Readers Place

How involved in the making of the film of Incendiary have you been?

Sharon Maguire wrote and directed the film, so my involvement was peripheral. I did contribute some dialogue and ideas and I loved working with Sharon and the film’s producer, Andy Paterson, but the film is all theirs. I had a wonderful day on location when the film was shooting in London. I was shocked not to have my own folding chair with NOVELIST stencilled on the back, but I did get to meet Michelle Williams and Matthew Macfadyen, who were very kind and interesting. I was a bit star-struck. I’m a fairly introverted person from the suburbs, so it felt as if I was in a movie myself.

When you were writing Incendiary did you ever imagine that it would become a film?

No – I never write with a film in mind. I love novels, and novels are completely different from films in terms of the way they’re paced and the nature of the journeys they go on to slip into the hearts of their characters. But when the film’s producers called I wasn’t completely surprised, because I’ve always suspected that the way I write is quite suited to film. My stories have big emotional highs and lows, and I guess it’s no secret that that kind of drama makes for a good movie. Also, my readers report that my scenes produce strong visual images in their minds, and I think this is what film makers like in my work.

How does it feel seeing your story brought to life?

It’s fascinating. Something that motivates me as a writer is to witness the reaction to my work, and the thing that delights me most is when a reader takes what I’ve done and pushes it further – by writing their own story, or by adapting my stuff for the stage, or in this case for the screen. I think the story is brought to life in the mind of every reader, because reading is such a creative act when you really put your heart into it. So I like my readers and I like to listen to them when they want to talk to me about their response to my stories, and I guess watching the film of ‘Incendiary’ is quite an extreme example of that. It’s like being inside the mind of a reader who happened to have $10 million and a film crew at her disposal.

The film company has made a number of changes to the plot of the novel to be able to adapt it to the screen. Are you happy with these changes? How do you think they add to the viewer’s understanding of the story?

I think it was necessary that the plot be changed to make Incendiary into a movie. Incendiary the novel is an intense, sustained monologue from the main protagonist, and everything that makes such a treatment perfect for the novel makes it utterly unsuitable for film. You simply need a lot more movement in a movie. Hence the introduction of more action into the plot. The way I see it, the movie is based on my novel in the same way the Space Shuttle is based on the achievements of the Wright brothers. The best way to think of my novel is as a sketchy beginning, and then simply to watch the film on its own terms and to ask whether it is true to the emotional heart of the novel, which I think it certainly is. The novel is an emotional plea never to let ideology be stronger than human empathy, and I think that comes across very movingly in the film.

The film has an all-star cast including Ewan McGregor, Michelle Williams and Matthew Macfadyen. Have the actors recreated the characters as you had imagined them?

Ewan, Michelle and Matthew are superb actors, and good people into the bargain. It was one of the most moving experiences of my life to see them interpreting the roles. They’ve realised the characters better than I could ever have imagined them.

The novel and film examine a controversial and topical subject: terrorism. How did people react to the book when it was published in the aftermath of the London bombings? And how do you think that readers and viewers will react to the film in today’s climate?

In a horrible coincidence the novel was published on 7th July 2005, the day over 50 people died in the terrorist attacks on London. In that climate it was impossible to promote the book. The print advertising was cancelled, the posters were taken down, and the book was voluntarily withdrawn from sale by many retailers. Fair enough: if you write in the space I work in – the contested territory between fiction and non-fiction – then sometimes the topicality of your work will be a curse rather than a blessing. But I didn’t feel I needed to apologise for having written a book about a mother’s love for her son. Nevertheless I was vilified by several national newspapers and one or two radio shows. What could I say? I didn’t explode the bombs myself – in fact the novel is a plea for an end to violence on all sides. I guess people were very upset about what had happened in London, and they were acting irrationally, and because I was the writer most closely associated with what happened, a lot of that irrationality was directed at me. So the publication of ‘Incendiary’ was not much fun for anyone associated with it. Nevertheless the novel slowly found its readership. It won a 2006 Somerset Maugham award, it was shortlisted for the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize, it won a big award in France in 2007 and now it’s being read more than ever. Especially now that my next novel is doing well, a lot of people are going back and discovering Incendiary. So I guess the novel is getting a fair hearing now. But how do I think people will react to the film? I don’t know! That’s the exciting thing about art. It’s unpredictable, powerful, volatile stuff.