STAR INTERVIEW
http://www.writers-online.co.uk NOVEMBER 2019 17Deciding what Lisa was able to do –
and not do – was crucial to determining
how Louise would tell her story. ‘ It was
quite hard deciding what powers she
would have, because that influenced
the narrative,’ she says. ‘If she’d been a
poltergeist and able to move objects and
communicate with people, there wouldn’t
have been much of a story.’
Researching Platform Seven meant a
return to Peterborough Station for Louise.
‘I spent a lot of time at Peterborough
Railway Station!’ she laughs. ‘I spent
some nights there – it’s a very creepy place
after dark. I was there on a freezing cold
November night with mist sweeping across
the tracks and a lone fox trotting along,
and a freight train passing through. I’m
really interested in the underbelly of all
our lives, the night jobs, the secret jobs,
the holding places where the infrastructure
of our lives takes place.’
Louise has a warm, energetic presence,
talks freely and laughs easily. Her books,
though, show another side, interrogating
various aspects of human darkness
from the Romani holocaust (Fires in the
Dark) to infidelity and murder in the
international bestseller 2013’s Apple Tree
Ya rd and the Indonesian genocide in Black
Water (2016).
‘All my books have darker sides,’ she
says, laughing. ‘My accountant says,
you write such dark books but you’re
so friendly. In novels we can live these
alternative existences and darker lives.’Although each of her books is different,
they have themes in common. ‘Probably
people leading secret lives – lives that are
not obvious to those around them. And
secret selves, and self deception. How
people develop a narrative of their lives.
And moral ambiguity – the idea of people
not being wholly good, or wholly bad.’
Matthew, Lisa’s boyfriend in Platform
Seven, is a case in point: a morally
ambiguous character rather than a
straightforward bad guy or bully. In
his private life he’s controlling and
manipulative, but in his working life he’s
a busy, conscientious hospital doctor. ‘We
are much more sophisticated now in the
way we perceive relationships and how
men who can be so outwardly charming
and respectable can be manipulative and
controlling,’ Louise says. ‘It’s not as simple
as good guys and bad guys – it’s a lot more
complicated than that.’
She created Matthew in response to
where Lisa was in her life at the time she
met him. ‘I had a very strong sense of
Lisa and who she was. I decided she was
36 when she died, and I remembered
the pressures on a woman of that age –
finding a partner, settling down, having
babies. So it was about creating a man
who was ostensibly very eligible – a doctor- but who had a darker side.’
Louise is known for nuanced, layered
storytelling, and for blurring the
boundaries between genres: in the case of
Platform Seven, it’s ghost story, domestic
noir and contemporary literary fiction.
‘I always end up mixing it up a bit,’
she says. ‘I don’t think anything I write is
a straight anything. The comments that
have pleased me most about my work are
that it’s different. Nothing I’ve written
falls into easily definable categories – I try
to put considerations of genre to one side
and write the novel I want to write. It’s
not really a conscious decision, I’m simply
telling the story that’s uppermost in my
mind. I’m loving that the domestic noir
form is popular at the minute.’
She’s always loved ghost stories. ‘I
love the traditional ones like Turn of the
Screw, and even things like Scooby-Doo.
They’re such rich material, ripe for so
many possibilities. I wouldn’t have written
a country house story – I’m much more
likely to write a ghost in a car park.’ Lisa is
Louise’s take on what kind of ghost might
be relevant to 21st century life. ‘She’s
different because she has no memory and
the main process of discovery is about
what happened when she was alive. She’s
a corpse and a detective at the same time.
It’s gothic in a very modern sense – but
Jane Eyre was domestic noir.’
Psychological thrillers are the
contemporary manifestation of a genre
of women’s literature that goes back to
the 19th century, and includes a beloved
classic that, on re-reading, is less about
doomed romance and more about abusive
relationships. ‘Wuthering Heights! I love it
but it changes according to what age you“I’m a big fan of the creative
writing course – I’m a product
of it. It’s bizarre to suggest that
you can’t teach any form of
technique. Nobody expects to
be able to pick up a cello and be
able to play Bach. It’s the same
with the novel. Of course there’s
a question of innate ability but
if you’ve got it there’s still an
immense amount to learn.”LISTEN
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SEVEN