The House of Sight and Shadow
by Nicholas Griffin
List Price: $12.95
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0375759395
Publisher: Random House
Nicholas Griffin grew up in England and New York and wrote his first novel, The Requiem Shark, after genealogical research turned up a pirate in his family tree. He is at work on a third novel, also set in the eighteenth century, about a group of troublesome young Englishmen on a grand tour of Italy.
top of the page
Q: The world today is rife with good material for a novel. What inspired you to write a story about intrigue and adventure in 18th century London?
A: So many of today's questions are the same questions posed two hundred or more years ago. We think because of modern ‘science' that we are sure of answers, but the original questions were just as much ‘whys' as ‘hows'. Why do some patients respond to placebos better than others? Why can some defeat terminal cancer while the rest succumb? The answers are still muddy, which to me makes The House of Sight and Shadow a modern story of what the mind is and is not capable of, what the heart can and can not achieve.
Q: As part of your research for your previous novel, The Requiem Shark, which was about pirates, you spent time at sea on a 18th century sailing vessel. What sort of research did you do for The House of Sight and Shadow?
A: The House of Sight and Shadow didn't call for the same physical requirements as The Requiem Shark. Instead of time at sea, it was mostly a question of observation. I was smuggled into mortuaries and medical schools by friends who happened to be doctors and watched the science of anatomy as closely as possible. It was never a stomach churning exercise, but always one of quiet, sitting silently in the presence of the dead.
Q: In one scene, Sir Edmund Calcraft, the famous physician and anatomist in your book, performs surgery on his patient to remove a painful kidney stone. As you describe the operation, it seems as if you yourself were a doctor who lived in that era. How did you make your dialogue so convincing?
A: Luckily, some records were kept of these explicit and brutal operations and it is not hard to imagine the extraordinary pain that a man would go through, submitting to the knife in the most intimate of places without anaesthetic. Add to this the distress of being aware enough to share your pain with witnesses who gathered around you (the surgeon and the men employed to hold you down) and the experience was traumatic and occasionally fatal.
Q: What inspired you to include Daniel Defoe, the famous author Robinson Crusoe, in this novel about medicine and crime? What sort of role does he play in the story?
A: Defoe was a man of many different cloaks: a business man, a spy, an essayist and novelist, a political activist and devoted father. Throughout his life, he often proved susceptible to temptations that might enrich him, most ending disastrously. At the same time, his knowledge of London and the workings of the press was second to none and some of his profit was drawn from the saddest of situations, such as narratives of men about to be hanged. We know that he knew both Wild and Sheppard. As far as the novel was concerned, it seemed there could be few better to act as a guide not only to our apprentice, Bendix, but also to the reader.
Q: Judging from your previous book and The House of Sight and Shadow, you enjoy the classic adventure tales like those told by Robert Louis Stevenson and the gloomy stories of Charles Dickens and Edgar Allen Poe. As a 21st century novelist, what sort of element do you bring to your narrative/characters? Or, what sort of element do you have to filter out?
A: Inevitably, I think you write what you like to read. I've always been a great admirer of Dickens and Fielding, but Dickens tends towards the sentimental, and Fielding the cynical. So many times, you find historical fiction dry, but there are so many 18th century texts that are ribald and rude and immensely enjoyable. I tried to base my novel in between these emotional extremes. Naturally, it's impossible to know how self-conscious our ancestors were, but they left some clues. All novelists construct and reconstruct, whether or not their work is historical. The only things I try to filter out are those moments that strike me as stiff — things that may have been imposed on an 18th century author that today's audience would recognize as wooden.
Q: Writing in the voice of a physician from the 1700's must be a challenge. Is there a ritual that you do before you sit down to write that helps you place yourself in that world?
A: I like to listen to the music of the era. For The Requiem Shark it was a steady diet of sea chanteys, but London in the early part of the eighteenth century pushed me towards Handel.
Q: Blindness seems to be a recurring theme in your book. Amelia Calcraft, the great beauty in your story, has a disease that slowly is causing her to go blind. Both Edmund Calcraft and Joseph Bendix eventually lose their rationality in their quest to cure Amelia. In effect, they are blinded by love. Does this theme reflect the state if medical progress at that time? Full of blind mistakes?
A: Very intelligent men in the 1700's went galloping full speed down dead ends. This wasn't specific to the eighteenth century, though it is easier to see the foolishness of these mistakes with hindsight. Blindness is an obvious metaphor to work with, and has been employed many times before, but in this case it seemed perfect for Bendix, the central character. The London that he confronts, begins to blind him in its own ways — obscuring the goodness that lies within him with ambition, money, lust. His talents, observation, intelligence, are at first set against these temptations, but the novel is first one of focus, and then of blindness. Ultimately, Bendix is more guilty of seeing what he chooses to see, rather than not seeing at all.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: My next novel is about a small group of Englishmen traveling through Italy in the early 18th century, at the birth of the Grand Tour. They presume that they have been sent by their fathers in an attempt to improve their education, yet they're much more interested in Italian women and gambling than in history or architecture. Slowly, they begin to see that they are being employed as pawns between Catholic and Protestant camps, a realization that undermines and then destroys their group.
Excerpted from The House of Sight and Shadow © Copyright 2008 by Nicholas Griffin. Reprinted with permission by Random House. All rights reserved.
• Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.
top of the page
