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Paul Spalding-Mulcock
Features Writer
@MulcockPaul
8:59 AM 31st October 2020
arts

Interview: Louise Fein, Author Of People Like Us

 
I recently read and reviewed People Like Us by debut novelist Louise Fein.

Beautifully written, her carefully modulated prose, meticulously crafted plot and vividly realized characters give the reader a tender novel which skilfully confronts truths as brutal as they are disturbingly visceral.

Yet, Fein gives us a book of hope, not one of abject, unmitigated sorrow. Counterbalancing the iniquitous horror of nascent anti-Semitism spreading its loathsome influence over a hijacked nation’s zeitgeist, Fein employs historical fiction to look Janus-like, both back to a tumultuous past and forward to our own tainted epoch.

Aharon Appelfeld said, ‘The Holocaust is a central event in many people’s lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century’. Fein explores this ineluctable truth, dextrously illuming minatory warnings, whilst also finding comforting humanistic insights, resiliently shining within her dark subject matter.

Interviewing the author of People Like Us evinced its creator’s inextinguishable belief in mankind’s capacity for candescent courage and unconquerable compassion. I fully expected the author of such a book to be intellectually and emotionally engaging, and a fine example of what George Eliot coined a ‘meliorist’…I was not disappointed!

Fein’s protagonists are children when we meet them. What of her own childhood?:

"Much of my childhood, when not pretending to be a pony or on my bike, was spent with my nose in a book, or escaping the mundane of everyday life in the vastly more interesting world of my imagination. I think I’m still that person and burying myself in my writing has been a welcome escape from the crazy times we are living through. I have always loved to write and as I grew into adulthood, I wrote stories, diaries and poetry."

Fein qualified as a lawyer before working in finance. "Life became busy with a career, husband and three children and I had little time for writing. But the bug wouldn’t leave me alone’" She went on to run a successful commodity consultancy business. Her unsatiated writing bug refused to lay dormant. The tipping point for Fein came when she, "saw an advertisement for a master’s degree in creative writing, aimed at writing a first novel. I went home and told my husband with a sigh, how much I would love to sign up for that course. 'Go for it', he said."

The result was People Like Us, or Daughter of the Reich in the USA and Canada, and the book is also being translated into ten foreign languages.

Having found the courage to give up her career and follow her creative desires, I wanted to explore the artistic agencies acting upon these newly liberated forces:

"I would say that no specific author has influenced my writing, it is more the amalgamation of many. I think it’s also important to develop your own style and voice, rather than try to emulate anyone else. I read really widely, but the books I love most are those which are beautifully written, emotionally engaging and say something about the human condition.

"Authors I love are Kate Atkinson, Khaled Hosseini, Maggie O’Farrell, Tracy Chevalier, Ian McEwan to name but a few. I also love Jane Austen, Graham Greene, the Brontë sisters and crime writers such as Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith".

Like many of us, Fein does have a small cadre of favourite writers:

"Small Island, by Andrea Levy; To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee and All The Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr. These books resonate with me because they are all stories of discrimination and the terrible treatment by people of each other, but the kindness, bravery and love of extraordinary individuals who are prepared stand up, in small or large ways, against the tide of hate.

"Books which were of particular resonance or influence for my debut novel were All The Light We Cannot See, The Book Thief, Markus Zusak; and Alone in Berlin, Hans Fallada. All very different, but equally brilliant at portraying the stories and bravery of individuals caught up and swept along by terrible events".

Louise Fein
Louise Fein
Fein drew on her own family history as well as the rich reservoir of her diverse reading. Referring to People Like Us, she says – "that novel was always going to be around exploring the life of my father’s family who had fled to London and New York as refugees in the 1930s from Leipzig, Germany. Many drafts later, and this became my debut novel, People Like Us, published this year by Head of Zeus’"

For me, Fein’s prose is delicately modulated, perfectly calibrated to achieve her artistic purpose at each point in the plot’s development. I hear a consciously restrained authorial voice, assiduously distilling both light and dark. Fein, though, characteristically holds her own view: "I don’t consciously try to adopt any style or voice. I just write in the only way I know how, which I suppose is from the heart. I suppose at the end of the day, I write the sort of book I would want to read".

Consciously or otherwise, Fein is evolving as an author - "I think my process is developing over time and experience. It certainly began as quite haphazard, with a basic idea and characters and trying out different ways of telling the story. I’ve honed and shortened the process somewhat by planning more than before. However, I definitely feel that the very first draft benefits from the creative freedom of just taking an idea and characters and seeing where that takes you".

I wanted to uncover the authorial intentions she wove into her debut:

"I suppose the main objective of the book is to explore and show just how easy it can be to brainwash a civilised nation. How we imagine none of this could happen to ‘people like us’ and yet it absolutely could and does. It’s about thinking about how we take our freedoms and institutions of democracy and justice for granted but how in reality they are fragile and must be protected. We must not go down the route of not allowing freedom of debate and thought, because without it, we live in silos of ideas and the conviction that our own ways and ideas are the right ones.

"I think we all like to think that in a situation like 1930s Germany we would be heroes and resist the forces of evil, but when it’s your own loved ones who are threatened, the reality might prove rather different.

"I think another theme in the book is a feminist one. I wanted to look at the role of women during that period. Above all, I hope that the book engenders discussion and discourse!"

One of the great triumphs of the book is the use of her chief protagonist, Hetty Heinrich, as an unreliable, but transformative first-person narrator - "I suppose the trickiest aspect of writing People Like Us was choosing a protagonist who was 'the enemy', but still make her a sympathetic character. I chose to do this because I felt the story was more powerfully told from this point of view. I’d read so many stories told from the perspectives of 'victims' or unwilling bystanders who were drawn into the horrors through lack of choice, but very few from those who bought into the rhetoric, and let's face it, some certainly did.

"People at the time didn’t have the benefit of knowing where this was all going to lead. Some people have commented that Hetty, my protagonist, was naive but people were, and that is the point. We make decisions in our daily lives having no idea what the ultimate consequences will be. I had to balance the realistic views a girl like Hetty would have had, with the sentiments of a modern readership, who will find those views reprehensible".

For me, Fein skilfully exploits Hetty’s naivety as the fulcrum of her authorial intention -"Children are innocent and if they are fed a twisted ideology, we can blame the adults rather than the young people themselves. Of course, Hetty undergoes a journey where her eyes are opened and her character undergoes a transformation, so I hope that for most readers, they can live with the early parts of the book!"

Fein also had another difficult creative hurdle to clear in the form of rendering Hetty’s father morally repellent, whilst also making him a convincing rendering of a real person, not just a loathsome thematic bag carrier - "I didn’t want him to be a stereotyped nasty Nazi, which of course he is. I think after a few drafts I tried to think of him as a father, a husband, and in his own eyes at least, a 'good' guy. This helped me to make him a more rounded person". By giving her character verisimilitude, she also gives him the power to shock, to viscerally disturb even the most equanimous of readers.

Hetty is a child when we meet her. She becomes an adolescent as the book progresses. Page by page, Hetty’s dialogue, inner monologues and private journal entries echo her own intellectual and emotional growth: "It was important to get the tone right for an adult book without it sounding juvenile. Hetty’s voice had to change through the book to reflect her growing maturity...it was also incredibly useful to be able to explore how the characters’ childhood experiences made them the adults they ultimately became."

Becoming an author presents challenges beyond solving authorial dilemmas: "The journey from concept to publication for most first novels is a very long one! I think one of the biggest challenges is to simply keep going when you think the chances of the novel ever making it to be a real book feel so infinitesimally small. Resilience and continued belief in your work is something you need to build up and hold on to …knowing that you can make it better, but not knowing quite how. Then wondering if it really is good enough to show the world.

"Once you are over that stage, getting the inevitable rejections from agents and publishers can be hard. But you only need that one to love it. I think the next challenge is all the silence and waiting once you have your publishing deal, and the fear it is all going to be a great flop and no one will buy your book".

A debut novelist often merely glimpses the summit of the mountain they have chosen to climb. An alluring pinnacle often occluded by newly formed clouds. Our literary mountaineer knows this truth all too well…"then of course there is the challenge as an unknown author of getting your book noticed at all. Finally, there is the challenge of writing that second book and getting over the idea that the first was merely a fluke!"

The persistent demons of self-doubt are not the only ones to haunt many writers. Success brings its own unique challenges - "I think writing the first novel is rather stress-free and expectation-free, as you have all the time in the world, and you don’t know if anyone will ever actually read your book. Once published, however, you have the inevitable deadlines and weight of expectation to deal with. I didn’t realise I would find that quite stressful at times".

Fein has not walked her chosen path alone…"what has been lovely is the relationships forged with the online writing community, and the support we are able to give each other. Without that, this would be a much lonelier business. I know that I’m incredibly lucky in that I have a supportive spouse and family and am now able to write full time around family commitments’"

For me, Fein has a bright future ahead of her. I asked her about the next steps on her authorial journey: "My second novel, The Hidden Child, is written, and the first round of edits done. It is to be published next autumn by my current publishers here and in the US. It is set mainly in 1920s England during the rise of the eugenics movement, about an influential young couple working to advance the ideology that would later be embraced to devastating effect by the Nazis. They are, however, harbouring their own shameful secret which, if discovered, could destroy their lives. I’m in the early stages of researching and planning a third book".

So, Fein’s historical fiction, though of course rooted in the past, is very much, like its author, ultimately concerned with illuminating not just historical fact, but society’s ongoing challenges. Her pen may be new, but her soul appears to be far older. For me, Fein is a debut author whose future novels are likely to be just as insightful, provocative and impressively engaging as her emotive debut!