Faber & Faber

Robert Dinsdale's debut novel is The Harrowing, a stunning novel of love, betrayal and redemption set amid the turmoil of the First World War. The book is published in June 2009.

It seems that this book is less about the First World War and more about the relationship between brothers. Would you say this is true?

When I first conceived of William and Samuel, they were wearing Stetson hats and riding horseback in the American Dustbowl of the 1930s. It’s a period I’ve long been interested in and still want to go back to - but, in the end, it wasn’t for William and Samuel, so out of the Old West they had to ride.

By the time the story had found its way back home, and to a landscape very close to my own, the story had shifted - but William and Samuel remained unchanged: William, the elder brother destined for greater things, and Samuel, who has spent his life watching jealously over the angels who watch over William. In a very real way, the setting is of secondary importance - there’s something universal about the relationship between brothers that means the story could, and does, go on in any corner of the earth.

I have a good relationship with my own brothers - I’ve never wanted to stone one of them to death, though I can’t speak for them - but there have definitely been moments in the past - too many to mention - when I’ve looked at friends and loved and hated them all at once.

Jealousy and envy are as natural emotions as love and longing; denying the bad doesn’t make it go away. Only the other night I woke up jealous of a dream, of some man I’d obviously created with his arm around a girl who used to like me. We hate it about ourselves, but it’s not going to go away - and that goes for people standing in the shadow of others whether they’re in the Antarctic, the American Panhandle, or Leeds in 1916.

Why did you choose the First World War as a backdrop?

If one boy has to follow another into Hell, in order that they can perform their own Harrowing, no moment in history is more apt than the battles along the Somme in the summer of 1916, when a generation of young men went, together, to their ends. The only thing I know about my paternal great-grandfather is that he came through those battles to live another day. Like thousands of others across the North of England, he was part of Kitchener’s New Army, and went in a Pals Battalion to die in a hole in the earth.

Recollections of the First World War are in a state of transition - there are so few left who fought there, and the landscape of the world is so vastly different to what it was a hundred years ago, that for someone of my generation it’s difficult to appreciate not only the horror, but the context in which that Hell was created. I don’t think I’m alone in having no feelings of patriotism whatsoever - and fighting for King and country was central to the mindset in that age.

And yet there is still so much that’s familiar about the conflict: the going-over-the-top, the mustard gas, the Christmas truce of 1914, games of football in no-man’s land, 'Silent Night', the fields of poppies. Simple images like this are part of every schoolboy’s learning, and in that way the events of 1914-18 have become instantly recognisable - if not instantly understood. History moves so quickly, now, that, for people of my generation, the war can feel as ancient as the fall of Rome - and that’s how I wanted to approach it in The Harrowing, with the same quality as an epic myth or legend.

Why is it called the Harrowing?

The story goes that, before Christ ascended from the Cross, he descended into the fiery vaults underneath the surface of the earth - and there he reached out to every soul who had lived and died in the centuries before his own life, so that they too might be forgiven of their original sin. This was the Harrowing of Hell. The implication, of course, is much bigger than the simple story allows. By the time of Christ’s ascension, Judas Iscariot - whose betrayal condemned Christ - was dead by his own hand, and thus damned to his own eternity in Hell. But in his harrowing of Hell, Christ would also forgive the man whose betrayal sent him to his agonising death - in effect, he would reach out and lead the man who killed him into Heaven. 

There are a thousand different interpretations of that very simple story, but at its root is a simple image that it’s hard to shake: one man reaching out his hand to another. So much of human nature seems to be encapsulated there: our propensity for bad as well as good, our need for fellowship and the thin line between friendship and resent. But the idea that a man could kill another and the slain could still reach out and say it’s finished with, nothing could ever change the thing you did, but it doesn’t matter, it’s over now - that might be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read. There’s a moral courage in that that goes beyond religion.

As a writer, what was the particular draw of the Cain and Abel story?

I’m not the first person to be drawn to Cain putting Abel in the ground. In the 1950s there was one of those odd moments in history I’m fond of, when American literature became obsessed with the story - all the way from East of Eden down to the pulps. There’s something about the simplicity of the story that is horrifying: Cain and Abel both offer up sacrifices to the Lord, and when Cain’s is rejected he slays his brother in what seems an act of revenge. You could spend a lifetime reading and investigating a thousand different readings of that simple story - is it really an ancient parable about the death of hunting societies and the growth in agriculture? - but, for me, the heart of the story is hard to deny: on the surface a motiveless crime has been committed - history’s first ever murder - but, simmering under the surface, there’s an eruption of jealous emotion. Cain is Abel’s brother, they share so much in life and looks and history - and yet, it is Abel who is smiled upon by their father. There always seemed to me something inherently unjust in that - and if you’ve ever stood in somebody’s shadow, you’ll know how difficult it is to truly hate Cain.

In Othello, Iago says it best: 'he hath a daily beauty in his life and it makes me ugly.' I’ve always loved that line - but been horrified by it too, perhaps because I’ve felt that sentiment in myself more times than I care to remember. In my experience, people are always at their unhappiest when they compare themselves to other people, when they can’t perhaps see who they are for the strength of the comparisons they and others make - and that, too, is at the heart of Cain and Abel. It’s love and it’s hate and it’s admiration and it’s envy - and it’s all encapsulated with a rock in a hand.

The book opens in Leeds. Do you have a particular relationship with the city?

I lived in Leeds for nearly five years. It was very definitely a formative time for me - and I’m still not sure whether I mean that in a positive or a negative way. Sometimes the places you live not only leave their impression on you, but change you in ways you hadn’t thought possible - but what happens when you don’t like the changes coming upon you, when you can feel a place changing you for the worse? That’s Samuel’s life at the beginning of The Harrowing, and in a way it was mine on the evening I left Leeds.

You’ve drawn on Biblical stories. Do you consider yourself a religious person?

I was in love with a Christian once. She took me to Church and sent me long letters telling me that even I could be saved - and the last time I saw her, she gave me a Bible. As odd as it sounds now, though I treasured that relationship, I could never understand why she treasured her God and her Church so much. There is no religion in my family, and I grew up feeling a tug of strange sympathy to the boys in school who would have to spend their Sundays in services and schools instead of out on the streets. It just seemed - and still does seem - so out of step with the real world.

If you look at the Bible as a book of stories, though, it seems to me that the whole of human experience is accounted for there: the ugly and the good, the beautiful and the depraved. In The Harrowing, Matthias is obsessed with telling the story of Abraham - who, at the Lord’s command, led his son Isaac to an altar on the mountainside and prepared to make a sacrifice of him there - and if ever there was a reason to loathe religious worship, there it is. But there are stories accounting for the best in man there as well - the story of the first stone, the Harrowing itself.

One of the lessons that Samuel has to learn in the novel is that, if you keep looking for bad things about yourself, you’re going to find them, that being human means being good and being bad and everything that falls between. That isn’t a religious message; it’s a human message - and that we can find it in the Bible isn’t by divine intervention, but because of the accumulated wisdom of generations of men.

Who are your literary influences?

Embarrassing and many. I think it’s probably a really unhealthy thing to start picking it apart - like asking exactly why a joke is funny - but I’ve always read from all corners of the bookstore.

As for The Harrowing, Of Mice and Men definitely has a shadow to cast over the novel - the relationship between Lennie and George might be the simplest and yet most heartbreaking of everything I’ve read - but so does that stubborn self-righteousness of the Spaghetti Westerns.

Is there another book in the pipeline?

I’m working, now, on a novel that would take us back to Leeds, a quarter of a century after the events of The Harrowing. It’s often overlooked, but while the Luftwaffe were raining fire across London, so too were cities across the North of England spending their nights listening to the song of air-raid sirens. The new novel is set across only one night in the Blitz over Manchester and Leeds, as an old detective endeavours to ferry his prisoner to a watch-house three miles across the city, while all around the bombs are falling and the spires of fire rise.

If the heart of The Harrowing is that good people do bad things, I’m writing, now, about a character who is crafting his own rules, making reasoned choices about good and evil - and choosing the latter; Samuel without a conscience.