A novel is already an event. Many events, from its conceptions to its life in each reader’s mind. When writing, working through numerous drafts for more than a decade, I found the ‘event’ of the book expanding and shape-shifting.
I had already visualised the narrative as performance – theatre, opera, film. Increasingly, I came to see that Mariamne and Hester, the roles they played, their geographical and psychological landscapes, are echoing wider social and political realities. Firstly, a window to the Holocaust, the tyranny of the Third Reich. And now, again, a further metaphor – the global explosions and increasing chaos of 2016.
It is New Year’s day, January 1st, 2017. I’m listening to Radio 4, five readings from T.S.Eliot throughout the day and early evening. The reader, Jeremy Irons. The commentators, Martha Kearney, Jeanette Winterson and Fiona Shaw spoke for me in saying that Eliot’s work, although published in 1922, speaks of the crisis of identity, purpose and belonging that humanity now confronts so acutely. I’ve called this PBSD, PTSD, since ‘disorders’ are increasing, and bordering on insanity. Chaos in the internal world sharpened by Brexit, Trump, an increasing vacuum where value and purpose should lie. Worse, refugees, displaced men, women and children, dying of hunger, drowning in their thousands. I make no comparison with the work of Eliot and my own. Simply a vivid realisation on the first day of the year, that writing can be interior, intimate and yet cast light upon global anguish, terror, asylum.
Thomas Johnes, Mariamne’s father, creates a paradise among the mountains of mid-Wales. Mariamne is both nourished and stifled here. Protected and prevented. Hester, lacking nurture of any kind, hunts her life through for asylum, ending time and again in a cul-de-sac. The novel, therefore, has epic dimensions alongside its close attention to detail. Tragic dimensions alongside its play and humour. In the right hands, this novel is ripe for adaptation, wider landscapes viewed or realised through its many windows. This, by way of the multiple personalities of Hester and Mariamne, playing out their losses and gains across the centuries. Both of them, in their various ways, and in order to survive, enact The Whole Cast.
The issue: how far do people go in order to survive. Under certain conditions (of asylum) what extremities are accommodated, or may kill. How much of each of us is being eroded, buried, eliminated, under current conditions.
Thus I am open to Asylum being staged in its entirety. Or settings, choreographies for any of its self-contained sections.
Self-contained is a way of saying that the narrative at the broad end of the spectrum vanishes for periods of time, brief or extended. This allows for much interference with the plot. The novel is hugely permissive!
Open to interpretations – poetic of otherwise.