My latest interview with the fantastic people at Newcastle libraries has just gone live. Snippet follows below—but don’t forget to click through; there’s still much, much more to read over there.
What inspired you to write ‘Children of the Resolution?
Children of the Resolution is an unusual novel, for me. Normally, my work is quite removed from my own, personal “story”. The novelist William Boyd once posited the idea that there are, essentially, two kinds of novelists – those who draw heavily from their own experiences, and those who write novels about things they, before researching, know little about. I’d always considered myself to be the latter, even though I do, naturally, use my own emotional experiences etc to breathe life into the characters and stories.
But there had been one particular story – heavily autobiographical – that I’d been trying to write for a number of years that contradicted this. That story, after three attempts, was to become ‘Children of the Resolution’.
The main inspiration was, simply, that there was a story here – more an anthology of experiences, I guess – that needed to be told. In the 1970s, as a child, I’d been among the first disabled children to be integrated into mainstream education in the north-east of England. It had been an exciting time. It had had that revolutionary feel about it. Even as a child, I got a real sense of that. Something new was being tried and, everyone seemed to think, it could only ever end well. Naturally, the initial enthusiasm – somewhat naïve, in many respects – of those implementing the new ideas was, to say the least, challenged.
For a while, I looked around for a written experience of the implementation of integrated education and I wasn’t really surprised to find that there were none. I felt it was a rich and important period. There were many lessons to be learned from those of us who had gone through the system (lessons, sadly, that simply haven’t been learned, in many areas) and, without wishing to sound too grand about it, I felt obliged to write it. Apart from the issues – which, I hasten to add, are not the driving force behind the novel – I very much wanted to give a sense of what it was like, the friends I made, the lessons I learned about life in general. It’s very much a coming-of-age story – rather sad in places but also, I’ve been told, laugh out loud funny.
Read your free sample of Children of the Resolution, please click here.
© 2011 Gary William Murning