Fiona McFarlane is that rare thing: a writer whose advances enable her to write full-time. Penguin Australia has just published her first novel, The Night Guest, winning the rights after a ‘strong auction’. Fiona has had her short stories published in The New Yorker, among other publications. She spoke to us about shifting gear from a career of short stories, the allure of tigers and her novel’s exploration of ageing and reflection.
You’ve said this book grew from the image of a woman waking in the night and imagining a tiger in her house. What appealed to you about that image – and how did it evolve into The Night Guest?
I became interested in the tiger after talking to a friend who was researching Victorian children’s literature – we were talking about all the exotic, terrifying creatures that turn up in nursery rhymes and bedtime tales, and I was intrigued by the idea of a tiger showing up from the edges of the British empire to haunt the Victorian nursery. I thought right away about writing something in which a woman with some kind of colonial past is visited by an uncanny tiger in her very ordinary house. I didn’t know, when I first started writing, whether it would be a novel or a short story, but eventually it became clear that it was a novel.
The morning after the tiger incident, a mysterious woman, Frida, arrives to announce that she’s been paid by the government to be a daily carer of sorts for Ruth. From the beginning, there’s a sense of disquiet about her presence, but neither Ruth nor the reader quite know what to make of her (danger or blessing?) for some time, as she takes control in ways both benevolent and suspicious. How did you get that balance – and suspense – right?
The balance and suspense were the hardest part of the book to get right. I’m not very good at showing my early work to other people, but this really needed other eyes that were less familiar with what was going on than I was; even just thinking about other people reading the book helped me track momentum and suspense.
The Night Guest seems resonant with lives not lived and paths not taken, as well as the actual present. Was this something you wanted to explore?
Yes – when you’re writing about an ageing character it’s impossible not to. But I was just as interested in the ways in which Ruth’s life feels inevitable – she decides at one point that, whether she’d married Richard or Harry, she would still have met Frida.
Ruth is a really interesting character: she is ‘blessedly ordinary’ but has worked to achieve that ordinariness, and her childhood was ‘weird, fervent’. What appealed to you about that contrast?
It made sense to me that when a person’s life has had such a definitive break – childhood in Fiji, adulthood in Sydney – that person would deliberately create a sort of heightened mythology around her early years. I liked the idea of a woman who has spent her adult life trying to be ordinary returning, in her older age, to the sense of the extraordinary she remembers from her childhood. I think childhood and old age probably have a similar sense of imminence about them, and I wanted to explore that.
Motivations and actions are intriguingly murky in The Night Guest. Some characters have ostensibly good intentions that don’t play out as altruistically as they think they do – for instance, Ruth’s missionary parents. Others skirt the edges of betrayal in a battle between their desires and their obligations (past Richard). And others have murky motives but also do some good. How deliberate was this aspect of the book?
I definitely wanted to explore the murkiness of different kinds of terrible care and caring terror. The book is very interested in the ways in which intention and result become more and more complicated.
I found it fascinating to contrast Ruth’s memories of her first love, Richard, from her Fijian childhood, with her present observations when they meet again. The way she is still drawn to him as she was in the past, but is now very conscious of his faults in a way she wasn’t as a besotted teenager. Does this perhaps reflect a benefit of age (aka learned experience, or a richer perspective)?
Yes, I suppose it does – Ruth is very conscious of all that’s changed in the fifty years since she last saw Richard, and it’s not just in the way she thinks about him. He’s different, too: less pompous, perhaps less idealistic. She’s also conscious that her body has gone through half a century of living, which includes sex, pregnancy, childbirth and menopause. This experience gives her a sort of calm when it comes to considering the question of Richard.
You were a successful short story writer, with publication credits including the New Yorker, before The Night Guest. How is writing a novel different from writing short stories?
Working on a novel means occupying a world for a much longer time and thinking more expansively about structure and character – these are both the luxuries and the insanities of writing a novel. The auditorium is much bigger, but you get out less.
Join us tonight for Debut Mondays at the Moat –where Fiona McFarlane will appear along with the prolific Adam Browne, Kirsten Krauth, author of the much-praised just_a_girl, and Voiceworks contributor Emily Prince.
Fiona’s short stories have been published in the New Yorker, Zoetrope, Southerly, the Missouri Review and Best Australian Short Stories. The Night Guest was launched recently by Nam Le, and is published by Penguin.
