Interview with Jem Shaw

Published 2013-10-25.
What prompted you to write a WW1 novel?
It's a period of history that fascinates me, especially the incredibly rapid development of aviation. At the start of the war pilots were staggering around the sky in fragile, wood and canvas dragonflies. The science of powered flight was barely a decade old, and few tacticians believed that they would ever constitute a major factor on the battlefield.

Within little more than a year, the concept of air superiority had been born and by 1916 aircraft were seen as a deciding factor in modern warfare. But there were no tried and proven formulae; nobody knew what worked and what didn't, and so every technological advance was a leap into the unknown. I'm astonished by the heroism and physical endurance of these young men, many of them still in their teens, who flew and fought daily in a bitter cold, airless world of constant danger.
You've done some flying yourself; how did this affect your writing?
I wanted to be accurate and believable. Most of my favourite books of the period are autobiographies of great pilots like Cecil Lewis or Arthur Gould Lee. I've tried to capture that same authenticity, while at the same time giving the reader a feel for just what it feels like to be in the open cockpit of a biplane in the thin, sub-zero atmosphere of high altitude. I've experienced it for a few brief minutes, with little likelihood of being shot down by the Hun in the Sun; these young men stayed in that perilous world for two hours at a time.
There's quite a lot of humour in The Larks; do you find war funny?
Anything but. I've said many times that The Larks is an anti-war novel; there's little in there of glory and patriotism. The Great War is probably the most brutal, slaughtering conflict this world has ever seen. I would never seek to trivialise that fact. But put people together in desperate circumstances and a frantic humour almost always surfaces. There were times when I laughed out loud as I wrote some of the sequences, because the characters have a life of their own; they were young men, each with a terminal illness, and an unconscious need to celebrate their unforeseeably short lives. They frequently took me by surprise.
How is that possible? Surely the author controls everything?
I can't speak for other authors, but I can't make it work that way. To me, the characters are real people. In the course of 100,000 words I got to know some of them better than members of my own family. As a result they develop their own personalities; if you try to make them act out of character, the story loses truth and conviction. So I've found I have to sketch out roughly where I want the plot to go and try to herd my characters in that direction. If they don't like it they'll let you know in ways that can be surprising.
What authors have influenced the way you write?
The most influential have, I guess, been Patrick O'Brian and Joseph Heller. In the case of the former I'm awed by his elegance and inspired by the realism and authenticity of his Napoleonic seascapes. With due humility I've aspired to do the same for a war that came 100 years after the time of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. Then there's the insane humour of Catch-22. While I haven't - I think - followed Heller's farcical surrealism, it was from his brilliant writing that I learned the power of hiding desperate tragedy under a beguiling cloak of laughter. When you're laughing you're defenceless against a sudden attack on your emotions.
Is there a sequel in the pipeline?
Yes, but that could be a year away. I have another book project on the go which will come first.
And what's that?
This one will be a collection of short stories about the Great War. I've written several already, and some of them fit together to create a single episode-based story. There are also reappearances of some of the characters from The Larks - we'll meet them at other times and places outside the scenes in the full-length novel.
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