The Lockdown Tales
by Alan Whelan
GENRE: Fiction, Contemporary
BLURB:
Seven women and three men leave the city to avoid a pandemic. They isolate together in a local farm, where they pass the time working, flirting, eating, drinking, making music and above all telling stories. It happened in Florence in 1351, during the Plague, and gave us Boccaccio's Decameron.
Seven hundred years later, in Australia, it happens again. The stories are very different, but they're still bawdy, satirical, funny and sometimes sad, and they celebrate human cleverness, love, courage and imagination.
"Alan Whelan brings us a clever, sensual and sometimes poignant collection of stories that would make Boccaccio proud"
- Tangea Tansley, author of A Question of Belonging
"An old frame for a sharp new snapshot of contemporary Australia"
- Leigh Swinbourne, author of Shadow in the Forest
Excerpt:
It was late and getting cold by the time Margo’s story was done. I reflected that she’d come a long way, in the three weeks she’d been here. She’d got close to Sue and Stuart, and they’d helped her believe that she could come back from Harry’s death.
Stuart and Danny pushed my barbecue back to the house, with Sue and Margo helping to keep it steady. This time it didn’t tip over.
Bran and Astrid stayed close to the fire, which had died down from a bonfire to a campfire. Jayleen and Bob stayed close. Bob had slept through most of the stories and was now awake, and enthralled by the night, the lake and the fire. I heard Astrid say, “The beast with three backs!” She punched Bran, amused.
He put his arm round her and drew her close. Bob climbed onto Astrid, so Jayleen took her place beside Bran, and he put his other arm round her. The night was cold. I had no idea if he really did want a threesome, but if he did I thought his chances were still close to zero.
Grace had relented after a stoned night of mostly ignoring Amelia. They walked back to the house together. I didn’t fancy Amelia’s chances much, either. But I knew that I’d make no declarations to Amelia unless her infatuation with Grace had been resolved and gone.
I collected empty bottles and put them in my pack. I probably missed some, but I’d check the ground in the morning. I shrugged the pack on and trudged back to the house.
When I reached the verandah I turned and took one last look at the fire and the lake. Astrid was kissing Bran, with intent, and Jayleen had snuggled in tight against his back. I wondered if I’d underestimated his chances. Though I still didn’t know if he had any threesome intentions. I decided it didn’t matter and I didn’t care, though no doubt it would mean a lot to them.
I shut the door behind me and went up to my bed.
Interview with Alan Whelan
What made you want to become a writer?
A friend of mine is in a rock band. When he was ten his parents had realized he was musical and they took him to a music shop. They expected he’d get an electric guitar, because guitar players are the stars.
But he saw a bass, picked it up, started to play it, and while he wasn’t very skilled he had feeling right from the first note. So they bought him a bass. He’s a bass player. He just is.
I suspect I’m something like that. I’ve always thought about how the writers I liked tell a story, the tricks they used to make me care and keep me surprised, the way they give the story tension and shape. By the time I was eleven I was trying to produce my own versions.
Adults told me my stuff was good, though I’d hate to read those early attempts now.
But now I do think I’m good. I’ve got my own style, poetic but also clear and economical, and I can make people laugh, or get angry, or sometimes cry.
I’m fascinated by the craft of writing and how it works. That helps you to get better. I won’t necessarily think of a better story than one I thought of and told a year ago, but I do know if I told that story now I’d tell it better. That’s a good feeling.
So I’m a writer. I’m doing what I want to do, that I’m good at.
What inspired you to write The Lockdown Tales?
I started writing The Lockdown Tales in March 2020. For the foreseeable future I’d be spending a lot of time shut down and shut in, and I wanted to write a book that draws on the ways that people have found to live through pandemics before. I wanted to show that there are things worth holding onto and other things worth letting go.
It’s a book about people who get together and tell each other stories, and the first priority is that those should be good stories: funny, sad, bawdy, satirical, and so on. But there’s a sub-text: courage, cleverness, kindness and hope are better than their alternatives.
I wanted to revisit some of the ways – Boccaccio did this in the Decameron – that people can be together and back each other in hard times. There are stories like the one where Bertrand Russell meets the ghost of Lao Tse at a Chinese customs post, but most of the stories are in a realist framework. Realism does not mean despair.
Can you tell us a little bit about the characters in The Lockdown Tales?
The Lockdown Tales follows seven women and three men who leave their city in the early stages of Covid-19’s arrival and get together on a farm. I came to love and care about them as I wrote them. I hope you will too.
• Grace Chan is a Chinese student, in Sydney to work on a doctoral thesis on Chinese and Western attitudes to time.
• Danny Darrock, a former government policy adviser, got fired for trying to tell a cabinet minister not to do something cruel and stupid.
• Dr Margo Collona is in mourning for her younger brother, who died of Covid-19.
• Bran O’Siodhachain, laborer, survived a brutal case of Covid-19 but lost his girlfriend and his job.
• Sue Pullar, a chemist, is worried about Margo’s mental health, and looks after her.
• Stuart Pullar, an architect, is older than the other two men, and more practical. He also looks after Margo, and plays honky-tonk piano.
• Astrid Flagstad used to organise parties for very rich people in exotic parts of the world, before Covid-19 hit and travel stopped. She’s happy being unemployed and failing to learn the ukulele. Bran, she thinks, is nice.
• Jayleen Harcourt is the mother of four old Bob. She had a supermarket check-out job, which left her terrified of catching Covid-19 and bringing it home. She agrees with Astrid, about Bran.
• Amelia Appelstein is Grace’s doctoral supervisor, and finds herself attracted to her student.
• Gail Haut owns the farm on which nine of her friends are staying. She is generous and observant. She is a little in love with Amelia, whose attention is elsewhere.
Each has a story to live and issues to resolve. Every Friday, they tell stories o
their own: funny, sad, often bawdy, sometimes satirical, always unexpected and
always very human.
You know I think we all have a favorite author. Who is your favorite author and why?
My favorite writer is the poet and essayist Percy Bysshe Shelley. I admire him for his range, his originality and his ability to write passionately both about ideas and about humans. Perhaps it helps that he’s not a novelist, except for a couple of gothic thrillers he wrote as a schoolboy. So we’re not in competition and I don’t have to look on his works and despair.
Can you tell us a little bit about your next books or what you have planned for the future?
Today – actually literally today – I finished the second and last volume of The Lockdown Tales, so the set is now complete. The Lockdown Tales: Emergence should be on sale before Christmas.
To focus on The Lockdown Tales I stopped working on a novel about an American writer who gets caught up in superpower rivalry in Parsia in 1865. I’m taking a couple of days off, and then I’m going back to my novel’s characters, who are currently stuck halfway up a mountain, and wondering when their author is going to turn up and move things along.
What did you enjoy most about writing this book?
I liked the fact that it was hard. I had to think of 50 story plots, plus all the incidents that happen in the framing story. Then I had to tell those stories, clearly, simply, in the right language.
I was going into rivalry with Boccaccio, one of the greatest story-tellers of all time.
I couldn’t have set myself a harder challenge, and I really am proud of what I’ve achieved. It’s a good, readable book, with comedy, sadness and more depth than it pretends.
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Alan Whelan lives in the Blue Mountains of NSW, Australia. He’s been a political activist, mainly on homelessness, landlord-tenant issues and unemployment, and a public servant writing social policy for governments. He’s now a free-lance writer, editor and researcher.
His story, There Is, was short-listed for the Newcastle Short Story Award in June 2020, and appeared in their 2020 anthology. His story, Wilful Damage, won a Merit Prize in the TulipTree Publications (Colorado) September 2020 Short Story Competition, and appears in their anthology, Stories that Need to be Told. It was nominated by the publisher for the 2021 Pushcart Prize.
His book The Lockdown Tales, using Boccaccio’s Decameron framework to show people living with the Covid-19 lockdown, is now on sale in paperback and ebook.
His novels, Harris in Underland and Blood and Bone are soon to be sent to publishers. He is currently working on the sequel to The Lockdown Tales and will then complete the sequel to Harris in Underland.
Alan Whelan co-wrote the book, New Zealand Republic, and has had journalism and comment pieces published in The New Zealand Listener and every major New Zealand newspaper, plus The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald.
He wrote two books for the NZ Government: Renting and You and How to Buy Your Own Home. His stories also appear in Stories of Hope, a 2020 anthology to raise funds for Australian bushfire victims, and other anthologies.
His website is alanwhelan.org. He tweets as @alannwhelan.
His phone number is +61 433 159 663. Enthusiastic acceptances and emphatic rejections, also thoughtful questions, are generally sent by email to alan@alanwhelan.org.
CONNECT WITH ALAN WHELAN
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THE LOCKDOWN TALES PURCHASE LINKS
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3 comments:
Thanks for hosting!
I liked the excerpt.
I like the cover, thanks for sharing!
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