Fiona Barnett’s debut novel The Dark Between the Trees is out now from Solaris, set in the same location in two different time periods – near-modern day and the English Civil War – but sharing a similar mystery. Barnett, who lives in Edinburgh, but grew up by the New Forest with stories of Roundheads and Cavaliers, and ancient secrets in the heart of the woods, has podcasted on the British Civil Wars, chatted about the book with Paul Simpson…

 

Where did the idea for this come from? You’ve done your podcast on the Civil War so obviously it’s something that interests/intrigues you.

All sorts of places. I always think there’s no one single idea that turns into a book, there’s a load of little things. At some point you can gather them up and turn them into a proper snowball, and make it compact together long enough that you’ve got something big enough to throw at somebody’s head!

I grew up near the New Forest with woods out back, and I always loved that setting. I think you can do all sorts of exciting atmospheric stuff with it, and also there were a fair few historical stories [attached to the area]. I loved the stories a lot more than I loved any kind of academic history growing up. I have no background in academic history at all.

At some point in my mid twenties I got hold of a copy of The English Civil War : A People’s History by Diane Purkiss, which is a really great book. I read it cover to cover, used up a lot of Post-it notes, thought ‘Actually, this is really interesting, this is really cool. This is fun because it’s not just about the five people at the top of the government.’

That was what threw me headlong into writing the podcast, finding out how people lived, what people were doing, trying to explain this really fascinating bit of history. I was never taught much of it at school, and I don’t think many people know very much about it. People either know everything about it or they know nothing about it, there’s very little in between – and it’s so complicated and difficult to explain, if you want to go into any depth whatsoever.

I went straight into researching the podcast, and essentially hit a bit of a brick wall, because if you don’t have access to academic history and academic historians there’s no way of telling how accurate your information is. Which is to say, a lot of the stuff that’s easily available in your average bookshop is either very surface level or it’s outdated, it’s wrong. It’s revisionism from the wrong period and scholarship has gone past that now. There’s just no way for a non-specialist to tell what is current academic thought on a subject is, just from the popular history.

So I went into the podcast thinking, ‘I have no idea what I’m doing here.’ I had a couple of very lovely friendly academics who I would show drafts to and they would say ‘Oh, we don’t use that guy anymore, try this instead.’ And I’d say ‘Well, I can’t find half that stuff.’

Then I got access to Edinburgh University Library, which is great, but a lot of the books I could access in there were from the 90s. So there I was, coming at a really interesting bit of history, knowing that I was taking my own biases into it and knowing that there’s really no way not to fall into all of the pitfalls, unless somebody tells you otherwise… well, that feels like a horror novel to me! If you want to do it justice, and you know you can’t, that’s got the feel of a horror novel.

So that’s really where I came to The Dark Between The Trees. It’s a story about people who think they have the right idea about what went on in the past, but who know there are dozens and dozens and dozens of extra layers to it. And to begin with, the idea for the novel was really a way for me to understand what I knew and what I didn’t know about my own research, and then to try and explain how on earth you deal with that. Then the story turned into a thing in its own right. Podcasting about history is hard enough, but the story about historians got really interesting to me too, and I kind of followed it.

There is a very famous British Civil War historian, the late great Christopher Hill: you can find his stuff everywhere, he gets put on all the reading lists, all of the podcasts use him. If you ask any academic they will immediately wince and say, ‘I love him, his writing is brilliant, he got me into it… but he’s a massive Marxist and don’t take anything he says seriously.’

Individual academics have their own views of what happened in the past and why, and I’m reliably informed that you can make an entire career out of having your own perspective on it. Which bears some relation to the truth, usually, but it can never be the whole truth.

And it’s a question of what facts you take, particularly when you’re in a situation where the actual facts are incredibly short on the ground.

There is an event during the English Civil War called the Barthomley Massacre, it’s really interesting. I first came across it in a couple of history books and it’s one of the main framing events in Red Shift, Alan Garner’s book.

The interesting thing about the actual Barthomley Massacre is that we know something happened, we know roughly how many people died, we know which side was responsible, and broadly whose fault it was. But most of the references to it are in letters obliquely referring to ‘We don’t want another Barthomley, do we?’ Or ‘After what happened at Barthomley, I’m not feeling so great.’

There’s hardly anything specific at all, which is, for me as a fiction writer, fascinating. Obviously, Alan Garner’s response to that was like, ‘Give it to me, put it here, I’m going to explain it in detail and use no dialogue tags.’ But when you get these kind of, edge-of-our-knowledge type events, you can either say, ‘Well. we don’t know what happened, we can never know. We can never know and that’s it,’ and then you have to work out how to live with that; or you can try and build the few details you have up into something that is a story that may or may not have any relationship to the truth.

It’s a weird thing to sit with in a lot of ways. What are you going to do with half-knowledge like that? Are you going to just write a large question mark on a chalkboard and leave it? Or are you going to try and get into the nitty gritty of something that doesn’t exist?

If you think about it, with what’s going on in Ukraine, we don’t know in the age of smartphones what’s going on in those Russian controlled territories so go back to 1644 and there was none of that sort of technology. We’re reliant on a letter, we’re reliant on this, that and the other.

Yes and the letter probably mentions seeing angels in the sky somewhere as well! How much of that is anyone going to trust?

As a fiction writer, do you see that as daunting because there’s a responsibility to the truth or do you see it, as you were saying about Garner, a huge ‘Oh wow, I can tell this story and nobody can say I’m wrong’?

As a writer – and you’re going to quote me on this and I’m upset about it but I’m going to say it anyway – I see it as a great opportunity to be a massive troll because I think the most interesting place to be with that is not as a writer but as a reader, right?

When you read Alan Garner, you don’t think that the stuff he’s describing actually happened the way he says it did, but you also have no idea how close to the truth he got. You read a fictionalised account of a real event and you think, ‘Well, I don’t know the truth but I’ve just been given a possible answer, what does that mean? What do I do with that now? Does that count? Can I tick it off, and call it case closed?’ As a reader, I think that’s a really interesting place to be; as a writer, I want to poke it.

I’m noticing some of the early feedback for The Dark Between The Trees is people saying, ‘The ending’s really open ended. I don’t know the rules, I don’t understand how it finishes. It’s just left there.’ But that’s what history is like. You don’t get the answers, you get a footnote in somebody else’s letter and that’s it, you’re done with it. And it’s uncomfortable and it’s annoying, and as a fiction writer, something that really interests me is that feeling of loose ends and of discomfort and not knowing how much you can lean on what you’ve been told. That feeling of uncertainty relating to it.

So it’s a great opportunity. On one level, I can put whatever I like in there and have a great time making up answers; and on another level, poking that uncertainty and seeing exactly how uncertain that ground actually is, is a thing I find really interesting.

Was there any discussion about making it less open ended?

Surprisingly little.

People want things served up, they want the Netflix end of episode eight, everything is explained. They want Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, turning up at the end of Knives Out…

…Explaining in the library? I’m a great lover of explaining things in the library. I wonder if some of it is to do with genre expectations as well – which is fine, that’s what genre expectations are for! And you do get a few definitive-ish answers in The Dark… even if there is a question at the end. But I can totally see why people have had that reaction to it.

You also get the cynical ‘Oh, you’re trying to get a sequel out of it.’

I have no intention of getting a sequel out of it, not any time soon.

No going back to any of the characters?

No. There is one vague possibility of a character that I might want to go back to and they’re barely a character. But I’m happy with this being its own story.

One of my all-time favourite books is Picnic at Hanging Rock, which also really leans into that uncertainty: it’s mimicking real life, and you don’t get answers in real life. I love stories that go that way but I can see why they might hit people strangely. Is it successful if it hits them in a way that they’re not comfortable with, but at the same time it definitely does hit them?

It’s a ghost story, there’s an element of a fantasy story and it’s also historical fiction. You’re trying to have a foot in three different camps, each of which has got its own expectations from readers. Were you going into it putting two fingers up to those expectations or were you trying to satisfy them where you could?

I had a very hard time with genre while I was writing it. I didn’t realise I was writing horror until significantly afterwards, when it suddenly clicked in a beautiful way that it was what I’d been doing all along. I did not read Mythago Wood until around about the time The Dark… was in copy edits so reading that and seeing some of the parallels was a bizarre experience. I was not really deliberately writing in response to that kind of fantasy except what I’d picked up of it secondhand, and I was happy to let all the secondhand influences develop naturally as the story came out.

If you’d asked me, on the day I wrote the end of the first draft, what genre I’d just written, I would have told you, science fiction. In a way I knew I was playing with motifs but I didn’t have much of an eye on genre. I think I was too close to being in the middle of the story, so I decided to park that particular question until afterwards – it’s thematically appropriate that I couldn’t tell its genre while I was still inside it. But I did definitely have an eye on some of the motifs, like the creepy woods…

I have very strong feelings about witches and stories about witches.

Arthur Miller’s The Crucible has Abigail Williams, the number one lady witch-accuser, and in The Crucible, she is eighteen years old, knows exactly what she’s doing, and is basically out to trap the main character who’s definitely not Arthur Miller in disguise. This bothers me a bit, because the original Abigail Williams was thirteen, she was so much younger than Miller’s version – and I just think, if you’ve met any thirteen year old girls and you’ve actually seen them for the people they are, you can’t possibly imagine that there’s that level of complicity there, that they would be more conniving than out of their depth, that something like a witch trial would be something they’re mainly complicit in rather than something that’s happening to them too.

This is a theme throughout witches’ history: assigning a lot of intention and expectations to women who are actually looking in a different direction entirely, to women and girls who couldn’t look in the direction you’re assigning to them because they wouldn’t even know how, they’re far too young.

Bear in mind that thirteen in those days was very different to thirteen now.

Well, it is in some ways and I think it is less so in other ways. Sure, in terms of some of the life experiences they would have had would have been very different. But I don’t think a thirteen year old in the 17th century would have been any better at 3D chess than thirteen year olds these days. Certainly not in terms of that kind of political scheming.

Certainly not in the way that it is in The Crucible.

Well, exactly. I think a lot of eighteen year olds these days couldn’t do that particularly well, a lot of the time.

The question is whether you take Abigail Williams as being atypical or as she’s presented in the play, more typical and is an example of her, and I’ll use the word ‘species’ because I think that’s actually the way that Miller is regarding it.

Yes.

It’s not gender, it’s species.

I think there is a tendency throughout art and literature to assign several further levels of intention than there necessarily are for female characters, often young ones but also old ones, ones that would be mistaken for witches. In the context of this, I just love the idea – which I definitely play with in the book – that there is one single solitary teenage girl and there’s a million stories about her. How old is she? Is she twenty? Is she nine? Did she kill her entire family? Has she said a single word in three centuries? What’s going on here?

And I think it’s really interesting that there can be this grand plethora of ideas about what constitutes a witch. Obviously in the 17th century this was literally within six months of Matthew Hopkins running riot around East Anglia witchfinder-generalling.

They had some ideas about what a female witch was likely to be like.

How much would your characters know of what Hopkins was doing 250 miles away?

Not much at the time, I’m sure. I find it bizarre that the real Matthew Hopkins, in his peak played-by-Vincent-Price years, was 24 when all of this was happening. Again, it’s that kind of thinking: ‘We’re going to take this person and turn them into a species,’ adding several years to their age and giving them intention in a way that I wonder what relationship it bears to how far ahead the real people were all actually thinking. Hopkins, I will happily say, had a pretty good idea of what he was doing – but he didn’t expect his own trial. He didn’t expect it to come back to bite him.

I think other people in other parts of the country at the same time did not know, necessarily, the flavours of superstition that were appearing in different parts of the country but…

They’re not in a world where everybody knows everything.

First of all these things would take a long old time to travel around to other places, and second of all, to use a phrase I hate, the English Civil War was a perfect explosion of ‘fake news’. Half the newsbooks lied, there were so many supernatural stories round the country, extremely locally specific ghosts, armies in the sky, angels helping out in the battlefield, dead soldiers coming to life again. Matthew Hopkins was not the epicentre of anything, I don’t think. He was symptomatic of something, or he was symbolic, I guess, of something that was going on around the country – and there was a lot of it around.

The idea that similar levels of anxiety and disinformation and stuff would be happening in this vaguely north west-ish part of the country, where The Dark… is set, as much as they were in the East Midlands, as much as they were in Cornwall or as much as they were in the New Forest? It seems entirely reasonable to me that the stories have certain touch points that would travel.

So while ordinary people where my book is set might not have heard about Matthew Hopkins, I bet a lot of them could probably piece it together if you said ‘There’s been something happening outside Norfolk, have a guess.’ The shape of it was very familiar.

By the time you get as far as my historian group, you’ve had the Victorians telling their ghost stories, which, again, were qualitatively different from what came before; you’ve had your 1960s/1970s fun, slasher, counterculture type stuff that, again, had their own interesting spin on the shape of a ghost story.

There are so many layers to all of this. How stories have been viewed over the centuries of telling them, of mythological constants and concepts. I love that. I love poking that, I love bending them back on themselves and letting them stretch out again.

We’ve got the two layers in the book: we have a story being told of what happened in the 1640s and we have a search for the truth going on in 2009. Did you regard it though, that what you were telling of in the 1640s was what happened or is just another telling of it?

Oh, that’s interesting. I tried to be behind the eyes of the characters and I know that they leave some things out. There’s a point quite late on, I think just before they get to the final location, where one character points out that they’d seen certain things in the wood and one of the main viewpoint characters says, ‘Oh yes, I’ve seen that as well.’ He’s never mentioned that before – there’s all this stuff that he’s just not thought to mention.

I think what happened in the 1640s characters’ sections is what they would tell you happened. I tried very much to be behind their eyes there. So, is that objective? No, absolutely not.

But from your point of view as the author, were you setting out to tell the truth of what happened in 1640? Were you, as the historian writing the book, writing that as the objective truth of what happened or is it just an interpretation? Could you pen a different version of what happened based on everything that you tell in this story?

Are you asking me about the Sergeant Thatcher cut? Is there a Thatcher edit, where he’s the hero?

I suppose so, yes.

Interesting. Yes, there’s always one of those. I like to root for my characters, I want to make the ones that I like look good. I guess it’s tied up with telling the story from behind their eyes, I want them to look good because it’s from their perspective.

Of course there must be a Thatcher-friendly way to tell it. I bet it’s an absolute trip! I bet Thatcher’s perspective is utterly horrifying and on many existential levels. The soldiers’ guide, Styles, I bet his version would be terrifying in completely new ways or unsettling in completely new ways. I don’t think there’s an objective story here at all.

What happens there is open to question because that’s what the whole book is about…

Yes, you can’t escape your own interpretation of ideas, or interpretation of what’s going on around you, certainly not when you’re in the middle of it. I reckon the Thatcher cut might differ in terms of events a bit more from what the rest of the soldiers thought was happening. But in the modern group, for example, the Sue cut might be similar in terms of the facts but with a wildly different spin on the interpersonal relationships. Some people would sound a lot less reasonable if the story were told from Sue’s angle.

You don’t get answers in a ghost story and to me, this is a ghost story. But we never have the Scooby-Doo type undercut…

That’s a fair comment: people specifically requested ectoplasm, so where is the ectoplasm? There’s ghosts, there should be ectoplasm.

I feel quite sanguine about this because nobody’s read any of my work before, they haven’t known what to expect from my stories and now they do. So here you go. Good luck, guys.

The Dark Between the Trees is out now; click here to order from Amazon.co.uk

Author photo © Kevin Percival and used with permission