Q&A With Charles Palliser

I am delighted that my publicist friend Mickey Mikkelson connected me with internationally bestselling author Charles Palliser. Two of Charles’s novels are The Quincunx & his recent novel Sufferance. Charles was born in Massachusetts but currently lives in London, England. Charles Palliser – Wikipedia

Q: Charles would you please give a brief description of each of your novels starting with your recent release Sufferance? 

A: SUFFERANCE: Although there are no names or dates in the novel, the setting is the Second World War in Eastern European. When his country is invaded and occupied by a brutal enemy, a middle-class man, motivated by a mixture of generosity and something less admirable, persuades his wife that they should give temporary shelter to a young girl from a different community who is at school with their younger daughter. He assumes that the arrangement will be temporary and that he will gain material advantages through it. However, days stretch into weeks and then months while the enemy’s hatred of the girl’s community leads to the gradual but pitiless exclusion and then persecution of all members of it and of anyone trying to help them. The man finds he has put himself and his family in danger. Gradually the girl turns into a hated prisoner whose presence imperils her hosts. The wife’s mental fragility becomes increasingly apparent while the girl is gradually revealed to have her own demons. Her disruptive presence opens underlying rifts within the family as the man’s two daughters come to resent the girl more and more bitterly. None of their neighbors – nor even their friends and relatives – can be trusted not to betray their dangerous secret. As the growing threat from outside puts an intolerable strain on the family, the man eventually finds himself confronted with a terrible choice.

THE QUINCUNX, first published in 1989, is written in the style of a Victorian novel and owes a little to Dickens but much more to Wilkie Collins who virtually invented the mystery novel and the whodunit. My novel is set in the period about 1818 to about 1825 and follows the central character, John, from an early age up to his late teens. At first he and his mother are living in a remote village in the country and John gradually realizes that they are hiding from enemies who are trying to find them. Their hiding place is discovered, and they flee to London friendless and penniless. There John’s naïve mother is tricked and betrayed and when she dies in the most abject circumstances, he discovers the reason for their persecution: John himself is the crucial figure in a long-running legal dispute over a huge amount of money and land. He realizes that if he can find a crucial document, he will not only make himself safe but possibly inherit a fortune. He sets out to achieve that and to be revenged on the mysterious people who have hounded his mother to her death. His adventures involve his unwittingly joining a gang of thieves and pickpockets, being consigned to a madhouse, getting caught up in a gang of “resurrection-men” who steal corpses from their graves to sell to schools of anatomy, and earning his living for a while by scavenging for dropped coins and valuables in the ancient sewers under the streets of London. John never abandons his dreams of wealth and vengeance and when he penetrates the mansion of his wealthy persecutors disguised as humble servants, he achieves success of a kind. But what has his pursuit of vengeance and wealth done to him and his capacity to love another?

My second novel, THE SENSATIONIST, was about a selfish young man coming to a strange city and plunging into a life of drugs, drink, and casual sex. It ends badly for him when he has to recognize the grave consequences his actions have had for other people.

BETRAYALS is the only novel I’ve written which is intended to be consistently funny. It’s a dark kind of humour in which the central idea is of people harming themselves by trying to hurt others. So it has would-be ambushers falling into traps they’ve dug for their enemies, people wrecking their own careers by trying to sabotage others’ lives, chemists poisoning themselves by mistake, and so on.

THE UNBURIED is set in the 1880s but there are events described from much earlier periods that are episodes in the history of the decaying cathedral city in which it is set. A middle-aged historian visits a long-estranged friend who teaches at the school in the precincts of the cathedral. He stirs up ancient animosities that led to the estrangement and awakens the ghosts of more distant periods. Without realizing it, he becomes involved in a murder that is carried out in such a way that he will be the crucial witness who unwittingly allows the murderers to evade detection.

RUSTICATION is set in the 1860s and is about a disturbed teenager who is accused of being behind a campaign of vicious anonymous letters and is then framed for murder.

Q: How does it feel knowing that you’re a international bestselling author and your book The Quincunx sold a million copies worldwide? It sounds so surreal & exciting! 

A: It was totally unexpected. I had spent twelve years writing the book in the time I could spare from my work teaching English Literature at a university in Scotland and by the time it was finished, the manuscript was so long that I didn’t believe it would ever find a publisher. But Canongate Books in Edinburgh very bravely accepted it. I was so sure that it would vanish very quickly that I bought fifty copies to be able to show it and tell people I’d once published a novel. Then I began to hear those rights had been sold in other countries and above all in the USA where the publisher, Ballantine, made a huge effort to promote it. Penguin and Ballantine both brought it out as a paperback, and it sold well and did even better in France and the Netherlands and was eventually translated into a dozen languages. All that took me completely by surprise. A pastiche Victorian novel of nearly half a million words had become an international bestseller. Nobody could have predicted it. In fact, a top literary agent had dropped me as a client when Canongate offered me only £500 pounds for world rights, explaining that it wasn’t worth his time trying to get them to increase it to a slightly less paltry sum. A few months after it was published, he saw how well it was doing and called me up to ask if I would take him back as my agent. With great restraint, I very politely declined his offer. 

 Q: What lessons and emotions do you hope readers learn and feel after reading each of your novels?

A: Very different emotions in the six novels I’ve published.

SUFFERANCE is a very dark story about the horrors that took place during the Second World War and a number of readers have told me they were in tears at the end. I don’t varnish over the things that happened then, but I do show that the struggle to behave decently is kept alive by some individuals even when the society around them capitulates to evil and cowardice. I wanted readers to ask themselves how they would have behaved if they had been put in the position that the narrator of the novel finds himself in, and I hoped they would realise how impossible it might be to avoid responsibility in such circumstances.

In THE QUINCUNX I wanted readers to care passionately about the plight of little Johnnie and his mother and understand how brutal Victorian society was for the poor. And I hoped they’d reflect on the relation between the desire for justice and the pursuit of revenge. Does John become compromised by his anger at the evil of what has been done to him?

In THE SENSATIONIST the reader perhaps at first identifies with the central figure – finding his way in a city where he knows nobody and doing a high-pressured job that quickly starts going wrong. But gradually it becomes clear that is on a path to destruction and taking another person with him.
I hope BETRAYALS is funny and I know its strange sense of humor has amused some readers.

In THE UNBURIED my intention was that readers would come to like the rather stuffy figure at the center and see a man who has tended to hide from real and life and emotions, start to move forward to a richer life.

The teenage hero of RUSTICATION is arrogant and self-obsessed and does some bad things but the reader, I hope, comes to see that he behaves well in the face of a horrific attempt to destroy his life and tries to repair the damage he’s done.

Q: If the entertainment industry were to get the rights to your work, who would be your dream cast to play the characters you created?

A: The well-meaning family man in SUFFERANCE who unintentionally endangers his loved ones would be a great role for Colin Firth.

Q: How long does it take for you to research and write your novels?

A: It has varied enormously. THE QUINCUNX took twelve years and I was writing it part-time while still working for a university. SUFFERANCE took about four years because once I had the outline, I went over it again and again to get it right. THE UNBURIED, though it required a lot of research into different historical periods, took “only” two and a half years. THE DISRUPTOR has taken three years which is quite good – by my standards – for a long and complicated novel.

Q: Are you currently writing your next novel? If so can you reveal plot details, a title and possible release date?

A: I’m just now finishing a novel called THE DISRUPTOR: It’s about an English teenager who, at the unexpected death of his mother, finds himself the legal ward of a New York property developer with presidential ambitions. He gradually realizes that, for reasons he doesn’t at first understand, he is an innocent threat to the wealth and reputation of his guardian. He is disrupting the great Disruptor’s plans.

Q: How long does it take for you to research and write your novels?

A: It has varied enormously. THE QUINCUNX took twelve years, and I was writing it part-time while still working for a university. SUFFERANCE took about four years because once I had the outline, I went over it again and again to get it right. THE UNBURIED, though it required a lot of research into different historical periods, took “only” two and a half years. THE DISRUPTOR has taken three years, which is quite good – by my standards – for a long and complicated novel.

Q: Since you live in London England, where are your favorite spots you recommend to those of us who’ve never been? I would love to see Big Ben, The London Bridge & The Tower of London & the palaces. 

A: All those are worth seeing as well as St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey and Westminster Hall (dating from about 1090!) and the British Museum. My favorite spots are these:

1) the Wallace Collection which is a fabulous assembly of famous paintings and beautiful furniture in one of the few remaining great aristocratic town houses. It was owned by a hugely wealthy peer who collected the works of art, and it’s like going back into the mid-nineteenth-century and visiting the house as it was then.

2) the Victoria and Albert Museum which is vast and crammed with exquisite artefacts from all periods and all parts of the world.

3) the Museum of London Docklands in an old warehouse on one of the quays is fascinating if you want to understand how London was for centuries the port that dominated world trade.

4) Spitalfields which is the ancient district just north and east of the City of London. Much of it dates from the seventeenth-century when Huguenot silk-weavers moved in from France and built houses with huge upper windows to give light for their work. It’s the part of London where you can most easily imagine the past.

Q: How does it feel knowing Kirkus and The Guardian gave such high praise for your novels?

A: It feels very good to know that something I’ve struggled over for years has brought pleasure to readers and has moved them and has, perhaps, made them see certain things in a new light. That’s why I write.