Guest Post – Tim Pears

I have read all Tim Pears’ books from In The Place of Fallen Leaves (1993) to Landed (2010) and am looking forward to reading his new novel Disputed Land which is published this month. Tim has kindly agreed to write a guest post for me describing the background to his novel Landed which has just been released in paperback (I reviewed it here). The Kindle edition can be found here.

Tim Pears

All my work is inspired by the lives of those around me, they are the starting points of what end up as stories – the chaos of life sculpted into fictional form. To talk about the real life inspiration of Landed, the identities of the people in this article and their relationship to me have been hidden to protect their privacy.

Some years ago, a woman close to me fell in love with an Australian who was here in Britain as a Rhodes Scholar, while she was still in her twenties. They married, had a baby, and went to live down under. She did not settle. She left her husband, brought the boy, now a toddler, back to England. She soon married again, had a daughter, left the second husband.

When the boy was seven his father (who’d also remarried and had further children of his own) wrote to her, proposing that the boy go to live in Australia; he argued that a son needs his mother in particular for those early years but the paternal influence more thereafter. My friend agreed.

Three years later, desperate with guilt and longing, she consulted a solicitor. Following his advice, she arranged a visit to Australia, and on the last day, after saying goodbye, contrived to snatch her son and get him on a plane back to England. What the solicitor did not realise was that this tactic was doomed to failure, Britain and Australia both having become signatories of the Hague Convention outlawing such renegade practices between signatory states. A month later the boy was returned on a flight, accompanied by a neutral acquaintance, to Australia.

I’ve always felt particularly attached to this boy, and empathised with his confusion and pain. From now on, with communication between his parents impossible, I wrote to him every week. A relative made contact with his father. When the boy was older he came to Britain to study, and has since lived, in phases, between both sides of the world.

I have, touch wood, a stable family of my own, with a great woman. I came to marriage and fatherhood late: I was forty one when we married; we had our first child a year later. I’m quite sure that if such commitment had offered itself earlier I’d have made as big a mess of it as my friend did.

Around the same time I met my wife, a man I knew well and was close to also met someone, who soon fell pregnant. They had a son. Their relationship foundered. She met another man, and told my friend to leave their home. He did so, hoping compliance would be the best way ahead.

Unmarried, he appeared to have few paternal rights. He saw his son when it suited his ex-partner, though she was reasonable enough. But it turned out the other man was Australian, and he wanted to return there, with his British girlfriend and her child, and start a new family down under. My friend, powerless, watched his son being taken to live on the other side of the world.

Whereas with my female acquaintance’s first marriage, I’d identified with the child, now (with children of my own) I found myself imagining what it is like to be cut off from your child, or children – and to have no power over the decision.

It was from this point that the novel, Landed, began to form.

Subsequently, I spoke to a number of men, separated from wives/partners and children, about their emotional, psychological and legal experiences. I learned how the suffering of this discord and separation had acquired a particular contemporary form; that an adversarial legal system had adopted a simple formula in child custody cases: mother and child v father.

That for every feckless man who’d abandoned his responsibilities there’d be another bewildered father, guilty at the failure of his family, denied access to his children; often poverty stricken into the bargain.

Desperate men, one of whose stories I now wrote, trying to give flesh and blood to him, his partner, their children and those close to them. A man whose life falls apart, but is given a shot at a kind of redemption.

For more information on Tim, go to www.timpears.com

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