Behind the Words: Homecomer
When this and the accompanying extract are posted, I will be presenting at the CAMTESOL conference in Phnom Penh. This is my second trip to Cambodia. The first was in 2013 with an old friend from uni, Robert. He was in the country for work and had a free week at the end of his stint there, so I flew over and we did a bit of backpacking, a lot of sightseeing and, in retrospect, probably far too much drinking. It was a great trip which produced warm memories and strong anecdotes. It also produced the initial seeds of what eventually grew into my current WIP, Homecomer.
Homecomer is a science fiction novel set in a system of 36 inhabited moons circling a gas giant. Specifically, it is set on one war-ravaged moon, and the main character whose voice narrates these extracts is a refugee returning home.
The idea developed from a boat trip Robert and I took across the lake and upriver from Siem Reap to Battambang. We were eight hours on this narrow wooden boat, stopping occasionally at riverside businesses to buy fish curry, cans of beer, little souvenirs. In my notebook I wrote down some impressions, descriptions of the river, the surrounding environment, how I felt at the time. A voice began to develop in my head, that of a young woman escaping something by river, a river that was both familiar and yet unknown to her.
I chose these sections to share today because they grew directly from those notes. The story may be hard to follow and some terms will not make sense—it’s science fiction, set on another world among a population who developed away from Earth—but I think these passages are evocative enough to stand on their own in this context.
Over the next 11 years I have returned to the idea periodically. I didn’t plan the story out in any way—unusual for me—as I wanted to see where it led naturally. I thought it would be the young woman’s story and it mostly is, but as time went by other voices appeared, other stories wanting to be told, and now the whole is a polyphonic lattice that begins with soft power diplomacy and ends in war. This also explains why it has taken more than a decade to finish (I’m very nearly there!).
The world I create in Homecomer isn’t Cambodia, nor is my regime based on the Khmer Rouge (I know so little about the Khmer Rouge that it would literally be impossible to do that), but the entire edifice was built around that voice, the image that came to me at that time and in that place. Cambodia is, in a sense, in this novels’s DNA.
Lekanne—my narrator—flees the city and certain death in chapter 21 of the novel (about 25,000 words in) helped by strangers who become saviors. I don’t know if this is how it happens with other writers—I suspect it is—but that image of a young woman on a boat wasn’t the start of the story even if it was the start of the idea. It’s in the middle, a transition point, the beginning of the second act. Tendrils move out in all directions.
As I write this, waiting at the airport in Nagoya to fly to Bangkok and then on to Cambodia, I am filled with returning memories of my last trip to Cambodia, but also with excitement about the novel that was conceived on the Sangker River. Writing can be a sprint when deadlines are involved but it can also be a marathon, one that requires endless patience. I always knew that I’d tell Leke’s story eventually, and I just had to wait until it was ready to emerge. This is why I work on multiple projects simultaneously: some take longer to gestate than others and a watched pot never boils. I didn’t want to force the story out prematurely, but nor did I want to sit idle waiting for it to finish cooking. Hopefully this second trip to Cambodia will provide the impetus for the final push to get me over the finish line. After all this time, it’s so tantalisingly close.