Special feature Q&A: Jane Dalton on her first novel THE SECOND LIFE OF ANTHONY B

 

Is someone playing a cruel trick, or is the impossible really happening?

Photograph by Sarah Widdowson

Jane Dalton is a journalist at The Independent, where she writes about animal welfare as well as general news. She previously worked for The Sunday Times, where she was Regional Editor and an occasional book reviewer. She began her career at the Dover Express, where she launched a high-profile campaign against live exports. You can find out more from Jane's website, and read an interview about Jane’s animal activism and reporting here. 

The Second Life of Anthony B is her first novel.

What if the person you loved most sent you one final email?

Eight months after his wife Maggie dies, widower Anthony Bothwell switches on his computer and discovers an email—from her.

The message is so personal it could only have come from Maggie. And its warning is terrifying.

Is someone playing a cruel trick, or is the impossible really happening?

The emails from maggie.bothwell@theafterlife.org.uk keep coming.

As Anthony's certainty about life, death and everything in between begins to crumble, he replies. Their conversations become tender, funny and deeply moving.

But when a long-buried family secret is uncovered, grief turns to betrayal, and Anthony is forced to question everything he thought he knew about the woman he loved.

Then he meets Brooke, a fellow widow who offers him the chance to begin again.

Can Anthony uncover the truth behind the impossible emails—and find the courage to embrace a second chance?

Jane answers questions from Linda Newbery.

Linda: First, congratulations on publishing your debut novel! You’ve worked for years as a journalist for The Independent – is writing fiction something you’ve always wanted to do?

Jane: Thank you so much. Yes, I started writing my first novel when I was eight. It took me a few more decades to finish writing one, though. After a tumultuous journey to publication (more of that later) I was very lucky that my manuscript was picked up by Poolbeg Books, the Irish publisher that first discovered Maeve Binchy. Not that The Second Life of Anthony B is anything like her novels – it’s much weirder than that.

Linda: The novel is based around the striking premise that Anthony receives emails from his dead wife. Did the novel begin with this idea, or did you begin with the intention of writing a novel about bereavement before settling on this device?

Jane: It began with Maggie, an outspoken woman who’s also great fun. That blended with the idea of emails from beyond the grave, because wouldn’t everyone who’s lost someone very suddenly love to be able to have one final conversation with them? I wrote it for everyone who has ever wondered what happens to us after we die and whether any form of consciousness, such as the soul, survives. I also wrote it for anyone who’s ever wondered how their life would have been had they taken a different path; and for anyone who loves garden birds.

Linda: You’ve written a page-turning mystery which is often amusing, sometimes even farcical, and equally often moving, as we experience Anthony’s deep sense of loss alongside his questioning of how well he knew Maggie. Was this a difficult balance to achieve?

Jane: Funnily enough, it wasn’t difficult. The novel is partly about how couples communicate – or fail to, and Maggie and Anthony’s turbulent relationship allowed both the humour and the sorrow to emerge naturally. That’s how it ended up with depth and bittersweet.

Linda: Did the voice of Maggie (forthright, teasing, assertive) come to you immediately? Our sense of Maggie comes mainly through her emails.

Jane: Yes, it did. She was partly based on a former news editor I had who was a veteran tabloid journalist and who had a long-standing challenge for all reporters to find a “naughty vicar”. I exaggerated Maggie a bit to make her more outrageous – but not much more. On the surface Maggie is flamboyant and larger than life, but deep down she’s extremely vulnerable and sensitive. Anthony is quite different – much more grounded, but also sensitive. Each of them is lovable in their own way.

Linda: Anthony is a thoroughly sympathetic character, and I know that readers who’ve been bereaved, or who are close to someone who’s experienced a loss, will find much that resonates. How and why did you decide that your viewpoint character would be a man in his sixties?

Jane: I’m not entirely sure, but just before writing it I’d been reading a lot of high-quality literature that happened to have male lead characters, such as novels by Ian McEwan, David Mitchell and John Updike. I didn’t want to write another popular women’s novel with the tired trope of a young woman and her boyfriend troubles. I wanted to write something non-formulaic, unpredictable and without cliche. And I forced Anthony to question his assumptions about a lot of things, such as whether people have a soul, that life is short and that the course of life after 50 is fixed.

Linda: Anthony investigates the subject of communications from the dead as the novel progresses – was this part of your own research for the novel?

Jane: To some extent, but I wanted the focus of the narrative to be more on the effect on Anthony of receiving the emails, and how they change him as a person, from being a grumpy sceptic convinced his life is over to someone open-minded to new ideas and able to start afresh. Communicating with Maggie forces him to confront things he’s never admitted before and enables him to move on in life.

Linda: Did you have the whole plot mapped out before you began, or did the novel grow in ways that surprised you?

Jane: I didn’t map it out – I wrote it instinctively, and a great many things in it surprised me. Which is appropriate for the story, because I think the same things will surprise readers, too. I never imagined I’d write a creepy psychological suspense story or one about the afterlife or how it’s never too late for fresh starts.

Linda: I know that The Second Life of Anthony B has had a difficult path to publication – through no fault of yours! Can you tell us about that?

Jane: Getting to publication itself was a drama! My first publisher, Neem Tree Press, a lovely women-only company, was taken over by Unbound, a crowd-funding publisher, which, it transpired, was in difficulty, and the new company collapsed into administration just as my novel was due to be published. I was devastated, because I’d put everything I had into writing it.

Linda: At The Independent you specialise in covering issues of animal welfare / exploitation. Do you think this will feature in future novels? Is a second novel under way?

Jane: They say novelists should not write to champion a cause but I am thinking about it. How can I not? Much animal cruelty is so extreme that it needs tackling. In this novel, writing about the symbolism of birds and caring for them was a bonus. I have already drafted a second novel, albeit not part of my three-book contract with Poolbeg, so I have two more to go.

Linda: Thank you, Jane - I'm sure your novel will be much enjoyed by its readers!

The Second Life of Anthony B is published by Poolbeg.

Guest review by Graeme Fife: THE GO-BETWEEN by L P Hartley

 

"Hartley weaves a compelling net of intrigue and a brilliant portrayal of the starchy customs of aristocratic life ..."

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press.

"I put a spell on you

Because you're mine ..." Nina Simone

"Once a go between never a go between." (The older Leo)

Towards the end of this outstanding novel, one of the principals, Marian, tells the narrator, Leo, returned to the village years after the book’s climactic end: ‘There are stuffy people, even in Norfolk’. I knew stuffy people in Norfolk. I arrived there immediately after the film of the book was shot but only now have I read it.

This novel tells a gripping story, a tense drama of sharply defined characters in another world, Hartley’s ‘foreign country’. Moreover, it’s not only the past that is a foreign country, so, too, is the present we enter as strangers. The language we use to explain the new experiences is tested, just as the shaping of the novel tests our sensibilities. The imagery is eloquent: Leo, the young boy invited by a school friend to the big house in the country, the wealthy, landed owners with their set ways and strict protocols of behaviour and dress, finds himself caught up in a bewildering game of intrigue, and stuffy manners, certain things that ‘are not done’ all strange to him. In soaring temperatures, the lad with a fixation about magic and making spells, through them hoping to manage circumstance otherwise beyond him to control, ironically is trussed up in a heavy Norfolk jacket. Add starched Eton collars – as stiff as the etiquette which governs his hosts, especially the horribly priggish Marcus, his school pal, and Hartley has cunningly outlined the central theme of Leo being used, as if he, too, were in a box, ready for wear, all analogous to the anxieties of the young boy which he never entirely shakes off.

At one point, Leo imagines himself proleptically, in conversation with his twelve year-old self: he’d been ‘flying too close to the sun’. Marian, whom he calls the Zodiac, a sort of immortal object, could he but put a name to his bewitched feelings, of his helpless schoolboy crush, uses the pretext of a visit to Norwich to meet her paramour, a secret concealed until later in the story, to go to a shop to buy Leo a suit of lighter clothes. First lie. The summer suit, in Lincoln green, evokes Robin Hood the outlaw, flaunter of repressive rules and regime.

Leo explores the deserted outhouses of the Hall, where in the tangle of weeds, the boy addicted to spells and curses, totems of his desire for otherness and escape, discovers deadly nightshade, atropa belladonna, whose juice is poisonous if drunk but squeezed as drops into the eyes, enlarges the pupils, hence the ‘beautiful lady’. A perfect symbolism. Even the contrast between the orderliness and formality of the house and the wild tangle of the outhouses – where the terrible climax of the novel explodes – is telling, the areas of life under constant surveillance and the neglected places where secrets flourish and are, eventually, catastrophically exposed. Hartley weaves a compelling net of intrigue and a brilliant portrayal of the starchy customs of aristocratic life, and, like a deadly leitmotif, the messages carried between Marian and Ted the local farmer – Beauty and the Beast…? – by their postman, Leo, the bewildered newcomer sucked into their conspiracy and ignorant about this mysterious practice of ‘spooning’ about which Ted, cleaning the shotgun – ominous portent – remains tight-lipped.

One of Marcus’s favourite words is cads - ‘only cads eat their porridge sitting down’. And into this strait-laced world comes the boy whose widowed mother cleaves to him almost as tightly as the Norfolk jacket and Hartley brilliantly shows us this new world through the child’s eyes; Leo wonders at the behaviour of the adults: ‘their worlds are private, even their games are mysterious’. Marian herself, affianced to the Viscount, is trapped, like a fieldmouse taking refuge in a stook of newly harvested wheat, caught between the heat of desire and the prickle of hidebound, emotionally shorn reserve. After the trauma of what he experienced at the Hall, Leo is, as Marian later tells the older man, ‘all dried up inside’. By contrast, the love that she and Ted Burgess shared was a ‘beautiful thing’, they were made for each other but social convention forbade that. The excruciating moral pressure arising from this denial lay heavily on Leo and crushed him forever, that and the sticky web of lies into which he’d blundered, forced to intrude upon an alien adult world of disappointment and misprision. All masterfully delineated by Hartley.

At the end, I cried.

The Go-Between is published by Penguin Modern Classics.

The Go-Between directed by Joseph Losey, 1971

The Go-Between directed by Pete Travis, 2015

More of Graeme's choices:

The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey

One Day by David Nicholls

What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe