Following the critical acclaim for his debut novel Absolution, Patrick Flanery's Fallen Land is his astonishing break-out novel; a nail-biting story powered by a fierce anger at the utter failure of the American dream, and the greatest fears that lurk in every one of us.
Both of your novels address the way history affects the present. What is it about our continuing relationship with the past that intrigues you?
By now it’s a cliché to offer this quote from Faulkner, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’, but the older I get the more I feel this is profoundly true. In America, history was for so long sanitized—at least in certain quarters—and it is my own feeling that there is a resurgent movement, particularly on the ideological hard right (but even to some degree on the left), to obscure or at worst to obliterate the darker aspects of our national story that need to be tackled and confronted with honesty if we have any hope of stopping such wounds from festering. In Fallen Land, this belief becomes literalized, so that ‘real history’, as embodied by the character Louise’s nineteenth-century house, is swept away to make room for what amounts to a landscape of historical pastiche, a suburb built as a revisionist model of nineteenth-century America.
The characters in Fallen Land are vividly drawn, affecting, and in some cases disturbing. How did you go about constructing such visceral characters?
I began with a sense of potential relationships rather than specific characters. In other words, I knew that I wanted to write about people inhabiting homes they had lost, and coming into conflict with new owners or occupiers. It took me a while to settle on who these people were, but once I had a gestural sense of the kinds of individuals they might be I began filling in details of background and class, education and profession. Paul Krovik and Louise Washington came to me first and most clearly, as I imagined Louise visiting Paul in prison. From there, characterization happens as it always does, through a process of imagining characters in particular situations, thinking about how they might respond to a given circumstance, building up my own sense of their physical aspects and traits, layer upon layer, until I end up with people in whom I can believe.
Fallen Land contains several messages. Amongst other things, it’s a portrayal of what is happening in the USA, and indeed in other countries as well; it addresses the issue of privacy vs. security and looks at how ordinary people can be driven to madness. What were you hoping to achieve with Fallen Land and what are you hoping that readers will get out of it?
I said in a recent interview that I hoped Fallen Land would speak to what I see as a crisis of empathy and neighborliness in America (I see comparable crises in Britain and South Africa, the two other countries where I have strong emotional, familial, and intellectual ties). Beyond that, Fallen Land’s underlying concern is with the ways in which people all over the world are heedlessly ceding their rights of privacy to governments and, more alarmingly perhaps, to private corporations who oversee so many of the services that were once the responsibility and preserve of governments that, in ideal circumstances, would always be answerable to and held accountable by voters. I am far from the first to say this: corporations are ultimately answerable to no one but their shareholders (and perhaps the law, although the policing of corporate malfeasance is at best incomplete), and to imagine a world in which our security, privacy, and natural resources are subjected to analysis and exploitation for their revenue potential, a world in which profit and the enrichment of the few is always the guiding principle, is, for me, utterly terrifying. This is not, however, a hypothetical or speculative construct, but rather the very shape of the world we have made for ourselves. In the end, Fallen Land is asking, ‘is this really how we want to live?’
What’s next?
I am midway through writing a new novel, which is set in Los Angeles in the 1950s, although it journeys through a landscape that I believe will speak metaphorically as much to the present as it does to issues of the recent past.
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