The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel (67 page)

A lot of that research was similar to Tristan’s. But he never worries about the thing that I found the hardest, which is getting inside a culture. It’s one thing to be correct with superficial details. But to be true to an entire vanished civilization—the way different people talked or acted, what they cared about, what they shared and what they kept to themselves—it’s nearly hopeless. The closest you can get is reading what these people left behind, their letters or diaries or memoirs. So I read as much as I could, until I felt neck deep in their world. No amount of research ever felt sufficient. But at some point I just had to close my eyes and imagine.

As Tristan researches more about Ashley and Imogen, he is often surprised. Did anything surprise you when you were conducting your own research for the book? If so, what?

I was surprised nearly every day. And if I wasn’t surprised, I’d feel like I wasn’t learning enough. It’s the surprising things that shift your view of a period, or give you details that later become important. I’d be trying to figure out how long it took to send a letter from the Somme to London, and I would read something unexpected about codes in soldiers’ letters. Often I barely noticed these things when I first read them, but they stayed inside me and came out later.

The best surprise was writing something from my imagination, then finding it mirrored an archive later, in a document I’d never seen before. It was usually trivial things—I’d imagine Imogen knitting an afghan, or Ashley writing a telegram about Poste Restante letters, or Eleanor ordering certain pigments from Paris. Then I’d read a letter mentioning knitting an afghan all night or Prussian blue pigments or Poste Restante letters. It felt like a small miracle every time it happened. I hadn’t done anything special, of course. I’d simply seen a detail elsewhere and it had entered my picture of the period, so I had put it in the novel. But it felt good to be vindicated.

Eventually the line dividing truth from fiction began to blur. I was going to the same places as Tristan and looking up the same things, and occasionally finding results similar to what I’d imagined Tristan finding. Sometimes the sense of unreality was so strong that I had to remind myself that the letters I was holding were real, that they had been written by real people who had held those pages at the Somme or on Everest. After dealing with so much fiction, the reality of history seemed too much to believe. But it was true.

The climbing sections of the novel are particularly vivid. Did you rely on books or other research to get a sense of what an Everest expedition might be like?

Everest has a wonderfully vast literature—a mythology of its own—but it can be overwhelming. I studied every relevant book I could find, but also photographs, maps, films, newspapers, climbing manuals, everything under the sun. It kept me busy for years. The 1920s expeditions left behind detailed records in the Geographical Society and the Alpine Club in London. There I was able to see things like climber’s diaries and detailed equipment lists, as well as many letters.

But I most wanted to understand what it felt like to be up there in a tent in a blizzard, or traversing stone slabs in nailed boots. The official expedition books were fairly dry, but fortunately the memoirs of climbers from the 1920s and 1930s expeditions were often vivid. I also read more recent climbing books, because although the equipment and techniques have changed, the sensations of cold or altitude are largely the same.

Eventually I went to Everest myself, traveling through Tibet to the base camp. It was an incredibly hostile environment—even more cold and dry and windy than I’d imagined. But the mountain was hypnotizing. I could have stared at it for days. Finally I understood the magnetism of it, the reason that men like Mallory kept coming back. Once you’ve seen Everest, you’ll never forget it.

Your characters are so well fleshed out, they feel like people that your readers should know. Were they based on anyone in the historical record? How did you come up with them?

History was always the starting point. Ashley is a climber and Imogen is from a very specific background, so I began by imagining the world they would have come out of, the kinds of people they might have known. The best way into this was looking at real people. Eleanor and Imogen seem to have been influenced by Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, the painter, but I didn’t do that deliberately. Eventually it just creeps in.

In the same way, you couldn’t imagine a character like Ashley without the examples of the original Everest climbers, particularly George Mallory. He was such a magnetic spirit that you get the idea that all the Everest climbers were men of great artistic and intellectual passion. But they were actually quite different. I tried to get to know all kinds of climbers from the period to broaden the foundation for Ashley’s character.

But no matter what your inspiration, characters ultimately just need to feel human. I might decide that Imogen loved Nijinsky’s dancing or Laforgue’s poetry, or that Ashley was an advocate of guideless climbing. But what really defined Imogen was her passion, a kind of emotional conviction I’d witnessed in certain people in my own life. In Ashley’s case, I began to understand him through his humor, a gallows humor I’d often seen in books and letters from the war. I thought Ashley’s humor might conceal what he really cared about. So you start with history, but ultimately the characters grow from what you believe about people. And your imagination.

What would you like your readers to take away from Tristan’
s
quest?

The beauty of literature is that everyone can take away something different. I see fiction as a kind of mirror to the world—a human reflection, not a factual one—and I don’t think novels should have a single meaning any more than life does. I try to tell a story without telling the reader how to feel about the story. The hope is that if you place readers close enough—until they’re experiencing what’s happening before them—they’ll have their own emotions, richer and more individual than anything a writer could impose.

But of course, I have my own feelings about Tristan’s quest. I spent a lot of my twenties chasing after some grand ideas I’d got in my head. I wanted to see everything, to experience everything. That gave me certain ambitions, but it also made me unhappy, because I was never really satisfied with what was around me.

Tristan is caught between his ideas and his reality. When he starts learning about Ashley and Imogen, everything in his own life seems trivial by comparison. But as time goes on, I think Tristan understands that what draws him to Ashley and Imogen isn’t some grand historical legacy, but that both of them craved something greater in their lives and were willing to fight for it. That’s what Tristan wants—to know what matters and go after it. In the end, I think he does that. He has to turn away from the past and that’s hard for him. But ultimately he chooses his own life.

Can you tell us anything about the novel you’re working on now?

It’s set in Europe between the wars, so it pretty much picks up where this book ends. I find the 1920s and 1930s to be the most fascinating period. There was so much political turmoil and at the same time such remarkable artistic achievement. I’ve been making these huge timelines and the backdrop is astonishing—the publication of
Ulysses
and
The Wasteland
in 1922, the German hyperinflation, American expats flooding the Paris Left Bank, the Nazis and Communists battling in the streets of Berlin, another world war looming.

But that’s just the setting. What interests me are the human relationships within all this—what they were like, not only around the centers of power but on the fringes of empires, in the remote corners of deserts or mountains. It’s a big story, so eventually I’m going to have to whittle it down to what works best.

I’d promised myself I wouldn’t do another historical book, because it’s so demanding. But I think the need to anchor things to research also anchors them to the real world, and that’s a good thing. I’m trying to get as immersed as I can, as close as possible to experiencing the things I’m writing about. And I’m continually inspired by the people whose books or letters I read—not because they teach me about history, but because they teach me about being human. Maybe one day I’ll give up on the past and write about other things. But not yet.

AUTHOR PHOTO BY MARLENE DUNLEVY

Justin Go was born in Los Angeles. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley and University College London. He has lived in Paris, London, New York City and Berlin.

At present he is at work on his second novel.

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition May 2014

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Go, Justin.

The steady running of the hour : a novel / Justin Go. — First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.

p. cm.

1. Young men—California—San Francisco—Fiction. 2. Inheritance and succession—Fiction. 3. Family secrets—Fiction. 4. World War, 1914–1918—Fiction. 5. Mount Everest Expedition (1924)—Fiction. 6. Mountaineers—England—Fiction. 7. Everest, Mount (China and Nepal)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3607.O22S74 2014

813'.6—dc23  2013027387

ISBN 978-1-4767-0458-6

ISBN 978-1-4767-0460-9 (ebook)

Epigraph