I’ve spent more than a month now putting the final touches
to the revising, writing and re-editing of my very long novel Gabriel Marchant: How I Became a Painter.
This painstaking process has been necessary because I feel this must be my best
novel. Room to Write has published it, using the invaluable Createspace process, where much of the responsibility for the quality of the end product lies with
the author. In the past this seemed much more straightforward as I worked for a long time with a big
publisher where whole departments attended to the details which I have now attended to myself in collaboration with the Room To Write team
People always say, about a new novel, what is it about? This
is always a difficult question to answer in one sentence.
 |
‘There is no doubt that fiction
makes a better job of truth.’
Doris Lessing |
Here is what it says on my cover:
'It is 1963, the day after the assassination of President
Kennedy, the eminent painter Gabriel Marchant pays public tribute to his late
mentor Archie Todhunter. He reflects on his early days when, as an out of work
miner in 1936, he met Archie, the charismatic warden of The Settlement, an arts
centre in his home town.
At that time, unemployed and feeling very low, Gabriel is
rescued by the encouragement he finds at The Settlement, where people out of
work are inspired by Archie Todhunter and the enigmatic German Rosel Vonn, a
sculptor and artist who teaches there. Travelling with Gabriel on his journey
are his best friend Tegger, who will become a writer, and the clever, witty
schoolgirl Greta who will change lives in her own way.
Later, both haunted and inspired by images of life and
work underground, Gabriel’s paintings finds first local, then national fame and his life is changed
forever.
As he tells the whole tale of how he became a painter Gabriel
Marchant celebrates the liberating nature of art in hard-pressed lives and the
role of people like Archie Todhunter, those magical change-makers in lives like
his own....'
Gabriel’s own story is fiction but it springs out of my personal experience of a
particular place at a particular time and my research into the true experience
of people whose lives were changed in such a way.
In my dedication
I say: This novel is dedicated to all
those whose lives impelled them to dig in the darkness, who still found the
grace there to create beauty. In particular I honour the inspiration of the art
of Tom McGuinness, Ted Holloway and Norman Cornish, in addition to the literary inspiration
of the writer Sid Chaplin. All of them, in their unique fashion, flourished as
young people through the magic of the Spennymoor Settlement.
I have
published this book to coincide with the magnificent Shafts of Life Exhibition - masterminded by Gillian Wales and
Robert McManners – currently on at the Bowes Museum in County Durham.
In my own mind I was writing a story which came to me and
which I felt compelled to write. Committed to Gabriel. Tegger, Greta, Archie, Cora, and
Dev, I wrote their story from the heart.
But during this long revision and rewrite I have discovered
that, threaded through my story, are my own sense of history as an element of
place and my own fundamental ideas about inequality, social justice and the
triumphs of personality over circumstance.
And, most importantly, my story is about the liberating
outcomes of practising one’s art, whether it is expressed through paint on
canvas or in words and stories on the
page. In their creative processes both painters and writers are, I feel, driven to arrive at
a greater truth.
The vivid paintings in the Shafts of Life exhibition are an enduring
proof of this. I hope that this also applies to this novel, as it may apply to many
of my other novels. As Khaled Hosseini says of writing, ‘Writing Fiction is the
act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.’
The exhibition shows the great art and the greater truth of individual
miners’ perceptions of their work and their environments. I hope my novel about Gabriel Marchant shows the greater truth about the interior and
exterior lives such artists lived.
Doris Lessing has said ‘There
is no doubt that fiction makes a better job of truth.’ In the same way the
paintings in this exhibition make a better truth of the miner’s experience
than any so-called factual documentary film.
Perhaps going to see Shafts
of Light and also reading Gabriel Marchant: How I became a Painter
would allow people to access a more complex truth.
I hope so.
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