Book Group Discussion: The Insect Farm by Stuart Prebble

Promised to deliver secrets, plot twists, haunting characters and a surprising ending that no one has yet guessed, The Insect Farm was the ideal book to get an interesting discussion started. Stuart Prebble came in to answer all of those stunned readers’ questions, reveal his inspiration for the novel and tell us how he came up with the unique topic of insects…

On plot… (Leanne Leveaux) (Van Demal)

I started with an idea about the basic plot, and then the novel just seemed to tell itself as I kept going back to it; it got more elaborate as I told the story. The Insect Farm itself is an idea I’ve had for a while, I love the idea of this sophisticated community of creatures which believes it is independent, but which is in fact manipulated by an unseen “god”, as maybe we are ourselves. It’s about 45 years since I read “Of Mice and Men” so if it was an influence, it was an unconscious one.

The whole business of misremembering is fascinating to me. As I get older I am constantly astonished by how people I have known for a long time remember things completely differently from the way I remember them.

On perspective… (Fran Roberts)

I did consider adding another perspective to the narrative. I thought about Roger, but then thought I would not be able to keep up the “surprise” if we were also in his head. I also thought about Harriet, but did not want her voice to vanish halfway through. I even thought about one of the policemen, but in the end decided that the challenge of keeping Jonathan as sympathetic as he needed to be was probably enough of a challenge.

I find the whole idea of societies which are sophisticated in themselves, but which believe themselves to be independent, a fascinating metaphor for our lives

On Brendan… (Emma Herdman)

I did hope that the character of Brendan would interest people. We are supposed to dislike him because he won’t take “no” for an answer, and keeps on sneaking up on Harriet. On the other hand, all he is guilty of in the end is falling hopelessly in love with her – and we can hardly blame him for that. I did at one time consider whether to have Brendan arrested, tried, convicted and jailed for Harriet’s murder, but then I thought we would dislike Jonathan even more than some people do, so that idea went away. Anyway, he seems to have lived happily ever after, so maybe he can re-emerge in another book sometime and we can get to know him better.

On Jonathan… (Janet Brown) (Katie Bond)

The challenge of keeping Jonathan as a sympathetic character when he has murdered his wife in a drunken rage was always going to be a tricky one! I think I hoped that by making his main motive for staying out of jail that he wanted to take care of his brother might tilt the balance in his favour. I suppose he does get his just punishment in the end. I also hoped that by letting the reader so far into his head, we might stay with him. Anyway the important thing is always that there is someone to like and Roger is loyal, simple, and very very effective, so maybe he is the real hero.

I think I probably got part of the inspiration for Jonathan’s voice from Enduring Love – where you start by being sympathetic to the narrator, and then gradually realize that he is a bit strange. It was a tricky balance. I tried hard to bring the reader into his mind, and I hope I managed it to a certain extent.

On Roger… (Charlotte Dibley) (Fran Roberts)

I had to find a balance for Roger where he is someone who needs constant care, but is also able to function in surprising ways. He is “on the spectrum” – at a point somewhere mid-way between two people I know. I think I would have found it too challenging to be inside Roger’s head for the whole time – but I did grow to love his simplicity, his loyalty, and his cunning.

I always wanted Roger to be an enigma, for us always to suspect that there might be more to him than met the eye. I tried to drop clues as we went through the narrative but it was always a balance between making him too “knowing” or too naive. I feel gratified that the “surprise” seems to have worked for most readers so far.

On the idea of insects… (Frances Teehan) (Sara Donaldson)

I didn’t ever create an Insect farm – but have been fascinated for a long time by the analogy of an insect farm and the world we all live in. The idea of an unseen creator, outside of our own ability to detect him/her, has long been of interest. I always envisage a conversation going on in an anthill somewhere in the rain-forest – where the creatures are saying “isn’t it great to be masters of our universe? Isn’t it great that we understand everything?” Just like us.

I was always aware that the theme of insects might be a bit repellent for some readers, so I knew I was taking a risk by adopting it as a microcosm of the wider world. It’s just that it offered so many opportunities – for example when Roger confesses to a murder when he is at the day-school, and it turns out that he is referring to the cockroaches. It was also always going to be a handy way of disposing of a body and I enjoyed the idea of the detectives wandering around, and coming so close to finding Harriet. Then there is the opportunity it provided for the ending, and taking us full circle back to the beginning.

I didn’t research insects first – though I’d have to do some work to find a species which ate bones as well as flesh! As I’ve mentioned, I find the whole idea of societies which are sophisticated in themselves, but which believe themselves to be independent, a fascinating metaphor for our lives. When Roger does his version of “the sermon on the mount” at David Frost’s party, I hoped the reader would go with me on the extended creator metaphor. I am delighted that so many people seem to have done so.

On the ending…  (Caroline Ambrose) (Zarina de Ruiter)

When I got to the end of the first draft, I went back and seeded some further clues such as when the two detectives visit Jonathan’s flat to ask about Harriet, and Roger has received an air-mail package. Yes, if Roger hadn’t returned unexpectedly, Harriet would probably still be alive – but would Jonathan have been able to live with the “jazz versus blues” sharing? I doubt it!

It’s fun to think about what happens after Jonathan’s final words – I have my own thoughts but it’s more fun for everyone to work out what they think for themselves. Roger obviously has capabilities far beyond the obvious. I always knew how I wanted it to end but since then my very clever agent has pointed out that maybe it’s not a good idea to massacre all of your main characters at the end of a book! Too late I fear.

The Insect Farm by Stuart Prebble was published on 15^th March by Alma Books.

 

Book of the Month: A Very Special Kind of Storytelling by Gordon Wise

We’re nearly at the end of our second Book Group Month and we’ve just about recovered from all of the shocks and twists of our joint book of the month – The Insect Farm by Stuart Prebble.  In today’s blog, Stuart’s agent here at Curtis Brown, Gordon Wise, reveals just what it was that made The Insect Farm stand out for him and why it’s a book not to miss on publication in March.

Gordon Wise, Agent at Curtis Brown

“I was hooked by this book from the first page of its very first draft. And at that time, it had a very different opening – what it was then remains Stuart’s and my secret.

And this is a book about secrets – about trying to get away with something, even when you don’t know if you did wrong. At least one guilty person meets their end. But so do innocent people. Quite why, and how, you will have to read to find out. And there are a few moral decisions you will have to make for yourself: can you possibly see the

world the way that Stuart’s characters do?  And yet you can see exactly why they do see it the way they do.

There’s a very special kind of storytelling at work here: while you know from the first pages that some kind of crime has been committed, soon you realise that this is a book about significant relationships, and just how blood can be thicker than water. No-one I have met who has read The Insect Farm has failed to be wrong-footed about their assumptions about what is going on. There aren’t many books that can excite you in the very particular, creepy way this one does without laying it on thick, while at the same time have you rooting for its antiheroes – or wondering whether they are even heroic at all?

Stuart has been a storyteller in all sorts of media for a number of decades. It’s so exciting that he is now becoming a master of psychological suspense writing, and all of us here at Curtis Brown, his award-winning UK publisher Alma Books, and the mighty Mulholland Books of the US Hachette Publishing Group are on the edge of our seats to see what he writes next.”

The Insect Farm will be published in the UK by Alma Books on Thursday 26th March and in the US by Mulholland Books in Tuesday 7th July.  You can follow Stuart on Twitter at @StuartPrebble and find out more about The Insect Farm and Stuart’s previous books at www.stuartprebble.com.

Five Siblings in Literature

Our other book of the month, Stuart Prebble’s The Insect Farm, deals with the complex and often sinister relationship between brothers – here between our protagonist Jonathan and his disabled older brother Roger. This got us thinking about our favourite siblings in literature and their relationships, from the sweet to the stormy to the downright sinister.

1. Miles and Flora in The Turn of the Screw, Henry James

When the governess in James’s novella The Turn of the Screw takes on a new position in an Essex country estate, she cannot believe that her angelic charges could be capable of the mysterious transgressions attributed to them. But she soon discovers that Miles and Flora, however innocent they may appear, possess a terrible and haunting knowledge, and that they are the conduit for the house’s old ghosts to make their presence felt. The children, the governess realises, ‘saw MORE – things terrible and unguessable and that sprang from dreadful passages of intercourse in the past.’ The original creepy horror children, Miles and Flora still bring us out in goosebumps, and will make you think twice about taking on babysitting.

2. Lowell, Rosemary and Fern, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler

“I knew the winds of doom when they blew,” writes Rosemary of leaving her sister Fern to go and stay with her grandparents as a child at the beginning of Karen Joy Fowler’s 2014 bestseller We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Rosemary and her brother Lowell return to find that Fern has vanished, and the rest of the novel follows the siblings as they try to unravel the reason behind Fern’s disappearance, and confront why her loss might have always been inevitable. Fowler’s novel emphasises that the absence of a sibling can have as profound an effect on our life as their presence, and, with its revelation of Fern’s secret, asks the reader to interrogate what, exactly, makes us brothers and sisters to each other.

3. Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis

On their own, the Pevensie children aren’t all that great: Peter’s a bit of a bully, Susan’s a bit of prig, Edmund’s a bit of a sneak and Lucy’s a bit of a drip. But C.S. Lewis is brilliant at capturing the dynamic between siblings, the power plays and alliances, however fantastical the setting he sends them into. The Pevensies carry their bickering into Narnia with them, and even if only three of them are allowed into Lewis’s frankly hokey heaven (silly old Susan, having developed an interest in ‘nylons and lipstick and invitations’, isn’t allowed to join her brothers and sister in heaven at the end of The Last Battle), it is Lewis’s talent for conveying the combined love and resentment that we feel for our siblings that has made these books timeless classics.

4. Tom and Maggie Tulliver, The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot

‘Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it’ writes George Eliot in Adam Bede; but it’s Tom and Maggie Tulliver from Eliot’s 1860 novel The Mill on the Floss who have made into our top five. Perhaps you’ve been either the long-suffering older sibling like Tom, or the adoring but perpetually rebuffed younger sibling like Maggie; Eliot, herself estranged from her brothers for most of her adult life, lovingly captures how different siblings can be and how love can bridge those differences.

5. Scout and Jem Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

‘When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow’ begins Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird. We can’t imagine a list about siblings in literature could be complete without Scout and her brother Jem, who is thought to be based on Lee’s beloved lawyer sister Alice. We can’t wait to see meet the grown up Scout and Jem in Lee’s upcoming Go Set A Watchman, or see if they get on any better, and we’ve already got our ham costumes on in anticipation. The Insect Farm by Stuart Prebble will be published in the UK by Alma on 15th March 2015 and in the US by Mulholland Books on 7th July 2015.

Book of the Month: The Insect Farm: Behind the Idea by Stuart Prebble

Our second Book of the Month for February is The Insect Farm by Stuart Prebble (check out James Hannah’s blog if you missed the first).  It’s an intense novel of psychological suspense that questions family loyalties, the reliability of memory, and asks “how well do you really know yourself and what you’re capable of?”

Stuart Prebble, author of The Insect Farm

“Though I did not necessarily appreciate it at the time, I have realized as an adult that my parents did a pretty good job of imparting to me some important nuggets of wisdom to help as I made my way through life.  One of them, to take a random example, was never to eat in a restaurant that has pictures on the menu. See what I mean? Good solid advice which I have always tried to stick to, and has always stood me in good stead.

Another virtue my parents tried to teach me was not to envy other people.  I’ve done a bit less well with that one, and one group I have sometimes found myself envying are those who experience lots of very vivid dreams. I don’t mean dreams of the Martin Luther King “we want a better world” type – heaven knows I have plenty of those, even though I long ago despaired of any of them being realized.   I mean the kind of dreams which take you in your slumber to otherwise unimaginable places and circumstances, and from which you wake up puzzled and exhausted. I don’t have many of these dreams, and I sometimes wish that I did.

This may be surprising, especially in view of the fact that the only dream I can remember having had more than once; indeed, a dream I have had variations of quite a few times, is that at some time in the past I have murdered someone. I am a murderer and am trying to get away with it.

I know;  weird shit.

Worse still, I quite often wake up in the early hours and spend some minutes still under the impression that at sometime in the past I have killed someone, and feeling anxious that I am about the be caught.   In these dreams, the incident in question has happened a long time ago, so that I can scarcely remember the details. And this aspect of it – the tricks played by memory – is the other element which got me thinking in the first place about the plot for my new novel, The Insect Farm.

Five years ago I started work on a non-fiction book I had long-planned to write about an incident which occurred during the Falklands War.  It was all to do with the circumstances in which the British nuclear submarine Conqueror had sunk the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano, with the loss of 328 lives.  I was a working producer of ITV’s current affairs programme World in Action at the time, and had become involved in covering the controversy.

At that time I learned a real-life proper military secret about the activities of the submarine during the Cold War, and stored away a lot of documents with the intention of waiting 30 years until the secret could perhaps be told.   My research for the book – Secrets of the Conqueror – involved digging deep into the archives, talking to a lot of people who were involved at the time, but also delving far into my own memory of events which had taken place nearly three decades earlier.

I found it an amazing experience. First of all, I discovered that there was a whole series of meetings and events at which I had been present, but which either I did not remember at all, or of which my memory was completely at odds with that of others also present.  One example involved an incident which had taken place at the wedding of an officer from the submarine. When I asked him about it he replied, “You should know – you were there.”  I would have sworn on a stack of bibles that I had not been at his wedding, until he sent me a photograph from the day, and there I am, sitting at the top table, complete with dreadful mullet haircut. Scary… (and even now, I’m still in denial about the mullet).

I also found that when people gave me their accounts of events about which I did have a decent memory, quite often they had a tendency to put themselves at the centre of business; attributing to themselves words or actions which I felt sure had actually been said or done by other people.  I sat at dinner and listened to my older brother telling an anecdote about a very funny thing he had said at a party, which I recalled as being entirely accurate, except that I was pretty sure that the funny thing had been said by me!

So when I started to evolve the plot for The Insect Farm, I decided to try to put these two things together. What if you had been involved in a murder, which became part of your memory bank for many years?  After three or four decades, perhaps you would be unable to remember accurately who had said what, and who had done what.  Had the murder taken place at all, or did you dream it?  And if it had, whodunit?  And so I invented Jonathan Maguire and his older brother Roger, who are drawn into involvement in a terrible murder. Destiny requires that they live all their lives together, but each of them has their own completely different understanding of what has happened, and each of them is trying to evade justice on behalf of the other. And all that’s before we come to the part played by the Insect Farm itself!  Now read on (please).”

The Insect Farm will be published in the UK by Alma Books on Thursday 26th March and in the US by Mulholland Books in Tuesday 7th July.  You can follow Stuart on Twitter at @StuartPrebble and find out more about The Insect Farm and Stuart’s previous books at www.stuartprebble.com.