"The cat is, in some ways, the most significant character in the book ... the cause of Fowler’s greatest sin and the subject of a failed poem. His final guise explains the whole story."
Spirit of the Place is now reissued by Writers Review Publishing. First published in 1995, the novel was described by Philip Pullman as "a marvellous story, put together with great ingenuity. Dennis Hamley seems to have got right inside the eighteenth century (one of my own favourite places to visit), heroic couplets and all. It made me want to go out at once and build a Grotto in the garden."
Dennis Hamley: I remember the first tiny inklings of the novel. We (my first wife and I) lived at the time in Hertford. Three miles away, in Amwell, on the outskirts of Ware, was John Scott’s grotto, built in the eighteenth century. Scott owned Amwell House. Once it was part of a great estate, now it is built over and the grotto exists almost by accident. Scott was a Quaker and a poet. His anti-war poem shows both qualities:
I hate that drum’s discordant sound
Parading round and round and round.
To thoughtless youth it pleasure yields
And lures from cities and from fields.
His grotto, open to the public on Saturdays in summer, is a magical place. A gatehouse, underground passages with walls lined with quartzes, glass, and shells which shine eerily in the light of your torch or your ancestors’ lanterns. You emerge into the daylight feeling that you have experienced a marvel.
Well, I did, anyway, and knew I must write a story about a grotto. And, as there seemed a connection between grottoes and poetry, I had to have a poet to go with it. Thus Nicholas Fowler was born. I saw him in eighteenth-century gentleman’s costume, a small figure, green jacket, blue waistcoat, beige breeches and hose encasing withered legs, walking across his estate, supported by a gold-topped cane.
The great poet Alexander Pope built a grotto in his garden in Twickenham and wrote a poem about it. So my Nicholas Fowler must do the same.
What secrets are exposed by human toil?
What great new work replaces sullen soil?
A thing of beauty forms for all of time.
Its epithet is clear. It is sublime.
LN: The novel uses a split structure. Can you explain about that?
DH: I think this came to mind as a necessity even as I emerged from Scott’s Grotto. Here was I, standing in the twentieth-century having just had an eighteenth-century experience. The centuries had to be merged.
Fowler is the novel’s main character. The poetry he writes is eighteenth-century in style. I am imitating the heroic couplets of Pope, Dryden and a host of lesser poets.
Spirit is a time-slip novel and present-day characters are equally significant. Chief among them is Lindsey Lovelock, a university student. Lyndsey has chosen Nicholas Fowler as the subject for the long study she must write for her degree in Philosophy and Literature.The ‘Now’ part of the novel is seen though her eyes. She comes to consciousness in hospital but with temporary amnesia, injuries she can’t explain, and with Kath Welland, a detective-sergeant to pull the extraordinary truth out of her. For Lindsey’s boyfriend Rod is in police custody, accused of breaking and entering Coswold, a mansion house once Nicholas Fowler’s home, now owned by the University and let out to a big pharma company doing secret research. Rod, a science student, longs to know what that research is: something to do with genetics. His garbled evidence suggests that he doesn't need the police, but a psychiatrist.
LN: The novel deals with big subjects. Can you explain how you made thematic use of them?
DH: Well, first of all there’s Jack, Lindsey’s microcephalic brother. He is the reason Lindsey is a home student, going to the university just up the road because she and her mother are his sole careers.
Quite apart from that, great changes are coming to our world. The implications of the human genome project, the dawn of cyberspace and AI might (or might not) seal humanity’s mastery of nature. But in the eighteenth century Man was seen, as Fowler puts it, ‘God’s viceroy on Earth’, whose purpose was to improve on nature, discover its laws, find the great principles and driving force of His power. In effect, these aims are the same.
Fowler doesn’t see himself merely as a poet. He is a scientist. He learned from Priestley, who discovered oxygen, how to build a friction machine which can trap a strange power, enough to make a needle swing seemingly of its own volition. The first hint of electricity. A vision vouchsafed to humanity by God himself? Yes, thinks Fowler. This new hubris will have grave consequences for him.
LN: Class distinctions are very important in the ‘then’ chapters.
DH: Yes. The concept of The Great Chain of Being was at the centre of the class system. As Fowler puts it:
For in this panoramic scheme
Each actor’s purpose long has been
Ordained in mighty plan .
Green frond to insect, fish to cat,
Ascending rungs in stairways that
Lead up to God through Man
Fowler is a gentleman. ‘I am a man of substance, a Master of Arts of the University of Cambridge, a member of the Church established and shall succeed to my father’s estate.' A very precise definition, but in the Great Chain of Being nowhere near the aristocracy. As Sir Charles Witherpole, an angry neighbour, says, ‘This is not Blenheim or Woburn. These are the modest estates of Squires, not Dukes.’ Which puts him in his place
Several rungs below on the class ladder is Mr Perry, clerk of works and a salaried man responsible to Mr Landskip Peters, an avatar of Mr Capability Brown. Perry and Fowler are at constant loggerheads.
In Coswold’s kitchen are four characters far below Fowler and even Perry. The cook, Mrs Mundy; Mr Grainger, a handyman and general factotum for the estate; Verity, a serving girl; and the boy, unnamed until the very end. And the cat.
LN: Yes, you made very clever use of that cat – an endearing and important character.
DH: The cat is, in some ways, the most significant character in the book. He appears in different guises throughout, in both ‘Then’ and ‘Now’. He is a sagacious creature with a mind of his own. He is the boy’s only friend. He is the cause of Fowler’s greatest sin and the subject of a failed poem. His final guise explains the whole story.
LN: Nicholas Fowler is very convincing as an 18th Century poet - i.e. you are! Did writing Nicholas's poems come easily to you?
DH: I’m not a poet. But I love capturing the feel of real poets. I suppose you could call it pastiche. Well, yes. But I think it’s something more. I love writing it anyway. Once, I managed about ten lines of T S Eliot’s Fifth Quartet. And once I wrote a Shakespearian play for students to act, The Tragicall Historie of Dogmaticus, Prince of Academe, his fall. I put it about that it was a lost Shakespeare play recently discovered and to my amazement some people believed me! Sadly I don’t have a copy, but I can remember whole chunks still.
LN: Can you tell us about Lindsey's brother and the treatment he receives? I was particularly interested in that, as one of my late uncles was very much involved with Conductive Education as a trustee and fundraiser. Again, you made clever thematic use of this character to link past and present.
DH: Well, Jack, Lindsey’s brother, is microcephalic. He is the reason Lindsey is a home student. In the prelims, I thank the Morrissey family, who live near Galway in Ireland. Their son was microcephalic and though it was a long time ago that we met I shall never forget him. Later on, I met a family whose child had cerebral palsy. It was then that I learnt about ‘Pathways to the Brain’, Conductive Education and the Peto Institute. This was important to the novel because it defines Lindsey’s professional purpose in life.
LN: What was it like returning to your earlier novel to revise it?
DH: It was wonderful. I had already looked at it again twelve years ago, when I brought out a hardback limited edition, 100 copies numbered and signed. It was not a very good idea because I’ve got fifty left! When I came to look at Spirit again I realised I had a difficult task. First of all, there’s a fair bit about computers, nineties technology and speculation about future social media. So I had to bring the technology up to date. That wasn’t as hard a task as I had feared. Then I thought about the novel’s structure. It had been written in alternating chapters. I felt that this wasn’t really suitable. So I divided the book into separate parts. Part 1 –‘Then’, two chapters. Part 2, - ‘Now’, two chapters. I think it makes the story move better and connects the separate themes more clearly. The last chapter deals with Fowler and his end. But when I did the limited edition, I wrote a postscript showing what had happened to Lindsey and Rod. Not good enough I thought now, so I lengthened it and, I think, provided a real ‘sense of an ending.’ Yes, how I enjoyed writing Spirit of the Place. And now I can enjoy it again, somewhat rewritten and radically reorganized.
Spirit of the Place is published by Writers Review Publishing
Dennis lives in Oxford with his wife Kay, an artist. Here he answers questions from Linda Newbery.
LN: Congratulations on the reissue of this marvellous novel! I loved it on reading it soon after its first publication, by Scholastic, and am delighted to see it reissued as the fifth title from Writers Review Publishing. It struck me as very different from anything of yours I'd read before. What was the sparking point?
I hate that drum’s discordant sound
Parading round and round and round.
To thoughtless youth it pleasure yields
And lures from cities and from fields.
His grotto, open to the public on Saturdays in summer, is a magical place. A gatehouse, underground passages with walls lined with quartzes, glass, and shells which shine eerily in the light of your torch or your ancestors’ lanterns. You emerge into the daylight feeling that you have experienced a marvel.
Well, I did, anyway, and knew I must write a story about a grotto. And, as there seemed a connection between grottoes and poetry, I had to have a poet to go with it. Thus Nicholas Fowler was born. I saw him in eighteenth-century gentleman’s costume, a small figure, green jacket, blue waistcoat, beige breeches and hose encasing withered legs, walking across his estate, supported by a gold-topped cane.
The great poet Alexander Pope built a grotto in his garden in Twickenham and wrote a poem about it. So my Nicholas Fowler must do the same.
What secrets are exposed by human toil?
What great new work replaces sullen soil?
A thing of beauty forms for all of time.
Its epithet is clear. It is sublime.
LN: The novel uses a split structure. Can you explain about that?
DH: I think this came to mind as a necessity even as I emerged from Scott’s Grotto. Here was I, standing in the twentieth-century having just had an eighteenth-century experience. The centuries had to be merged.
Fowler is the novel’s main character. The poetry he writes is eighteenth-century in style. I am imitating the heroic couplets of Pope, Dryden and a host of lesser poets.
Spirit is a time-slip novel and present-day characters are equally significant. Chief among them is Lindsey Lovelock, a university student. Lyndsey has chosen Nicholas Fowler as the subject for the long study she must write for her degree in Philosophy and Literature.The ‘Now’ part of the novel is seen though her eyes. She comes to consciousness in hospital but with temporary amnesia, injuries she can’t explain, and with Kath Welland, a detective-sergeant to pull the extraordinary truth out of her. For Lindsey’s boyfriend Rod is in police custody, accused of breaking and entering Coswold, a mansion house once Nicholas Fowler’s home, now owned by the University and let out to a big pharma company doing secret research. Rod, a science student, longs to know what that research is: something to do with genetics. His garbled evidence suggests that he doesn't need the police, but a psychiatrist.
LN: The novel deals with big subjects. Can you explain how you made thematic use of them?
DH: Well, first of all there’s Jack, Lindsey’s microcephalic brother. He is the reason Lindsey is a home student, going to the university just up the road because she and her mother are his sole careers.
Quite apart from that, great changes are coming to our world. The implications of the human genome project, the dawn of cyberspace and AI might (or might not) seal humanity’s mastery of nature. But in the eighteenth century Man was seen, as Fowler puts it, ‘God’s viceroy on Earth’, whose purpose was to improve on nature, discover its laws, find the great principles and driving force of His power. In effect, these aims are the same.
Fowler doesn’t see himself merely as a poet. He is a scientist. He learned from Priestley, who discovered oxygen, how to build a friction machine which can trap a strange power, enough to make a needle swing seemingly of its own volition. The first hint of electricity. A vision vouchsafed to humanity by God himself? Yes, thinks Fowler. This new hubris will have grave consequences for him.
LN: Class distinctions are very important in the ‘then’ chapters.
DH: Yes. The concept of The Great Chain of Being was at the centre of the class system. As Fowler puts it:
For in this panoramic scheme
Each actor’s purpose long has been
Ordained in mighty plan .
Green frond to insect, fish to cat,
Ascending rungs in stairways that
Lead up to God through Man
Fowler is a gentleman. ‘I am a man of substance, a Master of Arts of the University of Cambridge, a member of the Church established and shall succeed to my father’s estate.' A very precise definition, but in the Great Chain of Being nowhere near the aristocracy. As Sir Charles Witherpole, an angry neighbour, says, ‘This is not Blenheim or Woburn. These are the modest estates of Squires, not Dukes.’ Which puts him in his place
Several rungs below on the class ladder is Mr Perry, clerk of works and a salaried man responsible to Mr Landskip Peters, an avatar of Mr Capability Brown. Perry and Fowler are at constant loggerheads.
In Coswold’s kitchen are four characters far below Fowler and even Perry. The cook, Mrs Mundy; Mr Grainger, a handyman and general factotum for the estate; Verity, a serving girl; and the boy, unnamed until the very end. And the cat.
LN: Yes, you made very clever use of that cat – an endearing and important character.
DH: The cat is, in some ways, the most significant character in the book. He appears in different guises throughout, in both ‘Then’ and ‘Now’. He is a sagacious creature with a mind of his own. He is the boy’s only friend. He is the cause of Fowler’s greatest sin and the subject of a failed poem. His final guise explains the whole story.
LN: Nicholas Fowler is very convincing as an 18th Century poet - i.e. you are! Did writing Nicholas's poems come easily to you?
DH: I’m not a poet. But I love capturing the feel of real poets. I suppose you could call it pastiche. Well, yes. But I think it’s something more. I love writing it anyway. Once, I managed about ten lines of T S Eliot’s Fifth Quartet. And once I wrote a Shakespearian play for students to act, The Tragicall Historie of Dogmaticus, Prince of Academe, his fall. I put it about that it was a lost Shakespeare play recently discovered and to my amazement some people believed me! Sadly I don’t have a copy, but I can remember whole chunks still.
LN: Can you tell us about Lindsey's brother and the treatment he receives? I was particularly interested in that, as one of my late uncles was very much involved with Conductive Education as a trustee and fundraiser. Again, you made clever thematic use of this character to link past and present.
DH: Well, Jack, Lindsey’s brother, is microcephalic. He is the reason Lindsey is a home student. In the prelims, I thank the Morrissey family, who live near Galway in Ireland. Their son was microcephalic and though it was a long time ago that we met I shall never forget him. Later on, I met a family whose child had cerebral palsy. It was then that I learnt about ‘Pathways to the Brain’, Conductive Education and the Peto Institute. This was important to the novel because it defines Lindsey’s professional purpose in life.
LN: What was it like returning to your earlier novel to revise it?
DH: It was wonderful. I had already looked at it again twelve years ago, when I brought out a hardback limited edition, 100 copies numbered and signed. It was not a very good idea because I’ve got fifty left! When I came to look at Spirit again I realised I had a difficult task. First of all, there’s a fair bit about computers, nineties technology and speculation about future social media. So I had to bring the technology up to date. That wasn’t as hard a task as I had feared. Then I thought about the novel’s structure. It had been written in alternating chapters. I felt that this wasn’t really suitable. So I divided the book into separate parts. Part 1 –‘Then’, two chapters. Part 2, - ‘Now’, two chapters. I think it makes the story move better and connects the separate themes more clearly. The last chapter deals with Fowler and his end. But when I did the limited edition, I wrote a postscript showing what had happened to Lindsey and Rod. Not good enough I thought now, so I lengthened it and, I think, provided a real ‘sense of an ending.’ Yes, how I enjoyed writing Spirit of the Place. And now I can enjoy it again, somewhat rewritten and radically reorganized.
LN: Thank you, Dennis. I hope this revised reissue will give enjoyment to many new readers.
Spirit of the Place is published by Writers Review Publishing
and reviews by Dennis: Possession by A S Byatt
The Proof of my Innocence by Jonathan Coe
A roundup of three Booker-shortlisted titles: Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, Elmet by Fiona Mozley and Everything Under by Daisy Johnson
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