The 12-year Writing Odyssey: an interview with Karen Maitland

After a gap of twelve years since her award-winning debut novel The White Room, author Karen Maitland has returned with Company of Liars – an historical tale of secrecy, magic, and the terrible events of the Black Death. Calliope’s Sarah Fisher finds out how Karen got her start as a writer, what inspires her, and the lessons we can learn from Medieval England.

Company of Liars opens as an inn keeper and various villagers consider the best way to kill someone dangerous. The Black Death looms over the country – almost halving the population of medieval Britain.

Set in 1348 the story follows a camelot – a scarred peddler of holy relics who is travelling through rain and storms trying to outrun the bubonic plague which has reached England from Europe. Along the way he teams up with a mysterious band of travellers, all with dark secrets of their own, including a magician, a couple on the run, and a sinister rune-reading young girl.

Camelot feeds on fear and superstition at religious shrines, selling fake relics and potions for protection against the plague.

“I wanted people to think that, OK, it’s the Middle Ages, but actually people haven’t changed that much,” says Maitland. “Now they’d probably be selling Calvin Klein fakes instead.”

When the story idea came to her, she saw a Black Death-shaped hole in the fiction market.

“When the plague has been done before, it’s been from the perspective of a town or village,” she explains. “Travellers had a much different experience than those in a village where people were secure in their homes.”

Indeed, the absence of home is a definite theme of the novel, as the travellers use a horse-drawn cart as their only steady means of shelter, stopping in caves and abandoned barns along the way. With a pregnant woman in the group, and a wanted man, the heavy rains and fear of disease make the journey difficult at best – an opposite experience to reading the book in the comfort of a home armchair!

“Finding home did become an important strand in the novel,” the author, now settled in the city of Lincoln, admits. “It probably stems from the fact that I’ve never really had a base, I’ve always moved throughout childhood and adulthood.”

Denied the chance for a decent education as a youngster due to undiagnosed dyslexia it was her great aunt’s love of historical storytelling that fuelled her love of the past: “That generation had a natural gift for storytelling.”

Like many people of her generation – Maitland is in her early 50s – she was left behind educationally because of the dyslexia, a condition which she now considers an advantage.

“Dyslexics view words in a different way from others; we have a natural bent towards language. Now I view it as a positive gift.” Laughing, she adds, “Though it was a positive pain as a child.”

Leaving school without any real qualifications, and running through a series of jobs, she ended up in Northern Ireland at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. There she discovered a scheme that gave an outlet for her creative energies: after working for the emergency services she was awarded a grant by the hospital to attend the University of Ulster where she was finally able to continue her education, studying human communication before going on to get her PhD in psycholinguistics.

She ended up in Nigeria and witnessed the country descend into a bloody civil war. What she experienced inspired her first novel The White Room, which was published in 1996 and short-listed for the Author Clubs Best First Novel award the following year.

“It was a futuristic thriller,” she says of her first stab at fiction writing, which confronts the topic of terrorism head on through the eyes of a young girl. “I wanted to explore what would happen if terrorism came to mainland England, which at the time it hadn’t. Sadly, a lot of what happened, which people said at the time couldn’t, has happened.”

What followed was a decade of struggling to find the time and resources to write a sophomore novel.

“I always wanted to write fiction, but with setting yourself up as a writer you have to take the work where people will actually pay you. I got loads of writing commissions [after The White Room] which all turned out to be creative non-fiction.”

Writing for the National Rural Touring Forum in 2002, inspiration for Company of Liars hit after spending three months travelling the country to promote rural arts.

“I travelled with them in an unheated van, in the middle of winter, for miles in the dark on country roads,” she recalls. “We’d arrive on the other end with promises of somewhere to eat then discover the pub chef had gone off to play darts that night! It made me think what it must be like to travel from village to village, never knowing what you’d find.”

Like any good author will do Maitland exhaustively researched her subject matter and a story so rich in historical detail required that extra effort, including travelling to the small villages and towns mentioned in the tale. She’s done her research well, filling the novel with a sense of place and time that is so important to the story, even to the most trivial of details. To research kites, which were as plenty in 1348 as pigeons are today, Maitland visited a kite colony in Wales to watch how they interacted – all for just one small paragraph in the novel.

“If you don’t get it right, then someone will tell you! There’s no substitute for actually being in a country chapel and listening to the sounds,” Maitland advises young writers. “As I started to write other things would come up, such as how the characters would dress, how their clothes would be buttoned or stitched.”

She made a conscious decision to modernise one aspect of Medieval England however – the language. Forced to read Chaucer in school, she describes it as like a foreign language, putting a barrier between author and reader, and chose to create authentic characters rather than authentic medieval language. She drew on every day interactions with people to create her heroes (and anti-heroes), and says any random encounter can provide inspiration.

“I was interviewing a chap in a cafe for a non fiction book I was writing,” she recounts. “The interview was going fine until I asked him about his boss. His fingers tightened around his coffee cup until they went white! It was just one line for a character, but it gave me a basis for a characteristic.”

Writing can even be used for some personal justice: “We’ve all met bullies, and one of the great things about writing is that people you’ve disliked in real life – you can give them a horrible, sticky end!” Which is something she’s certainly done in Company of Liars, offing characters in unexpected and sometimes brutal ways.

So what inspired this educationally unqualified dyslexic to turn to writing?

“We didn’t have a TV, so I loved going to bed,” she remembers. “I loved shutting the door and making up stories in the dark. Later in life I had a burning desire to write a story.”

As most writers find, getting her first novel published was a struggle, with the usual amount of rejections (“I can see why, because it was never going to be a commercial success.”). She managed to have The White Room published by a regional publisher, and winning the Author Clubs Best First Novel award in 1997 was a first for a regional publishers. After the long gap between novels, she realised she would need an agent to sell Company of Liars and managed to get a meeting with an agent at the Historical Writers Society. Maitland advises attending literary festivals and joining genre societies to make connections with agents and publishers.

“It’s getting harder and harder to send work in cold. But at the end of the day it actually comes down to sheer luck really – that the right manuscript lands on the right desk on the right day.”

Company of Liars is out now in the U.K., published by Michael Joseph Ltd, and will be released in the U.S.A. on September 30, 2008, by Delacorte Press.

Maitland’s next novel is a prequel to Company of Liars set 25 years before the plague, in a claustrophobic village taunted by their own belief in a medieval monster, called The Owl Killers. To be released in the U.K. in January 2009.

May 2008 issue of Calliope