Читать книгу Howdunit - Группа авторов - Страница 30

I have used East Anglia as a setting for a number of my novels, the last example being Devices and Desires. The book had its genesis when I was exploring Suffolk with an elderly long-standing friend, Joyce Flack, who drove me in her ancient Mini. I stood for a few minutes alone on a deserted stretch of shingle and looked over the cold and dangerous North Sea. I remember that there were two wooden fishing boats scrunched into the shingle and some brown nets strung between poles, drying in the wind. Closing my eyes, I could hear nothing but the tinny rattle of the shingle drawn back by the waves and the low hissing of the wind, and I thought that I could have been standing on the self-same spot a thousand years ago, hearing the same sounds, looking out over the same sea. And then I opened my eyes and, looking south, saw the silent and stark outline of Sizewell nuclear power station dominating the coastline. I thought of all the lives that have been lived on this shore, of the windmills, once providers of power, now prosperous homes; of the ruined abbeys at Leiston and South Cove, which seemed like monuments to a decaying faith; of the detritus of my generation, the great lumps of concrete half embedded in the shingle, and the concrete pillboxes, part of the defences against the expected German invasion on this coast. And immediately I knew with an almost physical surge of excitement that I had a novel. The next book would be set on a lonely stretch of East Anglian coast under the shadow of a nuclear power station. The book, at present no more than a nebulous idea born of a moment in time and a specific place, might take more than a year to research and plan and the writing even longer, but already it has life.

Rural landscapes are a crucial ingredient of Ann Cleeves’ fiction, and have provided vivid backdrops to successful television series based on her books, Vera and Shetland, as well as her new Two Rivers series, set in north Devon. Here she offers thought-provoking observations about the connections between people and place.