:00:00. > :00:10.Now it is time for this week's Meet The Author.
:00:11. > :00:12.Louise Doughty has a natural feeling for suspense,
:00:13. > :00:14.how to produce a crawling unease, where there's something
:00:15. > :00:17.you don't want to know, but, in the end, know that you will.
:00:18. > :00:20.Her new novel, Black Water, introduces us to a very
:00:21. > :00:22.troubled man, John Harper, who takes us through much
:00:23. > :00:24.of the post-war era, from civil conflict in Indonesia,
:00:25. > :00:27.back to a Japanese war camp where he was born,
:00:28. > :00:33.He leads us into a world of deceit and violence that
:00:34. > :00:56.Louise Doughty, what is it about menace that attracts
:00:57. > :01:02.Well, menace is a gift to any novelist, really.
:01:03. > :01:05.Because what menace is is the promise that
:01:06. > :01:13.I think in an ideal world, your reader's reading your book,
:01:14. > :01:15.you're with the character, you're feeling for them,
:01:16. > :01:17.you're in their head, but you have some knowledge
:01:18. > :01:22.But there's something else in Black Water, and it's this.
:01:23. > :01:25.We know, the readers know, that he, the central
:01:26. > :01:28.character, has knowledge that we don't know.
:01:29. > :01:38.It strikes me that menace, fear, is the knowledge of the unknown that
:01:39. > :01:43.at some point will be revealed in ways that we can't tell?
:01:44. > :01:45.It is, it's also knowledge based on the knowledge of
:01:46. > :01:51.I suppose the point about Harper in the book is he's very frightened.
:01:52. > :01:54.As the novel opens, he thinks men with machetes are going to come
:01:55. > :01:58.and kill him, but, actually, I think we get very quickly that
:01:59. > :02:00.what he's really frightened of is not something
:02:01. > :02:05.He's frightened of something that he himself has already done.
:02:06. > :02:08.It's his past experiences that are really making him afraid.
:02:09. > :02:12.And, of course, Harper is actually a metaphor for Indonesia.
:02:13. > :02:16.He is a metaphor for any country like that that has had a terrible
:02:17. > :02:22.Well, you mentioned Indonesia, and it's a central part of the book,
:02:23. > :02:24.dealing with the violence that racked that country
:02:25. > :02:29.To the outside world, certainly in this country, I think,
:02:30. > :02:33.to many people who didn't have a particular interest
:02:34. > :02:41.in Indonesia, south Asia, is still a period of
:02:42. > :02:47.The massacres of 1965 in Indonesia, they rank alongside the massacres
:02:48. > :02:50.in Rwanda, alongside the Khmer Rouge killings in Cambodia.
:02:51. > :02:52.It's one of the great tragedies of the second half
:02:53. > :02:57.It's virtually unheard of in the West.
:02:58. > :02:59.The character of Harper also suggests a kind of world
:03:00. > :03:04.that we recognise now, where there are strange conflicts
:03:05. > :03:07.of which we know very little and find it hard to explain,
:03:08. > :03:09.going on in distant places, in which, somehow, Western
:03:10. > :03:20.There are so many people playing a double game.
:03:21. > :03:26.What they don't know is that, as well as government spies,
:03:27. > :03:29.there are huge amounts of companies who would be offended if you called
:03:30. > :03:32.them spies or mercenaries, they don't like those terms.
:03:33. > :03:37.They would call themselves risk analysis, security consultants.
:03:38. > :03:40.We saw a lot of them active in Iraq during the war there.
:03:41. > :03:42.American government officials were being protected
:03:43. > :03:52.These companies, there are hundreds of them worldwide, and I spoke
:03:53. > :03:55.to people who work for those companies, on the condition
:03:56. > :03:57.of anonymity for themselves and their company, both
:03:58. > :03:59.They are huge businesses, they have thousands
:04:00. > :04:05.Harper, of course, is not a political figure in the sense that
:04:06. > :04:08.it's not a one-dimensional political struggle that he's involved in.
:04:09. > :04:10.There's a human story here, which is very touching
:04:11. > :04:21.You do really like to peel away the layers in a personality,
:04:22. > :04:25.don't you, and leave very little left to the imagination?
:04:26. > :04:33.What really undoes Harper, how he has to come to
:04:34. > :04:35.terms with his past, is when he meets a woman.
:04:36. > :04:39.He meets a woman in a bar, in a local town, as the novel opens
:04:40. > :04:42.They are both middle-aged people, it's understood
:04:43. > :04:48.But it's through her, talking to her, and her starting
:04:49. > :04:50.to ask him about his past, that he becomes
:04:51. > :04:55.I mean, he's a man who has existed for decades
:04:56. > :04:59.He's had an unsuccessful marriage back in the Netherlands.
:05:00. > :05:02.But it's when he meets Rita in the bar and starts to talk
:05:03. > :05:04.about his past that everything comes undone for him.
:05:05. > :05:07.Do you think that most people have a secret
:05:08. > :05:13.I think every one of us has something in our lives
:05:14. > :05:19.Harper, in many ways, is only an extreme example of somebody,
:05:20. > :05:22.he's got to his 50s and he has got to the point in life
:05:23. > :05:27.where he is reflecting, as well as living.
:05:28. > :05:31.In his situation, it's actually something very terrible indeed.
:05:32. > :05:38.In fact, his inner self isn't extreme or extraordinary at all,
:05:39. > :05:41.it is something we would recognise in friends, family and ourselves.
:05:42. > :05:44.Harper, he's had a very interesting childhood.
:05:45. > :05:46.He was born in a Japanese internment camp, in 1942.
:05:47. > :05:49.His father is Indonesian, his mother is Dutch.
:05:50. > :05:51.His father is beheaded by the Japanese and his
:05:52. > :05:53.mother is imprisoned when she is pregnant with him.
:05:54. > :05:56.They then end up going back to the Netherlands at the end
:05:57. > :05:58.of the war and he spent some time there.
:05:59. > :06:01.But they emigrate to California and his mother marries a black GI.
:06:02. > :06:04.So there is a sense that, for part of his life,
:06:05. > :06:06.for about five years, there is some sort of moral
:06:07. > :06:10.That all ends up going horribly wrong and he ends up going back
:06:11. > :06:15.But I think, although he has a sort of global childhood,
:06:16. > :06:17.if you like, he's an outsider, he's a man who doesn't
:06:18. > :06:21.I don't think you need to have that kind of upbringing
:06:22. > :06:25.I think a lot of us feel like outsiders.
:06:26. > :06:28.In a way, there's a theme here, I suppose, in the book,
:06:29. > :06:35.that violence, the place he came from, the circumstances
:06:36. > :06:37.in which he was born, violence breeds violence.
:06:38. > :06:39.Is there a terrible inevitability about it?
:06:40. > :06:41.There is a terrible inevitability about that, and we see that
:06:42. > :06:44.But we also see it on a micro situation.
:06:45. > :06:47.We know that most people who are abusive as adults have been
:06:48. > :06:51.It's this kind of awful roller-coaster of history.
:06:52. > :06:54.As far as Harper himself is concerned, the man
:06:55. > :06:58.who carries a secret, the man whose life unravels
:06:59. > :07:00.as a consequence of a love affair, do you care for him?
:07:01. > :07:10.In fact, although he is a man in his 50s who has lived
:07:11. > :07:12.as a mercenary and done some terrible things,
:07:13. > :07:14.in many ways I think of him as my most autobiographical
:07:15. > :07:18.Everybody always thinks I'm the women in my books,
:07:19. > :07:20.and I've written several books from a female point of view.
:07:21. > :07:22.The one previous to this, Apple Tree Yard, had
:07:23. > :07:29.In many ways, I feel closer to Harper.
:07:30. > :07:33.I think he's a man who's always been an outsider.
:07:34. > :07:36.He is a man who's never really at home, wherever he is.
:07:37. > :07:39.In a way, that's what makes him good at his job.
:07:40. > :07:41.He's a chameleon, he can also fit in anywhere.
:07:42. > :07:44.You spend two or three years with an individual character,
:07:45. > :07:50.You can't look after a child for that long without
:07:51. > :07:54.I think you can't create a character for that long without really coming
:07:55. > :07:59.Louise Doughty, thank you very much.