Isolated Thoughts

any excuse for a cat picture

Like everyone else, I am in isolation. It means I don’t get off the property day after day. I don’t see anyone, apart from two members of my family here with me, except the postman, from a distance, and my sister who delivers our shopping once a week.

It worries me, which is odd because it’s actually no different to the way I normally live. I’m in the country, down a farm lane in the middle of nowhere, quarter of a mile from the nearest house, a mile from the nearest village, I work from home and someone else does the shopping. I love it. Most days the postman delivers something and occasionally I drive off to see a friend, but otherwise I live in splendid isolation. Now, apart from not being able to see a friend, nothing has changed. So the worry is born solely of the fact that my isolation is now compulsory, not merely voluntary. I am a bit like my cat Mitsy, who will settle anywhere and not move all day, just as long as the door is left open. Shut it and she'll be up and scratching at it. A case of sheer perversity for both of us.

Thinking about it, not only have I embraced isolation for years, but it has also been a major theme in my writing, because a sense of isolation, physical and emotion, is a compelling dramatic theme, a gift for any writer.

 In A Time For Silence, Gwen’s physical isolation, in a cottage in a remote dark valley, amplifies the emotional isolation that traps her, and the isolation of her community also plays a significant part in the story. In Shadows, Kate is isolated, wherever she goes, by the knowledge that she has feelings that no one else shares, and it has raised impenetrable bars around her. In The Unravelling, Karen is isolated by mental derangement (or re-arrangement). Regarded as a freak and pariah, she isolates herself in fiction.

I’m not the only one, of course. Authors have always dwelt on isolation, accidental or chosen, enforced or embraced. Hansel and Gretel, Robinson Crusoe, Dickens' Miss Havisham, Jane Austen’s Fanny Price and Anne Elliot, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Waugh’s Tony Last in A Handful of Dust, Naipaul’s Salim in A Bend in the River, Gollum, Harry Potter… Could I include Adam and Eve?

Wuthering Heights

Isolated houses are irresistible as setting for novels. Wuthering Heights! Agatha Christie was the mistress of trapping a whole cast of suspects within one country house. I can’t resist isolated houses either. Give me an empty window in shadows and I'm off, whether I'm peering into a tiny cottage like Cwmderwen or a mansion like Llysygarn.


Isolation is not always a bad thing in literature. In my set of novellas, Long Shadows, my medieval girl, Angharad, longs to escape from her suffocating life at Llysygarn and see the world, but finishes up embracing confinement, while the 17th century girl, Elizabeth Bowen, wants nothing more than to be left alone with her isolated house.

I have no real cause to complain about my isolation and as a writer I can feed on it, inflicting it on my characters. But even in the best of times, there are people abandoned in loneliness and people who feel most alone when surrounded by crowds. My sympathy is for all those out there isolated in desperation, anxiety and loneliness, shut up away from family, in homes or hospital wards, trapped in their own heads. We are in territory beyond fiction now.

Block

It was bound to happen. I am disappointed but not surprised. My new novel, The Covenant, which was to have been published on July 16th, has now been put on ice until August 20th (fingers crossed). By then, I hope, bookshops will have reopened, distributors will be operating their warehouses again and Amazon will have books back as no.1 essentials. Meanwhile, of course, I can always get on with another book, except...

I can’t write. Well I can, because I’m writing this, but otherwise I am faced with a brick wall.

All I ever wanted to do was write (and read). I turned down very sensible career advice from my headmaster (study law, get rich), because I didn’t want to do anything except be a writer. I made a mess of my first degree because I’d virtually given up on studying in order to write instead. For years my primary occupation, when not having to work for a living, was writing. My secondary occupation was watching for the postman to deliver rejection letters. I never, ever, considered giving up.

And now, with Covid 19, I am confronted with insurmountable inertia. I’ve never experience writer’s block before. I’ve had times when I’ve had to put things aside while I worry over why something isn’t working, or where it will go next, or if I’m bored with it, but I’ve never been faced with such a total lack of desire to write until now.

It isn’t that I am too terrified of imminent death to think of anything else. It isn’t that I am sick with worry, about falling ill, about my nearest and dearest falling ill (which I am), about whether we’ll go mad in isolation (not me, I’m used to it). I am nursing pangs of guilt that I’m not worrying about where the next meal is coming from, whether the house will be repossessed, whether the shops will have anything in or whether my money will run out. I know how lucky I am not to be worrying about those things.

So why can’t I write? Everything else is on hold. I have the perfect excuse to sit at my laptop, without interruption, and write non-stop from dawn till dusk. But I can’t, because everything I was writing, with a contemporary setting, seems now so utterly irrelevant. How can I write about a world that, when we eventually come out of all this, will no longer exist? Should I turn to writing historical drama? Somehow everything historical is now imbued with a heavy weight of inevitability, leading to an inexorable present that is sinking like a stone. All I can see, looking back, is greed, stupidity, bigotry, pointless conflicts and an endless stream of futile mistakes, peppered with plague and disease. Plus ça change. Should I write about the future? It will be dystopian, won’t it? It always is, and that now seems a little pointless, when faced with the actual thing.

I think I shall just have to dig the garden, plant seeds and crawl back inside the 1530s with Hilary Mantell. It’s going to end with a decapitation; if that doesn't cheer me up, nothing will. Then, when it’s all over and the world has decided which way up to land, I’ll start again.