There was a long gap between Sophie and The Dandelion Clock. This was largely due to the fact
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that, after university, I had taken a full-time teaching job at Eton. It was a wonderful opportunity and
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an almost incredible first post, and what was initially supposed to be a one-term position slid almost
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without my noticing it into three years. During this time, I did try to keep writing, but what I wrote
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sufferered from the demands of a tough and draining day-job. Teaching, which is essentially
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creative and communicative in many of its aspects, tires exactly those mental muscles that are
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needed for writing. It became gradually clear that while I was at Eton, I wasn't going to write anything
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good, and so at that point I started saving up to buy myself some time when I left. By the time that,
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with many regrets, I left, I had enough money to live for one year. After that, I was going to need
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another job quickly, but meanwhile I had a chance I'd never had before: that of spending all day,
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every day, writing, without distraction, and without worrying where the rent was coming from.
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The idea of The Dandelion Clock had been growing steadily over the preceding eighteen months
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or so. Memories of school Art trips to Florence, consolidated by more recent returns to the city,
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gave shape to a story set in Italy, though the fictional coastal town of Altesa had its origins
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elsewhere on the Mediterranean, in provincial Spain. The two characters of my initial notion quickly
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became three, and while a plot of sorts was coming together, these three characters took up the
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greatest part of my attention. I grew to know and care for and love them, and they became very
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personal parts of my life, even long before I started on the writing proper.
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It was always my intention with The Dandelion Clock to write something utterly distinct from my
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previous two novels. It was ten years since I'd written After the Hole, and I didn't want to write
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psychological thrillers forever: I'd loved that territory when I'd written within it, but now I wanted to
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move on. But you can't just make a break with your own past, and inevitably many of the elements
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that characterise the earlier two novels - flashbacks to the past, secrets, the hidden world of
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childhood - became central here also.
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The difference, I think, is in the emphasis that these elements have within the structure of the
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book. There is a plot, in The Dandelion Clock, that takes in manipulation and terrorism and
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assassination; but this plot is buried below the surface. The primary layer of the book, the thing that
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it's really about, is love - which was something I realised myself only gradually in the development of
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the idea. The characters of Jamie and Alex and Anna came to occupy the foreground more and
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more, and as they did so, the original notion I'd had of a much more fully-realised terrorism plot
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became submerged. When I saw this was happening, I helped it along very happily, until such plot
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as the novel has is glimpsed in snatches and fragments, while the real impetus of it all comes from
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Alex trying to understand how Anna and Jamie became lost to him.
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It's a sunstantially longer novel than the first two, and I wanted to use that length to explore the
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characters in more depth without feeling hurried or cramped. (By contrast, the characters in After
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the Hole are more like quick sketches - they have to be, in a novel that's a quarter of the length.)
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The Dandelion Clock is a novel that plays on emotions I'd never really tried for before, too:
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poignancy and pain of loss, mainly. And though my books don't force-feed the reader 'style' in a
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heavy-handed way, I did make a conscious effort to work on this aspect of my writing here: to refine
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the manner in which I was communicating and to give some space to the language as well as to the
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events.
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For all of these reasons, The Dandelion Clock is the novel that I think gets closest to me: the
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characters in it ring more true to me, and interest me, more than anyone in the previous novels
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(except, perhaps, Liz). (You could of course say that to a certain extent the most recent novel is
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bound to be the one closest to me; it represents most closely the way I am now, and it's no real
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surprise that I feel different about myself and my writing than I did when I finished After the Hole,
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ten years ago. This is true, I suppose, but to my mind there's more to it than that: the novel just is
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different in impact to the others. If nothing else, the number of letters I've had from readers who've
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been, sometimes profoundly, moved by the story is an indication of this. The other two never
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generated quite this type of response. People finish reading After the Hole in shock, sometimes,
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but not in tears, nor feeling that they'll miss the characters - both of which are things that people tell
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me happen to them at the end of The Dandelion Clock.)
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In personal terms, then, this book is an indication of the direction in which I want my work to go from
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this point on: towards a greater development and integration of character into the narrative, and a
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greater emphasis on the role of character in the structure and impact of the novel. (At least that's
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what I'm telling myself for the next one!)
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