Foreign Bodies 1990
This is the story behind the novel
When I was eighteen I, too, left home to live in Cortona, the Italian hill-town later made famous by Frances Mayes's best-seller Under the Tuscan Sun. My novel shows a rather less idealised portrait of what both Tuscans and expatriates are like, possibly because unlike Mayes I have known both since childhood. My background is very different from my heroine's, and my reasons for leaving home quite different, but like her I had an Italian boyfriend and was waiting to go to university (in my case Cambridge, not to read my invented Art History course at Oxford.)
Santorno is an imaginary town, set in an imaginary part of Tuscany. Those who search for a railway line between Rome and Urbino will be sadly disappointed, and no town is named after St. Anthony - or indeed Saturn. What fascinated me was the way so many Tuscan hill-towns are generic. There is always a Via Nazionale, a Via Garibaldi, a local saint, a pompous mayor and various greedy shop-keepers; just as there are always young girls of good family having their first heady experience of the dolce vita, and assorted international drop-outs. Many of these are extremely nice people, but I prefer writing about flawed individuals to the sort with whom, in real life, I would choose to pass time.
In scrutinising my imaginary town I was influenced by Balzac, a perpetual love, and of course George Eliot's Middlemarch. It's no news to tell people that provincial life is mean and riddled with secrets, but it hadn't been done for Italy (as far as I know). I always wondered just how EM Forster's heroine Lilia fared being married to a Tuscan in Where Angels Fear to Tread; and I have known plenty of English and American girls who had done the same thing, usually with dire results.
Emma was named for two of the greatest heroines in literature (you are nothing if not ambitious when starting out): Jane Austen's Emma, and Flaubert's. Like the former, she is rich, spoilt and in need of a moral lesson; like the latter she is foolishly idealistic and romantic, which gets her into an increasingly squalid affair. Perhaps I should have realised that I, like Austen, had created a heroine whom nobody but myself would care for because her arrogance and rudeness brought down a torrent of critical wrath, especially from women reviewers. One quoted Sophocles, that "the unexamined life is not worth living", a particularly odd flourish as the whole point of the novel is that Emma does come to scrutinise what she is, and doesn't much like it. Perhaps what prevented some people from understanding that she is primarily a comic creation was the addition of the detective story element. I didn't want a rites-of-passage novel, and it struck me after reading Auden's essay on classic detective fiction how much the detective story could meld with that of a young person growing up. My favourite detective story of all is Oedipus (something to which I returned in In a Dark Wood), in which the detective uncovers something about him or her self as well as a crime.
The underlying structure of the novel is the tension between the body and the mind. Just as Santorno itself is divided into the beautiful, ancient upper town and the ugly but necessary modern town below, so Emma is torn between the needs of her mind and the desires of her body. The two men she falls in love with, Andrew Evenlode and Lucio Ferrante symbolise this, and although her choice is externalised by the murder plot it is also very much an internal one.