Rediscovering Undiscovered Country

For the past six weeks, I’ve been retyping one of my previously published novels – a task that might strike some people as entirely pointless. There’ve certainly been times when I’ve identified with the deluded hero of the Borges short story who, having transcribed Cervantes’ Don Quixote line for line, believes himself to be the author of it. I suppose the difference is that I am the author of Undiscovered Country, first published in 1997 by Penguin Books. This edition will be a new one (to be published by Arbuthnot Books in September 2010), with revisions and corrections I’ve been wanting to make for more then a decade. But even so, it would have been a lot less work if I’d merely scanned the existing text.

I chose not to do this partly because I wanted as ‘clean’ a copy as possible – free of the blurring of letter-forms that can occur even with the best kind of scanner, and partly because I wanted to give the book the close attention which having to retype every word would necessitate. Would it stand up to such scrutiny – or would there be things that, after all this time, I might want to change? It seemed entirely possible. Would I find myself, like Henry James after 1909, revising this – and all my other novels – so thoroughly that they became, in effect, completely different books? The prospect was an intriguing one.

Having got started on my Herculean task, I found that it was not just about the words on the page, but about everything that lay behind them. A revisiting, in fact, of an entire world. Anyone who has read Undiscovered Country will know that is set in Venezuela during the 1950s, and that there is a strong autobiographical flavour to the work. Although the story is entirely fictional, the characters and settings owe a great deal to ‘real life’. Revisiting Venezuela, in the mid-1990s, in order to research the book, brought back extraordinarily vivid memories of my childhood. This was the landscape, with its mountains and palm-fringed beaches; these were the brilliant colours, the exotic tastes and smells, the music and the language, of my earliest recollections.

Now, fifteen years on, I was ‘returning’ again – if only through the medium of the printed page. Re-reading the novel, with its descriptions of places and people I had once known, often felt like a trip into my own past. ‘Aren’t you tempted to change things?’ friends said, when I told them what I was doing – and of course I was. There are certainly things that, were I writing the novel now, I would have done differently. Because of course novels aren’t just about the time or the place in which they’re set, but about the time and place in which they were written. Memories of that period, too, kept coming back to me as I read. The person I was then, at the time of writing, and the person I am now found themselves engaged, more than once, in a kind of literary quarrel.

‘Surely,’ the present writer would say to her former self, ‘it would have been better to have done this another way?’ ‘Absolutely not,’ the writer of 1997 would reply. “that’s the way I wrote it; and that’s the way it’s got to stay.’ And of course in the end – with the exception of a few small but significant changes here and there, invisible to anyone but me – I decided to leave things well alone. After all, this was a book that others, apart from myself, had liked – and liked so much they’d awarded it a prize. To have disregarded their opinion would have been disrespectful, to say the least.

And so I came to the end of my voyage into that ‘other country’ of the past, where, as L P Hartley said, ‘they do things differently.’ Having subjected my novel to the closest scrutiny it was ever likely to receive, I’d satisfied myself that it was the way I wanted it to be, when it becomes available once more for the reading public. More than this, I’d had the chance to reacquaint myself with the person I was when I wrote the book, and thus to understand a bit more about the writing process. Because, strange as it sounds, re-reading one’s own writing really does feel like reading somebody else’s work. It’s out there. It has a life of its own. It doesn’t belong to you anymore.