Billie's Kiss
by Elizabeth Knox

List Price: $13.95
Pages: 368
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0345450515
Publisher: Ballantine Books

Elizabeth Knox is the author of The Vintner's Luck and Black Oxen. She lives with her family in Wellington, New Zealand.

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Emma Donoghue is an Irish novelist who lives in Canada. Her historical fiction includes Slammerkin and The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits.

Emma Donoghue: What was the initial inspiration for BILLIE'S KISS?

Elizabeth Knox: For some years I'd been thinking about an idea for a novel in which the hero believes the heroine is guilty of an act of sabotage that results in the loss of a number of lives. It was what I'd call the "starter motor" of a book, the little engine that makes the big engine of story turn over and go.

My initial idea had the novel taking place in the mid- nineteenth century, in a small principality, on the banks of a great European river. But I wasn't sufficiently excited by this setting. In autumn 1999, I went to stay in the Western Highlands, with my friend, who was the "Loch Keeper" (like a gamekeeper) at a private loch. He and his wife told me about the first Lord Leverhulme, a man who, in the early twentieth century, had bought the island of Lewis and Harris, and had set about improving the lives of its inhabitants. I was fascinated by this history. I visited Lewis and Harris and was in-spired by the landscape. Actually, "inspired" is a rather weak word for my reaction to the landscape. I come from a forested country, and the bogs and mountains of Lewis and Harris are stark and bare. I was astonished and rather frightened by the landscape. I wanted to see how people, to whom the land was as foreign as it was to me, would do there. How they'd feel.

ED: To set a book on an island is a great device for bringing the characters close together in a small world. What basis in reality has the book's setting of Kissack and Skilling (off the west coast of Scotland)--an island of two halves, two religions, and several languages?

EK: The relationship that the historical Lord Leverhulme had with the island of Lewis and Harris was, by and large, benign. I wanted the industrialist owner of my islands to be a little more ambivalent. As part of my research I found out about a biography of Leverhulme, but I couldn't get hold of a copy, and since I'd decided to produce a rather different sort of social-experimenting philanthropist, I passed on further research and relied on invention. However, I had inherited a background to my invention. The city in which I live, Wellington, was founded as "the Wakefield experiment"--a model city, funded by subscription, in 1840. So, while Kissack and Skilling are more like Lewis and Harris than like any other real place, they are not Lewis and Harris. The islands Kissack and Skilling, like Lewis and Harris, are divided by geography as well as religion. I emphasized the contrast between the Catholics of Skilling--in the novel represented by Alan Skilling and his father Rory--and Kissack's Scot's Reform Church, with a dash of Lutheranism, mainly to make Alan and Rory outsiders among the Gaelic speakers. The novel's main characters, all visitors to Kissack and Skilling, tend to think of Alan and Rory as being "of the Island," but, in fact, all the book's named characters are outsiders, people who have imported their dreams and aspirations and ghosts and problems. I wanted to people the book with nonindigenous characters partly because I was interested in showing an affirmative immigrant story--for instance, Henry and Billie are able to leave behind them some of the limitations imposed by class and culture. But then there is Lord Hallowhulme, who has the at- titudes of nineteenth-century colonizers, but also provides a little glimpse of why the twentieth century turned out the way it did--for Hallowhulme is a person who works with terrible, pious energy to make the world be the way he thinks it should be, regardless of the interests of others.

ED: How much research does a novel set a hundred years ago require?

EK: I did quite a bit of research--but only used some of it. And I have to say, it is very, very difficult to research how to build a primitive time bomb! My technical-minded brother-in- law put me on the right track--and I checked it all with someone at a museum of technology.

ED: Your heroine, Billie, has dyslexia ("congenital word blindness," as someone calls it in the novel) and various communication and coordination problems. Did you write her this way as a focus for one of the novel's themes that will have resonance for contemporary readers--genetic research?

EK: Billie has burdens, so she is less encumbered by ordinary expectations. Nothing much is expected of her--which gives her a lot of freedom. Early twentieth-century eugenics ideas were instrumental in the horrific events of the mid-twentieth century. Arguments about nature and nurture are still raging today. Lord Hallowhulme's ideas are clearly repugnant and reductive--and his certainty about his ideas is even more so. However, the novel is a little mischievous about Hallowhulme. His monologuing, his obsessiveness about his hobbies, his shifty gaze, his blindness to the reality and inner lives of other people--well, I'll just say that it's possible to diagnose Lord Hallowhulme. His ideas are cultural, but his thinking is pathological.

ED: In BILLIE'S KISS, two pregnant women, the sisters of the hero and heroine, meet horrible deaths (one by drowning) while in childbirth. Are you gesturing to a strong association between pregnancy and death, in an era of high maternal mortality rates?

EK: Yes, I was born by an emergency caesarian, which, in earlier times, my mother and I wouldn't have survived. And my son was born by an emergency caesarian--ditto. I was thinking about it.

ED: The inhabitants of the wonderfully named Kiss Castle stage a private production of a play the Laird's daughter Minnie attributes to George Bernard Shaw, called Fortune and the Four Winds. What's going on here? And are you suggesting that on some level, aristocracy is play-acting?

EK: Minnie passes her own work off as Shaw's in order to write a play containing a portrait in negative of her father. (Her character, Mr. Goodwin, believes that parents shouldn't raise their own children because they pass on bad habits. He says "Family culture is private doom"--because Minnie's father thinks people are blessed or damned by their genetic inheritance.)

Lord Hallowhulme is definitely "playing" with his island. More "playing" than "acting." He isn't interested in appearances, in appearing "aristocratic," so much as in reshaping the world into a place in which he--odd, cold creature--will feel comfortable, not baffled and monstrous.

ED: With its large cast of characters who have complex and obscure motives, BILLIE'S KISS is by no means an easy read.

EK: I was aware that I was trying to do a rather difficult thing: write a novel that was a romance, and took being romantic seriously; a novel containing a formal mystery, a crime, investigation, and solution; and a novel that is a work of literary fiction about how to live, how to be a decent human being, and how to live with our dead.

ED: The novel has a gritty, sometimes startling realism, but it can also be read as a classic romance of accidental meeting, hostile misunderstanding, and a long, prickly period of mutual discovery.

EK: What I wanted to do was to write a romance--a story of gradual, unwilling enchantment, between two people who are extremely well suited to each other, but not equipped to know it. Billie is used to following her sister in everything, so can only fall for her sister's husband Henry. She can't see Murdo as a mate till she's differentiated herself first from Edith, then from the dead Edith, whom she wants to follow, in a way, and can't. Murdo is so disgusted with himself, and with life in general, that he can't think of wanting anything much. They take each other by surprise. So, you see, I wanted to imagine two very real, forceful people, and let them find each other. It wasn't my intention to push against the constraints of the genre.

I only intended to write an honest romance.

ED: The book is also a very satisfying mystery, of course; by the last page not only the cause of the ship's explosion but several other profound family secrets have been revealed. But in its pacing, BILLIE'S KISS seems to resist taking on the page-turning momentum of simpler crime novels.

EK: I loved writing a book that had, as part of its architecture, the formal structure of a mystery--crime, investigation, clues, red herrings (one a red-haired herring fisherman), and a solution. But I didn't want the plot, the formal mystery, to entirely run the book. I wanted the novel to do other things as well.

As for the pacing, a friend of mine called Billie's Kiss a mix of Robert Louis Stevenson and Ingmar Bergman. I think that's pretty astute. The book has bursts of action and drama, but also has its lyrical and reflective moments.

ED: BILLIE'S KISS has been compared to the work of two very different nineteenth-century English writers: Emily Bronte and Jane Austen. Did other novels help you write this one? Were any of its antecedents from New Zealand, where you live? Billie may remind some readers of the mute, awkward heroine of Jane Campion's film The Piano.

EK: When I was writing it I was thinking of three books: Wuthering Heights, Mansfield Park, and Kidnapped. I wanted torment, then a social comedy in a country house, then a danger-filled chase across moors. I wanted echoes and suggestions, as an homage to books I'd loved. I didn't much care if readers noticed my echoes--but was quite pleased about the Bronte and Austen comparisons.

Yeah, I hadn't thought of The Piano--but there's definitely something "New Zealandy" (as Patrick White would say) going on. I think it might take a non-New Zealander to define it though.

ED: One great strength of the book is the subtlety of the relations between its characters. I'm thinking of the delicacy with which you explore class as a "confidence trick," to use a phrase of Billie's, and also the wide spectrum of homoeroticism in an era that pre- ferred not to mention such things, for instance when the Vauses fire Billie from her job as Olive's maid, or in the web of male friendship around Murdo.

EK: Thanks! I'm particularly proud of that. Olive is feeling a mixture of envy and attraction that she can't express positively because of her class, the times, and so forth. As for Murdo, yes, it isn't that he's "saved by the love of a good woman"--the whole summer saves him. He interprets his grief over his dead servant Ian as a desire to avenge Ian--but has still to think about what he's lost. Murdo has to share his loss with Ian's brother Geordie, and accept Geordie as an ally in his search for justice and revenge. Alliance becomes sympathy, appreciation, and liking--then, before he knows it, he's back in the world of people, and able to risk loving again.

ED: In the last chapter, why do you move quickly over more than a decade to reach World War One?

EK: Part of what I was doing, by ending with the war, was to show the possible trajectory of even the really benign industrialist--Andrew Tannoy--who has imagined his heavy machinery building roads and dams, and sees it turned into tanks in war.

Also I wanted to give another alternative to Murdo's rather haphazard mercy (he lets James Hallowhulme get away with things not because he's promised James's wife Clara, but because he thinks that his honor won't be tested, that he'll have to explain Rory's death, and it'll all come out). Alan covers for Murdo, who he knows has something to do with his father's death, because Alan loves Billie. He lets go. Murdo, and James Hallowhulme would never do that--would never say, "I won't judge" and lift their hands. I wanted to show that kind of moral agency.

ED: How do you respond to "historical fiction" as a genre label?

EK: I think genre labels are a marketing invention, and that "literary fiction" is also a genre, and that literature--the real thing--can appear in any "genre."

ED: In BILLIE'S KISS, the visceral realism of certain scenes (the viewing of the drowned, the artificial insemination of fish, the clambering past Rory's body in the tower) may shock readers who are used to a more soothing representation of the past.

EK: Yes, I'm infatuated with the world. I'm not trying to shock my readers--only casting Yeats's "cold eye" and seeing what I fish up. And, for every shocking, visceral scene in Billie's Kiss, there're several sensuous, exultant scenes. Like Billie's swimming. The sea that makes a monster of the drowned Edith, makes a spirit of the living Billie.

ED: Are there certain common myths about the early twentieth century that you're out to demolish in this novel?

EK: I am aware of the myths--and I tend to treat myths not as things to demolish but things to go around. The image of the pilgrim's way in Billie's Kiss--a way through the world that isn't the world's way--is terrifically important to me. The obstacles produce a path where the traveller has to measure the ground, where settlements are a day's walk apart, where the human body is visible in the way the land is shaped. I'm not, temperamentally, a renewer or improver--I'm a pilgrim, rather than an evangelist.

ED: BILLIE'S KISS is your sixth novel. How does it relate to the others?

EK: Three of them are autobiographical novellas. My third novel, Glamour and the Sea, has my father in it as a main character--my father as a twenty-year-old merchant seaman in 1947. All my novels are superficially different, set in different eras and places. Some are fantasy, or supernatural, or magic realist (depending on your favored marketing description). But they are all of a piece--novels that explore ideas about identity, memory, destiny and fate, what it is to be human, how we should behave, how we can live with our dead, remember, commemorate, embody them. . . .
Excerpted from Billie's Kiss © Copyright 2009 by Elizabeth Knox. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine Books. All rights reserved.

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