Interview:A former British soldier wrestling with memories of the Troubles is central to Rachel Seiffert's new novel, she tells Susan McKay.
When Rachel Seiffert was writing her new novel, Afterwards, she kept a quotation pinned over her desk. It is from Frank McGuinness's great play, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme: "Again. As always, again. Why does this persist? What more do we have to tell each other? I remember nothing today. Absolutely nothing".
She prefaces the novel with it, too. "The play is full of banter and yet there is a sense of reticence - territory that can't be crossed," she says. "I felt it was the perfect touchstone." Her book is about invisible borders, the hard-held Irish Border, the border between lovers, between generations, between past and present. It is a fine and profound work.
As she comes to trust him, Alice wants to tell Joseph her most private stories. In turn, she wants to know all about him. He can't let her. When she gets too close, when anyone gets too close, he has to hurt and abandon and run away. "It is about secrets. I suppose it is about trauma, how much you need to know, and how much it is tender not to ask," Seiffert says.
Joseph is a former British soldier now working as a painter and decorator. Alice is a physiotherapist. They meet in a pub in England. She is grieving for her grandmother and trying to forge a new relationship with her bereaved grandfather, a former RAF pilot and veteran of bombing missions in Kenya, a man of few words and "small, clumsy gestures". She has recently been hurt by her father. She tells Joseph, and tells him, too, "I've never told anyone that before". Joseph tentatively feels he may be getting all right again. It has been a while since his demons drove him off alone to the wilds, or to fights with strangers in pubs. He is afflicted by memories of his time in Northern Ireland, and specifically an incident at a checkpoint in south Armagh when he killed a man in disputed circumstances: "Years gone by and still no escaping".
Their growing intimacy is indicated rather than spoken. When she is going to visit her mother in Yorkshire, he leaves her to the station, walks down the platform with her. She reaches out of the window to touch his face. He stays, even though she doesn't know he's still there and has started reading her paper. "He felt a bit stupid then . . . But when the train started moving Alice raised her head. Saw him, and then lifted a hand to wave to him, surprised. Looked almost shy, pleased to see him still there, and then Joseph was glad he'd stayed."
SEIFFERT SUGGESTS THAT her spare, pared-down style is related to the fact that she worked as a film editor before realising that writing was what she loved. "I don't want to explain, I want to show. I don't want to get in the way. I don't want to write what tone of voice someone speaks in, and physical descriptions of what people look like. Readers need to develop their own sense of the characters."
She hates mawkishness, sensationalism and literary flourishes. "There are horrible incidents in Joseph's past, but what you are trying to do is not to describe them but to recreate how memory works," she says.
Joseph doesn't know why he did what he did at the checkpoint, though he is forced to interrogate himself endlessly about it. So we don't know either.
She goes against the grain of our times by suggesting that it may not be possible to recover from trauma. "It's a cliche, isn't it? The idea that once he remembers and tells exactly what happened and why, then everything will be all right."
Her research for the novel included sitting in on counselling sessions with former soldiers at a specialist centre in Scotland. "The over-riding feeling I came away with is that for many people suffering from post-traumatic stress, it is a matter of finding ways to cope. You are not talking about returning to a whole self or to peace of mind. Some people have to talk. Others can't. I hope people will feel Joseph doesn't have a duty to tell. His way of looking at it is, 'Why touch the sore parts?' If you have done something which transgresses codes of civilisation, you need remorse. He finds it difficult to forgive himself. His inability to have an intimate relationship is his penance."
People coming out of wars who get good therapy are the lucky ones, she believes. "A lot of ex-soldiers end up in prison or in and out of psychiatric units," she says. "The ministry of defence ought to take responsibility and look after them, but it doesn't." She is concerned about the thousands of soldiers who will return to Britain from Iraq and Afghanistan.
HER PREOCCUPATION WITH guilt comes, she says, from her own background. She was born in England in 1971. "My father was Australian, and mum is German. I grew up with a strong sense of a terrible wrong having been done and not being able to separate myself from it." She wasn't allowed to, either. She grew up in Oxford and at primary school she got used to jeers of "Nazi" from other children.
After Bristol university, she worked on low-budget films with a project in Glasgow. Her husband, Michael, is from there, and they spent the latter half of the 1990s in the city. She did a part-time creative writing course run by Strathclyde and Glasgow universities, and wrote her first novel, The Dark Room.
This book explores the legacy of the Holocaust for Germans. It was nominated for the Booker Prize, and she was chosen as one of Granta's best young British novelists. A book of short stories, Field Work, followed. "While I was publicising The Dark Room in Australia, nearly every event was preceded by someone standing up and referring to the Aborigines as the former or rightful owners of the land," she says.
"I had already been uneasy about saying I was half German - I'd thought of Australia as the happy country! I began to wonder what Britain had to feel guilty about. Of course it is the colonies, and Ireland - ever present and not addressed. Able to cause a row in the pub if you try to talk about it." After Glasgow, she and Michael moved to Berlin for three years. "After 9/11 people would ask me what it was like being in England during the IRA campaign," she says. The idea for the new novel began to take shape. She'd been to Ireland as a teenager, hitching around with a friend in 1989.
"We intended to go to the North but we dawdled too long in Galway. Also, it didn't seem like the safest place. I didn't have the courage. That trip disabused me of the notion that people in the Republic wanted a united Ireland. I took a photo of a Yield sign with IRA scratched on it but there was little talk about the Troubles." She didn't visit the North when she was researching Afterwards either. "I really struggled about whether I should go or not," she says. "I decided I'd end up fighting against the present. I knew Armagh was being demilitarised." She read, and interviewed and discussed imagined scenarios with ex-army people to make sure they were authentic. One of Joseph's unshareable memories is of him and his mates rolling around laughing after an IRA bomb blows up a truck, killing a contractor and his son who were bringing toilets to the army base.
THESE BOOKS WERE, Seiffert admits, painful to write. She got depressed after The Dark Room, and felt dislocated. "I didn't have kids then. I do now. I've a boy of three and a half and a girl of one. I write in the morning and then I'm with them in the afternoon. It's a good balance." She's a reader. "I like Adam Thorpe, Heinrich Böll and spinners of tales like Annie Proulx. She is so brutal with her characters. She kills them off in undignified ways. That takes courage." Among the Irish, she finds Ronan Bennett's novels "amazing" and loves the poetry of Ciaran Carson.
Seiffert, who lives in London, is writing another novel now, for teenagers. It is about a Chinese Glaswegian girl "going through teenage anger", who gets sent to live with her grandfather. She becomes friends with a Protestant boy from an estate and he teaches her how to become a cat burglar. "It has got serious issues, but also a bit of fun," she says. Her "big love" is film musicals. "My favourite film is The Umbrellas of Cherbourg - it is so beautiful and so tender and everything is in song. Singing in the Rain is really up there in my top 10."
Afterwards shows how love can fail to make its way across the bad places. But there is hope, too. Seiffert honours kindness and discretion and the bravery of those who are moved to try, at least, to reach out across the silence and touch another person.
Afterwards is published by Heinemann, £14.99