Divinity Road

Daily Info interviewer Helen Ward spoke to Martin about the book, life as a writer, past influences and future plans.

HW: Before settling in Oxford, you worked and travelled extensively in Africa. Is there any one place, experience or person who stands out in your memory from that time?

MP: No one single thing. My first experience of Africa was a year in Cameroon as a student. It's an enormously rich and varied place and one lesson it taught me was about how Eurocentric my view of the world was.

HW: My 3 years in Zimbabwe were probably the happiest of my Africa life - I was working in the countryside but had friends in Harare, so I got a real taste of both sides of Zimbabwean society, urban and rural.

I had over three years in Namibia, which was an incredible place for tourism - the oldest desert in the world, the highest sand dunes, some of the best wildlife viewing in Africa etc. One of my children was born there, so that's one experience which certainly stands out.

Probably the most interesting country I visited was Zaire (now Congo). It's a place of incredible contrasts. I met some wonderful people and was able to indulge one of my passions - listening to Congolese music.
 
HW: Have you always wanted to be a writer? When did you start writing? Would you like to be a full time writer?

MP: No, I haven't always wanted to be a writer. When I came back from Zimbabwe aged 27, I spent a year writing. I produced three manuscripts, two works of fiction and one an account of some travelling I'd done in Southern and Central Africa. They were all three undoubtedly unpublishable, but I think I wrote them as much for therapy as for anything else, a way of helping myself move on.

I started writing properly about 4 or 5 years ago. I had wanted to find a creative outlet, and I initially tried my hand at painting in oils. After a bit, I decided this wasn't enough and decided to try writing fiction. I didn't know what to write about, then had the idea to produce a short story based on, or inspired by each of my paintings. A year or so, and twenty-odd stories later, I felt ready to start on a novel.

I took a year's unpaid leave 2 years ago from the college where I work. During this time I finished 'Divinity Road' and wrote two further novels. It gave me an inkling of what it must be like to be a full-time writer. I'd help get the kids up and out to school each morning, then face the blank screen of the computer in an empty house. At times it was great, an incredible buzz, but I was also quite lonely, and I think someone like me with a limited imagination probably needs the stimulus of a life away from the writing in order to provide fodder and breathing space for the creative process. So, in answer to your question, I don't think I'd be a very good full-time writer. There's also the financial question - I'm sure very few writers make enough money to give up their day jobs.

HW: “Divinity Road” is your first published novel, but you began by writing short stories. Is this a natural progression or do you plan to continue writing in both formats?

MP: I do still write the occasional short story. I wrote one just before Christmas based on a conversation I overheard on the bus coming from Blackbird Leys into the city. If I get ideas for more, I'll certainly continue. Writing a novel is obviously a bigger slog - inevitably more complex - I guess it's the difference between fixing a snack and cooking a three course meal.

HW: Where did the idea for “Divinity Road” come from?

MP: It started with a recurring image I had in my mind as I fell asleep over a period of some months. I imagined waking up in a remote part of Africa, perhaps in a war zone, having survived a plane crash. I asked myself what I'd do in that situation, why I'd been travelling, how I'd feel, what I'd do next. That was the beginning, and once I'd created the Greg character, I fleshed out his history and along came the Nuala character. There was her journey of grief to explore.

At the same time, my work teaching asylum seekers and refugees at the FE College in Oxford has helped me understand a little of what they go through in their journeys and I wanted to explore this. I like the way writers like David Mitchell weave interconnecting narratives together and I wanted to do the same with Divinity Road, so creating Semira and Aman, and tying the threads of their stories to those of Greg and Nuala seemed like a good idea.

HW: Amongst other things, “Divinity Road” deals with the experience of asylum seekers and the development of an Islamist terrorist. These are potentially sensitive subjects. What prompted you to write about these topics and what sort of response have you had from readers?

MP: I've had only positive responses so far. My publisher was concerned that dealing with the issue of Islam - Kalil's corrupt interpretation and his success in exploiting Aman's mental vulnerability - could be emotive. I know a local Imam - a former student at my college - and asked him to read the book. He helped correct one or two minor theological points but overall he was very positive. He made the point that the Qur'an itself makes reference to 'Kalil'-types who poison the Qur'an's message and so create chaos.

HW: What are your plans for the future? I understand that you’ve written a number of other novels, including one about an Oxford five-a-side football team. Will we be seeing any of these in our bookshops before too long?

MP: I have three unpublished completed novels, one of which is, as you say, about a local five-a-side football team. I'd love to get them published so if you're a publisher reading this....

Helen Ward (DI Reviewer), 03/03/11

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Daily Info staff member Su Jordan had some further questions for Martin after reading the book...

SJ: The scenes relating to Greg are all very graphic. How much of the imagery came directly from your recurrent waking dream of surviving the plane crash, how much from film and other media, how much from real-life experience?

MP: I had an image of the locale in my mind, based on my own first-hand experiences of Africa, probably an amalgamation of parts of Zimbabwe, northern Cameroon and Namibia. My only experience of conflict in Africa was an unsuccessful coup attempt I got caught up in in Cameroon's capital, Yaounde, in April 1984, so that played no part in the rural imagery of the book. Nor have I experienced any kind of aircrash, so I suppose it's my imagination superimposed on a collection of first-hand experiences of the environment.
 
SJ: The Aman sections are, for me, the bleakest and darkest in the book, well before one begins to get a vague suspicion of where things might be heading. Again, are these pure flights of fancy, or are you basing any of it on first-hand experience? Have you, for example, heard real-life tales like Aman's and Semira's of trafficked escapes from troubled lives in other lands? Have you visited any UK detention centres, and if so, what was your experience? (Oxford has its own vibrant group of visitors to Campsfield, our local centre, and I wondered if you had had any involvement with this, for example. This kind of leads on to question 3...!)

MP: A lot of the episodes that Aman and Semira face, particularly those of Semira, are fictionalised version of real events told to me by students I've worked with in my job. I also did a fair amount of on-line research, often first-hand accounts of the experience of being trafficked or of being detained. I gained a more general insight into the global issue of refugees from a powerful book, Human Cargo by Caroline Moorehead.
 
SJ: One of the positive effects the book will surely have is to make readers think about how much more can be done to help people in situations like those of Semira and Aman - and that perhaps in reaching out and helping, far greater evils can be averted. How much of that was your original intention/purpose in writing the book?

MP: Making people think about these issues was certainly one intention, though I feel strongly that in fiction, the inform/entertain balance should always fall far more heavily on the latter. If I want to be informed accurately, I'll always read non-fiction.

SJ: I like the way that you mention very real, local things in the book, and that a substantial section is very identifiably grounded in Oxford, even mentioning local businesses by name. Was this too - particularly mentioning the excellent Ethnic Minority Business Service - part of an aim to guide people practically by showing what help is on offer, and what pitfalls to avoid? Or was this a conscious attempt to document the processes for British people ignorant of what happens to refugees once they arrive here? Or both?

MP: I certainly didn't want to provide a guidebook for asylum seekers - as I mentioned above, I think if you want to be informed, it's best to read non-fiction and there are already useful directories published for just such a purpose. I think it's probably more your second suggestion - an attempt to document just how difficult life can be for an asylum-seeker (just as it can be for a UK citizen, of course, though there is an added vulnerability when you have limited awareness of lingusitic and/or cultural issues, don't understand 'the system' and have few or no other people to turn to for help). Probably the other reason for making the book so 'identifiably grounded' in Oxford is also my lack of imagination and my inate laziness - it's easier to write about what you know!

SJ: The end of the book is beautiful - I love the way that Semira and Aman's stories dramatically distort over the top of Nuala's slow-burning emotions, and that somehow, the reader isn't left depressed but wanting to rush out and do some voluntering (or maybe that's just me?!). I have to admit, I cried. I think a fair few people will. Does it take a lot of skill, a lot of hard work or a lot of luck to come up with this kind of gold?! Did it fall into place, or did it take hours of slaving? Feel free to blow your own trumpet here!

MP: Thanks for being so complimentary. Art of any form is all about eliciting an emotional response, isn't it? I'm very happy to read that the ending had a powerful effect on you. I think I wrote the ending very quickly - I already had it planned in my head, and though I'm sure it went through a process of editing over a period of time, it was mainly just polishing, and the published version is more or less the same as the original draft. By the way, you might be interested to know that when I first sent the book to various agents to try and get representation, I had an early response from a successful agent who liked the book but wanted quite a lot of editing done on it including a new 'happier' ending. She said the rest of the book was so grim, she didn't want the 'Kassa revelation' included - she said it was just too much. I was willing to compromise on some things, but the ending wasn't one of them, it was there from almost the beginning.
 
SJ: Your publisher, Signal Books, is a small, local company, with an eclectic output (including Annie Skinner's book on the history of the Cowley Road). You've already had some very positive publicity in the local press; assuming that Signal's publicity-power may fall short of that of the major publishing houses, is there anything readers can do to spread the word (I've already passed my copy on to a friend, but can people review online, mention in blogs, Twitter, etc.)?

MP: There is a Facebook page, Divinity Road The Book (www.facebook.com/pages/Divinity-Road-The-Book/172219302789057), which my publisher suggested we set up. I'm not very knowledgeable when it comes to marketing, but I suppose any word-of-mouth recommendations are very valuable, whichever medium is used. I'm sure leaving reviews on literary and commercial sites like Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk/Divinity-Road-Martin-Pevsner/dp/1904955797) is useful. There's a nice one already on www.curiousbookfans.com.
 
SJ: Congratulations on a truly excellent first novel that succeeds in being very readable (if not un-put-down-able!), accessible, eduational and moving. I think it deserves a wide readership and I hope you get it.

Su Jordan (DI Staff), 03/03/11

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