#authorinterview: patrick allington

Longlisted for the 2010 Miles Franklin award, Patrick Allington’s debut novel Figurehead blends history and fiction to explore the turbulent rise and fall of Cambodia’s infamous Khmer Rouge regime. Allington delivers his thoughts on what it means to feel ‘finished’ and the challenges of taking on the big H in fiction.

It is all too easy to pigeonhole novels that draw from history. Blurbs pine over the phrase ‘based on a true story’ and yet rarely are we encouraged to consider what is lost and gained in the process of putting the story back into history.

In his debut novel, Figurehead, Patrick Allington explores the complex and brutal set of events surrounding the coming to power of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during the late 1970s.  Rather than stick rigidly to the tracts of recorded history, Allington courts fact and fiction in delivering his absurdist take on the period, using the inconsistencies and misgivings of his characters to give readers a glimpse into the conflicted history of a brutal regime.

“I don’t want to pass myself off as some sort of Cambodia scholar,” says Allington. “I’m sure actual scholars would have no problem telling you the folly of that! But I did do a lot of research, even if I then often set about messing with that research.”

This is something I try always to do now with anything I write: when I think I’m finished, I set it aside for a time — a day or two (sometimes only an hour or two) if I’m got a tight deadline but preferably a week or even a month — and then look at it fresh.”

To give potency to his fiction, Allington drew extensively from Khmer Rouge and Cambodian history, and utilised real people such as war correspondent Wilfred Burchett and Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphanas, as the basis for his two central characters Ted Whittlemore and Nhem Kiry.

“It took me a long time to work out how to ‘free’ the stories of Nhem Kiry and Ted Whittlemore from this morass of source material — even though their fictional ‘life and times’ emerged from that research. I found this much easier to do after I’d left the draft alone for a while (i.e. months) and then came back to it with fresh eyes.

“This is something I try always to do now with anything I write: when I think I’m finished, I set it aside for a time — a day or two (sometimes only an hour or two) if I’m got a tight deadline but preferably a week or even a month — and then look at it fresh.”

Like many first time novelists, Allington is quick to point out that Figurehead is far from his first attempt at a full length manuscript. Though, he admits, it is the first one that ever felt finished.

“By ‘finished’ I don’t just mean published. I mean it’s the first time I really felt that the final manuscript actually recreated on the page the original idea of the story that I had in my head — the sense, the feel, especially the aburdist tone of it. [...] In my case I’ve written fiction, or tried to, for many years, but it’s been a struggle — a fun and constructive struggle, I should add — to get stuff finished.”

On Mentors

To put Figurehead front and centre, Allington enrolled into the University of Adelaide’s Creative Writing PhD program where he was able to receive supervision and mentoring from J.M. Coetzee and Tom Shapcott. J.M. Coetzee went on to speak at the launch of the novel in support of Allington.

“I carried the idea for Figurehead in my head for many years but it always seemed too hard, too big, of a project to tackle in piecemeal fashion. If I hadn’t done the PhD I would still have been writing — an hour or two here, a half day there — but I would probably have worked on short stories or on a novel that seemed less conceptually daunting.”

He suggests a mentor can be a valuable sounding board and source of inspiration, although to Allington, having one sounds all too much like having an intervention.

“There’s that romantic notion of a writer sitting in splendid isolation at a desk in a book-lined shed looking out the window at a bubbling, trout-filled stream, using birdsong and the staccato of rain on the shed’s tin roof to induce a hypnotic state out of which a story appears like magic blah blah blah.

‘Writing is a solitary act but it’s also an exercise in sharing, in communicating. Whether it’s a mentor, a partner, a friend, a writing group, a trusted editor, I’ve become a firm believer that the drawn-out act of writing a story (i.e. that process of ‘finishing’) is both utterly personal and communal. It is for me, anyway.

There’s that romantic notion of a writer sitting in splendid isolation at a desk in a booklined shed looking out the window at a bubbling, trout-filled stream, using birdsong and the staccato of rain on the shed’s tin roof to enduce a hypnotic state out of which a story appears like magic blah blah blah.

“If I’ve now got any altered perceptions of myself as a writer, then perhaps I feel an increased confidence in my ability to know that a piece is not finished … even if I really really really want it to be finished … and to know why it isn’t.”

On First Impressions

“The moment I remember with most pleasure is standing in my kitchen opening up the express bag from Black Inc, my publisher. I love books as objects, and I love Figurehead’s cover, so it was a real thrill to hold my own book for the first time.

“The initial excitement was fleeting, probably as much as anything because there’s such long lag times in publishing that a certain amount of anticlimax is inevitable. But I still get a buzz from walking into a shop and seeing Figurehead on the shelf.”

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Patrick Allington is currently working on a new novel, Potatoes In All Their Glory, which is set in Adelaide. He writes regular book criticism for Australian Book Review and The Advertiser. Figurehead is available now from all good Australian bookstores.

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