COMMENT

I don't like to talk about my influences. It makes me nervous to talk about that kind of thing - in case it sounds like I'm comparing my book to ones which are far superior to it - it's easier if I just say what books I like.

I absolutely love stories which have characters on journeys and quests, like Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson and a wonderful South Seas novel he wrote called The Ebb Tide. Then there's Gulliver's Travels and a second century novel by Lucius Apuleius about a man who is metamorphosed into an ass, as well as American classics like As I Lay Dying. I'm even a sucker for Kerouac's On The Road, which has got to be the stupidest quest-story ever told, with that idiot narrator who is forever in a mystical ecstasy of longing to be someone or somewhere else - only happy when he's traveling and can kid himself he's on some kind of a seeker's pilgrimage, even though he has a sneaking suspicion his journey is nothing more than a user's carnival of drugs, kicks and 'scenes'. For me the suspense of that book is - will he manage to keep deluding himself till the end? It's completely beguiling - the mixture of innocence and deceitfulness in the narrator's voice - the addict's signature note of frankness and deep-down dishonesty.

Sad to admit, but just like Sal Paradise, I'm infatuated with movement, whether it's a truck, a train or a novel. I could drift down the river with Huck Finn and Jim for days. I actually sort of resent it when they tie up the raft and go ashore. And books which have travel and adventures, and first-person narrators, I naturally looked at quite closely while I was writing Missy.

Another first-person narrative I read a few times was Jane Eyre. It's not exactly a travel book, though she is wrenched from location to location in a series of dramatic journeys - from the tyrannical Reeds' house to the severe charity school, from the shocking revelation at Rochester's Thornfield Hall to the refuge she finds with the sisters in Whitcross, and then back to be reunited with Rochester in the retired hide-away of Ferndean. She has a big character-journey and that's reflected in the characterful presence of the different stopping-places of the story. That's one thing I like and admire about that book, though there's nothing like that in Missy.

Another attraction for me about Jane Eyre is - Jane is tremendously alone in that book, and that creates an intense intimacy with her. That was something I wanted the reader to have with Dol. They are both strong-willed and therefore solitary characters, somewhat at odds with the world in general. In Jane Eyre we, the readers, supply the place of the friends and confidantes Jane doesn't have - and I hoped in Missy to try and mimic that effect. From near the beginning Dol is telling us things she can't tell her best friend, and she gets more and more isolated as the story goes on.

Obviously, to some extent intimacy is what all first-person narrations aim to create, but there was something about Jane's character that attracted me as a reader and that I thought I should study as a writer. There are unlikeable aspects to Jane - a self-pitying streak, a me-against-the-world attitude, an egoism, a will to dominate - and I needed to know how we as readers can still feel so close to her - because I knew that Dol had characteristics as bad and worse. There are aspects of Dol's thinking and her behavior that are really difficult to stomach - so I kept going back to see how Bronte kept us close to Jane. I'm not sure I cracked how it worked - it's kind of unanalyzable - but it was a model for me to look at and think about.

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