by Mary Swan
Trees
THERE ARE TREES in the old world, trees in the new world, some so deep in the heart of things that they’ve never been seen but still living, changing, touched by wind and rain and the skittering of tiny claws. Others closer to the world of men, and even trapped within it. Some have been started by design, but most are completely random, a seed blown by a breeze or a gale, or passed through the belly of a songbird. Parts can be named—crown, trunk, root—but each one grows in its own way, and some are twisted and stunted by the ones that surround them, while others burst up and through. Even the unseen trees are marked, by disease, by accident, by the paths of gnawing insects, and they grow around their wounds, and are changed by them. Others are marked by climbing children, notches cut and twigs broken off, and the thoughts of small boys are caught in the web of their branches. Some falling with the leaves, some slipping through in the tossing wind, but enough remain to whisper, when everything else is still.
Acknowledgements
WITH THANKS TO my agent Dorian Karchmar, my editor Jack Macrae, and assistant editor Supurna Banerjee; it’s all been a pleasure. Everyone else—if you think your name should be here, I’m sure you’re right.
Q&A with Mary Swan
1. Where did you get the idea for this story? What about the time period and subject matter appealed to you? Did you set out to write a novel?
The first spark came from something I happened upon several years ago—an account in a publication of a local historical society, of a man who had been tried and executed in the late nineteenth century for killing his family. I can’t really explain why that story caught me, but I did know immediately that I would do something with it. Some time later, I started to write a short story about a young boy who had witnessed this execution, and for some reason he watched it from a tree overlooking the jail yard. But of course this boy had a home, and a family and friends, and I began to see that there were many other people connected to the story, and many different ways to tell it.
2. Naomi suffers the loss of her first three children to diphtheria, and thereafter moves from England to Canada, where her husband’s troubles drive their small family from town to town. Mrs. Robinson, the doctor’s wife, likewise finds herself living a life she would not choose for herself. What did you hope to convey about the condition of women, either in general or in this particular situation?
When writing about the past, it’s important for me to really have a sense of what it was like to experience the world as an individual living in a particular time, and that means recognizing limitations as well as the thoughts and feelings and situations that are constant. Historically, women’s lives have been particularly restricted by their biology, economic dependence, and lack of political power. I don’t write to convey a message, but I did have that fact very much in mind when thinking about and creating the female characters in The Boys in the Trees.
3. The narration of the story switches from character to character to great effect; however, one significant perspective is missing. Did you deliberately avoid including a section from the point of view of the adult William Heath?
Yes, I knew from the beginning that I wouldn’t have a section from Heath’s point of view, just as I knew that I wouldn’t deal any more directly than I have done with the murders themselves. To have done either of those things would have made it a different kind of book. I suppose that I am most interested in the ripples caused by events, and the way so many things, especially human beings themselves, are ultimately unknowable.
4. At the end of the novel Eaton looks back on the town’s reaction to the murders, which linger in his memory. Did you always plan for the novel to span multiple generations?
That wasn’t part of my plan, but then again I didn’t have much of a plan when I began to write the book, only an idea of a number of things and characters that I wanted to explore. At a certain point, however, I began to feel a need to somehow bring things forward, and to give an idea of what might have happened to some of the characters, without using a neat, summative epilogue. In thinking about it now, I suppose that I was also not ready to let them go, if that makes any sense. I particularly didn’t want to leave Eaton stuck in that tree, without the suggestion that his life was all right, in the end, when it easily might not have been. Not exactly a happy ending, but as close as I’m likely to come to one.
5. What resonance, if any, does this story have with your own personal experience? Are the themes of family and memory ones that you have explored in your other works?
When I began thinking about this story, the idea of family was central to what I wanted to explore. I thought a lot about happy families and miserable ones, about lost families and damaged families, and about how much of our sense of belonging in the world is bound up in that relationship, in one way or another. The importance of memory ties into that, of course, and it does seem to work its way into almost everything that I write.
6. Your writing in this novel is very suggestive, details and their meaning rising slowly to the surface as the story progresses. Was this style particular to The Boys in the Trees?
I don’t think it’s particular to The Boys in the Trees; more likely a function of the way my mind works. Things usually take a very long time to gel for me, and I can walk around for months half-thinking about something I want to be writing, my pockets filling up with scraps of paper where I’ve scribbled phrases or ideas as they bubble up. It wouldn’t be true to say that I don’t have any kind of plan, or any idea about the direction I want for a story or the connections I want to make. But those things really only happen through the process, when I actually start writing the story.
7. You’ve captured the interior lives of young and old, male and female, with deft assurance. Did you find any section or character particularly difficult to write?
I started a number of versions of the “Forgiveness” section before I worked out one I was content with, and I think that a lot of the difficulty had to do with the character of Sarah, whose intensity and joylessness are quite alien to me. I was trying to find a way to communicate some kind of sympathy or understanding for a character who is not, to me at least, particularly likeable. Also, as I mentioned earlier, I began by trying to write what is now the last section, “Eaton—1889,” but didn’t get very far. I came back to it a number of times while I was working on the rest of the book, but it wasn’t until I thought of using dime novels that I was able to actually write it from beginning to end.
