Out Aug. 5, the novel is about a character who survived the sinking of the British ocean liner the RMS Lusitania during the First World War.Supplied
Canadian author Giles Blunt began his career writing scripts for television police crime dramas before establishing himself with the John Cardinal crime novels later adapted for the CTV series Cardinal. His latest novel, however, is a work of doomed romance and picturesque historical fiction set in the early 20th-century Adirondack Mountains, where tuberculosis patients went for treatment.
Books we’re reading and loving this week
The novel, out Aug. 5, is Bad Juliet, named after a character actually named Sarah. She survived the sinking of the British ocean liner the RMS Lusitania during the First World War but doesn’t consider herself to be a convincing tragic figure − thus, a self-described “bad Juliet.”
Blunt spoke to The Globe and Mail from his Toronto home via video conference. He sat in front of a bookshelf for the interview.
Your novel’s protagonist, a poet, says that in 1915, “books were the thing.” There is one character writing a memoir and another one building bookshelves. Tuberculosis patients read books because they can’t do anything else. Is it fair to say that books are big in your book?
Well, I’m intrigued by the Bloomsbury Group of British writers and intellectuals in the early 20th century. It’s not that I’m so much a Virginia Woolf fanatic, it’s that their milieu fascinates me. These are people who lived and breathed books. It was the water they swam in. So, I kind of had the feeling that my young professor-poet character would be like that.
Weren’t a lot of people like that then?
Yes, reading all the time. It was their main source of entertainment.
It was reflected in their dialogue. Conversation was an art, and the dialogue in Bad Juliet has that jaunty style.
I think people read so much they couldn’t help but sharpen their own dialogue. In a sense, the whole narration of my novel is a monologue by the protagonist. He’s talking in 1954, looking back to 1915. He’s had a long time to think about events, and I suppose he’s sexing up the language.
It’s one thing to get the jargon of the era correct, but how did you get yourself in the right rhythm and stay in that pocket?
The autobiographies of Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf’s husband, were a major influence on my book’s tone. He was writing in the 1960s, looking back at a time earlier in the century, similar to my protagonist. His writing was rational and, as you said, taking pleasure in the language itself. The minds of those people, I won’t use the word refined, but they were just more muscular. They did more exercises with language than we do, I think.
Author Giles BluntSupplied
There’s a nice turn of phrase about Saranac Lake, where the book is set. You describe the town as “transcendentally peculiar.” It’s a specific little world you’ve created, and in a very specific time and place.
That’s the magic of Saranac Lake. When I’m there, I’m constantly seeing it as it was. Many of the same structures, including the sanitarium, are still there.
I once stayed in a Saranac Lake bed and breakfast that was a former cure cottage for people with tuberculosis.
Did you? The B&Bs come and go. My wife and I love the Adirondacks, and once I read the history of the cure cottages, I wanted to go back to Saranac Lake. When we did, I was in research mode for the book right away.
It’s set in the tuberculosis era. Did you write it during COVID?
No. I started thinking about it in 2017 and was well into it by 2019. But if anyone is wondering why I set a novel in the United States as a Canadian writer, it’s because that time really presents Americans at their best, that real can-do spirit. The combination of public money and private philanthropy coming together for a common good.
In the novel’s preface, the protagonist Paul Gascoyne says when you’ve reached a certain age, the idea of writing an autobiography threatens to become irresistible. You’re 73, are you at that age?
I’ve certainly thought about it. But I guess I was more thinking about colleagues of mine who have written memoirs recently. I’m always amazed how they are able to focus on the people they met rather than themselves. I’m such an egocentric fool I couldn’t possibly do it.
For Margaret Atwood I suppose that certain age is 85. She has a memoir coming out this fall.
Is she 85? Wow. I’ll stick to fiction, though.
Giles Blunt appears at Noonan’s Pub, Toronto, Aug. 6; North Bay Public Library, North Bay, Ont., Aug. 14; and the Caledonian, Toronto, Aug. 26.
This interview has been edited and condensed.