Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Herley
Thanks for the interest in this! I'd like to answer a few of the queries that have emerged so far.
This book had a very long gestation, and you are not wrong if you think that the England described just before the plague has a somewhat earlier feel than it should. My agent submitted an early draft of the first 15,000 words or so to various publishers; a couple were enthusiastic but didn't think they could make money on it. Times are even tougher for fiction now, so this title has only ever been available as a shareware ebook.
My original intention for the story was to leave the setting open to doubt. There were three possibilities:
1. As described in the final draft.
2. Suter really was the only, and I mean the only, survivor. He has lived alone, in that house by the river, for many years, but now he is sick and dying and the narrative is an hallucination.
3. Suter is a patient in a mental hospital and the whole thing is delusion.
An echo of (2) comes when he is recovering at the end and conflates his room at the rectory with a room in his own house: especially the view from it, including the copper beech. (3) is strongly hinted at in the hospital scene when he is waiting on the stairs. The conflation of the two Helens is part of this too: the man pulled from the river can also be thought of as Suter himself.
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Thanks for clarifying about the time frame it was written in
I also found an echo of 3 in when he was recovering at the end. I really did thing for a moment that it was either going to be a dying hallucination, or that he was in a mental hospital. Or, of course, possibly both.
I definitely intend to try your other books on the strength of this one.