The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Boy in the Field: A Novel by Margot Livesey

Episode Date: August 21, 2020

The Boy in the Field: A Novel by Margot Livesey Margotlivesey.com The New York Times bestselling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy delivers another “luminous, unforgettable, and perfectly rendered” (Dennis Lehane) novel—a poignant and probing psychological drama that follows the lives of three siblings in the wake of a violent crime. One September afternoon in 1999, teenagers Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan Lang are walking home from school when they discover a boy lying in a field, bloody and unconscious. Thanks to their intervention, the boy’s life is saved. In the aftermath, all three siblings are irrevocably changed. Matthew, the oldest, becomes obsessed with tracking down the assailant, secretly searching the local town with the victim’s brother. Zoe wanders the streets of Oxford, looking at men, and one of them, a visiting American graduate student, looks back. Duncan, the youngest, who has seldom thought about being adopted, suddenly decides he wants to find his birth mother. Overshadowing all three is the awareness that something is amiss in their parents’ marriage. Over the course of the autumn, as each of the siblings confronts the complications and contradictions of their approaching adulthood, they find themselves at once drawn together and driven apart. Written with the deceptive simplicity and power of a fable, The Boy in the Field showcases Margot Livesey’s unmatched ability to “tell her tale masterfully, with intelligence, tenderness, and a shrewd understanding of all our mercurial human impulses” (Lily King, author of Euphoria). Margot Livesey is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Flight of Gemma Hardy, The House on Fortune Street, Banishing Verona, Eva Moves the Furniture, The Missing World, Criminals, and Homework. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Vogue, and the Atlantic, and she is the recipient of grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. The House on Fortune Street won the 2009 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Born in Scotland, Livesey currently lives in the Boston area and is a professor of fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks chris voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show i don't know that was kind of weak and it was kind of strong but i'm just gonna run with it so. So there you go. Welcome to the show. Welcome. Welcome one and all to the show. The big show. The top show. The show. I don't know. Why am I doing Barnum & Bailey Brothers in Circus?

Who knows? But we improv the front, so that's what makes it fun, right? Now, see ya. Anyway, so welcome to the show, guys. I don't even know if I'm going to stick with that in the edit. So if you still hear this part, I stuck with it in the edit. So there's the improv. Anyway, guys, we have, of course, the most exceptional guest. This guest we have on today, she is a brilliant author. Eight books.

Eight books. We're not going to talk about all of them. We'll have her on probably eight different times to talk about the other books if she wants. But we're going to talk about our latest book that's pretty darn amazing. But in the meantime, we have this special new thing that you can do. It's a special new book club where we talk about the authors that have been on the show. We talk about some of the backgrounds and arrangements, some of the things we discuss that we can, you know, we don't talk about everything, but we, you know, we,

we talk about what our experience was with the book, how we liked it, reviews, all those sorts of different things, things that we learned from the authors and stuff. We talk about that on the book club that we just set up two days ago, patreon.com forward slash Chris Voss. That's patreon.com forward slash Chris Voss. You can get involved. You can have fun. We're going to involved you can have fun we're going to

be giving away books we're going to be having all sorts of fun uh we might have some different things going on with authors that we can maybe get roped in to do some stuff with us but so check that out at patreon.com for just chris voss you can also go to youtube.com for just chris voss to hit see the video version of this um wonderful podcast that's being brought to you today today and you know whenever you hell you're listening to this um and you can also go to the cvpn.show uh the cvpn.com and tell your friends hey have you listened to chris foss show.com lately well you need to because it will improve the quality of your life. It's been shown to help grow hair if you're bald and, uh, God knows what else. I'm just going to get on with the show really seriously at this point. Um, today our most exceptional guest

is Margo Livesey. She is a woman who grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands in the grounds of a boys' private school where her father taught. Her first memories are of boys in kilts and sheep. She has taught in numerous writing programs and is the author of a collection of stories, eight novels including Eva Moves the Furniture and The Flight of Gemma Harding, or Gemma Harding, I think it is, and The Hidden Machineryinery Essays on Writing. She lives in

Cambridge, MA with her husband, a painter, and on the faculty of the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her ninth novel that we'll be talking about today is The Boy in the Field, has just been published. Welcome to the show. How are you, Margot? I'm doing fine, Chris. Thank you. It's a pleasure to talk to you. It's a pleasure to have you because the nice thing about novels, we were talking about this pre-show, the nice thing about novels is we don't have to deal with anything, you know, the horrors of what's going on in the news. So we can get into the fiction and that ethereal zone of kind of enjoyment and beauty and fun. So you've written this book, you've written eight books total, which is pretty darn amazing. That's a lot of writing. I'm still

working on my first book. So tell us what led you to write this book. Well, writing books is what I do. So I always have my antennae out for possible subjects, things that I think will interest me, but also interest a lot of other people. That's my hope. And a few years ago, I met an old school friend. I hadn't seen him in 40 years. And he described coming home from school one summer afternoon and to this tiny, tiny village where he lived, a village so small that no one locked their doors, picture of rural Scotland, the sheep, et cetera.

And at the bottom of his garden, he came across the body of a woman who'd been murdered. Oh, wow. And he was only in her presence for probably less than 15 seconds. But those 15 seconds changed his life. And 40 years later, he described it to me very, very vividly. And the idea stayed with me. I was deep in a novel called The Flight of Gemma Hardy when he told me this. So I wrote down the idea and I thought, I can do something with this. And in my novel, The Boy in the Field, three siblings, three teenage siblings are walking home from school one September afternoon in 1999 when everyone was worrying about Y2K and not worrying about the things that it turned out we needed to worry about. And they find this boy in a field

who's been assaulted and they summon help. The boy is saved, but each of the three siblings sets off on a separate quest. So it's like the beginning of a detective story. And indeed, I do have a detective in the novel, but it's not really a detective story in that not a great deal of time is spent on police procedure. Okay. So that's kind of the arc of the book, the overview of the book on what it's about.

Does it follow the pathway of the boys through and how it affects in the short term, or are there full lives, or where does it move from there? Excellent question. The book mostly takes place the autumn after they find the boys. So from September until New Year's Eve. And it follows each of the three teenagers. Matthew, the oldest, becomes a kind of detective figure trying to figure out how to find the boy's assailant. And he also befriends the real detective who is trying to find the boy's assailant. Zoe, who's turned 16, goes looking for someone who will see her. So she wanders the streets of Oxford, the novel is set in and around Oxford, England, and looking, I suppose one might say looking for romance,

so that's not exactly what she would say. And Duncan, the youngest, who's 13, is adopted. And he's never previously given much thought to the fact that he's adopted, even though he looks so different from his siblings. Suddenly, in the aftermath of finding the boy in the field, he really, really wants to find his birth mother. And so with the help of his parents, he sets out to look for her, to find her. Wow. So there's a lot of different stories and sub-currents of stories where it begins this journey where they each start following their own path and, of course, the events that probably, I'm sure, come from it. Exactly. And in the case of Duncan, there was a second sort of origin story for the novel, which comes very directly from my own life. After my father and my mother both died when I was very young,

and from the age of 22, I was convinced I had no living relatives, no one with whom I shared DNA in any meaningful way. And then a former student was doing research for me on Ancestry.com, and someone wrote to her and said, did Eva McEwan have a daughter? And I wrote to this woman, Gail, and it turns out I have all these relatives. They just happen to be in Australia. Holy crap.

They went to Australia and ditched you? That's not cool. No, all my grandmother's siblings went to Australia and ditch you? That's not cool? No, all my grandmother's siblings went to Australia. They didn't ditch me, Chris. I think back in the

day they used to ship people to Australia for a certain thing, but I think that was in the 1800s. It was a prison colony back in, I don't know, the pre-1800s or something like that england would send people there so maybe that was it maybe they're bad no i'm just kidding i'm sure they're wonderful people my great-grandfather um was a tailor and he made kilts you know that's an interesting story do you so um this is set in oxford are there boys in kilts running around or

uh because uh that's a different area but um tell us more about the boys and and kind of what their um what their experience is um there are no kilts in my novel no kilts in the novel i now realize this is a major we just lost the kilt crowd crowd. We just lost the Scottish kilt crowd. I'm sorry. They just tuned us out. They turned us off and tuned us out. That was it. But I do think some of my feeling interest in writing about teenagers

and my feeling about how full one's life can be as a teenager, how much is going on in your life as a teenager, how passionately you feel about things, comes from growing up in an institution. I didn't, in fact, have very much to do with the boys that my father taught, but still, it was a bit like watching a laboratory of a certain kind. I'll bet young boys are interesting. You know, it's an interesting time to go through that age and to experience it. So did you pull a lot of that for your writing on this book, what you saw in the boys at your father's school?

I think mostly, actually, I consulted the children of friends, many of whom were tremendously opinionated about all kinds of things, climate change, politics, work, socialism, gardening, reading. They had opinions. And it was wonderful to talk with people who I think what struck me was their their sense of right and wrong and how clearly they felt no something's wrong and if it's wrong we ought to fix it we're not just to stand by. Yeah, it's interesting, the innocence and the honesty of young people. I remember being principled and having principles, like I'm

like now, I suppose. But I remember, you know, believing in things so fervently and not willing to compromise at all on them. But this is interesting. So they basically, the three boys, they're walking home. They find the guy. He's bloody and unconscious lying in a field, and they save his life, really, when it comes down to it, right? It's actually two boys and a girl. The middle sibling is Zoe.

Okay. And so I would imagine, so they go on this big quest. Everyone's trying to find out who assaulted this boy they saved a life for. Is it the fact that they saved someone's life? Is that the real life-changing sort of event for them? I think that's life-changing, to do something so amazing and so powerful. And I think it's also life-changing to realize how random life is, that things just happen. Things happen for no reason. Bad things happen to good people. And that very much violates the world of childhood in a way i

mean i think we try to convince children that a plus b does equal c and um it's finding this boy he's unconscious when they find him really shakes their view and in in response to that, each of them goes off in a different direction or something else. And so it basically changes their life in an extraordinary way and kind of wakes them up to life, if you would. That's a very good way of putting it. And it was also interesting in the case of Matthew, the oldest, who's 17. You know, I think a lot of detective fiction, it makes it look really easy to find who did it. But in Britain, at least, the police report that 50% of crimes are not solved. Wow. So I tried to think about, well, what would it be like if you were a normal person and

with limited resources and you were trying to find out who committed this crime? Yeah. And it looks like they go through several different complications and contradictions as they get older, they start to become more adult and find themselves either drawn together or driven apart, I guess. And kind of interesting, the byline here is it's kind of a power of a fable. Is that true? Well, I worry that the word fable suggests

something rather reductive, like the tortoise and the hare or the fox and the ape. So there's a very simple message. But I did choose to set it in 1999, partly because I wanted to avoid or evade the mobile phone and our incessant connectivity. And partly to talk about a time which, at least in retrospect, seems less troubled than life does nowadays. And lastly, because I think children, by children, I mean people under 18, had more autonomy then. That they actually, in an odd way, had more freedom. And I wanted my three characters, Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan, to be able to conduct their own lives, to go off to look for assailants, to go and look look for romance to think about how to find your birth mother that that probably makes all the difference in not writing about this age because

i mean your story would have been really short it would have been like uh the you know because when i was growing up we went into the fields you know we went in the fields construction projects we wandered we adventured everywhere. Like everything was an adventure, especially wandering through fields and building tree houses and finding, finding like little club areas that we could have that were hidden in the woods. And, you know, we grew up in all that sort of thing. And, you know, if, if you'd written about today, it would have been like, uh, three,

three people weren't in the field because they were on Snapchat or playing with TikTok. So they didn't find the guy and he just died. And that was the end. The end. Or alternatively, they would immediately have dialed the police and that would have been the end. And they would have went back to TikTok. And then they would have probably Snapchatted some pictures of the poor guy, you know, because that's what people do now.

They're just like, that person's being murdered over there. Let's film them. No, I'm just kidding. Anyway, this is the way there's a romanticization behind novels and fiction and being able to get it out of our world because it's sure a whole lot more interesting

than some of the things we have going on today, that's for sure. So in the end, I suppose we shouldn't blow the ending, but they learn a lot about themselves, I'm sure, and as they develop the characters and you see the different pathways and the twists and turns that they go on. All of that is true. And I would say that the novel in some ways begins and ends like a detective story. And then in the middle goes in several different directions. But one of the reasons I was really attracted to the idea of detective

stories was because the detective is like the person of virtue walking into the valley of shadow, a man or woman of moral courage descending among the villains. And that idea and the kind of order presupposed by the traditional detective novel in which, I mean, when you start a detective novel, you can be really almost 100% sure that the villain will be found, the crime will be solved. And that idea, I mean, I play with that idea throughout my novel in various ways. But I think we read detective novels both to be frightened and to be reassured.

That's true, huh? We're looking for, you know, order in the world. And so you present the book, you know, some disorder, some disarray, and people find something that changes their life. I've always been, you know, it's an interesting life sort of, what would you call it, format where you, you know, this is one of the reasons I like to have interviews on the shows because I like to see where people go with the forks in their life. There's no one certain way that you have to go through your life. And like you mentioned earlier, there are challenges that we're presented with and different disasters or different things that lift us up.

And there's so many different ways to choose to go. And you go through life, and it's interesting to see the forks people take, the paths that they choose, whether they turn left or turn right down a road that takes them on a multitude of options. And I suppose the big thing is just what people, what they learn, whether it's us in real life or whether it's the characters in your book. And I think what you're saying is really interesting because I think we talk about

making a decision or making a choice, you know, but so often there's a kind of random element in how the big choices in our lives get made. Often the person we end up living with, or the university we go to, or the job we get, or the bus we catch. And it's an uncomfortable feeling to think that something very significant in your life happens almost by chance, that you have so little control. And I think my novel, The Boy in the Field, is just really interested in that intersection of the purposeful part of ourselves and the part of ourselves that has to acknowledge how much happens by chance. You bring up a great thing. I didn't really address that in my little fork in the road sort of thing, huh? Because there are things that

happen to you. You can wake up one day and you have cancer, and then that's a new fork in the road sort of thing, huh? Because there are things that happen to you. You can wake up one day and you have cancer, and then that's a new fork in the road you really didn't have a choice in. So there you go down the road. Is this your first book with kind of this sort of format of a detective sort of search and find yourself sort of plot? My second novel was called Criminals, and it was about a banker who finds a baby at a bus station, a Scottish bus station, and what happens. And again, it flirted with the idea of a crime, although quite what the crime is is a little unclear.

I mean, in a sense, everyone in the novel turns out to be a criminal. Some people don't return their library books. Some people don't return babies. I have that problem. I'm just kidding. In a later novel, The House on Fortune Street, I have a character who's almost a pedophile. He's very, very drawn to children and tries very, very hard not to act on that attraction. So I think there's definitely a way in which I think that bad behavior throws into

relief good behavior or shows us something about life that's really, really interesting. I would say nowadays we have perhaps too much bad behavior. We do have a lot of bad behavior. If you seen Twitter lately. Um, the, uh, or the news. Um, so this is really interesting. I like how you play with the characters, develop them and, and, uh, give them these possibilities and options. Cause I'm sure it makes for some good twists and turns in the story and their lives and their adventure together. Um, and, uh, I'm sure it ties up nicely at the end. Um, and, uh end. And what else do we need to know about the book and what it entails? Is there any other little stories or antidotes you want to give us out of

the book? Well, just a couple of things I'd like to add, seeing you're opening that door. Duncan, the sibling who's adopted, who's looking for his birth mother, is an artist and he's passionately in love with the work of an Italian painter, Giorgio Morandi. looking for a painter. And I read a wonderful essay by the Italian novelist Umberto Eco, who describes how in 1948, as a teenager, his little city in Italy held an exhibition of contemporary art, and he'd never seen a picture by a contemporary artist before. I fell in love with this painting by Morandi and went every day to visit it for the two weeks the exhibition was on. And I really loved that description of a young person encountering art and falling in love with art. And I also made one of the characters a philosopher so that Zoe, who's looking for someone, who's looking for a way to escape the family, if you will, gets to have a little bit of philosophical conversation to talk about ideas of cause and effect and

right and wrong and those kinds of things. But I will say that this is a short novel in which a great deal happens. So I don't spend pages and pages talking about causation. We have a few exchanges about it, and then we move on to something more exciting. There you go. Keep it moving, keep it exciting, and stuff like that. This is pretty interesting. So are you going to move on to another novel after this, or is there going to be extension of this book,

maybe where the characters go to the next stage of life? Or is this kind of completed their stage with the book that you have here? That is such a great and hard question, Chris. I've never written a sequel, but I begin to understand why some writers do. And I do remain very interested in these characters. So I think they're going to reappear in my work, though I may give them different names. Do you do that a lot when you write multiple books where the characters, you know, sometimes I suppose you would take

pieces and parts from different characters and move them to other books? I think it's more like I have certain preoccupations that I keep coming back to or things that I'm interested in, various kinds of minor criminal activity, the effort to make art or why we would want to do that, why we struggle to do that, the power of money in our lives and what a difference having money or not having money makes. And also the idea of family. I mean, as someone who didn't have any relatives for 40 years, I have a family I adopted whom I'm very close to. So when I did finally meet people to whom I was related, I kept looking at them and saying, so what

difference does it make that we're related? And do we both like kiwi fruit? And, you know, I was really sort of puzzled. I was like a water diviner looking for water. There you go. That sounds like me every day. I go to the fridge and look for water. I'm about to do one of the two. That must have been an interesting journey to find your relatives and stuff maybe that maybe that could be a basis for the next book where you where you talk about someone who's been looking for for their family and the whole

experience only you can put it into a different character format other than yourself and that would be interesting story i always wonder about people that that do that they they look for their parents um one of my business partners' girlfriends, she had been adopted, put up for adoption at age three. And I don't think she was searching for a long time to try and figure out who her parents were. I don't know if she ever did, but I know it was kind of a bucket hole she was trying to fill for a long time.

Yeah. So interesting book. And where can people get it? Give us the dot coms or people can look it up and everything else. Well, I have a website, margolivesey.com. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where there are a number of wonderful independent bookshops, Newtonville Books, Porter Square Books, Harvard Square Books, Brookline Booksmith. And I teach in Iowa City, where there's a wonderful bookshop called Prairie Lights Books. And so I really recommend independent bookshops and if you can't remember the name of an independent bookshop then there's something called bookshop dot org and if you go to that you can buy a book which will benefit an

independent bookshop so you are supporting a larger organization of independent bookshops. And I'll refrain from mentioning the obviously very wealthy person who is a last resort on hopes. But support your local bookstores because, I mean, even here where I'm at, there's these really classical bookstores and they're really struggling with covid19 because people weren't going in anymore and they were already you know on the edge anyway because so many people don't read so much anymore and they probably should uh get from the news and everything else um so uh check out the book uh go ahead and order it up guys you can go to all the different

wonderful places uh that margo mentioned and uh it's the boy in the field a novel um i think you'll find it most excellent uh it sounds like she's got a lot of experience in writing and stuff like this um and one final question i have for you is uh why is haggis so nasty for the Scottish people? What's going on there, man? Well, I hate to break it to you, Chris, but I'm that very rare person, a lifelong vegetarian. And so I've never eaten haggis. But haggis is actually having a tremendous comeback in Scotland. And you can go to all kinds of posh restaurants and get haggis wrapped in phyllo and, you know, haggis and frog's legs. And so do not disdain the humble haggis.

I think you're going to find it in America very, very soon. There you have it. Do not disdain the haggis. Yeah, I just figured I'd throw that in there for fun. But seriously, though, if I had seen haggis as a child growing up in Scotland like you did, I'd probably be vegan too permanently. So, yeah. Run for the hills.

Run for the hills. Well, thanks to my friend Margo for coming on the show. We certainly appreciate you being here. Be sure to check out her book and her other books that she's got there. You can get them from all the different places. I'm looking at pictures of haggis here. I've got to turn away. And be sure to follow thecvpn.com, thechrisvosspodcastnetwork.com.

You can subscribe to the show over there, youtube.com forward slash chrisvoss, and go to patreon.com forward slash chrisvosspodcastnetwork.com you can subscribe to the show over there, youtube.com forward slash chrisvoss and go to patreon.com forward slash chrisvoss so you can see the new book club that we have launched there. Thanks to my audience for tuning in and we'll see you next time.