Mark Winkler is the author of five critically acclaimed novels, including The Safest Place You Know, Theo & Flora and Due South of Copenhagen. He chats here about his latest book, The Errors of Dr. Browne.
Where did the idea for The Errors of Dr Browne come from?
I was researching something completely different when I came across the only surviving transcript of a witch trial held in England back in 1662. It was a superficial and amateurish document, but there was something intriguing about it. Thomas Browne was mentioned, almost in passing, as a witness, and I thought that narrating the story from his point of view might be an interesting challenge.
I’d never heard of him, and imagined that I’d have to “invent” him as a character pretty much from scratch. But a little more research turned up a huge gap in my own knowledge. Browne, it turned out, was a respected polymath – a medical doctor, natural philosopher, logician, and prolific author who stood on the cusp of the dawning Enlightenment. He was also someone who never reconciled his dedication to the emerging world of science with his deep-seated religious beliefs. This personal conflict led directly to what his biographer Edmund Gosse would call ‘the most culpable and most stupid action of his life’.
In writing circles you are known as a chameleon – your style changes from book to book. Why is that?
I’m not sure it’s done me any favours, but after my first book was published back in 2013, the last thing I wanted to do was write another one just like it. Over a lifetime of reading I’ve developed a fascination with the indivisibility of voice and character, and in all my subsequent books the storylines has emerged from the core of character and voice. Mostly, though, it’s a personal challenge: how can I tell this story in a unique way, and can I credibly sustain this voice (and grow this character) over 80,000 words? Errors is my sixth novel, and for each of them five or six attempts were abandoned when my early experiments couldn’t answer these questions positively.
Dr Browne thinks of himself as a good person, only to realise, too late, that he has made a terrible mistake, for which others have to pay. Do you think it is possible to move past regret?
Perhaps the psychology of regret isn’t that different to the psychology of bereavement. Regret too involves loss, sadness, hurt, and the impossibility of turning back the clock to alter the events, actions and decisions that led up to it.
I’ve heard bereavement described as a hole into which one keeps falling until one learns to walk around it – the pain of the loss never leaves, but one comes to manage it. I think that pretty much goes for regret as well. Some become more proficient in dodging the hole than others.
A little bird told me that you do not like historical fiction. And yet, this book is a prime example of the best historical fiction has to offer. Why your apparent dislike in the genre?
It’s true that I’d rather read Conrad or Hardy or George Eliot if I feel like historical fare, simply because there’s a natural authenticity to the observations and experiences of an author’s own time. History is a bit of a sieve, with more holes than substance, and modern writers of historical fiction will sooner or later have to turn to their imaginations to compensate for historical lacunae in the lifestyles, language, mores and behaviours of their chosen period, no matter how much research they’ve done. I know I had to. So Moby Dick rings truer to me than, say, Ian McGuire’s excellent North Water, even though the writerly stitches holding together this patchwork of historical fact and imaginative interjection are invisible.
“What surprised me most, within everything else that I’d learnt, was finding out that of the nearly eight hundred neologisms coined by Browne, many survive in ordinary English today.”
Tell us about the research you had to do? Were you able to travel? And the most astounding thing you learnt?
If I were to print out the research I did for Errors, it would make a pile many times taller than the manuscript itself. I discovered soon enough that research was critical on every level, from the banal to the substantial. Social research on fashions, food (what did one wear, or have for breakfast, in 1662?), religious beliefs and behaviours. Structural research, in this instance how case law and legal processes functioned (or didn’t) in the seventeenth century, how the itinerant Assizes worked, how the early days of the Restoration were affecting law, church and society. Fishing laws and the related legal disputes that were underway in East Anglia. Architecture, city layouts, construction methods and materials, geography, agriculture, industry… All came to bear on the novel, if not materially then texturally. But the bulk of my research centred on Browne, who features in innumerable biographies and academic documents. I read (most of) his Pseudodoxia Epidemica and Religio Medici, plus a smattering of his other writing, and in this my most valuable discoveries lay between the lines, where the personality of this remarkable man shone through beyond the text itself. This was invaluable in helping me settle on a literary voice and character for the doctor – a process not unlike trying to tune a guitar to a piano by ear.
I completed the first draft (of eight or nine) just before lockdown in 2020, which kindly put an end to any ambitions I’d had to visit the land of Browne. Turning to the Internet, I ended up strangely pleased about this – it was clear that Norwich, Lowestoft and Bury St Edmunds were now no less a rash of chain-stores, parking garages and Starbucks than other modern cities. Like 1662 itself, much of what I’d hoped to uncover had long disappeared. But there was a purity in the old maps, artworks and literature I’d dug up online that in my rewrites helped me focus more narrowly on how these places (and people) may have been in Browne’s day. So I like to tell myself that by not travelling I was in fact able to create a far stronger sense of place than if I had.
I was amazed to discover that the so-called “spectral evidence” entered into the Bury St Edmunds’ trial would set a legal precedent for the more famous witch trials held in Salem, Massachusetts, thirty years later, where it led directly to the execution of nineteen people.
But what surprised me most, within everything else that I’d learnt, was finding out that of the nearly eight hundred neologisms coined by Browne, many survive in ordinary English today. We wouldn’t be using words such as computer, approximate, electricity, disruption or causation in our daily conversations if Thomas Browne hadn’t come up with them first.
For many years, you had a fulltime job and wrote at night and in-between. Now you are in the lucky position to be a fulltime author. Tell us about the changes you’ve made?
Ironically, the structure of my day-job gave a clear structure to my writing time. I would know exactly where and when I’d be able to sit down and write, and the knowledge that I’d be heading back to the office on Monday morning was enough to make sure that I did, in fact, write. So, far from being a full-time author these days, my time is carved up by freelance work, running the family business with my sister, fighting with a manuscript called This Mess You Left, and trying to elevate myself above my current rank as the world’s second-worst guitarist.
The Errors of Dr. Browne is out now.
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Extract: The Errors of Dr. Browne by Mark Winkler