The starting point for The Girl in the Red Coat came from a very strong image I had of a young girl, standing against the background of a forest. She was wearing a red coat and I knew somehow that she was lost. Somehow the image just wouldn’t go away and a couple of weeks later I sat up in bed and wrote the first chapter of the novel in one go.
Generally I edit my work a great deal but that chapter has changed very little since first writing it. The chapter wasn’t in the voice of Carmel, the lost eight-year-old girl, but her mother – Beth. She was talking about her daughter who is missing and so the novel was born. It’s written in a dual narrative of Beth and Carmel and I didn’t really realise at the beginning that was a tricky act to pull off. I don’t regret it, though, because it was the only way I could have told the story – both voices needed to be heard.
The central colour and image of the story is red – Carmel is fixated on the colour and wants everything in red, especially her coat. I’ve always been drawn to the image of a red coat – I watch a lot of films and am as influenced by film as much as books. I think the red coat has a wider resonance than my novel – it brings to mind films such as Don’t Look Now and Schindler’s List and that was quite deliberate.
I first saw Don’t Look Now when I was quite young – about 13 – and its imagery and haunting atmosphere stayed with me for a long time. I also love how in Schindler’s List the young girl in the red coat is at once marked out as an individual because she is the only spot of colour against black and white but it also makes her a kind of universal figure of tragedy too. I hoped that by calling my novel The Girl in the Red Coat there was the possibility of calling on a deep bank of imagery and associations pre-existing in the mind of the reader.
But the original red coat is of course Little Red Riding Hood. I loved fairy tales as a child and after I finished writing the novel it occurred to me that Carmel is actually none other than Red Riding Hood – she has strayed from the path and is threatened by wolves. One reviewer called the book “a twenty-first century fairy tale” and I really like that – it’s exactly what I was trying to achieve.
It’s quite hard to pinpoint these things because it all goes on at such a subconscious level. The subconscious works away, weaving disparate things together and throwing up the resulting images and narratives. I sometimes write “morning pages”, free-flowing work done first thing in the morning before the conscious mind really has a chance to boot up, and I often find it really worthwhile.
For specific films that I think have influenced me – Gillermo del Toro’s and David Lynch’s work appeal to me for both their narratives and their visual qualities. I also recently saw a 1976 Spanish film called Cria Cuervos which also features an eight-year-old girl and really captures the atmosphere that I was trying to create in the novel. It’s quite strange when you see something after the event like that. The first chapter in the novel contains a lot of “jump cuts” and images pop up quickly and disappear. After writing it I saw the brilliant opening titles for the American drama series Homeland where images flash up quickly, sometimes even appearing sideways and I thought: “that’s what I was trying to achieve in that first chapter”. What was really weird was that the titles have the image of a maze and there is a maze in the novel.
In terms of literature I tend to read quite widely – Maggie O’Farrell, Graham Greene, Stephen King, Hilary Mantel and Rose Tremain are all favourite authors. If I read something I really like I tend to read it twice – once to be swept up in the story and the second time to take it apart and see how the author did it, to find out the nuts and bolts of it, like taking apart a car engine. I also read as much contemporary fiction as I can.
One theme in the novel is the complex and secret life of children. Carmel is scathing of adults who think of her as having no more thought in her head than “a mouse or a bat”. I’ve always felt that children can have very rich inner lives with strong opinions and can be extremely perceptive. I had to weigh this with Carmel’s voice. I didn’t want to “talk down” to her by making her voice childish, yet of course she needed to sound like a child. Getting that balance right was one of the challenges of the book.
But the main theme in the novel is the tender but complex relationships between mothers and daughters. I really wanted to explore that particular relationship which I think is under-represented in literature. Carmel might be only eight but she has already become scratchy with her mother sometimes and longs for her own identity. Already the push-me, pull-you aspect of the relationship has begun to establish itself even though the two are so close.
When she’s cruelly taken from her mother I wanted the relationship to continue in both Carmel and Beth’s minds and hearts. The bond has been smashed apart yet on some level it will never be broken. The book is hopefully as much about love as it is about loss.
The Girl in the Red Coat by Kate Hamer is out now, £12.99, Faber & Faber
