M.J. Carter is the author of The Strangler Vine, a wonderfully
enjoyable historical thriller, set in the 1830s, in India. The novel introduces Blake and Avery, an
investigative pair with hints of Sherlock and Watson – solid, dependable Avery
is the sidekick to brilliant, but troubled, Blake. They are both employees of The East India
Company. When their employers ask them to track down a missing poet, Xavier
Mountstuart, they are forced to confront the Thugs, who roam around strangling
their victims…or do they? Perhaps Company man, Major William Sleeman, is
exaggerating their depravity? Perhaps Thugs
are little more than vagabonds, and pawns in The Company’s power games? It’s a
great book, and I urge you to read it.
In the meantime, M.J. Carter answers a few questions.
In the endnotes, you call
yourself a neophyte when it comes to India and its history, but you also
mention your mother-in-law lived for many years in Madras / Chennai. How important, if at all, was this family
connection? How come you decided to
write about colonial India?
It was very important. My mother-in-law was the reason I heard about
the Thugs and William Sleeman in the first place. I’d never have thought about
writing about India if it hadn’t been for her. She was rather an amazing woman
and was a nun in Chennai running the teacher training college there in the
1950s before she decided to renounce her vows. In fact my husband wrote a
memoir about her, Family Romance, by John
Lanchester. Her stories about the Thugs were the starting point, but what
really got me interested was the fact that there was a fierce debate about
whether the Thugs had existed or whether they were a convenient British
fabrication, or myth. That gave me my story.
You live in London. Had you ever been to India prior to writing
the novel? Afterwards? Do you think it’s
important for a novelist to visit the places where her novels are set? If so, why?
If not, why not?
I hadn’t ever been to India before I decided to write to the novel. And
I must say I felt pretty intimidated by the idea. So I went – taking my family
with me for the full two weeks – I couldn’t afford to stay longer. I went to
Madhya Pradesh, the present day name for Saugor and Nerbudda territory, and
visited Jabbalpur and travelled up and down the road from just south of
Mirzapur, and saw tigers, ending up in Mumbai. I felt afterwards there was no
way I could have comfortably written the novel without going, though what I got
out of it was more impressionistic than specific: a sense of what the roads
looked like and the plants and trees, and the smells, and the bungalows and
what it felt like to be travelling in October and November. I didn’t manage to
get to Kolkata and the Grand Trunk road, so I just had to rely on research and
my imagination for writing about that – though I felt my trip had still helped,
not least through giving me the confidence to feel I could write about it.
So yes, I do think it’s important to see somewhere you’re writing about,
but not vital. I was a writer of historical non-fiction before I wrote The Strangler Vine, and since you can’t
go back in time, for that kind of writing you have to rely on research and use
your imagination. The writer’s work is to create a world that the reader finds
sufficiently plausible and engaging - how they manage it is up to them. But for
me, just being in India was immeasurably useful.
Were you at all daunted by the
necessary historical research? And how did you go about it?
As I said, I was a writer of non-fiction before I came to The Strangler Vine, and so the
historical research was the bit I felt really comfortable with. I’m good at absorbing large amounts of
information. I basically read a lot of books: about East India Company India;
biographies of Sleeman and his own writings; memoirs of British travellers in
India; histories of the time. The person I completely fell in love with was the
English traveller Fanny Parkes whose memoirs I found so terrific I decided to
put her in the book.
I could just read for months. So the research felt like the safety net.
At least I’d be able to create the period I was interested in. What really
worried me was whether I could do character and dialogue and - most frightening
of all - plot.
The novel includes a lot of Indian and Anglo-Indian vocabulary. Did
you enjoy researching it? How did you decide which “native” words to use, which
to exclude, which to explain, and which to assume readers would get from the
context, or the glossary?
I’ve had a copy of Hobson-Jobson:
The Anglo-Indian Dictionary - the classic dictionary of Indian words that
have sidled into English, pyjama, bungalow etc. - in the house for about
20 years, flicking though it from time to time. I wanted the characters to
sound as authentic as possible, so I just scavenged everything I could from my
reading - especially from contemporary accounts that gave glossaries - and then
I glossaried as many words as possible, except where the meaning was explained
in the text, or where it was very obvious from the context and only mentioned
once. I did also find someone with a knowledge of 19th century
Hindoostani to do a bit of checking and translating for me.
Did you feel constrained by the
historical facts? Or anyway what is known
of them / versions of them? Or did you
feel free to ignore inconvenient truths if they got in the way of the novel?
I definitely relied on the history to provide a background. I don’t
think I actively went against what I knew was the spirit of the truth –
although, of course, I invented all my main characters, including Mountstuart.
But the fact that the existence of the Thugs and Sleeman’s reputation are still
argued over meant that I could play around within that. And I did really enjoy
making stuff up.
What did you end up thinking
about whether or not the Thugs were more-or-less conjured by officers of the
East India Company, for their own policy ends?
Well, initially I rather did feel they were a convenient invention, but
I have since talked to an anthropologist who lived a few years ago with a group
in India who described themselves as a thieves’ caste. She said that, having
spent several months with them, she went to read Sleeman’s material on the
Thugs and was struck by how similar the language and customs he wrote about
were. She thought Sleeman thought like an anthropologist 100 years before the
subject was properly invented. Her work is still very controversial with
certain post-colonial historians, whom I guess she quietly thinks put ideology
before fact. I guess my feeling is that the whole thing was more nuanced and
complicated than either side was willing to admit. That there probably were
groups of people who called themselves Thugs but that they were as much conmen as
murderers. And that the British whipped themselves up into a frenzy about them,
and embellished the stories, and did use them as a convenient myth.
Is The Strangler Vine available in India? If so, how has it been received? If not, are there any plans for an Indian
edition? And how would you hope
readers in India respond to it?
Penguin haven’t done an India edition. I would love it if they did, but
I have to confess a slight anxiety that some Indians would find it too
Anglocentric - English protagonists solving English crimes, which I’d quite
understand, and maybe accuse it of orientalism. I suppose I came at the subject
from a funny angle. I had a character, Blake, I knew I wanted to site
eventually in England - and possible make travel - but I wanted to give him a
back story that didn’t involve England, and I wanted to write about the Thugs.
I did toy with having an Indian narrator describing Blake, but I just didn’t
think I could carry it off, whereas having a clueless young Englishman telling
the story meant that if I didn’t know something, it was perfectly plausible
that he wouldn’t too.
You discuss colonialism within a
rip-roaring mystery-thriller. What are
your thoughts on the divide within publishing and bookshops between genre
fiction, and “literary fiction”? Do you
think it’s a useful distinction, or not?
I love genre fiction, and films - I always have. When I thought about
writing a novel it was always a crime or thriller novel. I like
the directedness of crime fiction. I knew exactly what I’d want to write; I
liked the ways that good crime novels give you a world: Carl Hiassen’s Miami,
Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh, etc., and I felt I could do that. And I liked having
the constraints of the crime novel and then finding ways of pushing the sides
of the envelope a bit. I also think that
of all genre fiction, crime lends itself to really interesting worlds, ideas
and good writing. So I never felt cross about the distinction and I’m married to
a writer of “literary fiction”. But ask me that question in ten years. I may
feel differently…
The book has Western characters
confronting the exotic, dark, mysterious, dangerous and depraved East. Were you
ever at all worried about romanticising the East for contemporary Western
readers? Were you wary of orientalism?
I’m really interested in orientalism. And I think it starts in that
period – with Thomas de Qincey writing about the terrifying eastern numberless
hoards, the various novels that were written about the Thugs, and the First
Opium war in 1839. As for worrying about the book, as I said, I was a little
anxious that the book might be seen as re-treading those old tropes, but I
intended it more as a reworking of the old adventure stories with a more modern
and satirical take - so that the British aren’t necessarily the heroes and the
romance that Avery imagines is largely a fantasy with a nasty core. On the
other hand, while I do completely understand the offensiveness of the idea of
orientalism, the fact is that Westerners were, and are still, fascinated and
overwhelmed and drawn by the difference and the beauty and exoticism of the
East - for good or ill, it’s a fact. My hunch is that with the burgeoning economies
of India and the countries further East - China - this may well be a
romanticisation but it is also less and less an instrument of oppression.
The book is dedicated to your boys. It’s easy to see men and boys would love its
derring-do, adventure, Thugs, fighting and gore - and the relative lack of soppy
romance. Did you consciously aim for
male readers? Did you publish as M.J. Carter to disguise you are a woman, and
thus inveigle men into reading you? Do
you think most of your readers have in fact been men?
Actually I wrote it, then my agent sent it out to publishers and the
three or four who wanted to buy it ALL said: “you’ll have to be gender neutral”.
I.e., that the primary or initial audience would likely be men, and men
apparently won’t pick up books of this sort if they are obviously written by
women, so my full name – which I’d used on my two previous big non-fiction
books - couldn’t be used. So there you go. In 2014. But hey, if it sells more
copies…
I’ve had a really big response from women!
The Strangler Vine is the first in a trilogy. The second book, The Infidel Strain, is to be set in England. Will it also concern
skulduggery in the East India Company?
No - no East India Company in the next one, though a few nods to
Blake’s past. The second one involves newspapers, pornography, Chartists, and
Evangelical Christians – sex politics and religion. More of my historical hobby
horses! And I’m just starting the third one
now.
The Strangler Vine is
published by Penguin, in paperback, priced in local currencies. To buy it from
Book Depository, click here.
