Authors: Elizabeth Buchan
Tags: #Literary, #Ebook Club Author, #Ebook Club, #Fiction
Daughters (43 page)
Gardening is a recurrent theme in the novel and it serves as a respite for both Lara and Bill in times of emotional difficulty. What role did you feel the garden played throughout the novel?
When Lara discovers Andrew’s infidelity, she feels she has no choice but to let Eve know. What did you think about Lara’s decision – was she right to try to help her stepdaughter, or should she have stayed out of something so personal?
When Lara tells Eve of her discovery, Eve is furious. Did you sympathize with Eve’s behaviour? Or did you feel that Eve should have been more grateful for Lara’s concern?
There are three distinct examples of different couples in the novel: firstly, Andrew and Eve with their upcoming wedding; secondly, Duncan and Jasmine, who, despite being unmarried, love each other; and thirdly, Lara’s burgeoning relationship with Robin. Elizabeth Buchan subverts our expectations: by the end of the novel, the happiest couple are the unmarried Duncan and Jasmine, while the newest relationship belongs to the middle-aged Lara and Robin. What effect does this have, and how did you feel about each of the three central relationships?
Lara acknowledges that a small part of her irrationally wonders if Louis’s death was a direct result of her dishonesty: if she was being punished in the worst way possible for falling pregnant with a child she conceived as a deception. How does this admission affect your opinion of the usually pragmatic Lara?
Andrew insists that he and Eve ‘understand each other very well’, hinting that even if Eve doesn’t know precisely the nature of his infidelity, she is aware of how things stand. Do you think he has a point when he hints that it’s better for Eve not to know? Is not knowing sometimes better than knowing the truth?
Jasmine ends her relationship with Duncan because he appears to tolerate his friend’s infidelity to her sister. Do you think this behaviour was justified?
Only at the end of the novel does Lara tell Maudie why Bill left. Do you think Lara should have told her earlier on, or was she right to protect her children from the truth?
What inspired you to write
Daughters
?
Who hasn’t clucked over Jane Austen’s Mrs Bennet? ‘What a silly woman’ is often the general verdict, and Jane Austen herself was not at all kind about her – and how we enjoy her portrayal! Imagine my astonishment, then, that as my children grew up I found myself a little bit more in sympathy with Mrs Bennet. Whoever or whatever they are, I suspect there beats deep in most parents’ hearts the desire to see their children happily settled. Mrs Bennet was stymied by the cruel powers of the entail. The modern parent – Lara in
Daughters
– has other aspects to wrestle with such as divorce and an altered sexual landscape. How are these different aspects reconciled? How do woman negotiate a balance between working and domesticity? And, not least, why are we still so powerfully seduced by the idea of marriage? Why do we love weddings, particularly a family one? These were all themes which rose to the surface as I thought about
Daughters
… Themes which are as stuffed with the comic, tragic and the absurd as they have always been.
Mother-and-daughter relationships can notoriously be fraught with emotional difficulty and intensity. Yet the relationship between Lara and her daughters is not typical; she’s a stepmother to two of them, and a
biological mother to one. What made you decide to give Lara this role?
Originally, I was thinking along the lines of – in homage to Jane Austen – five daughters. On further consideration, it is unusual for a contemporary family to have five children – unless there has been a second marriage. However, I whittled the daughters down to three and made them half-sisters. Stepmothers are frequently given a bad press but I wanted to write about one who is truly generous and loving to her stepchildren. Yet there are moments thrown up by preparations for the wedding when even Lara has to acknowledge that blood is thicker than water. What is she to do about it and will it change everything?
Bill and Lara are an unconventional family in other ways, too – for example, Lara raised Bill’s daughters alone after their marriage broke down. Are you particularly interested in writing about complex families? What inspired you to give the family this background?
Put me on a desert island and I would expire pretty quickly from boredom. Being a novelist offers a licence to stare at what is going on around one … and the more I observe, the more diverse and unpredictable human relationships and behaviour apparently are. And, yet, nothing much changes. Yes, a century ago it was almost impossible to divorce but the death rate for women was high and the stepmother was frequently in evidence. Family have always re-shaped themselves, sometimes well, sometimes disastrously. Every family has its fractures and fissures and, very often, what is happening in it is reflected in the society around it. But, over and above literary analysis, there is a very simple obligation laid on the novelist, which is to tell a
story and to tell it well. The family set-up is instantly accessible and what happens in it can engender an infinity of plots, characters, dramas and crises … and tender resolutions. What is not to like?
You write very evocatively about Syria. Have you ever been there? What made you want to write about it?
I have always wanted to go there and have never managed it. Now, because of the political situation, it might be many years before I do so. But I have a strange feeling that – somehow, somewhere back in time – my ancestors came from that area. It calls to me. Luckily, there are compensations for being physically stuck to my chair and I was able to go on to YouTube and to see the area I wanted to write about. Here might be a good place to acknowledge all the generous people who visit somewhere like the Krak des Chevaliers and upload their film on to the internet for others to benefit from. I certainly did.
The garden plays a large role in the novel, and seems to act as a balm for Bill and Lara. Do you feel that gardening provides some sort of emotional sustenance?
The garden has always been a magical, sometimes enchanted, place in stories and myth and it is a theme to which I am always drawn. I wrote about it in my third novel,
Consider the Lily
, and sharp-eyed readers (if they were so inclined) might spot a little joke that I have played on myself in
Daughters
. The garden is a place of reinvention, both literally and metaphorically. For the novelist, it is a treasure trove of imagery and symbol … You just have to think of the cycle of growth, blossoming, decay and death to see how this can relate to human beings too.
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Sir Allen Lane, 1902–1970, founder of Penguin Books
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First published 2012
Copyright © Elizabeth Buchan, 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Illustration © Adrian Valencia
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ISBN: 978-0-141-96988-6