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SpineOut : August - September 2018
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Moby Dick is a notoriously difficult book to tackle. What was your experience of reading Melville’s epic novel? My experience was fine. It’s much, much easier than its reputation. I’ve read far harder novels, really. Sure there are some bits that drag for a modern reader (you’ll learn a LOT about ships and knots and whaling) but it’s 500 pages. Shorter than most of the ‘Twilight’ books. What parts of Moby Dick would be useful for readers of And The Ocean Was Our Sky to know about? Besides the whale- hunting premise of the book, were there other elements of Moby Dick that influenced your story? Readers don’t need to know any parts of Moby Dick at all. Prior knowledge is not even remotely a requirement. This is inspired by the book, not a sequel or anything like. I just wondered what the story would be like if a whale told it. And then things got stranger from there. Moby Dick was a starting point, and then the story became its own. How did you become fascinated with how narration, and who narrates a certain story, affects our understanding of events? I think that’s the central question of every story: who’s telling it. Even if it’s not narrated. When I was eight years old I was struck by a car in a crossing between a supermarket and a petrol station. Dozens of adults saw it happen, and I’ve always wondered, do they tell the story? It’s an important one that I tell in my life, but what does their version sound like? And where does the truth lie? At the intersection of all the different points of view? How does a whale think and feel in And The Ocean Was Our Sky? What was it like trying to write a non-human character, and inhabit the mind and voice of a whale? I’ve done it before with a (quite popular) dog (who people are still angry with me about). It’s what all fiction is about: imagining others, embodying them, taking parts of yourself but daring to stretch what you know to try to accurately make each character real and full-embodied. What I started with for Bathsheba, my narrator, was her vocabulary; her up and down are different than ours. And it develops from there as she becomes her own whale. Spine Out AUGUST SEPTEMBER 2018 MEET THE AUTHOR PAGE TWO WARFARING WHALES MEET PATRICK NESS
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