Author Benjamin Wood talks to us about his latest title The Young Accomplice and the research that goes into his novels.
Benjamin Wood was born in 1981 and grew up in northwest England and is the author of four novels. His debut, The Bellwether Revivals (2012), was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Book Prize, and won one of France's foremost literary awards, Le Prix du Roman Fnac.
His second novel, The Ecliptic (2015), was shortlisted for the Encore Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. His third book, A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better (2018), was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award and the European Union Prize for Literature.
His newest work, The Young Accomplice, was published by Penguin Viking in June 2022 and is also available on our catalogue.
Until my late teens, my main literary inspirations were mostly songwriters (Paul Simon, Thom Yorke, Michael Stipe, Jeff Buckley, Elliott Smith) because that’s what I hoped to become. I only got into the habit of reading fiction seriously in my early twenties. At that time, my literary hero was Michael Marshall Smith, an amazing sci-fi novelist whose books I completely adored (and still do). I was very fortunate to be able to meet him when I was nineteen, because he liked a demo tape of my songs that I’d sent to him via his publisher; he came to watch the first ever gig I played in London, at a place called The Kashmir Klub, and we stayed in touch after that. He is every bit as gracious and generous and brilliant a person as I hoped he would be when I read his books in my youth. I owe him a lot.
I’d say it was mostly helpful to me. I read The Secret History about ten years after it came out, when I was doing a screenwriting degree at University of Central Lancashire. In those days, I had a brilliant tutor called Ailsa Cox, who could tell from the verbosity of my screenplays that I was probably better suited to writing fiction. She asked me one day in a tutorial, ‘Have you ever thought of writing a novel?’ and I told her I’d written about five or six first chapters of various novels that never went anywhere. Her follow-up question was: ‘Well, have you read The Secret History? I think you’d like it a lot.’
So I picked up a copy that day and it turned out that Ailsa, as always, was very astute—I devoured that book, as many readers have done. It has a rare mix of elements which make it utterly compelling: strong characterisation, big ideas, foreboding atmosphere, narrative tension, a sense of the cinematic and of being invited into an exclusive world. It wasn’t the first literary novel I had fallen under the spell of so deeply (that was Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy), but The Secret History was my favourite book for many years, until I went to study creative writing in Canada, where my tastes began to diversify.
I wasn’t trying to mimic her style or approach in any way with The Bellwether Revivals, but I think it helped to have Donna Tartt as the benchmark for my youthful aspirations. I wrote that book when I was 26 years old, and it didn’t come out until I was 30. So it has a slightly wide-eyed quality about it, which I think is probably to its benefit. The place it’s most loved today is France, which I’m very grateful for and still trying to understand.
All of my novels — even A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better, which was conceived to be a project that would require less of it — has involved an enormous amount of research, be it book-based or fieldwork. That’s really so that I can give the story as much verisimilitude as I can — in relation to the period, the place it’s set in, the type of jobs the protagonist and other characters are engaged in, etc. For Bellwether, I had to learn so much about psychological disorders, yes, but also music theory, choral music, and some pretty niche classical composers, which — as a self-taught musician in the Lennon-McCartney sort of tradition — was tough going!
As I recall, The Ecliptic involved a lot of dry research into paint-making and colour theory, as well as walking round the island of Heybeliada with a notebook for a week. But the research phase of a novel is often the most spiriting, because you can come across a detail within a text you’re reading, or in some archive, or just wandering about a certain place which you know can be fashioned into the fabric of a scene later on. I like to feed my creativity with facts then let my imagination project itself into the gaps of what I’ve learned.
It’s the story of two siblings, the Savigears, who leave borstal in the early 1950s to become apprentices at a pioneering architecture practice in Surrey, run by a married couple, the Mayhoods, who want to help young offenders get a fresh start in life. Their aim is to establish something like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship in Wisconsin, and they have nothing but the best intentions—but sometimes people’s kindness is what makes them vulnerable. And that’s all I’ll say…
She was one of the first characters to arrive in my head as soon as I decided on the framework for the story. Very early on, I toyed with the idea of having the Savigears be two brothers instead, but I changed it back, because the gender dynamic made the scenes have much more life, more tension, more everything really. Joyce’s sections were the parts of the novel I enjoyed writing most: I felt I understood her character’s viewpoint and I really had a handle on her manners of articulation from the first line of dialogue I gave her. She’s the first character I’ve ever created whose perspective I could comfortably live with writing forever. I might return to her character some day, I suspect.
I always start with the aim of my next book being a slim, elegant volume. 150 pages of lean and shimmering prose. But then my ideas seem to get bigger, and my characters’ voices tend to be more expressive than those original intentions allow. But maybe, just maybe, I might achieve it with the next one, who knows?
I would love to do a writing residency in snowy Istanbul again. And, as a lifelong supporter, I would definitely not repeat the experience of enduring Everton’s 2021-22 Premier League campaign.
I once had a review on Goodreads from a person with a yowling cat avatar whose favourite books were listed as entirely cat-focused non-fiction, and the review just said: Booorrrrriinnng. There are no cats in any of my novels, so I don’t know what this person was expecting.
Tinkering with the page(s) I wrote the day before.
For years, I’ve had a recurring dream in which Thom Yorke is my new best friend and he invites me to record an album with him in his studio. It hasn’t transpired yet, but I’ll keep writing the songs for our imaginary project, just in case.
