Author Jenny Ackland pens a piece for us about the process of writing her new novel, Hurdy Gurdy.
"We have to say how it is in our own time in our own way. We have to tell our story the best we can and go on." (pg.11, Hurdy Gurdy)
Hurdy Gurdy is a novel of ideas, and while it does deal with extremism – of ideology and oppression – it also asks questions for which there are sometimes no real answers, not in a binary sense. But while the book grapples with this, it also seeks to show that beauty can always be found in times of great darkness. That we find it in nature and we find it in art, and that even when things are at their bleakest, as humans we can try to look for light and joy. Some of us laugh as a way of coping with difficulty and stress and it’s these very human qualities that help us endure and connect to hope. It’s how we go on, how we survive.
I first had the idea to ‘write about a circus’ decades ago, before I was a writer, and when I came to actually develop the concept and write it, the world had changed and so had I. Over the last few years as I worked on the book we had the pandemic, and in the US the threats to the reproductive rights of women. It seemed impossible, surely the Roe v Wade legislation would never be dismantled. In the time I finished the novel and got the manuscript to my publisher and it was acquired, though, things had progressed, and what seemed ridiculous had actually happened. It all seemed timely.
Still my challenge remained: I wanted to write a quite political book, about serious themes so how could I write a book that would not saturate readers in darkness? One way was to make sure I included moments of humour and light, as well as observations of beauty in nature through the eyes of the characters. I also needed to show how laughter can and does exist alongside darkness; how historically people in terrible situations have always used humour to help survive, if not physically at least on a soul or spirit level. Another way to create a lightness in the book was to use a fragmented structure, with lots of air and space, to offer pauses for a person to breathe and step out of the intensity. To include other threads of thought: historical content about the old shows and animals, space missions, pineapples and clown philosophy. And still another was to have the main protagonist Win – newly nineteen – beginning to ‘wake up’, with her thoughts turning to love and what she might hope for herself in life. Love isn’t all you need but it helps, and it was important for readers to have someone to represent hope and the idea that a future exists.
But after all of that, one of my ambitions with this book was to offer certain readers my understanding and compassion in an almost secret show of support (while at the same time presenting two extreme sides of an ancient debate). It’s a book that might divide, but we are already divided. It’s a book that might make people angry, but girls and women are angry and growing more so. It’s an extreme book for the extreme times we find ourselves in.
Hurdy Gurdy
by Jenny Ackland
A powerful and important novel with a crucial and timely feminist message, from the Stella Prize-shortlisted author of Little Gods.