Louise Doughty Meet the Author

Now it is time for this week's Meet The Author.

Louise Doughty has a natural feeling for suspense,

how to produce a crawling unease, where there's something

you don't want to know, but, in the end, know that you will.

Her new novel, Black Water, introduces us to a very

troubled man, John Harper, who takes us through much

of the post-war era, from civil conflict in Indonesia,

back to a Japanese war camp where he was born,

He leads us into a world of deceit and violence that

Louise Doughty, what is it about menace that attracts

Well, menace is a gift to any novelist, really.

Because what menace is is the promise that

I think in an ideal world, your reader's reading your book,

you're with the character, you're feeling for them,

you're in their head, but you have some knowledge

But there's something else in Black Water, and it's this.

We know, the readers know, that he, the central

character, has knowledge that we don't know.

It strikes me that menace, fear, is the knowledge of the unknown that

at some point will be revealed in ways that we can't tell?

It is, it's also knowledge based on the knowledge of

I suppose the point about Harper in the book is he's very frightened.

As the novel opens, he thinks men with machetes are going to come

and kill him, but, actually, I think we get very quickly that

what he's really frightened of is not something

He's frightened of something that he himself has already done.

It's his past experiences that are really making him afraid.

And, of course, Harper is actually a metaphor for Indonesia.

He is a metaphor for any country like that that has had a terrible

Well, you mentioned Indonesia, and it's a central part of the book,

dealing with the violence that racked that country

To the outside world, certainly in this country, I think,

to many people who didn't have a particular interest

in Indonesia, south Asia, is still a period of

The massacres of 1965 in Indonesia, they rank alongside the massacres

in Rwanda, alongside the Khmer Rouge killings in Cambodia.

It's one of the great tragedies of the second half

It's virtually unheard of in the West.

The character of Harper also suggests a kind of world

that we recognise now, where there are strange conflicts

of which we know very little and find it hard to explain,

going on in distant places, in which, somehow, Western

There are so many people playing a double game.

What they don't know is that, as well as government spies,

there are huge amounts of companies who would be offended if you called

them spies or mercenaries, they don't like those terms.

They would call themselves risk analysis, security consultants.

We saw a lot of them active in Iraq during the war there.

American government officials were being protected

These companies, there are hundreds of them worldwide, and I spoke

to people who work for those companies, on the condition

of anonymity for themselves and their company, both

They are huge businesses, they have thousands

Harper, of course, is not a political figure in the sense that

it's not a one-dimensional political struggle that he's involved in.

There's a human story here, which is very touching

You do really like to peel away the layers in a personality,

don't you, and leave very little left to the imagination?

What really undoes Harper, how he has to come to

terms with his past, is when he meets a woman.

He meets a woman in a bar, in a local town, as the novel opens

They are both middle-aged people, it's understood

But it's through her, talking to her, and her starting

to ask him about his past, that he becomes

I mean, he's a man who has existed for decades

He's had an unsuccessful marriage back in the Netherlands.

But it's when he meets Rita in the bar and starts to talk

about his past that everything comes undone for him.

Do you think that most people have a secret

I think every one of us has something in our lives

Harper, in many ways, is only an extreme example of somebody,

he's got to his 50s and he has got to the point in life

where he is reflecting, as well as living.

In his situation, it's actually something very terrible indeed.

In fact, his inner self isn't extreme or extraordinary at all,

it is something we would recognise in friends, family and ourselves.

Harper, he's had a very interesting childhood.

He was born in a Japanese internment camp, in 1942.

His father is Indonesian, his mother is Dutch.

His father is beheaded by the Japanese and his

mother is imprisoned when she is pregnant with him.

They then end up going back to the Netherlands at the end

of the war and he spent some time there.

But they emigrate to California and his mother marries a black GI.

So there is a sense that, for part of his life,

for about five years, there is some sort of moral

That all ends up going horribly wrong and he ends up going back

But I think, although he has a sort of global childhood,

if you like, he's an outsider, he's a man who doesn't

I don't think you need to have that kind of upbringing

I think a lot of us feel like outsiders.

In a way, there's a theme here, I suppose, in the book,

that violence, the place he came from, the circumstances

in which he was born, violence breeds violence.

Is there a terrible inevitability about it?

There is a terrible inevitability about that, and we see that

But we also see it on a micro situation.

We know that most people who are abusive as adults have been

It's this kind of awful roller-coaster of history.

As far as Harper himself is concerned, the man

who carries a secret, the man whose life unravels

as a consequence of a love affair, do you care for him?

In fact, although he is a man in his 50s who has lived

as a mercenary and done some terrible things,

in many ways I think of him as my most autobiographical

Everybody always thinks I'm the women in my books,

and I've written several books from a female point of view.

The one previous to this, Apple Tree Yard, had

In many ways, I feel closer to Harper.

I think he's a man who's always been an outsider.

He is a man who's never really at home, wherever he is.

In a way, that's what makes him good at his job.

He's a chameleon, he can also fit in anywhere.

You spend two or three years with an individual character,

You can't look after a child for that long without

I think you can't create a character for that long without really coming

Louise Doughty, thank you very much.