Book after Book

By Chris Womersley Published by Quercus Bereft is the second novel by Australian journalist and literary reviewer Chris Womersley. As the author explained in an exclusive piece written for Book After Book , inspiration for him is “ a series of small insights that coalesce over several months – sometimes years – into a bunch of characters living in a particular time and place, each of them with their own set of problems ”. In Bereft , the sense of time and place is particularly clear. The year is 1919, the Great War has ended and the Spanish flu epidemic is raging across Australia as Quinn Walker returns to his hometown of Flint, in New South Wales. His return from war, however, is not anticipated with joy and elation. In fact, nobody is waiting for him. Apart from the fact that he is believed to have died at the front, Quinn hasn’t set foot in Flint since he was accused of the murder of his younger sister ten years earlier. In town he is known as “the murderer” and even his own father...

Inspiration is a curious concept and when it comes to the writing of a novel it is, at least for me, not a singular thing. The etymology of the word ‘inspiration’ harks back to notions of inhaling something from without - a spiritual influence, a divine force. For those of us who are queasy about notions of divine visitation (how would God taste, after all?), it is still useful to think of such matters in this way, for it relieves us of the burden of genius. After all, a preparedness to fail is perhaps one of the writer’s most essential qualities; it’s always handy to have someone to blame for a lousy reception - as long as you’re also willing to share the credit should things go well. For me there is rarely a single moment of inspiration but, rather, a series of small insights that coalesce over several months – sometimes years - into a bunch of characters living in a particular time and place, each of them with their own set of problems. These characters, the setting and their proble...