Interview: Vicki Jarrett, Always North
First published in Shoreline of Infinity 16 (Autumn 2019)
Vicki Jarrett’s Always North, a time-travelling dystopian slice of “cli-fi” is out October 2019 on Unsung Stories. To quote from the publisher’s blurb:
“As part of a weathered crew of sailors, scientists and corporate officers, Isobel sails into the ice where their advanced software Proteus will map everything there is to know. But they are not alone. They have attracted the attention of a hungry, dedicated polar bear. The journey to plunder one of the few remaining resources the planet has to offer must endure the ravages of the ice, the bear and time itself.”
IM: Firstly, congratulations on the book. It’s fantastic, and it’s fantastic that Unsung have picked it up. How did you get on board with them?
VJ: I happened to see a Tweet from Unsung saying “send us your weird stuff” and I thought “Oh! I’ve got some of that.” So I just fired a section of it off with a very hastily written cover letter saying “Here: some weird stuff. You might like it. Let me know.” And they got back to me and were like “Yes, we like this weird stuff, send us more weird stuff.” So I sent them the whole thing and it just went from there. But it was just pure luck that I saw their Tweet. I checked them out and read some of their stuff as well and thought “Aye, I like what they do. I’d be pleased to be alongside those books.”
IM: That’s great. When I heard that Unsung had picked up Always North I was really pleased. What were the origins of the book?
VJ: It was originally a short story in Gutter back in 2011, which was actually before my first novel Nothing is Heavy came out and I was still working in technical authoring – which partly inspired this because I did work for a company that made navigation software for the seismic industry. I wrote this short story which was extremely weird, I had all these different threads of strange stuff and time stuff and bear stuff and I actually did the William Burroughs cut up thing, juggled it out a bit and thought “yes, that’s the very thing” and sent it to Gutter. It kind of grew from there, though obviously the novel is very different from the short story.
IM: Did anything of the short story survive into the novel?
VJ: Yeah, there are fragments of it in there, the bones of it are visible but it had to change substantially because the short story was really impressionistic. You couldn’t sustain that level of weirdness for a whole novel. I mean, you could, but I don’t think many people would enjoy reading it.
IM: That’s really interesting, because I know your work best from The Way Out, your collection of short stories, and when I was reading Always North, the chapter at the start where the protestors come into the office dressed as bears, I could see that as having been a short story that then expanded out. The Way Out has a lot of that kind of humour, weird things happening in a funny way, and I could see a definite connection to your earlier work there.
VJ: Yeah, that could’ve been a stand-alone short story in its own right.
IM: The humour is one thing I loved about it. There’s so much dystopian fiction around just now and this fits into that genre, but most of them don’t have that kind of humour. It’s laugh out loud funny in places.
VJ: That’s the kind of books I like, the ones that’ll take you to emotionally different places, you know, you’re not just stuck in the one groove. It’s going to horrify you but then make you laugh. I like that kind of dissonance myself. Also, when you’re writing something really heavy, sometimes you just have to do something ridiculous to make yourself laugh.
IM: Are you a fan of that kind of speculative, dystopian sci-fi? Because it’s a bit of a departure from your other two books in terms of genre.
VJ: Yeah, some of my short stories, in fact some of the ones that didn’t make it into The Way Out, could have been classified as a little more genre… actually I think one alien managed to stray into The Way Out but otherwise… in fact the original Always North didn’t make it into the collection because it was a bit too out there and didn’t fit with the rest. But yeah, I’ve always read widely. As a kid I read the obligatory Tolkien and as a teenager Stephen King, but now I do enjoy Margaret Atwood, Ursula le Guin. I really enjoyed Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time which has somebody going into different time periods and so on – in fact Cathy McSporran’s book Cold City does that really nicely…
IM: Yeah, that’s a great book.
VJ: ...yeah, so I do enjoy that kind of thing but I like to be pretty eclectic.
IM: What was it about that original short story and that genre that made you go down this path?
VJ: Well, it just really got under my skin and wouldn’t leave me alone. It wasn’t like I weighed up my options and chose this one, I don’t have that kind of authority over it, unfortunately. The original short story had come from a video one of the guys offshore sent back to the office of a polar bear which appeared to be stalking the vessel. It was make-your-hair-stand-on-end kind of stuff, just really chilling and weird, and it kept bothering me.
IM: Did you sit down and do any kind of world building, particularly for the sections set in the farther future in Aviemore?
VJ: More or less. Once I’d decided where to anchor the point in the future, I did… not a huge amount of world building but just thinking things through. Looking up which areas would go first if the sea level rises. How many metres does it have to rise to lose how much of Scotland, what would that look like, what effect would that have on life. But I didn’t go into huge painstaking detail, it was an ongoing thing, when I ran up against something and thought “oh wait a minute would that...” and go back to my ideas see if that would make any sense at all.
IM: I think it’s handled really well, because some writers get caught up in that and you can see in the text that they’ve gone down a tangent of world building rather than storytelling, but in Always North you just give us enough to understand the context and to move the story along. There aren’t any of these long passages of description there just for the sake of describing. I really liked that.
VJ: I tend to come at it from the character’s point of view so it’s just what’s directly in front of them. I don’t do world building as a separate kind of exercise.
IM: Why Aviemore? I think this may be the first dystopian fiction set in Aviemore.
VJ: Really?
IM: I can’t think of any others. But why there?
VJ: It’s one of my favourite parts of the world. There’s something about the Cairngorms that’s quite otherworldly. I wanted to keep it in Scotland and it also worked out that up there is one of the highest places, you know, it would be a great place to go if the sea levels start creeping up on you, so it just seemed like the right place. We used to go on holiday a lot up there and also I was reading Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain about the Cairngorms at the same time, and that’s incredibly poetic, spiritual and otherworldly. It just seemed like a logical place.
IM: There’s been a few Scottish dystopian books over the last few years with Louise Welsh’s trilogy where they escape to Orkney, you’ve got Aviemore, and Michael F Russell right up on the north west coast. I’m quite worried that if the sea levels ever do rise that far, then the whole of the central belt and the east coast is going to leg it to the highlands in one go.
VJ: Yeah, this is it. It sort of crossed my mind as well, we’d have half of England all in their camper vans all heading up here. We’re going to be stuffed.
IM: Going back to the time travel elements, you have a pretty unique take on it. Is there any basis in science for that? Where did that come from?
VJ: There was a little bit of science in there, some research I read to do with memory and how memory is laid down in the brain, how it’s tied to identity and your sense of time. It made me think about seismic graphs because the two things did look kind of similar, and it made me think of growth rings in trees, just these kind of echoing wave patterns of memory and the natural world… you know it’s not solid science but it’s kind of intuitive and yes, I did read a few things around it and then took massive liberties.
IM: From my limited knowledge of that branch of science it all seems to hang together but I couldn’t – and I guess this is deliberate – I couldn’t for the life of me work out what they were supposed to have done that sets the chain reaction off, what it is that they’re supposed to go back in time to fix.
VJ: Yeah, that’s deliberate. Something that’s so difficult, I’m sure you run up against it yourself, is how much you tie stuff up for the reader, and the balance between frustrating the hell out of people and just making it really boring because you’ve done everything for them. Sometime I’ve veered a little bit too much in tying stuff up because I didn’t want to annoy people, but with this book I did want it to leave a lot for the reader to chew on. There’s quite a few different things that could have happened and I’m not going to tell you which one it is.
IM: There’s a couple of places where you do that. One is the ending, which definitely doesn’t wrap things up, but the overall structure does that too. What you do with the structure is fascinating. You get that first section on the boat, then it jumps forward to Scotland after the flood, as it were, then back to the boat, then forward again. That kind of structure is usually used to fill in the blanks – here’s a bit of a mystery, now here’s a flashback that explains it, but you don’t do that. It moves back and forth and it shades things in a bit but doesn’t really explain anything. Did you work with that structure from the start, or did that come in the editing?
VJ: That came fairly early on… the structure was a major… I wouldn’t say stumbling block but I really needed to decide what I was doing with it because it affects everything. I originally started with a chapter here and a chapter forward, a chapter back but that was too disorientating, you just couldn’t really get a grip on the storyline and what was going on, so I tried grouping it in larger chunks, at one point I had it in two halves but that didn’t have enough going on. I wanted to get the dynamic between the times but not, as you say, to have one explain the other but to set off these echoes, that you know what’s going on in one time but then given that this is happening in the other time and there’s weird stuff going on with time then that must mean that… I love all that wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff, I love that, the thought experiment side of that, making your brain try to swerve round those corners, so I wanted to do that to other people.
IM: The structure for me is the thing that really makes the book, it’s a brilliant display of technique. Given the way it ends and what you’ve said about not explaining yourself, would you ever return to this world?
VJ: I hadn’t actually considered that but I certainly wouldn’t be averse to it. There’s tonnes of stuff there and it’s very relevant and frighteningly possible.
IM: It’s really visual as well. I could easily see it being adapted for screen, or even for stage. I could really see someone like The Citizens Theatre making a powerful play out of this. A lot of it is in fixed locations, you know, you’re on the boat, or underground...
VJ: Yeah, there’s a lot of closed environments. I am absolutely up for anybody filming anything I’ve written, you know. Hollywood please send your money this way; likewise if the Citizens want to do a stage version I would be more than up for that as well.
Vicki Jarrett’s short story “La Loba”, which won Shoreline of Infinity’s 2018 flash fiction competition is featured in issue 14.