Emma Darwin - Five Way Interview

By Brian Clegg

Emma Darwin’s passion for Pieter Bruegel the Elder was born in a childhood spent partly in Brussels; on publication The Times made The Bruegel Boy their Historical Fiction Book of the Month. Her debut novel The Mathematics of Love was nominated for both Commonwealth Writers and Romantic Novelists’ Association awards, and A Secret Alchemy was a Sunday Times bestseller.  She is also the author of Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction and the memoir This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing, has taught at Oxford, Goldsmiths and the Open University, and her Substack This Itch of Writing is linked to by writing courses around the world.

Why this subject?

I’m endlessly fascinated by creativity, but writing about writing feels a bit solipsistic, and it has so little physical, material presence. I find visual art more fun and more fruitful. And when I realised that a childhood love, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, was painting his nativities and satires just as the Low Countries was exploding into political and religious rebellion and image-smashing, I couldn’t resist!.

Do you think Bruegel would have used a model for paintings where there are so many small characters? Just wondering if there’s evidence or it’s more a vehicle to get Gil involved.

There’s very little direct evidence for how Bruegel worked in the day-to-sense. Just using common sense, it’s hard to imagine he would have needed a model for each of the hundreds of little almost stick figures in something like The Triumph of Death – but perhaps some of the more extreme poses would have needed a sketch to be worked out. The value of having Gil in his house is that he’s handy for that kind of thing, as well as the bigger figures.

I know you have an interest in church music – why did you decide to have a central character for whom music didn’t do anything?

Gil has a powerful sense of transcendence – his need for that space is the strongest driver in his passionate vocation for the priesthood. Normally music is one of the great ways to find it, but music is incredibly hard to evoke without fuzzy abstraction or naff metaphors. Perhaps more importantly, it felt too easy – lazy, almost – to just write ‘the choir began to sing’, and assume the reader would feel Gil there. By making him tone deaf in the true sense (which is rare but does happen), I knew I’d have to work harder to get the reader to feel him entering that state which is so essential to him.

What’s next?

I’m working on another novel. It’s set at a completely different time, but religion, politics and the arts are again profoundly entangled, in ways that mean the characters must risk everything, including their souls, to survive.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

That novel, but also the possibilities for developing my creative writing blog This Itch of Writing since we moved to Substack.

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.