Your story “The Particles of Order” is set in the English countryside, in Devon, in the house of a deceased crime writer, which is now used as a holiday home. When did you start thinking about the cottage as a suitable setting for a story? Did you want to use elements of the crime genre – do you want the reader to imagine that there might be a murderer or a victim in the following pages?
A quaint cottage in the English countryside where many crime novels have been written, a seemingly unremarkable caretaker who pays attention to detail, a single guest checking in for an extended stay out of season – these unsettling elements were what made me think at the beginning of the story that there might be a murder. In fact, I imagined the murder to some extent, but soon found that I couldn’t decide whether it would or should happen.
I am a mediocre reader of crime fiction. I read Agatha Christie, PD James, Dorothy L. Sayers, Colin Dexter and a few others in a passive way. I accept the contract that a murder (or several) will happen and the author will solve the mystery, and I read without any intellectual involvement. With this story, the fact that I could not offer that contract became important because I had to write the story to figure out my ambivalence and the ambivalence of the story.
The story is told primarily from the perspective of Ursula, the caretaker who was Edmund Thornton’s typist for many years. She is curious about the newest guest, a woman named Lilian Pang, who has arrived from the United States but knows nothing about Thornton’s work. Did you know from the beginning that the conversations between these two women would form the heart of the story?
I didn’t anticipate that such a large part of the story would be made up of the conversations between the two women. Ursula has lived in the same place for years – both physically in Devon and emotionally in Thornton’s work – so her existence is part of the story’s framework. And then we have Lilian, “an Asian woman from this far-off place called New Jersey” who intrudes into Ursula’s world, bringing with her a sense of strangeness and disruption.
They are both avid readers – and writers – and spend a lot of time talking to themselves. At one point Ursula muses: “Strange women often exist in parallel. An encounter between two such specimens should not be avoided.” And this encounter is their conversation.
How well did Ursula know him as Thornton’s typist? How close is this relationship? It becomes clear that she loved him for many years. As the story progresses, she begins to suspect that he may have known this. Do you think he did?
Ursula’s relationship with Thornton is her relationship with him and his work. From the way she talks about Thornton’s beliefs and philosophy, we get a sense that the two have discussed many topics over the years. The intimacy between them was probably much closer than Ursula would like to admit – even to herself. Meanwhile, the well-maintained boundary between them gave their relationship an external distance that may have made their intellectual closeness possible. All these little changes Ursula introduced into Thornton’s work – I think he understood them. Both characters seem to me as if they had stepped out of a typical William Trevor story (one springs to mind), and of course Ursula’s statement that she lives in a William Trevor story would confirm our suspicions.
As you say, the women are no longer discussing Thornton’s work, but that of William Trevor. He also had a house in the countryside in Devon. You have often spoken about how influential he was to you as a writer – and as a person – and said that you like to imagine your stories in dialogue with his. Did you have any particular Trevor story in mind when writing The Particles of Order?
I’ve written before about William Trevor’s influence and my friendship with him. But I knew from the start that this story wasn’t a conversation about a specific Trevor story. The story I had in mind was “The Trouble with Mrs. Blynn, the Trouble with the World” by Patricia Highsmith, which I read for the Fiction podcast and discussed with Deborah Treisman a few years ago. Set in an English cottage, this story is about a dying woman and a nurse who visits her. Impending death rips away the veil or fluff of life, and the encounter between the two women takes place on a heightened level of consciousness.
It was William Trevor who brought Highsmith’s work to my attention, and I thought it would be a good tribute to him to make Highsmith’s story a possible interlocutor for my story. I should also add that I deliberately gave the opening and closing paragraphs a Trevoresque feel – from the imagery to the cadence of the language, so that the story is still in conversation with his work, albeit in an oblique way.
Lilian tells Ursula that she feels like she’s been “cast out of Trevor land,” and goes on to explain that she is the mother of two sons, both of whom committed suicide. It’s a devastating moment in the story. You’ve suffered the same devastating loss. How important was it for you to write about it in your story? Is the conversation between Ursula and Lilian one you could have in life, or just in the story?
Lilian’s statement that she was “driven out of Trevor land” sometimes hits close to my feelings. But what happens after the drive? A verse from a poem by Wallace Stevens came to mind recently.
This is the first story I wrote after my husband and I lost our younger son, James. As with an earlier story, “When We Were Happy, We Had Other Names,” which I wrote after we lost our older son, Vincent, I view writing these stories as an exercise in speaking humanly from the height or depth of experience. So it’s important—and essential—to cover my life in fiction.
I suppose people generally avoid speaking too intensely or too sharply. I always liked Elizabeth Bowen’s defence of Ivy Compton-Burnett, which she made after some readers had objected that “Englishmen of that sort are not speak so,” referring to Compton-Burnett’s characters. “No, but they feel that way,” Bowen noted, adding that Compton-Burnett “intentionally raises her characters to a higher level of consciousness, And of expressiveness than comparable people would have in real life.”