Over the years of developing Maddie’s character and role in the novel, I have at times been concerned that she was unrealistic (even for a novel that isn’t aiming for strict realism). But then I realised that she doesn’t have to be representative, or typical. If there is one person in the world who has responded like this to cancer, then she is realistic.
Maddie is also a model for me, not of how I think I would respond if I had a life-threatening illness (which is something I don’t think you can know until it happens), but of how I would wish to respond: an ideal.
As such she has become a character that I continually learn from and am challenged by, a vehicle for extending the way I think, and what seems permissible as I gradually come to understand – often through further research prompted by something in the novel – the logic of her way of thinking.
As a character Maddie is rarely present in a scene, but is usually talked about, referred to and paraphrased.
While I have been able to draw on my own experience of having a chronic illness for many years, this is very different from having a life-threatening one. So I wanted to signal that Maddie’s experience is coming to the reader second-hand – a result of research, observation, empathy and imagination. As such her words are almost always (as much as possible) filtered and mediated through Angela. Thus I have repeatedly used the form ‘Maddie says,…’ rather than having her opinions or feelings in direct quotes.
The character Bruce — Angela’s brother who is deeply concerned that Maddie is not using conventional cancer treatments – was also very difficult for me to write.
He began simply from the need to have a character expressing the conventional views, and it took a long time to make him a character that I liked and respected. I think at first I was basing him on the most aggressive or worst aspects of people I knew (and with whom I’d had similar confrontations), without realising that I could not only bring in the best aspects as well – such as their love and compassion – but that this was essential.
Indeed, to show Maddie’s courage I had to make Bruce much more than a straw man; which meant that I had to learn to have respect for his perspective. In a piece of non-fiction I may have been tempted to simply find ways to counter these kinds of arguments, but in a work of fiction it became necessary to try to understand them, to track them to their source and context, to appreciate them as much as possible.
Nevertheless, the overall aim of the chapters that feature Bruce and Maddie (with Angela in the middle) is a polemical one, and I can’t pretend that I am in agreement with Bruce’s views, although I have some empathy for them.
Thus, as with Maddie, I have tried to avoid setting up scenes in which Bruce speaks his opinions directly. Bruce’s words are usually interpreted, filtered through a different set of ideas and beliefs, selectively remembered by Angela and placed in contexts that he himself would not choose.
Bruce is the sandpaper that helped me to explore and refine Maddie’s arguments, and as such he needs to be honoured by being a character that I at least, as author, can love. Whether this comes across is something for readers to judge. In the small amount of space available, I didn’t do anything particular to make him appealing, I just changed my own attitude to him and wrote the scenes as if Angela loved him too.
For me, one of the benefits of writing fiction has been this need to keep extending myself in multiple directions.Certainly, being able to introduce and play with some very ‘alternative’ and overtly spiritual ideas about illness, the body and the ‘self’ (ideas that include the notion of a sixth sense) by giving them to Maddie, has opened the way and made it much easier for me to then introduce these ideas into my non-fiction writing, such as the exegesis.
Bruce, however was also a vital ingredient in this process, providing an anchor for me to dominant cultural views which are still my inheritance, and still within me as a desire that I have to constantly contend with – the desire for order, for simple cures, for a cultural mainstream that is dependable and trustworthy, for a white knight to come and take control and bring salvation in times of crisis.
Fiction gives me a space in which I could allow these different views and impulses to take form in a less-threatening way, without having to subsume them into one non-contradictory underpinning logic, or to designate one of the other as necessarily wrong.
What I can do is suggest one way of looking at it might have more consistency with a particular kind of overall aim.
But as Maddie says, ultimately nothing is provable, there are no certainties, so in the end, after weighing up the evidence, you have to make your decisions according to your own past experiences, feelings and values. And this will differ for each person.
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How did this strategy work for you, as a reader?
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