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Susan ElderkinSusan Elderkin
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Bibliography |
Prizes and awards |
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Biography
Susan Elderkin was born in 1968 and grew up in Leatherhead, Surrey. She studied English at Cambridge University and later, Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia with tutors Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain, for which she was awarded that year's Curtis Brown scholarship. She works as a freelance journalist and teaches Creative Writing at Manchester University.
Her first novel, Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains (2000), tells the story of Theobald Moon, an English emigré in the Arizona desert, who brings up his daughter Josie on fairy-tales and ice-cream, while all the time concealing a terrible secret. It won a Betty Trask Award and was published in nine countries. The following year she was listed as one of twenty-one 'Orange Futures' women writers for the twenty-first century.
Her second novel, The Voices (2003) - again very much inspired by a remote, desert landscape - is set in Western Australia, and is the haunting tale of Billy Saint, a white boy who is 'sung up' by an Aboriginal spirit child and made to love her for ever. It was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Ondaatje Prize, in 2005.
In 2003, Susan Elderkin was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British Novelists'. She currently lives in London, but escapes to remote regions of the world whenever she can.
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Fiction
Bibliography
Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains Fourth Estate, 2000
The Voices Fourth Estate, 2003
Prizes and awards
2000 Betty Trask Award Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains
2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (shortlist) The Voices
2005 Ondaatje Prize (shortlist) The Voices
2007 Society of Authors Travel Award
Critical Perspective
in 2003, Susan Elderkin was chosen as one of Granta’s 20 'Best of Young British Novelists' and listed as one of the 'Orange Futures' women writers for the twenty-first century. She has also won a Betty Trask award and been nominated for The Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, which is given to an author who has best evoked a spirit of place in their work. It is not difficult to see why she has come to the attention of prize boards. Elderkin’s work demonstrates an admirable desire to engage with concerns beyond the personal. There is an interest in a universality of emotion and human behaviour, an undoubted daring and courage which enables her to take risks with form, setting and subject manner. There is an undeniable seriousness to her work.
Both of Elderkin’s novels to date deal with ghosts and secrets. Her debut, Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains (2000), is the tale of Theopold Moon, who knocks back his own pee for breakfast. Moon is a 34-year-old overweight Englishman, who, until his mother’s death, lived with her his whole life. Desirous of change, and puffed up with a sudden sense of freedom, Moon decides to move to the Arizona desert. There, he buys a plot of land and a mobile home, and sets about practising Yoga and working on his garden desert. Theopold Moon reminds me of William Trevor’s Mr Hilditch in Felicia’s Journey, or John Fowles’ Fredrick in The Collector. That is not to say that Moon is, like them, a murderous psychopath, but in his withdrawn way, his 'out-of-place-in-his-own-skinness', he shares some of their awkwardness and their slimy sudden kindness. He may be endearing and amiable, a bumbling comic soul, yet, as the story moves on, he becomes less and less appealing, and his skewed, out of balance psychology begins to creep through the gaps. Elderkin uses the third person to tell Moon’s story but allows Josephine, Moon’s daughter, to narrate her tale. We see Josephine grow up throughout the novel, from loving four-year-old to sullen teen. We watch the warm and ordered haven Moon builds for Josephine begin to disappear into disaffection as his daughter moves towards adolescence, falls out of love with the fairy tale world in which she lives, and becomes frustrated at her father’s continued rebuttal of questions about her dead mother.
Josephine’s narration is one of the most interesting aspects of Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains. When we first see her at the age of four, Josephine tells her story in an intelligent, wry, adult voice. While at first, this seems unusual, it soon stops feeling incongruous. Josephine is the rational one, the ‘adult', the one who has a wisdom beyond her years. It is her father who remains lost in a twisted childlike innocence, unable to truly occupy space in the world of the real; living in fantasy, unable and unwilling to accept his own history.
Elderkin’s debut also tells the story of Slovakian shoe factory worker, Eva Kigocka, and her lover Tibor, the ice-cream seller of indeterminate nationality, who together flee Europe for the USA and a new beginning. Elderkin switches between the two strands of the novel, counterpoising the intense heat of the desert with the winter snowscapes of Eastern Europe with deft skill, gradually establishing links between the narratives, and posing a number of questions which hang unresolved until the dark and troubling conclusion. A well-structured and bold debut novel, Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains has charm and originality, and is evidently the work of a writer of great imagination.
Elderkin’s second novel, The Voices (2003), is, if anything, more daring than her first. A self-confessed ‘desert junkie’, the author chooses once more to set her tale in this most preternatural of landscapes. Deserts dominate her narratives, the endless open spaces evoked with a certain feel for the lyrical, the poetic, the way in which we are quite literally of the land that houses us. 'I think people are formed by place,' Elderkin has said, 'you can't really have character without place … I became fascinated by the sort of people who live in desert regions, and the way in which they have adapted to the harsh conditions.' The Voices is an elegy for a lost world, a hymn to an Aboriginal Australia stripped of life, culture, and its sense of self. Set in the blood-red desert of the Kimberley, it is the tale of Billy Saint, a young boy fascinated by kangaroos and attuned to the spirit of the land, where he hears the song of an Aboriginal girl calling him, drawing him in, ‘singing him up’, making him love her forever. We see him years later, with horrible injuries, attempting to explain himself to the nurses and doctors; it is his haunting that will be central to the novel. The Voices is aptly titled, given that it is a chorus, a play of disparate identities, a multiplicity of viewpoints involving a vocal wind, loquacious spirits, mineworkers, swaggering unreconstructed Ozzie males, gullible tourists and eyes-on-the-fast-buck guides.
The most impressive aspect of The Voices is Elderkin’s ability to evoke the spirit of another land. Only an Australian could say whether Elderkin has truly achieved this or not, but to me her novel feels authentic. It doesn’t read like a lame impression, a two-dimensional portrait reliant upon stereotypes. Seductive and sensual, beautifully harsh and enticing, the land is the central feature of Elderkin’s second novel; it is what we keep coming back to when all the voices threaten to become a maddening cacophony. Some of the strongest parts of the novel are the domestic scenes in Billy’s family home, and later, when as an adult, he develops an oddly unphysical relationship with a single mother. We are left wanting more of this, and perhaps a little less of the attempt to capture the pain of Australia’s past. The Voices suffers at times from feeling like a thesis, a demonstration of an argument, for then its characters – who are quite wonderfully drawn - suffer, burdened as they are with representative weight.
Susan Elderkin is to be commended for ignoring the typical territory of British novelists, and not falling prey to the portrayal of metropolitan neuroses. She has a gift for structure and character, for language rich and evocative, and, given her notable refusal to be anything less than original, I think we can expect great things.
Garan Holcombe, 2005
Contact information
Publisher (General enquiries)
Fourth Estate
HarperCollins Publishers
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 8JB
England
Tel: +44 (0)20 8741 7070
Fax: +44 (0)20 8307 4440
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
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Agent
Aitken Alexander Associates Ltd.
18-21 Cavaye Place
London SW10 9PT
England
Tel: +44 (0)20 7373 8672
Fax: +44 (0)20 7373 6002
http://www.aitkenalexander.co.uk
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