Shooting Stars
The novelist D.M. Thomas describes how he gained inspiration from a black-and-white photograph of Finnish troops fighting in the Winter War.
Almost all of my novels deal with people caught up in the great, and mostly horrifying, historical events of our century. In my first novel, The Flute Player, a woman reminiscent of such great Russians as Anna Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam becomes the life-nourisher while, all around her, dark events unfold. The White Hotel shows how the terrible hallucinations of one of Freud’s patients become the ‘real’ hallucinations of the holocaust. Ararat explores the chaotic lives of Soviet poets against a background of an earlier genocide, that of the Armenians. This novel was followed, much to my surprise, by four others taking further the themes of the Cold War and tangled love, making a Russian Nights Quintet. Flying into Love moves across the globe to the America of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Pictures at an Exhibition looks back at the Nazi genocide from the viewpoint of the 1990s – with more genocide taking place in the Balkans, and the West in the grip of a milder form of fascism called Political Correctness. Eating Pavlova looks into the mind of Freud as he lies dying in London in September 1939.
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