Samantha Harvey

What sparked The Wilderness?
So many things. Perhaps, very early on, the knowledge that Iris Murdoch had Alzheimer’s, which left me certain that something must still be going on in her brilliant mind. What does it mean to say a person is no longer him or herself, or that they are thinking nothing? Is it possible to think nothing or not be yourself?

I think Alzheimer’s is a disease of universals – what it is to age, to love, gain and lose, to live in time and to conceive of yourself as a person. I wanted to make the theme resonant rather than depressing, and to see deeper into both its darks and lights. And I thought that maybe, if you could view the disease from the sufferer’s perspective, there could be some hope of redemption – in which case The Wilderness is, yes, about the disappearance of a person, but also about the reappearance of that person to himself as he recalls and invents his past.

Please set the scene of the novel for us.
It portrays the world of its main character, Jake, as seen through the lens of Alzheimer’s – Jake is the increasingly unreliable witness to himself, thus I think this is a jigsaw puzzle of a book, kaleidoscopic in the way it delivers his life in fragments and broken stories.

Mainly, its setting is a small area of peat moors in Lincolnshire, northern England, in the 1960s and 1990s. Jake is a retired architect with bold but frustrated ideologies; he’s half Jewish but raised in the most English of ways. Part of his quest for himself – as that self gradually slips away – is in trying to reconnect with the half-grasped Jewish mythologies of his childhood, and with the loves of his life – his late wife, his children, and his one-time lover Joy.

The Wilderness is a book about identity, and what constitutes identity. Who am I, what are my founding myths? And if I don’t know the truth about myself anymore – if I can’t resolve the story of my life – am I any less of a person?

Do you have a particular attachment to any of the characters or places in the novel? If so, which one(s) and why?
I am very attached to Jake – three years inside a person’s head encourages a firm bond. He’s an entirely fictional construct but I think that at some point in the process I fell in love with him (for all his flaws), and in response he came fully to life. So it became a relationship between the two of us and I guess, because Jake is not actually real, it became a relationship with myself – hence the attachment. When the time came it didn’t feel good to consign him to the abyss; if a sudden cure for Alzheimer’s had been discovered, I would have given it without hesitation.

What are you reading at the moment?
I’m reading poems by Ted Hughes, and trying to learn some by heart (in preservation of my memory…). He’s the person I read whenever I want to remind myself how and why to write.

What are you working on now?
A new novel about an inscrutable and uncompromising man who believes that human life should be subject to ongoing examination and questioning. It’s a very loose and modernised retelling of the life and death of the philosopher Socrates, whose constant interrogation of life became so intolerable to his fellow citizens that they sentenced him to death. So if you like it’s about death by philosophy. And is also an unconventional love story.