Heather O’Neill’s fascination with history stems from arcane impulses.
The Montreal-based author has now written three historical novels in a row: The Lonely Hearts Hotel, When We Lost Our Heads, and now, The Capital of Dreams. This cycle of stories reflects her belief that time does not flow linearly, but operates as “part of some strange, back-and-forth cycle.”
“The way I write historical fiction is I choose a time that I’ve been fascinated with throughout my whole life and which I’ve naturally accumulated ideas about, and I start writing,” she says.
“It’s like taking a modern character or modern ideas, and placing them in a historical setting to look at how certain types of structures still exist in the present. It’s always a way of using the past to speak about the future.”
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Dreams is set in the fictional country of Elysia shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War; a neighbouring power threatens to invade its borders for the purposes of national reunification. Identified only as “the Enemy,” their desire is the elimination of certain Elysian cultural elements they deem to be repugnant and unenlightened (among other things, inclinations toward superstition and “hypersexuality”).
The pre-eminent public figure in Elysia is the outspoken feminist writer Clara Bottom, who entrusts the manuscript of her wartime memoir to her teenage daughter Sofia. Sofia is tasked with leaving the country and meeting with her mother’s international publisher, who will see that the rest of the world bears witness to the injustices occurring under their noses. The only hitch is that Sofia has misplaced the sole existing copy of the memoir.
Sofia’s one companion on a perilous journey to retrieve the manuscript is a talking goose – a cross between Simone de Beauvoir and Samuel Beckett – who counsels the young heroine on how to avoid enemy soldiers, black market profiteers, and collaborators.
Regarding the decision to write a philosophical, anti-war fable, O’Neill draws on her own family experience.
“My dad enlisted in World War II when he was 16. He got a fake birth certificate because my uncles were over there [in Europe]. The way they explained the war to me afterward was always in this very fairytale-like way, without any details of the battles.”
This first impression would lay dormant for several years. As a teenager, O’Neill’s high school indulged her predilection for reading in class. She was given a free period to engage in the activity to her heart’s content, and it was in the school’s “old reading room” that O’Neill discovered a box of existential plays. The effect on her could not be overstated.
‘It’s always kind of shocking when you’re writing something in the fictional world and then it applies to so much of what’s going on,’ O’Neill says.
“I felt so alienated from the rest of the world at the time because I was being abused at home. Who are you when you’re young and can’t really speak about trauma? When you just have things that you remember from fairy tale books to go on and you escape into these books with talking animals?”
The collected works of Samuel Beckett from the reading room in particular provided O’Neill with an outlet to process what she had undergone, furnishing her with “a new kind of language for those who have been so fundamentally traumatized they can’t speak.”
The fairy tale elements within Dreams recede as Sofia confronts the grim realities of tank shelling, land mines, and sexual violence. With each passing indignity and transgression, Sofia’s world begins to contract. She leaves adolescence behind, while becoming further acquainted with what it will actually take to survive a country ravaged by war.
When Sofia is first sent away by her mother, she boards a train filled with children. The Enemy promises that they will provide safe passage for Elysian children away from the fighting. The children disembark onto the tracks, but as if obliging some dark premonition from within herself, Sofia flees into the forest while the other children are massacred in a hail of bullets.
O’Neill is cognizant of the timing of the book’s release, at a moment when several international conflicts are currently raging.
“It’s always kind of shocking when you’re writing something in the fictional world and then it applies to so much of what’s going on,” she says. “I was in Poland doing research during the same time that Russia was invading Ukraine. Then last year, [Palestinian author] Yara El-Ghadban asked me if I wanted to go to Palestine with her. I wanted to see a country that was actually under occupation.”
“We went all over the West Bank visiting writers and artists,” she continues. “Israel had razed so many things to the ground and then said ‘Palestine did not have a culture.’ But I saw this exhibit in a museum that featured little pieces of tile found from wreckage or that washed up on the beach. They had put it all down to make a floor. It was like an entire civilization was proving its existence. That really affected me.”
The significance of Clara’s manuscript serving as a similar testament to Elysian culture is not lost on Sofia, who strives to find the moving black market in the hopes that the book was miraculously recovered and put up for sale there.
“I think the allegorical driving force of the novel,” O’Neill says, “is the idea that if it’s a war, then it’s able-bodied men getting killed. But if it’s a genocide, they come for the children. This could be applied to any genocidal movement – the way that artists and children, who are the ones creating the memories of a country, are just exterminated.”
At a pivotal point in the novel – perhaps at the moment that the text becomes most self-aware or conscious of how it will be read – Sofia hears an infectious, familiar Elysian melody; it is a contraband song paradoxically being sung by a member of the Enemy state.
“The nature of good art is to express freedom,” Sofia thinks to herself. “Some people might say that artists are silly. And that art is a frivolous and unessential part of life … that you cannot equate art with necessities like food and shelter.”
O’Neill is adamant that this is never the case – that the value of writers and what they represent are actually indispensable to societies the world over.
“For me, writing is like magical spells. Writers are able to change the narrative. They can open it up and show it from different perspectives. They have this ability to express perspectives that everybody is hiding from you. That’s the idea of a writer.”