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As Peter Temple was unable to get to the UK for this month’s launch, I was delighted to be given the opportunity of putting a few questions to him via e-mail before publication.
Bob Cornwell:
When we last met,* after winning the 2007 CWA Gold
Dagger for The
Broken Shore, you were already talking about that book as the first
part of a possible trilogy. How did you arrive at that idea?
Peter
Temple:
It came to me while I was finishing The
Broken Shore. Stephen Villani had a bit part and I liked him as
a character: knowing, sardonic, much older in his manner than his contemporary
Joe
Cashin. I thought he might deserve his own book
and I began thinking about his life and his city, and that became Truth.
But I don't know about a third instalment. I need to do something else. Get
out more.
The book has been long in the writing. More relaxed
deadlines this time around? Did the (I believe) unprecedented award from the
Australia 
Council
for the Arts in any way enable you to take what you have called “a longer
swing at it”?
I
was able to take my time with Truth
and for that I’m indebted to the Australia Council's wonderful policy
of giving money to all kinds of writers, even those badged as crime writers.
Before this taxable gift, I’ve always written under the pressure of bills.
Of course it is not in the interests of publishers for writers to escape the
lash of need, but mine is patient - not happy but patient.
You normally work from a “feeling” about
what you want to do. What was that feeling this time?
Melbourne
is a city changing faster than many of its inhabitants like. I wanted to write
something that could capture its present and its recent history through the
hard eyes of a cop twenty-five years in the job. I did my usual fiddling around,
trying to find a score for the story, trying to find a voice for Stephen Villani,
trying to avoid exposition as far as possible, losing faith, and giving up on
the enterprise from time to time.
You had also clearly decided on the provocative Truth
as a title early on in the gestation period. Why was that?
It’s
paradoxical that novels are elaborated lies but often speak emotional truths
that more-or-less factual stories cannot utter. Truth
is in large part about lies public and private so the title spoke to me.
(Incidentally, I was astonished to find that no-one had called a novel Truth.)
You have talked about your wish to move on from Joe
Cashin at the close of Broken
Shore, that readers can only stand so much pain. Now you give us
Villani! (I hope I hear laughter at this point...) What was it about Villani
that you felt could carry a whole book? And did you feel from the start that
you were writing a character study as much as a crime novel?
Joe
Cashin is a man who has known a great deal of physical pain and has been transformed
by the experience. Villani’s pain is of a different kind. Most of it is
self-inflicted and that’s important. I wanted to write something about
how character is formed, minute by minute, day by day, incident by incident,
from early childhood. There is nothing that bars this kind of thing from being
explored in the crime novel. And the kind of turbulence associated with the
crime novel – and you will probably agree that Truth
is a fairly turbulent story – is suited to looking at Character (in the
sense of mental and moral attributes).
Did you find it at all difficult to keep the balance
between plot and the personal and professional background? How do you maintain
that balance?
Balancing
narrative, character development and exposition is a problem for all novels
that rely on momentum. Truth
is a shark book. If a shark book stops moving for too long, water doesn’t
pass through the gills and the book's gone. It sinks. So you have to trust your
sense of momentum, trust your sense of how long you can linger on memories,
dreams and reflections before you must twist and speed away.
The plotting of Truth,
with its four crime strands, two of them in the past, is your most complex yet
(and, I think, beautifully brought off). Does this imply something more than
the “endless tinkering” we discussed back in 2007?
The
book was written at a more leisurely pace, which means more time for tinkering.
In my mind I’m still tinkering with it. Actually, I’m still tinkering
with all my books. Just saying that makes me so sad.
Politics plays a much more overt role in Truth
than in most previous books. How important is politics to you?
I’m
a political animal. I grew up in a highly politicised culture and I'm capable
of politicising anything. I wanted Truth to be (among other
things) about politics – personal and professional and public. The story
is about a week in which, for one man, these things intersect. It's about the
dangerous ground where they meet.
I find it interesting, for instance, especially given
your own journalistic background, that it is radio, rather than newspapers (as
in the UK, for instance), that appears to lead in the law and order debate...
I
love radio. I shout at the radio all day long. And for the book radio suits
my purposes. It's immediate, it’s the human voice. And talkback has a
vox pop feeling, the people speaking. Quite fraudulent, of course. So the radio
takes on a something of a choric function in the story. (It was in retrospect
that I saw that, I should say. And that's probably as it should be.)
Whilst your story is clearly a fictional
creation, an early reference by Villani to local villain Tony Mokbel, the regular
(and marvellously rendered) bush-fires that, in fact, culminate in Melbourne’s
2009 Black Saturday, suggest a complex Australian reality to which the international
reader may not easily relate. Are we missing anything?
I
like novels not because I understand all the cultural references (in fact, I
like not understanding them), but because there's something about the language,
the characters, the setting, the weight of the story. I don’t think readers
will like, dislike or be indifferent to Truth
because they don’t know who Tony Mokbel is or because they know nothing
of the terrible fire history of the state of Victoria in a place called Australia.
Truth
is an Australian novel, so you either take that or you leave it.
Through the flawed Villani, Truth is probably your most
thorough exploration of the texture of male relationships, both professionally
and within the family. (As the eldest of three brothers – “boss”
manner occasionally evident – I can attest to the truth of Truth.)
How far is your own experience reflected in the substance of the book?
I’m
not conscious of writing about male relationships. What I’m interested
in is the threads that connect people to one another and to the past. And I
don’t want to draw a diagram. Does the book reflect my own experience?
I suppose that experience is in every book I’ve written. Your childhood
filters the air you breathe as an adult, it’s in the breath you expel.
But Truth isn’t about my life. It’s all lies. I
make the stuff up.
Two points about style: greater use of the vernacular
perhaps; the prose and dialogue more pared away than ever. Bearing in mind your
enlarged increasingly international audience, a risky policy?
I
must point out that there isn’t any more of the Australian vernacular
in Truth than in my other books. I'm Australian by rebirth. I write for Australians
(although I’m delighted if non-Australians enjoy the books. Anyone really.
Martians.) As for the style, I shudder to remember saying to students that style
was what remained when you'd got rid of the extraneous matter. I think I pinched
that from someone. Anyway, I am by nature a remover of extraneous material,
a brushcutter.
You talked about your occasional disagreement with your
Australian publisher over your paring down of the prose style. Was the occasional
compromise required?
If
you trust an editor then you must take the person's concerns seriously. There
are very few trustable editors, as there are very few good mechanics. I am at
the mercy of two excellent practitioners, Michael Heyward and Penny Hueston
[at Text Publishing, Temple’s Australian publishers]. They would have
made good jockeys: strong in the upper body, in the habit of walking the track
before the race to get a feel for the going. When told by one or both of them
that the reader would never make sense of something unless I was more explicit,
I sometimes gave way.
................................Reluctantly. They
turned out to be right most of the time.
You examine the idea of truth in many ways in the book
(at one point playfully including what I might term a ‘Rosebud’
moment). I have described the over-riding theme of the book as dealing with
the elusiveness of truth... Am I close?
Very
close. In a half-arsed way, in both The
Broken Shore and Truth
I’m suggesting that the rich and the powerful can make their own reality.
And that includes being able to wash away everything that is inconvenient –
including crimes.
Has Truth
achieved what you set out to do? Why, finally, did you stick to that title?
It
was always going to be called Truth, a small, lovely word with
immense power. Is it the book I wanted to write? I’m always impossibly
ambitious for books and I always fall badly short. From that point of view,
it’s another failure. But some people think it's the best thing I’ve
done. That’s nice. I’d hate to be going backwards.
Tantalisingly, the final chapter of Truth
offers a number of possibilities that might be explored in Book Three. Care
to give us a further hint or two? Further to go, do you think, with the style?
For
now, I think the world of Cashin and Villani closes with the last scene in Truth.
The style is pretty much a work in progress.
Quercus are pushing the J.M. Coetzee comparisons. I’m
a crime-reading philistine I know, but should I rush out and read him?
I
think everyone should read J.M. Coetzee. He’s one of the great writers
of our time and I am not fit to be spoken of in the same breath. Damn flattered
though.
How is your relationship with Quercus, now that ex-Chairman
Anthony Cheetham has moved to Atlantic Books and their new Corvus imprint. Might
you follow?
I
like Anthony Cheetham very much and I will always be grateful for his good taste
in writers. But I have an excellent relationship with [chief executive] Mark
Smith and Jon Riley and others at Quercus. I’m not going anywhere.
Looking back on The
Broken Shore and the books before it, how is the
balance sheet looking? – I mean in terms of your progress as a writer,
not necessarily in financial terms...
The
balance sheet says my annual income over 12 years now averages out to that of
a second-year accountant. As a writer, I think I've learned a few things. But
looking at bits of the earlier books, I think I've also forgotten a few things.
The Broken Shore has been
published not only in English-speaking countries, but also elsewhere, particularly
in Europe. I have a feeling that your work may present some difficulty to a
translator. Any feed back on that?
The
Broken Shore has been published in all the main European languages
and I’ve had exchanges with the German, French and Italian translators
– wonderful people to deal with. I think what they have all found is that
they have to decompress my language and in doing this something is lost. The
urbane Lorenzo Mattteoli has remarked that sometimes he needs five words in
Italian for one of mine. I’m flattered.
You would, I think, regard yourself as an Australian
writer. But has South Africa contributed to your work in any way, however small?
I
am one of those fortunate people given a home by Australia and I take huge pride
in being accepted as an Australian writer. From the South African part of my
life, I bring an admiration for those who stood up against apartheid and a contempt
for my own lack of fibre. But I am, of course, deeply marked, for good and bad,
by my South African life.
The last time we met you had been working on film scripts.
Did anything come of that? How was the experience?
A
version of my screenplay Valentine's Day was filmed for television
in 2008 and they gave me the cheque, honoured. I had the experience and I missed
the meaning. I think I should stick to books. Your publisher doesn’t tell
you the receptionist thinks you should change the girl to a dog.
Are you still content to work within the genre?
I
don’t feel restricted by the genre because I have no idea where the genre
boundaries lie. And I don’t give much of a bugger anyway. Writers can
either stop you in your tracks or bring tears to your eyes or they can’t.
Some of them write books labelled crime fiction.
One of them, praise be, is Peter Temple. Long may he
prosper.
BOB CORNWELL
My thanks go to Peter Temple for his time over a no doubt inconvenient period, and to Lucy Ramsey of Quercus for the original invitation.
*
Bob's
review of Truth
* Bob
interviewed Peter after winning the 2007 CWA Duncan
Lawrie Gold Dagger
List of Peter Temple titles available in TW's Shop and TW's Book
Address
An
Iron Rose (Quercus)
The
Broken Shore (Quercus)
A
Jack Irish Omnibus: Bad Debts, Black Tide, Dead Point (Quercus)
In
the Evil Day (Quercus)
Bad
Debts (Quercus)
Black
Tide (Quercus)
Dead
Point: A Jack Irish Thriller (Quercus)
Shooting
Stars (Quercus)
White
Dog (Jack Irish Thriller 4) (Quercus)
Truth
(Quercus)
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Iron Rose
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Broken Shore
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the Evil Day
TW's Book
Address - http://www.tangled-web.co.uk/crimedigests/digests06/quercuswi06.html#A
Jack Irish Omnibus: Bad Debts, Black Tide, Dead
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Debts
Point
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Tide
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Point: A Jack Irish Thriller
TW's Book Address - http://www.tangled-web.co.uk/crimedigests/digests09/quercussp09.html#Shooting
Stars
TW's Book
Address - http://www.tangled-web.co.uk/crimedigests/digests09/quercusau09.html#White
Dog (Jack Irish Thriller 4)
TW's Book
Address - http://www.tangled-web.co.uk/crimedigests/digests10/quercussp10.html#Truth
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