From - The Official Book Club Guide: The Rules of Seeing by Kathryn Cope
In 2004, you won the Foyle Young Poets Award. Do you still write poetry? Was it always your plan to write a novel?
Since I started writing, aged about twelve, I wanted to write novels. More specifically I wanted to write stories. Novels were just the kind of longform story I was interested in. The trouble is, novels take ages to write, especially when you’re young and have yet to develop any kind of work ethic. I started plenty of novels but didn’t finish one until I was almost out of university, by which time I’d been writing for ten years.
Poetry happened sometime in the middle, and I discovered it could be quick – you could write a poem one day, edit it the next and boom, you’re done. Poems tell stories too, but they’re condensed down, like stories that have been left on the hob until they’ve mostly boiled away. I enjoy writing poetry, but my desire to write longer stories usually wins over my ability to condense.
Debut novelists often stick with a narrative viewpoint fairly close to their own. With this in mind, what made you take the brave decision to write a lesbian love story from the viewpoint of two female protagonists – one of whom is blind? Is there any chance that your next novel will be about a thirty-something male author from Yorkshire, or will you always take the most challenging literary road?
When I was twelve, I desperately wanted to be an actor. I went to a drama class on Saturday, bought Stanislavsky’s books and wore a lot of black. The trouble was, I was starting to realise I was a bit crap. Not dreadful, for a twelve-year-old at least, but not good enough to make a living out of it. At the time, that realisation hurt. Though I didn’t link the two things in my mind, I think writing was a replacement for playing a character on stage.
There were practical reasons for writing this book from the perspectives of Kate and Nova, but this is the more truthful answer – I like stepping out of my own skin. It gets boring being one person all the time. I like trying to imagine what it would be like to have been born to different parents, at a different time in a different city. Of course, that’s one of the great pleasures of reading. I don’t miss acting now or regret giving it up – as a writer I get to choose my own roles and build them from scratch. I still have the challenge of making those characters real for other people, and the corresponding pleasure if I succeed.
So yes, I do have characters in mind for future books who look and sound more like me. But they will probably play more of a supporting role. I find it more fun to write someone whose life is very different, and I think it helps me stay creative. If you don’t have your own experience to fall back on, it makes you work a bit harder.
Is the eye surgery that Nova undergoes in the novel really available?
There are lots of operations which can cure visual impairment. One of the oldest and most common is cataract removal, which has been attempted since ancient Greece and has been performed successfully since the eighteenth century. There are many different causes of blindness and many existing procedures to deal with them. Of course, many types of blindness are still incurable.
The only conceit in Rules is that a new operation has been invented. If the operation already existed, there would be the question of why Nova hadn’t been offered it sooner. It wasn’t really important what the procedure was, but it became clear to me while researching that it’s only a matter of time before such a procedure is invented. We’re making so many advances, medical and technological, I’m sure we will soon be able to treat a number of currently untreatable forms of blindness. Then we will have a generation of people like Nova, who have grown up blind and now must learn to see as adults.
At the beginning of the novel, Nova describes life from the perspective of a blind woman. After her eye surgery, she then faces the challenge of seeing but struggling to interpret that visual information. How did you go about imagining and differentiating between these two experiences?
Halfway through work on the book, I became a father for the first time. Sam arrived in the early hours of a frosty February morning, and from the beginning it seemed that he was trying to take in everything around him. Of course, I knew he could barely see a handspan beyond his face, not to mention the fact that everything would still be upside down. Nevertheless, he looked with a sense of urgency, watery-blue eyes wide to the world.
Through the months that followed, the highs and lows of sleepless nights and developmental milestones, I couldn’t help but try to see the world as Sam was seeing it. In some ways it was frustrating – here I was, writing about a character learning to see for the first time, while living in the same room as someone who was doing it for real, who couldn’t tell me anything.
But often his curiosity spoke for itself. Watching Sam track an aeroplane as it crossed the sky and disappeared into a cloud, I realised that he had no idea that some solid-looking things were not solid at all. Watching his fascination at his own legs through a few inches of soapy bathwater, I realised how confusing the concept of transparency must be to him. Why are some things see-through, some opaque, some reflective? I watched him as he saw fire for the first time, and the ocean, and falling snow.
There are several cases of people who have lived blind for much of their adult lives, only for an operation to restore some of their vision. They are remarkable stories but, watching Sam, I was constantly reminded that all sighted people go through it, at least once. It’s just that very few of us remember what it was like.
In your Contents pages, you use hieroglyphic-like symbols to create a visual map of the story and its themes. How did you come up with this ingenious premise?
This was something I wanted to do as soon as I had the idea for the book. I really like novels that use different ways of marking the chapters, such as the prime number sequence used in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I was also thinking of a brilliant short story by Jonathan Safran Foer called A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease, in which he uses symbols to create a new set of punctuation marks.
To begin with I just wanted it to be basic shapes – circles, squares, crosses and so on. I imagined it as a visual alphabet. Just as children must learn to form vowel sounds aaa, eee, ooo, so Nova must learn the most basic shapes. But as I progressed in the novel I realised that a) I was going to run out of shapes before I ran out of chapters and b) it would be more interesting to see Nova’s visual development reflected in the shapes. So we go from geometric shapes to natural forms like a hand or a tree, on to manmade objects in the final third of the book.
The Rules of Seeing presents a very individual take on two classic fictional forms: the thriller and romance. While you use recognisable conventions of both genres, you also manage to subvert the reader’s expectations of them. Was it your intention to breathe new life into these much-loved but sometimes predictable formats?
I like fiction that crosses genre lines, though it can be a difficult thing to pull off as a writer. Agents, publishers and booksellers like things they can categorise – it’s difficult to sell something if you don’t know what to call it.
I think the mixing of genres also reflects my reading habits. I’m a shallow reader – I like to read widely, but I rarely go deep into any particular area. This would be a disadvantage if I wrote in a fixed genre, where a working knowledge of what has gone before is essential. But because I don’t know genres inside out, I don’t attempt to ape them. Rather, I can borrow elements from romances I have read, or thrillers I have read, and incorporate them into something I can be reasonably sure won’t copy anything.
There are a striking number of scientific references in your novel – many of them relating to physics and astronomy. Do you have a scientific background and what inspired you to include these concepts in your novel?
I was walking in the park the other day with my dad. We stopped for a minute under an oak tree and I noticed some strange growths on the bottom of the leaves that looked like freshly shelled garden peas. My dad is a science teacher – his speciality is biology, but he knows a lot about astronomy and geology and plenty of things besides. Within a minute he had told me not just about the lifecycle of the wasps that form oak galls, but also how a mixture of crushed oak galls and iron was the basis of one of the earliest inks, used by Leonardo da Vinci for many of his sketches.
This is typical of his way of looking at the world, forming connections between areas of knowledge we treat as discrete. I think that has always informed my writing and my reading. Oliver Sacks and Richard Feynman were brilliant scientists who were also brilliant at explaining their science to readers of their non-fiction. Fiction is another good way of approaching scientific concepts. But science also enriches fiction, allowing us to better understand human nature and our place in the cosmos.
In The Rules of Seeing, I wanted to look at the practicalities of learning to see for the first time, but also use Nova’s enthusiasm to show some of the things we take for granted as sighted people. Looking up at a starry sky is my favourite example. The stars are inconceivably distant, inconceivably vast, yet we perceive them across the gulf of space the same way we see our friends across a crowded room.
In portraying the female protagonists, you create a wonderful contrast between Nova, who is impulsive, childlike, untidy etc, and Kate who is more reserved, cautious, and orderly. Which character is most like you?
I thought it was only fair I pose this question to my girlfriend before answering. She can confirm that I’m anything but orderly.
As you’re telling a story, the character’s actions, inner thoughts and outer conversations all come from you. There’s nowhere else for them to come from. To use a metaphor that Nova would like, I think writing is like putting your personality through a prism, separating out the different wavelengths.
So I’m like Kate in some ways – I enjoy working creatively, I’m quite private, I’m a bit of a homebody. But Nova is closer to my heart, and perhaps closer to my personality on a good day, or after enough coffee. If in doubt, order the most ludicrous thing on the menu.
Is there one particular aspect of The Rules of Seeing that you hope will resonate with readers?
I think most people, when they’re writing a novel, don’t know what it’s ‘about’ until late in the process, if ever. They know the characters and what happens in the plot, but not the bigger question of why they’re writing this story in particular and why anyone should care.
When I started writing Rules, I knew it was a story about learning to see. There was a relationship in there, but it was rather incidental to the plot. Looking back, that relationship is anything but incidental – it is the story. I think people will take away different things, but here’s my take. The Rules of Seeing is, in part, a book about the things we take for granted, or fail to see through overfamiliarity. It’s a book about the importance of friendship, and the importance of love. It’s about the good things that can happen if we are honest with ourselves and with the people we most care about.
If readers take anything away from Rules, I hope it’s Nova’s optimism. If we are brave, remarkable things can happen. The world is open for play.
Which writers do you like to read, and do you have an all-time literary hero?
Growing up I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction, and I still do. I think Rules is an attempt to do something like a science fiction story in a real-world setting. I think I’ll always be rereading Iain (M) Banks and Neil Gaiman. I like comic fiction, particularly PG Wodehouse. His writing is like a miracle tonic if my own writing isn’t going well – after spending a little time in his company, some of the sparkle rubs off.
Perhaps my favourite writer is Russell Hoban. There’s really no way to categorise Hoban, and that’s part of what I love about him. An American expatriate in London, he wrote strange, charming novels and was never afraid to indulge his pet interests. Reading one of his books feels like walking about in Hoban’s brain for a while. I would recommend Amaryllis Night and Day as a starting point. It’s a wonderful, weird novel about two people who conduct a love affair in each other’s dreams.
Do you have a new novel in the pipeline and, if so, can you reveal anything about it?
I’m doing the final edits on my second book, which is currently untitled. It starts with a boat caught in a storm. By the end of the storm, the only people left onboard are an 85-year-old woman and a six-month-old baby. They’re marooned in the middle of the ocean, with no power and limited supplies. The woman, Ella, used to be a brilliant musician but now has dementia. As she tries to keep herself and the baby alive, her missing past starts to come back to her in strange ways.
It’s a survival story, but also the story of one woman’s remarkable life. It’s about memory and music and the way people stay with us after they’re gone. It’s different to Rules but shares a lot of the same interests – love and friendship and the varying ways we perceive the world. I really hope people like it.
