There's something about Mary...

Published on Monday 17 August 2009 22:57

IT NEVER fails. Given a chance to buttonhole an author, nine out of ten readers inquire: where do you get your ideas? But where doesn't a writer get ideas?

Tracy Chevalier – whose bestselling novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, became an equally popular film in 2003 – has found inspiration in everything from Vermeer's canvases or the colour blue, to London's atmospheric Highgate Cemetery. She tells me her latest book, Remarkable Creatures, was inspired by a trip to Dorchester's Dinosaur Museum with her ten-year-old son.

There, she first heard of Mary Anning (1799-1847), a fossil hunter in Lyme Regis, Dorset, who was struck by lightning as a baby, and went on to make discoveries every bit as electrifying in the way that they challenged the premise that God created the world in just under a week.

"The dinosaur museum is very small," says Chevalier, "but there was one wall devoted to Mary Anning, who I'd never heard of. I was immediately drawn in. I always have those sudden moments of discovery when something strikes me that I want to write about it."

Chevalier's novel unfolds in parallel narratives, in the voices of Anning, and her great friend, Elizabeth Philpot. They are an unlikely pair – Philpot is older, educated and from a loftier social class – yet their bond was strong and enduring.

Both are spinsters, and Chevalier explores what it was like being a woman forced to eke out some kind of living in a restrictive era when the list of things women "couldn't" do far outstripped the "approved as respectable" activities.

"I started out with the character of Mary," says Chevalier. "What struck me was that she was a working-class woman in a middle-class environment. She never married and she was very eccentric."

She's not entirely likeable, either, for Anning could be almost painfully blunt and occasionally small-minded. "I try to make characters as rounded as possible," says Chevalier . "I started out with her and then got more into the idea of what the discovery of these fossils did to the intellectual community at large. And then the novel also became about her friendship with Elizabeth Philpot, and what is it like to be a woman in a man's world." Chevalier admires Jane Austen, but points out that Austen's books all have conventional endings in which her heroines marry. Yet Austen herself did not, nor did she ever write about that. "She knew her readers were wanting to marry and to fulfil their fantasies through her novels. But in the 21st century I can be more realistic and give a sense of how these (unmarried women] did manage to have lives. I didn't make up that bit.

"We don't know much about them, but we do know that neither Mary nor Elizabeth ever married and that they were great friends, and both really interested in fossils, with Mary making a living off of them. So it shows what an independent, unmarried woman could do."

Remarkable Creatures could easily find a champion in Richard Dawkins, for it points out the ripple-effect that Anning's dramatic finds – including the first complete skeleton of an ichthyosaur – caused throughout the scientific community, which led to an intellectual rethink of commonly held presumptions.

Although I've spent a lifetime looking at fossils, it took this novel to ram home the point that they are more than attractive, intriguing rocks, they're the remains of the dead. Chevalier nods. "There is this idea that you are finding fossils of animals that are extinct. And they didn't really have the concept of extinction until Cuvier developed it in about 1812."

Georges Cuvier was the French naturalist who established extinction as a fact in the early 19th century. Before him, she explains, "most people believed that what you see around you is what God created by day six. The idea was that the Earth is static. These fossils showed that actually it was in flux, that things had shifted. There were animals that had existed and no longer existed. This made people think, 'Why would God do that? Why would God create animals and then kill them off, or allow them to die off? What does that say about God, what does that say about his plans?'

"Later on in her life Mary discovered these things called coprolites and worked out that they were actually dinosaur shit. That threw people into even greater confusion. A lot of them said God created the fossils to test our faith. Then that argument was thrown out the window when people realised that it didn't make any sense. It's totally perverse." Unfortunately for Chevalier, this occurred after the timeline she'd conceived for her novel, so dinosaur poo doesn't figure in Remarkable Creatures.

Shortly after our meeting, Chevalier was due to hop a plane bound for America to see family and friends. Originally from Washington DC, she spent a term in London as a university student, and returned after graduation, intending to stay just six months while contemplating her next move.

"I was 22; I wanted to do it before I had to get serious with life. I thought I wanted to go into publishing and I was a little nervous about moving to New York – DC is like the little nave sister to big bad NYC. It was the 1970s and 80s and it was scary to me. After six months in London I'd met a guy and found a way to stay. Things didn't work out with the guy but by that time I'd a job with Macmillan, working on a 30-volume dictionary of art. Then I became a reference book editor at a small publisher called St James Press. After a few years I decided I wanted to be the writer instead of the editor."

Living in England suits her temperament, she says, and it also feeds her work. "It is good for a writer to be the outsider, a little bit, to be on the sidelines watching the culture without entirely taking part of it."

Ex-pats both, we laugh when I bring up her recent comment, complaining that she now finds American boisterousness jarring. I know the feeling, though I haven't been here quite as long as she has.

"It kicks in after six or seven years," she says. "I go back to the States all the time and love visiting. I always revel in the positive energy and how nice people are – to complete strangers. You could be waiting on line, as they say there, and Americans are really good at spontaneously talking to each other, which never happens here. On the other hand, people can be incredibly rude and litigious. I'm not sure I could ever live there again permanently."

Normally after a holiday Chevalier heads straight back to her desk, but she admits that for the first time, she's not sure what's next. "Normally I'm writing one book and I have the idea for the next one, in this sudden moment of discovery. This time, while writing Remarkable Creatures, I did have an idea that I thought was great, but you have to wait a year because you're still in the middle of the first book. Usually the idea, if it's strong, sticks with you. This time nothing has quite stuck. So I'm … not floundering, but contemplative. I have to do more research. In a way I think I've become more self conscious."

Is it a case of regarding her life as "pre-Girl" and "post-Girl"? "Kind of, but I gave birth to my son right when I turned in the manuscript, so it's more 'pre kid', 'with kid'. It's true that I don't miss the uncertainty of whether or not I'll get a contract or if anyone will buy or review my book.

"But the drawback is that everyone has expectations – myself, the readers, the publishers, and so my writing is more self conscious. I work really hard not to be, but I'm not sure I'd have had this debate in my head, 'what am I going to write next' a few years ago. I'm trying really hard not to think, 'what will the market take, what will readers take?' Until now I've always written what I wanted and hoped that people would take that journey with me, and up until now, people have."

She confirms that a contemporary novel is in the cards, one day. "I'm not sure I want to write historical books my entire life; you get pigeonholed. Do you want to maintain that, or try something else? And then I think, 'It's the recession…' and then it's – 'Hang on a minute! You have to write the book that you really feel passionate about.' If it takes me a little while to find out what that is, then I have to sit with that."

&#149 Remarkable Creatures is out on 24 August from Harper Collins. Chevalier will be at the Book Festival today, 11:30am.