The Ripping Tree: my first adult novel in a decade

I write to disturb. It’s always been an ambition. It has gotten me into a lot of trouble over the years. Ambition. Funny old word for a writer. Once it was to win the Booker and have a worldwide bestseller, now it’s just gratitude to have a reader stay with me until the last word. To get them to turn the page, that most difficult of tasks. To touch a reader emotionally, or intellectually. To move them, to take them by the hand with my words and say, come, trust me, please.

Is this softening of ambition a process of ageing? This vast sense of relinquishing to the younger shoots coming up strong. A letting go of the striving, the scrabbling, the craving; all are part of the writing business. But with a letting go of envy I feel loosened. Lightened. By the knowledge that what will be will be. It’s someone else’s turn now so let them be, let them flourish; especially in this current climate of recognising groups that haven’t been sufficiently recognised in the past. This is no time to cling on, and in so many professions this sentiment is true but so often unheeded. Yet with this pivot in attitude comes a vast sense of peace.

I’ve learnt that endurance in this writing business comes in the tenacity and the discipline, not so much the talent. It’s all about confidence, so easily crushed as a writer. Imposter syndrome is always there, the cat behind the curtain ready to pad into the light. I’ve had it for years. The key: to persist. But quietly now, with less jostling and fret.

The aim as always is the Ezra Pound battle cry, “Make It New”. To create something fresh and startling and bold. Risk. Dare. “For a true writer,” Ernest Hemingway said, “each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.” I’ve always loved fearless, dangerous writing. Where the aim is to disturb; that makes people uncomfortable. Gets them to think. With narratives that linger in the conscience.

Which brings me to – deep breath – my first adult novel in 10 years. Yeah, life got in the way. This one is a historical thriller, a tale of survival in colonial Australia. Unsettling, disturbing, hopefully getting the reader to think. A woman has to find a way to escape the claustrophobic world that initially appears to be rescuing her. Get out – before they save you is the shoutline. The aim, as always, is not to flinch from difficult truths; to lure, then provoke. With truth bombs that may or not be accepted. The Ripping Tree was created in snatches during baby nap times and in cafes before parent teacher meetings and on car steering wheels by soccer pitches and finally in a room of my own I’d managed to snare, at last, but only because the eldest child skedaddled. If you’re too precious about the writing space you’ll never begin. As E.B. White said, “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”

So it’s now time, finally, for this new baby to enter the world and I’m as nervous as I was with Shiver, the first. It never gets easier. That is the vulnerable truth. I’m not cut out for this bit, just want to write. What have I created this time? Everything a risk, never the easy path; and the dream is to disappear like Elena Ferrante does every time on publication. I like to think of this one as a depth charge of truth wrapped in the glossy package of a thriller, a love story. Novelist Khaled Hosseini said of the writing process, “I hope to see the story getting closer to what my original hopes for it were.” They always slip away from you. This one’s on its own now, and I’m on to the next.

The Ripping Tree (4th Estate) is out now