungle and the Inca trail. I took a dictaphone with me to recall my impressions, and playing it back now, all you can hear is my huffing and puffing as I struggled to the top of Dead Woman's Pass. It's so funny to play back! The one occasion I can type and keep up with my narrative because I'm speaking so slowly. Helen asks Victor why he stays in Peru "... if it's so terrible, if it can be so brutal". But he replies "Because it's in my blood, I'm addicted to it. Because it's the most beautiful country on earth." How did you feel about it? It is. It is the most beautiful country on earth as far as I'm concerned, staggeringly beautiful. You've got the Andes, you've got all the archaeological ruins, you've got incredible coastline, phenomenal jungle - the greatest bio-diversity on the planet. The high Andes are really violent looking, wild, frightening mountains. The landscape itself is brutal - think of all the terrible earthquakes that periodically wipe out tens of thousands of people. And there isn't the support system to go and get people out; they don't have the money to build houses that are earthquake proof, people rebuild on the site of the old earthquakes, very often in the landslides and live and farm in the same place as they have for generations. Then there are terrible droughts and terrible floods - the country really is wracked by acts of God. And that shows in the people as well, they have a different attitude to life and death. Think also of the extremes between rich and poor there, it is one of the most unequal countries in the world, and the poverty there is extreme. And then, of course there's all the history of terrorism there as well. The threat of kidnap if you or any of your family are involved in any kind of corporate activity is huge - especially if you're a gringa. I'm sort of tall and blonde and obviously not local! And that just marks you out as a target. You do get used to it, but you have to have what I call your "radar" on the whole time - you've still got to be very, very aware. It's just bliss to be back in London where you still need to be aware but not to the same level! Having said that, I really want to go back there and I really want to take my son there and show him. It is a staggeringly beautiful country, and for anybody thinking of going out there on holiday I would say "Go!" Did you know you had this book inside you when you went out there? No, the book was my salvation out there. I think otherwise I would have gone completely nuts guarded in this beautiful gilded cage of a house. My books always are my sanity because I lose myself in them, there's a fantasy world you can escape into - particularly when you are slightly imprisoned, as I was there. I could follow my book into the high Andes, or into the jungle or wherever I wanted to be, so the book gave me something wonderful to do. I started writing almost as soon as I arrived. I was going to wait and do more research but I had to start. That's always my problem - that I start writing too early. I long to get going and I'm not very comfortable unless I'm underway, and then of course I find I have problems with the plot and have to rewrite and rewrite and go back because I've started too soon! Do you know roughly where you're going when you start writing? The writing kind of takes off and it's always a mystery to me when I try and remember how I came up with the plot. I start off with an idea; in the case of Into the Fire I knew I'd have a heroine who was set up in a financial scandal and who went to Peru to find her father. I subsequently had to work out what the financial scandal was and I sat down and researched for a long time until I came up with another perfect financial crime. That's the other thing that takes months, putting my criminal cap on and sitting there thinking, "What hasn't been done? What would I do ...?" So, it took a while filling in the details. The best thing was discovering that the Peruvian national intelligence service was called SIN! Short for Servicio Inteligencia Nacional. Wonderful, I couldn't believe my luck - a novelist's dream! I also love working on the characterisation. And sometimes when you're thinking about a character's behaviour, you suddenly find an explanation for why people in your real life have done the things they've done. It's like the light going on. I think a lot of the "art" (if I can put it that way without sounding pompous) of a book is making the connection between what people do, what they are and why things happen. Making order out of chaos. And I suppose that's what writing a book is about. You've got this great, infinite world that you could write anything about. Writing a book really is like getting a microscope out and fixing on one little bit and making order out of all of the potential chaos, all the world, all the themes, all the characters! And it's great fun pulling that all together - it takes a sort of supreme act of will to get it all together and squeeze it into one book. Your books are frightening in the sense that, in order for justice to be done, an innocent individual has to take on and stand against the full force of the establishment. Is life like that? I think it can be, yes. I always been aware of it as a tightrope that you're walking. And if you fall off the tightrope you expect there to be a safety net. For most of us - not for everybody, but for a lot of us - this safety net exists. But if you fall through, then you really can find yourself on your own against the system - especially if you're up against very powerful forces. And in somewhere like Peru there are only two safety nets - there's money and there's influence. You're not protected by the rule of law to anything like the same extent as you are in England, for example. So if you don't have money or more powerful forces on your side and you somehow fall foul of the wrong people then it would be extremely frightening; it really would be frightening. I had to be careful with my researching for instance, that I didn't come to the attention of some of the people there. Journalists I knew had their phones bugged and were followed. More journalists have been murdered in Peru than in any country since the Vietnam war - journalists investigating the narco business and the intelligence, which is what I was doing. When Connor decides to help Helen in Into the Fire, you write, "... it was the man deciding, not the agent." How far do you think people are ultimately driven by emotion rather than reason? Oh, I think we are! A lot of what I write about depends on human emotion and not on logic. Because people repeatedly - and all of us do it - act against our best interests on the basis of emotion. A lot of what fires the work the intelligence services do, a lot of the access they get to people and a lot of the way they recruit agents or get people to inform is on the basis of emotion. But so much of what we do and so much of what gets us into trouble is not logical, rational behaviour; it's emotion - it's the man or the woman who ultimately acts and that's far more powerful than any institutional, religious, moral overlay can put on us. And so what I wanted to get at in the book is what really motivates people, and what people will really do and - yes - I think ultimately the civilising layer is pretty thin. As a thriller writer, do you believe in evil? Absolutely, yes. I do believe in good and I do believe in evil definitely. I find it very frightening. I don't think you can put everything down to social explanations, conditioning, bad experiences - I think there is an inherent evil. But what I find very interesting now, having had a child, is looking at a baby. Well, if you do believe in evil as I do, you must believe that babies can be born evil. But then I look at babies who look so beautiful and so innocent and think, how could this be? And I come to the conclusion that evil must be a consequence of what happens to them. Which kind of overturns my old argument! So something creates evil. Now, whether it's bad experiences or conditioning, I don't know. Perhaps some people are born with a propensity for it and if experiences reinforce that then you've got a real problem. But it's something I find fascinating - and absolutely frightening. I know it's out there and I've seen it and so yes, I do believe it. 2001 http://www.fireandwater.com/Authors/interview.asp?interviewid=76 |