Abstract
We speak to two leading authors,
The Full Story
Victoria Hislop writes beach reads with “heart”, but also honesty
CREDIT: Ioanna Tzetzoumi
For a long time, says novelist Victoria Hislop, her bestseller The Island came emblazoned with a reviewer’s quote on the cover: “a beach book with a heart”. This was, in a way, true – the novel is set on the Greek island of Spinalonga, but is far from a slice of holiday romance in a sunny Greek paradise. The Island delves into the history of the location, revealing its brutal past as a former leper colony.
“It was definitely read a lot on the beaches that summer, and at the heart of the book was a very tough reality – a story of a onceincurable disease,” said Hislop, who is now an ambassador for leprosy charity Lepra.
“It’s fine for people to go to the Greek
is paradise, in its way. But at the same time,
the 20th century was a very dark time – full of conflict, war, poverty – and I suppose my point is that these dark periods explain why Greece is as it is now. And that’s what I explore.”
Hislop was moved to write The Island, her debut novel, after a visit to the former leper colony.
“Without doubt there was a stigma surrounding it – and something buried [or] hidden acts like a magnet for a writer. This isn’t a criticism of the Greeks per se. Unlike most diseases, leprosy in general has a stigma attached to it (Leviticus suggests that it is a punishment from God, and that sufferers should be shunned), so locally, the story of this island had not been promoted very broadly because people were ashamed of it,” she said.
“Some of these islands that people go to for peace and paradise were once used as islands of exile (in the 1940s and 50s, some in the 60s) for thousands of people who had fought for the Left. The locals might not tell them that, but I will, because it’s interesting and should not be forgotten, in my view. They were imprisoned for their views, some for years and deprived of their human rights.”
Published in 2005, The Island was picked for the Richard and Judy Book Club, and went on to sell a million copies. Hislop’s subsequent novel, The Return, was set in Granada, looking into its violent past; The Thread centres on Thessaloniki; and The Sunrise on Cyprus.
“Wherever people go to relax and get away from it all, there is probably a darkness lurking nearby,” Hislop said. “Spain is another example, which was why I wrote The Return. I had been lying on a beach in a bikini in the 1970s without any idea that there were still people in prison, probably not far away, simply for being on the ‘wrong’ side in their civil war back in the 1930s. Franco had crushed the opposition so heavily that we Brits were lapping up the sunshine oblivious of his crimes. I suppose I felt guilty about that in retrospect – and wish I had known. The truth about what happened during the Spanish Civil War (and the repression afterwards) would definitely have been a good thing for the average tourist to know.”
Her readers – holidaymakers or otherwise – have certainly been keen to explore the darker side of paradise that Hislop portrays. But covering the Cyprus conflict in The Sunrise led to the loss of some of her Greek readers.
“There were some Greek Cypriots who were angry that I had implied that the Turkish invasion of Cyprus was provoked by a Greek army coup in the country. And not only that, some of my most sympathetic characters were Turkish Cypriots – and the villain was a Greek Cypriot,” she said. “My point was that being a good [or] bad human being is not a matter of ethnicity. It is more than that.”
According to Hislop, fiction is “a really valid way to tell a story which explores the truth of a country’s history”.
“Of course ‘truth’ is often a matter of opinion and its definition is fought over by historians – so I am very conscious of the responsibility not to be biased in one or other direction if there is any ambiguity. This, of course, is done by having the characters taking different points of view, and then you almost hand it over to the reader to decide (whilst knowing yourself where you stand),” she said.
The beach in Ayia Napa, Cyprus, an island which has seen unrest and violence in recent decades
CREDIT: Alexander Chaikin/Picfair
Beyond The Bagpipes
Ian Rankin, whose Rebus series shows Edinburgh’s good and bad sides
CREDIT: Liam Longman/Figment/Noel Gay/Channel 4/Kobal/Rex
Ian Rankin writes crime fiction because, for him, it’s one of the best ways to accurately depict somewhere and not censor out the less palatable sides.
“The reason I turned to crime fiction is I think it’s the perfect way to scratch the surface of a place, of a culture, of a country, of a society, and show what’s underneath, the good and the bad,” he told Index. “So if you want to talk about social issues, if you want to talk about political corruption, and if you want to talk about corruption in business, immigration policy, xenophobia, all of that, you can deal with a police officer who is looking for the truth.”
The best-selling novelist explains that when it came to Edinburgh, the setting of his Inspector Rebus series, showing the city in its various shapes and guises wasn’t typical at the time he started writing. He first arrived in Edinburgh as a student in the late 1970s, and from then to the early 1980s, the city had a lot of issues.
“It had problems with drugs, it had problems with unemployment and social problems, problems with prostitution. And yet, you know, I would watch the tourists come and go and of course they got no sense that this city had any problems like that at all. They were just happy to see the castle and they would see someone play the bagpipes and they would go to the museum and think they had seen Edinburgh and, of course, they had only really seen the one side of it.”
Rankin says Robert Louis Stevenson’s portrayal of the different sides of Edinburgh in his 1886 book The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was a notable influence, but adds that the literature of the late 20th century was avoiding the city’s harder truths.
“In literature, in the novel, not much had been done with Edinburgh since The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, you know [Muriel] Spark’s novel, which had been written in 1961 and was set in the 1930s. So I thought ‘if nobody’s writing about contemporary Edinburgh, I’d like to give it a go’. And then, you know, shortly afterwards along came Trainspotting and showed the wider world, courtesy of the movie, that there is more to Edinburgh than the castle and the tartan and the bagpipes.”
Equally, crime writers have to ensure they don’t go too dark in their portrayal of a place and miss the nuance for the opposite reason.
“It’s getting slightly frustrating for me when I write about my character Rebus because he is
a professional cynic,” said Rankin.
“He’s been in the job so long that he cannot see the other side of Edinburgh. He cannot see the Jekyll, he only sees it as the Hyde, he only sees it as crime scenes that have happened, or crime scenes that might happen in the future, so other characters have to be roped in to show him that he does live in a very beautiful city, a very literary city and a very cultured city.”
When not in Edinburgh, Rankin spends time in a small, seemingly idyllic fishing village in northern Scotland called Cromarty, which he is tempted to airbrush.
“When I post photographs of it on social media, I’m always careful to point the camera one way because if you point it the other way all you see are oil rigs and an oil rig yard. So there’s industry up there, it’s not the kind of tartan, shortbread image of Scotland.
“But it’s a lovely, small town on the coast where there are dolphins playing and everybody knows everybody,” he added.
Rankin understands why visitors might only want to see one side. “Tourists to any city in the world will tend to go to the attractions and the attractions are usually the nice things,” he said.
Speaking specifically of when he’s on a book tour, he said: “You tend to see the nice places, you tend to stay in quite nice hotels, you get taxis everywhere, people take you out for meals and you go to bookshops and radio stations and TV studios. You don’t tend to go to the ghettos, you don’t tend to go to the rougher parts of town because there are no bookshops there, so why would you?”
Asked where Rankin has personally observed a big gap between the tourist brochures and reality, he replies, with little hesitation – India.
“I shouldn’t have been surprised by India, but I still was,” he said. He spoke of taking a train through Delhi first thing in the morning and seeing “people brushing their teeth by the railway tracks, defecating by the railway tracks, eating a breakfast by the railway tracks, having slept out by the railway tracks”.
He added: “You’ve got this country which is seething with colour and life and vitality and culture and history, but also has huge, huge problems and they’re visible, they’re visible to the visitor, and I wasn’t quite expecting that.”
Two aspects of Edinburgh– the beautiful one the tourists see (right) and its edgier other persona, as depicted in the film Trainspotting
CREDIT: ChrisHepburn/iStock
