Cover Story
There’s a story behind this cover that stretches back decades and deep into the psyche of the characters of my latest novel, THE SILK PAVILION, which is out in June 2022 with Barbican Press: pre-order here or search in your own country’s Amazon.
“A brave and important book that reads like an engrossing thriller”
(Grace Nichols, Winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry)
Pre-order on Amazon in your country. Please add a review if you love it (release 9 June)
There’s a story behind everything. The house is often thought of as an analogy for the psyche in psychoanalysis, one of the key themes of the novel - as this book is a psychological thriller.
And just as a house is built brick by brick, our characters and our lives are built story by story. And as I often say, a story is built word by word. THE SILK PAVILION was a 6-year journey to build.
The story unravels from an idea that came to me on a stormy night staying in an old house in the magical town of Deià on the Mallorcan coast.
There’s a story behind everything. This story came to me on a stormy night in an old house in the enchanting village of Deià in Mallorca
There was a hole in the roof of the house and the Sirocco (a violent wind that blows in from the Sahara desert) howled round the house, whistling through the gaps in the tiles in the old roof and through the slits in the shutters. The pipes clanked as the plumbing was ancient. My imagination pictured someone in the cellar, tapping out a message to me where I was laying in bed up in the converted attic bedroom.
I was alone and the house was detached from the village, nestled into the mountain of the Teix. I felt isolated and a tad afraid. A situation like this is not ideal for a person with a fecund imagination and I tried to picture rational causes for the noises in the house, and pushed away ideas about ghosts and unwanted intruders.
All of a sudden there was a loud bang at the door. My body froze in the bed and I wanted to hide under the duvet, hoping it would go away, but it didn’t. The banging got louder and louder, until eventually I pulled on a jumper and jeans and creeped down the cold stone stairs to the ground floor.
Was Villa Rosa haunted, or was the ghost a projection of Lucy’s psyche? Read THE SILK PAVILION to find out
A man stood at the door with a rake in his hand. In the darkness he looked threatening as he rattled away in the local dialect of Catalan (Mallorquín) and broken English.
It was just the neighbour telling me about some damage to the property. But that night my imagination ran riot, and so the novel was conceived - or the initial ideas for a novel, not yet fully formed, but ripe with potential for a psychological thriller that might haunt a reader like that night haunted me.
After the neighbour left I lay awake in a state of fear in the large bed in the attic, my hearing alert to every sound the house made. It was as if the house were alive and awake to me.
Deià’s Cliffs when the Sirocco blows in
I thought of its age and all the stories the house had witnessed. Like Villa Rosa in the novel, the house I was in would have lived through the Spanish Civil War - as I tried not to imagine the house was haunted.
I wondered who had lived in the house. In the lobby hung two portraits. One of a man and another of a woman, facing each other in their old bronze frame from either side of the lobby. The woman was dressed in a severe black dress and on her hung the energy of grief and mourning. Their clothes looked like the sort of fashion of the 1930s, so it was possible these two people had lived through the Civil War.
I wondered how these two had faired in the Civil War and whether Franco’s troops had come to this house and taken the men of the house, and marched them to the mirador in the night?
The next day the storm had cleared and the sun was shining again. The shadow of the night had passed and as I swam in the Cala, the tiny clear water bay surrounded by rocks, I looked up at the mirador where the men would have been either pushed off or ordered to jump to their deaths by Franco’s men.
I thought too of my own fears in the night, of how familiar it was to lay awake in bed when I was a child; how I had listened like that for my father’s key in the front door at night with fear at what might await me if he was in a temper.
I thought how I’d replayed the pattern of my childhood as I listened to the sounds the house made, and wondered if it was haunted, and if so, whose ghost hung in the air – the mourning woman in the painting in the lobby or that of the man, whose body she might have collected from the cliffs by the Cala.
My fears that night were rooted deep in my shadow, in my own psychology. I contemplated the effect of trauma on the psyche, and considered the links between what’s pushed deep into the shadow of a nation like Spain’s as a result of the Amnesty (which was appropriately called The Pact of Forgetting) and personal trauma locked in an individual’s shadow.
The shadow, being a term Carl Jung used to represent the aspects of the self we do not want to own, those memories that give us pain or shame. I remembered Jung’s belief that if we do not confront our shadow, it will compel us to act out the aspect of the psyche we are denying. The psychological shadow is a key theme in THE SILK PAVILION and the cover reflects this - in the dark shadow the cliffs cast over the women who is floating in the sea.
I considered the patterns created by the shadow – acted out again and again in one’s life – because the traumatised parts of our psyche seek healing from the trauma. And I began to wonder about the link between national trauma and personal trauma and how that pitches up in romantic relationships.
The house I’d stayed in that stormy night became Villa Rosa in the novel - a symbol for the damaged psyche, and all the ghosts that lurk in the shadow of our soul.
The house I’d stayed in that stormy night became Villa Rosa in the novel, a symbol for the damaged psyche, and all the ghosts that lurk in the shadow of our soul. Those characters – the victim, the dark abuser, the rescuer – that we push into the shadow of the self in order to avoid the pain and the shame. And how that denial in turn means those characters will seek out expression on the stage of our lives, again and again, until our shadow characters are acknowledged.
Cala at Deià
I love this cover as it communicates so much about the book – the shadow and the light, the nuggets of stolen freedom Lucy, the main character found in the Cala at Deià, swimming every morning to escape from the house and from Miguel, her narcissistic lover.
Here’s an overview of some other ideas Barbican Press and Jason Ascomb had for the cover that reflect themes or locations in THE SILK PAVILION:
Idea No. 1
Villa Rosa - the exterior of a typical Deiàn stone house with a tiled roof and plants or bougainvillea hanging from the walls
Idea No. 2
Villa Rosa - the interior of a house with the sense of claustrophobia and a view of Deià
Idea No. 3
The Mirador - a photo of Deià’s cliffs where General Franco’s Dragons of Death would have either pushed the captives off or given them the choice to jump to their death
Idea No. 4
The Cala at Deià - a photo of the Cala at Deià with a woman (representing the main character) swimming alone and a dark sense of foreboding. This is the one we went with - and Jason Anscomb did such a great job of designing. It was inspired by Hayley Robert’s photo of me taking a very cold plunge in February 2019 on my final research trip.
Thank you to Jason Ascomb and my darling friend, Hayley Roberts, who took the photo of me swimming in the Cala at Deià on my final research trip (of which there were a few over the years) on a freezing, but sunny February afternoon.