 The Gardens of the Dead
 16 Mar 06
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The Sixth Lamentation
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Q Can you give us some background into your research?
A Insofar as The Sixth Lamentation was outward looking (onto  the Occupation of
France - which required considerable research) the landscape of The Gardens of the Dead is psychological, and inward looking. We see the story through the eyes of six people, all of whom have been radically affected by the same trial. To that extent research was minimal. As I wrote I found the text making a tilt towards Pilgrim’s Progress, and one of the characters (Nino) has a Virgilian role as guide into the underworld, which was a tilt at Dante. Research into this sort of thing is left till much later, so that the imagination remains unfettered. It was a very different writing experience to my first novel, because there was no historical framework within which the mind was set to work.
Q Where did the original idea come from?
A I don’t want to give away too much, but I had often wondered what might happen if a trial could take place where there was an intimate connection between all the main players, without anyone else knowing about it; where justice is seen to be done, but when, in fact, a travesty has occurred, out of sight. This is the nub of The Gardens of the Dead, and as one might expect, Father Anselm is in the thick of the mess without realising it. To that extent, this novel is about the adversarial system of law, its relationship with the truth, and how that system is flawed yet essential.
Q Do you have any personal stories or interesting anecdotes connected with it?
A a] The book is in part a tribute to the time I spend working with the homeless after leaving religious life and before coming to the Bar. I worked at The Passage Day  Centre in Victoria and subsequently at The Depaul Trust. I wanted to capture in Gardens something of the wonderful people I met, despite their circumstances; something of their stories, something of their wisdom. Many of them, while on the move, and without a home, had arrived’ in a spiritual sense beyond anything I could hope for. This is not to romanticise such a situation but rather to recognise a special quality in some people who have apparently lost everything. There is, I believe, a matter of importance here. Hence the theme of pilgrimage, the homeless person as a kind of Desert Father or mystic and the Bunyan references. I tried, also, to present a glimpse of the dangers of the street, and how some young people can be lost to the protection of the law.
b] George Bradshaw, a main character, actually made his first appearance in The Sixth Lamentation. At that stage he was simply an unidentified homeless man. He simply walked onto the page and I left him there because to me he was important. However, everyone involved with the editing of the manuscript asked me what he was doing there, and so on, so I cut him out, knowing that he was going to be a lead character in the next book. This was before I even had an idea or a title. George, if you like, introduced himself in advance.
c] On the day I finished the first draft of The Sixth Lamentation, a friend of mine told me she’d just obtained a safety deposit box to deal with an overflow of things she couldn’t throw away. That afternoon, handling an old book of my father’s, I imagined a hole cut in the text to hold a key to a family secret. I wrote the first chapter straight away (it eventually lost its place in the final draft, but it’s substance was unaltered).
On a light note:
d] I’m told second novels are difficult. I was doing fine until I fell out of a tree and broke my shoulder; developed RSI in both arms; my neck locked at an angle requiring months of physio; I took medication that made my vision blurred; my computer blew up (sort of). The list of obstacles is endless. But I did get there in the end.
Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.
The Gardens of the Dead
(Little,Brown,
2006)
Mar 06
The Sixth Lamentation
(Little,Brown,
2003)
timewarner Pbk Apr 04
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