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How A Desolate French Village Inspired a Novelist
In August 2014, I gave up my teaching job in Lyon to look after a remote farmhouse for a friend of mine. I wasn’t looking for the good life. I just wanted a break from the city.
It was OK at first, but after a few weeks, I realised that once I’d tended to the garden and finished the few jobs my friend had left me, there wasn’t much to do. The nearest village was 14 km away and my nearest neighbour 2 km.
You could write a novel? A voice in my head said. I mean, why not? Man with vague literary aspirations finds himself in a lonely farmhouse in the middle of rural France. What are you waiting for?
I set up a desk in one of the back rooms and started.
Over the next six months, I got up at seven every morning and wrote while the sun rose up from the small wood in front of the house. At midday, I stopped and walked down the hill to the river, and when the spring came, I swam.
I’d written my novel in eleven Oxford cahiers (notebooks) that every kid in France has. I hadn’t meant to write it in long hand, it was just to get me started. But writing on those shiny pages with an old ink pen was so pleasurable that I couldn’t stop. And by the time I was halfway in, there seemed little point reverting to my laptop.
