Christine Lai is a novelist and essayist currently based in Canada. Her debut novel, Landscapes, was a finalist for the Republic of Consciousness Prize (US and Canada); an earlier manuscript version was shortlisted for the 2020 Novel Prize. Christine holds a PhD in English literature from University College London. She is currently at work on a second novel, which engages with photography and the urban culture of Tokyo.
NAT TOWNSEND asks Christine about her recent debut, the boundary-crossing in her work, and the inspiration she draws from ruins.
Nat Towsend: You undertook your doctoral research at UCL, but before I enquire about the influence of academia on your work, I would like to ask you about London. We are told early on in the novel that the protagonist attended the Slade and spent the first three decades of their life sharing a house in London with their father. You write in the novel: “The city is a large mnemonic device. The past seeps through the cracks in the walls and bleeds out of the stones”. How do you think the city influenced your writing of Landscapes?
Christine Lai: I love London and I lived there for about five years. We go back every year to visit because that is where my husband is from. So it is definitely part of my personal life. Also I think that because my research was about London, to be in the actual city and see these streets, [is to] to kind of make the connection between the construction of Regent Street, for example, in the 19th century and what we see today. There is no book that can teach you that, so being immersed in that cityscape was just such an eye-opening experience. I really got the sense of the city as a kind of palimpsest, to use a dated metaphor, and I was able to think about that connection between past and present. I think it’s that link that continues to play an important role in my writing. The character is always returning to the past.
NT: I think London is such a moving city. I was going to ask you about the Romantic influence in your writing, but I suppose you already began to address that with your reflection on time and architecture. You brought up your academic research: what difference did you find between writing your PhD thesis and completing a novel?
CL: Oh, I mean, it’s a very different process. The Turner aspects [of the novel] were actually from my thesis. And so that was the only thing I really took from the PhD. I’ve always been fascinated by Turner, and I felt like I wanted to return to his work in a completely different way. My sense is that academic writing requires clearer arguments; the way that the thesis will be structured is very different and it doesn’t allow for open-endedness in the same way that a novel does. So I think the novel does allow the writer more freedom and there is this kind of capaciousness to the form that I think is more difficult in academic writing.
I mean, that said, I still do read academic books and I have noticed that a lot more academics are bringing in their personal observations into monographs in a way that perhaps was less common before. So I think that’s an interesting change. There is, now, this overlap, or cross pollination, between academic research and creative writing. And of course a lot more novelists nowadays, I think, do have a background in academic research. So you can see the influence. I’m thinking of people like Teju Cole and Valeria Luiselli, who all have PhDs and they bring bits of that knowledge into the fictional space. And, as a reader, I find that really fascinating, because it means I’m not just reading a novel, I’m learning about something else on the side that might lead to other books. But I enjoy both academic writing and creative work. I just think they’re very different. And I think that, perhaps, the novel allows you to dwell in the space of the novel. It’s kind of hard to describe that. I guess it just, for me at least, felt like it seeped into my everyday life more. Whereas with the academic work, I would think about it when I’m not doing it, but when it was my personal time, it was my personal time. I didn’t necessarily bring the work home, as it were. Whereas with the novel, for me, it’s everything.
NT: The kind of style that comes from your position as both an academic and a writer is one of the most wonderful things about your novel—the reader feels like they’re learning about something, and then they also get these very figurative and moving discussions. It’s interesting to hear that the novel permeated your personal life so deeply. What about this project meant you couldn’t really separate yourself from it?
CL: People do say this about debuts, where you try to cram too much into it because you have no idea whether or not you’re going to be able to write a second one. So there’s this kind of maximalist effect to the debut and I really saw it as almost like a box or a repository where I just brought in a lot of what I was thinking about and what I encountered. There was this brilliant essay by Calvino where he talks about the process of writing Invisible Cities, which is one of my favourite books. And he said that he approached it almost like diary writing. That there would be an exhibition he went to or a conversation he had with a friend and that he would somehow bring that into the space of Invisible Cities. So that there is no boundary between the life that was lived, the world that was encountered and the writing itself. So I found his comments very illuminating because that’s what I’ve continued to do and that’s the process that works for me. So there’s always an element of chance in the writing. I think perhaps a bit more so now than with Landscapes, when I was starting out and more uncertain about what I was doing. But I continue to use that method of just allowing these random encounters with artworks, with films to seep into the writing.
NT: It’s interesting you bring up the idea of a diary, because the epistolary novel works really well with bringing in these random encounters. Diaries also appear frequently throughout Landscapes—you reference those of Woolf and Kafka quite often. What influence have you taken from these writers and their diaries?
CL: I love reading writers’ diaries and certainly Woolf’s diary and Kafka’s diary. And I think I love the fact that, unlike a work of fiction, which might be more polished and is obviously produced for the reading public, there’s something imperfect and incomplete about the diary as a form. So I think to actually use it as the form for a novel is fascinating, because there’s this inherent contradiction. So I think I reference Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, which I love and I think was an early version of the diary novel or epistolary novel. And there’s some more recent examples like Kate Zambreno’s Drifts, which takes the form of a diary. I’m drawn to the kind of deliberate imperfections, and also the fact that we see the narrator as a writer, in the form of a diary, that you won’t otherwise see. We see them grappling with their own thoughts and emotions on the page. And the ways in which I think, often in first person narratives, you see the way that someone constructs themselves on the page. So I was interested in that process and I felt like with the diary, it was the perfect opportunity for me to explore those aspects of the character.
NT: Reflecting on your time as a student, I wanted to ask how studying poetry influenced your approach to writing prose?
CL: For my PhD, I studied mostly prose writers. For my masters I studied Keats and Shelley. But for my PhD, it was prose writers like DeQuincy and Charles Lamb. Mainly London prose writers. I did study Turner’s poetry, which actually is maybe not…very good. But it was fascinating; he was very indebted to 18th century poets and he obviously knew a lot of poets in London at the time. He appended these poetic fragments to some of his paintings. I looked at those, and that was really fascinating. So I guess I was just really interested in him as a figure, and as a writer, a poet, a painter, as well as an architect. The way that he kind of crossed all of these disciplinary boundaries, which was something that I was interested in, the interdisciplinary approach to various subjects.
NT: The painting by Turner you reference is fictional. In a previous interview, you mentioned that your editor had gone on kind of a goose chase trying to find it, and I did a very similar thing. Why choose a fictional painting?
CL: It was actually more to do with not wanting to violate any sort of copyright issues, because I’m obviously changing the provenance of the painting. So I decided to come up with a fictional painting that’s really a composite of various paintings that he did or drawings he did of the Seine. The one that was the main influence is actually at the Gulbenkian in Lisbon and it’s called The Mouth of the Seine, which has the town in the middle, but he’s painted that town multiple times. So it was just that he, I guess, was interested in the confluence of the two rivers and the crash of the waves against the town. I just took that idea and came up with a different name for it. Having a fictional painting meant I could do something different with it, though, of course, it is inspired by the real works, and also by the provenance. I find the provenance of paintings or artworks really interesting. I actually came across this—it was a Sotheby’s Catalogue entry for the Aaron Bernstein painting that the novel ends with. And it just came with a long list of country estates in various different countries. So it’s traveling all around Europe, and that was part of the inspiration for the country house setting with this precious painting in the middle of it.
NT: It’s interesting that the painting that you end the novel with travels around, much like the novel itself. You write: “Even jotting down these words pains me tremendously, but I must continue to write to go out there and look again and again as a way of paying tribute to all the life that has been lost”. I found this very impactful and it certainly has a strong resonance with the climate crisis at the moment. Could you tell me about the process of writing about a ruined climate?
CL: I really wanted to write a book that was not confined to a single genre. I don’t see it necessarily as climate fiction. I think that these terms can be very limiting. So I wanted to write a novel of eco-fiction that was also a country house novel, that was also a kind of feminist novel and wanted to combine them together. And I think as a person living in the world today, it’s very hard to avoid the climate crisis and to stop thinking about it. Certainly, my own sense of anxiety, and everything that I was witnessing, contributed to the writing and made me feel compelled to write something that includes the climate. Actually, over the six years during which I wrote the book, a lot of these elements occurred—for example, the flooding, which obviously didn’t happen in London, but happened in many other places in Europe.
So at the beginning, all of that seemed very speculative, but that’s all become part of reality. That was part of, I suppose, that sense of grief, that I felt that all of this, which seemed so improbable a couple of years ago, has now actually taken place. And so, part of the writing was about somehow translating that grief into fictional form and into what the character might feel at a future time. A lot of the details about the trees came from the National Trust website, the Woodland Trust website. They do talk about the tree disease, everything that is threatening these buildings and the plants, and so on. All of that is actually quite real and it’s not really speculative. I think this is what makes it horrifying. It’s not something that will occur, it’s something that already has occurred.
I was actually really influenced by a book called The Wall—I don’t know if you’ve read it—by the Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer, written in the sixties. And it also has this dystopian framework. It’s about a woman who becomes locked in the mountains. I won’t go further into it because that would kind of ruin it, but it’s really brilliant. It ends up being not so much about the dystopia, but about how we survive within catastrophe and how we care for non-human beings. It’s a book that’s about love for animals—I find that a world without animals is completely unimaginable, I mean, that would be a nightmare world. And there was a novel, The Last Children of Tokyo, that was an early influence, in which animals were not completely extinct, but very scarce. So I took all of these ideas and looked at how they addressed environmental issues. The other thing about The Wall is that it also takes the form of a journal. It’s like one continuous entry. And I think part of what the author was trying to do was to show the ways in which writing, or art-making more generally, becomes a way to endure catastrophe. That was something I think Penelope embodies: it’s through the writing that she is able to let go of what had happened to her and move on to the next stage.
NT: I remember one aspect of the novel that stayed with me was the relationship between animals and a kind of endurance. Watching the rabbits leap and play in the forest offers a moment of breath in an otherwise suffocating landscape. Within the novel, art is both a means of endurance and a way of putting a spotlight on that which is often ignored. As you mentioned, the speculative moments in the novel are very resonant because they’re not entirely speculative. They’re real. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on what draws you, and perhaps writers and artists generally, to ruins.”
CL: That’s a good question. I think that there’s certainly an aesthetic aspect to ruins. I mentioned the people photographing ruins and how there’s certainly this aesthetic appeal that leads to reflections on mortality, or the futility of human aspirations. But I also think of ruins as something that points towards regrowth and that sometimes decay is necessary. For example, the country house definitely symbolizes power and wealth. I did a lot of research on its history, which I actually didn’t know much about before. I tried to hint at that history a little throughout, but I didn’t want to be too didactic. In that sense, the dismantling of the house is symbolically important—it allows for some sort of rebuilding in the future. I think that the ruination is not something that’s necessarily melancholic. It’s something that signals a sort of beyond, or some sort of future. I was initially inspired by these photographs by a Belgian-based artist called Mirna Pavlovic, and she goes into these ruins of palaces and castles all throughout Europe to photograph them. They’re really stunning photos that show the beauty of these ruins. But there is also the danger of over-aestheticising something. I think that it is perhaps not an issue, but certainly something you see in art is the sanitisation of ruins without really questioning why we find these things beautiful or appealing. And I think the same goes for paintings that depict violence. We collectively accept their beauty and the mastery of the colours and techniques, without thinking about what they might imply.
NT: I have one final question, and it’s short. What are you currently reading?
CL: Oh, that’s a great question. I’m actually rereading Proust. I have the twelve-volume set, so my reading project of the year is to read one volume per month. And I’m reading the Scott Moncrieff translation, which a lot of people say is not the best, but then other people say it’s very poetic and it’s kind of a work of art on its own. So I’m reading that and I’ve been going through, very slowly, the novel Compass by the French writer Mathias Enard, and it’s really, really brilliant, but it’s quite dense, so I have to go through it slowly. I just finished Calvino’s Mr Palomar, which is phenomenal. I mean, I love Calvino, so I’m always trying to read something by him. I’m also doing a lot of research for the next novel. So I’m reading a lot about photography theory, which is very exciting.
NT: That’s wonderful. Towards the end of the novel, someone on the train is reading À la recherche du temps perdu and slowly making their way through it.
CL: Yes. I think Proust is a nice way to mark your progress through the year and the passage of the time.
Featured Image courtesy of Mirna Pavlovic.
