The Unclimbed Mountain: A Conversation with Sara Baume, author of Seven Steeples
Multi-award-winning author Sara Baume is the author of three novels, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, A Line Made by Walking, and her most recent title, Seven Steeples, shortlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize, the Irish Book Awards’ Novel of the Year, and the Dylan Thomas Prize.
Photo Credit: Kenneth O’Halloran
The vivid and deftly constructed novel, Seven Steeples, follows couple Bell and Sigh, who make the perhaps bewildering or perhaps enviable decision to cut themselves off from friends and family and move to a remote house in the south-west of Ireland. Spanning seven years, Seven Steeples is a rich and intricate novel that will provoke readers to reflect on how humans inhabit the natural world, how we build a home around us, and the withdrawal from the rigid conventions of modern life.
First of all, what was your initial inspiration for this novel and also for the for the format that it takes of the seven years?
Well, the initial thing was this road that I walk every morning; the book is very much based in the landscape where I live. I walk it every morning with the dogs and after probably about a year of walking it, it struck me how much and yet how little had changed. This is a very quiet road with grass growing up the middle, and it struck me that there had been literally tens of thousands of small changes over the course of the four seasons, between things growing up and dying back, things getting dropped on the road, leaves falling – all this kind of stuff. Initially, I wondered whether it might be possible to write an entire novel just about a single road. And while I obviously didn't quite succeed in that all the time, the focus was on how little I could begin with and then how much I could make out of that with language.
And then the seven years... There's something irresistible about the number seven. At that point, I had been in a relationship for seven years, so I felt like I could write about a seven-year relationship; it was something I knew. It’s a stage in life which I think they call the seven-year itch, when couples either get married or break up. I thought that was a good point to look back on as a span of time. Then the other thing is this urban myth of how –this may or may not be entirely true – the body entirely renews itself, as all of the cells have died and come back to life after seven years. So that was where the seven idea came from, I suppose.
I loved that the progression of time is highlighted through the motif of the mountain, and each year passing without them climbing the mountain. I live in Edinburgh and have shamefully not climbed Arthur’s Seat yet, so I know how your characters feel in a way… Did you always know it was going to be something natural, more specifically a mountain, that punctuate the years?
It was, I suppose, very literally based on the landscape; I mean not symbolic in any way at all, we literally live at the foot of this landmass now. It's really not a mountain at all, but there is supposed to be a path to the top, and there's a good view, but there's no clear path, so we would intend to climb it every year and then another year would go by, and we wouldn't climb it. But I guess as time passed, it took on this monumental significance. Perhaps your mountain in Edinburgh is the same, it's like ‘Oh, that's cool. I'll do that on Saturday’, you know when you first move to a place, and then suddenly as more and more time passes and you don't do it, it seems like this massive thing that you're never going to do. So, the mountain was supposed to symbolically begin as something that was just in the background and then it becomes sort of monumental; by the end of the novel, it is a mountain.
I mean there is also a lot of symbolism; the novel in my mind is an allegory. There's a very short chapter about the mountain having all of these eyes and at a certain point I realised that the mountain was God in a way – it was all seeing and all knowing – but at the same time its magnitude was entirely dependent upon how we choose to perceive it. Everything in the novel is influenced by my interest in the little rituals that we invent for ourselves in the course of daily life. That probably comes from being raised Roman Catholic and then, like a lot of people do, abandoning religion in my teens and then in adult life finding that I really miss that sense of ceremony and community and ritual. And that's reflected in the book around Christmas when they realise that they've left their families, they've abandoned religion and community and society, and it's actually a bit sad because they've nothing left to celebrate.
Yeah, that section was really powerful, I loved it. Is the sense that the mountain is a kind of omniscient present the reason why almost everything you learn about the couple is through an omniscient narrator?
Definitely, the mountain is the narrator. In that way, you never get terribly close to the characters, you never get inside their heads. That was something I was doing to challenge myself, I guess, as my second novel was in the voice of the narrator, so it was very much first person in a sort of interior monologue, and then my first one was a man talking to a dog, but again, it was his own interior monologue. So, for me, I thought, ‘I can't write another book that's just in voice all the way through’. It was an experiment in that sense, and whether it worked or not...
It definitely worked! I also really like the idea that when you’re looking down from a mountain, everyone notices and sees things completely differently or picks up on certain things they can see. I can imagine that is reflected in the way people have read your novel as well, because you really can see the entire situation and their decision and their lives in two completely different ways; there's a lot about decay and, especially towards the end, a sense of sadness and neglect, but there’s also a sense of this peace and a return to nature. Have you noticed that in the responses you've been getting from the novel?
I mean, it made me think about how even when you go away for a few days and then you come home, suddenly it sort of smells strange and you wonder, ‘Was it always like this?’. You see things completely differently when you go away and then come back to them. Definitely Bell and Sigh can't really see themselves in a sense, and that's why they're letting things fall apart and, in the long term, losing their place in the world, for better or for worse. What's been interesting about people’s responses is that I've had some people say it's a lovely romance – it’s about this couple who are completely devoted to each other and disappear into each other, literally. And then I’ve had other people say that you know, it's sad, it's awful, it's about how you lose yourself in a long relationship, and you reach a stage where you don't know who you are, who your original self is anymore. And it was kind of about both of those things, I'm not entirely sure.
I wanted the end to be a revelation, but I wanted it to be a quiet revelation; whether or not it's a happy or sad ending, I'm not sure. I guess that's another reason why I couldn't be inside the two characters’ heads through the writing of it because I always knew that the end was going to be this kind of osmosis. As the novel goes on, they go from being ‘he’ and ‘she’ and ‘Bell’ and ‘Sigh’ to ‘they’. I mean, it's really subtle, it took a lot of working, and so it kind of happens gently, that they cease to become their individual selves.
I also think that the way readers respond is kind of a reflection on somebody’s own relationship, you know? Maybe if I'm a staunchly single person, I'm going to see it as a kind of a toxic end, but if I'm someone who's really happy and comfortable in my relationships, then it seems like a romance. I think it says more about them than it does about me.
I wanted to pick up on what you were saying about rituals, which I really love throughout the book; you include specific repeated acts that the characters do, which people can relate to, like going for walks and coffee and certain mundane acts that create a life. As a reader, I couldn't help always placing it in the modern world that I live in, so I couldn’t help but think, ‘What do they do? Do they have jobs? No one’s mentioned money, how are they paying their rent?’. Were you challenging the reader to think of a completely different way of living, or did you know the answers to these questions, but just didn't share them?
You know, it's funny but the question has come up with every novel that I've written of ‘How do they survive?’. I guess I never want to have money in there, I'm someone who’s never loads of money, and I’ve had never been flat broke either, so I've never thought about it too deeply. I guess in my first novel he was on the dole and because people questioned this, I had to put in references to him going to the post office and picking up his dole cheque. Then in my second novel, the character was just out of college, she was in her 20s and she was living in her dead grandmother's house and her grandmother had left behind in her will a certain amount of money for her dog, but the dog had died just after the grandmother died, so she was living off the dog’s money. And then this novel, I put in no reference to money again, though I did want there to be sort of subtle references to how things appear to be getting a little bit more desperate as time goes on. So, they're clearly not on the make, but in general I wanted to take out any of the kind of normal things about a life, so you know, work. I didn't want there to be any high dramas in it, so there's no arguments, there's no sex, instead there's just seven years of these little moments, these quiet moments, these little details, and how they accumulate. But in my head, they're probably on welfare.
Briefly, for the first couple of years of my relationship with my partner, we just moved to the countryside and rent was very low. It feels like a long time ago because now your state benefit wouldn't cover your rent but that was the recession, so it was around 2011, and everyone was on the dole really, and there was no shame in it. We were just about able to live, indulging art projects without needing other money; it wasn't a long-term plan. So, I guess in my head, they have a source that just about keeps them ticking over, but with nothing fancy, no bells and whistles, and indeed as the novel goes on, they don't even drive around as much as they once did.
This might be an impossible question to answer, but if reading the book could instil a certain idea or thought or inspiration in your readers, what would you want that to be? What would you want the takeaway to be?
Well, you know, very few people have connected it to climate change, I mean some have, but to me it's very much about that, as is my last novel as well; it’s sort of about nature slowly dying. I don't know, there's not much I can do as a writer, I'm not trying to be an activist in the stuff that I write, but I'm looking at the natural world all the time and trying to remind myself of how precious it is, it's still there, and these cycles are still going on. Because I think in ten or twenty years they won't be, things will be very different, even in the moment since I finished the book, it's very much affected the coast of Scotland, there's been a bird flu epidemic and it's killed a lot of gannets in particular because they live together in these big colonies. And I mean, I'm walking on the beach now and seeing dead gannets washed up and that really feels like it's serious, it's happening, and all of that is in my novels, it's just not stamped on the cover, I guess. So, I'd love for readers to take away some kind of a very small climate message.
I can feel that, and it links a lot with what you're saying about this kind of gradual sense of desperation which kind of mimics the earth; it might be gradual, but we're feeling the desperation reaching more and more people every day.
And I think there's also a certain amount of psychological preparation for loss. So, they don't have kids, for obvious reasons. They even cut themselves off from their family in one sense, because the less you have the, the less you have to lose. That's something that goes on in my head too.
I'm just curious, do you have in your mind the context of why they left their families and all their motivations behind it? Or to you is that just irrelevant?
I guess the context I put in the start was that they both had sort of unremarkable families and unremarkable childhoods. They have a strong sense of wanting to live alone in a quiet place and I think I've had that too and so has my partner. I mean, please don't think that we have the same kind of life precisely as Bell and Sigh, we don't, we have friends, we have family, but we are kind of two solitary people who happen to live together. God, I was in London last week and it was kind of traumatic; I honestly came away thinking I don't know how people can live like this. And yet it's completely normal, most of the people in the world live in big cities. So, I guess with the characters I was just tapping into the kind of person who seeks that kind of life; I think we all have it in us.
Definitely. I'm from London, I used to live there, and I now live in Edinburgh, which is obviously still a city, but it's much calmer, and even now when I go back to London, I feel frazzled and I do just look around and think, ‘How did I exist like this?’ Because I know that I did and I know that I spent hours and hours on the train every day, and I know that this was normal to me. Now I come back here, and it feels like I can breathe. A lot of people around me have that ideal in their head, of solitude, I guess, and escape.
Everyone has that, you know, wanting to go to a quiet, rural place to rest, I think that's what holidays are for most people. But you know I've just finished reading the Celia Paul book Letters to Gwen John and she's really interesting. She lives in the middle of London, in Bloomsbury, the view out the window is the British Museum. She lives this kind of crowded, busy life all the time and yet she's extremely self-contained and just sort of seeks quietness and peace of mind to make her paintings, and I thought, well, it is possible to sort of maintain that balance, you can be that kind of person and not necessarily live in splendid isolation in the countryside somewhere.
But they're interesting questions, because I mean the planet’s getting really crowded and, in the future, there's not going to be lots of solitary places to live. I live in a quiet place, but there's a house at the end of the driveway, there's another one over it, there's cows in the field, so nowhere is that quiet anymore.
My next few questions are just about writing in general. First of all, do you have any specific writing rituals, and have they changed over the years?
I always write in the morning. I bring the dogs out, so maybe that's a big part of the ritual. I know some writers say that they need to go straight to the desk and Kevin Barry, an Irish writer, says he needs to get to the desk when he still has his dreams in his head because you're sort of channelling this dream world that’s connected to writing. I think that's lovely, but I have to kind of get my thoughts together, I think. So, walking the dogs before I sit down, and then if I'm in the first draft of something, I'll be putting notes in my phone quite often as I walk, or I'll jot things on post-its when I come in, and then by the time I've gotten dressed and had breakfast, I'll try and capture whatever the fleeting thought was. I'll do a few hours in the morning, but I by no means write for twelve or even six-hour days; it's just what I can get when I'm fresh and so I guess I write very little at the desk. All of the good stuff, the juice for lack of a better way of putting it, happens elsewhere and then at the desk I'm just kind of expanding upon it and refining
And what about in terms of reading? What type of books do you tend to gravitate towards, and does it change while you're writing? How do you feel about reading while you're in the middle of a project?
I'll always be reading, definitely. I try to gear what I'm reading to what I'm writing. At the moment I'm sort of starting to research another novel and so I'm reading books that are relevant to it, or relevant to its period. Recently I'm actually reading more older stuff, more 20th century literature, I suppose. And then there's also a certain amount of responsibility to read your peers and what's happening around you or stuff that's coming up, such as younger writers, so I try and balance it. I don't know how fast I am. I'm a book a week, definitely, sometimes more.
It always boggles my mind because you think of how many books are probably lying around our houses and how many books you want to read and then you realise that if you read a book a week or a whole year, that's only 52 books!
Exactly. I used to feel more pressure, but I would find myself flippantly reading things whereas now I do read more slowly and pay mor attention to what I'm reading, but I don’t set a goal. You know you might read twenty very long books in the year, which is no lesser achievement.
Our last question is something that we ask every everyone we speak to, which is, do you judge a book by its cover?
Yes, definitely. I'm from visual art background, I went to art school, and I also work as an artist. I mean not very successfully, but I show the odd piece and I make pieces, so I'm pretty critical. I mean, every book that I've published with Tramp Press, who are my Dublin press, except for the first one, uses a photograph that I took on the cover. But with this one, I was kind of emphatic about it just being very simple and very white, and we used the same small caps, same font, for all the novels so yeah, it's definitely something I'm picky about. And in my non-fiction book and second novel there were images in the book.
You know, I was in Foyles last week and there’s a lot of nice covers at the moment. Whereas I've gotten kind of jaded with there being covers that are all font you know and not a lot of images; the whole image on the front is just the title and the author. I can see a Deborah Levy book behind you, and I think I almost had her covers in my head, just the one photograph with this strong colour behind. Do you judge a book by its cover?
Definitely! I'm not by any means an artist, but I'm interested by art and design. Especially with such talented designers around now, we should be judging it as part of the whole experience of the book, because if the cover does its job correctly, it should be an illustration and indication of what you're going to read.
I think so too, but in many cases the book designer hasn't even read the book which seems nuts to me! Because, to me, it is an intrinsic part of it. But I've been lucky with my publisher. You know, I think a lot of writers are told that that you can always object to the cover that they pick for you, but I used to publish with a bigger house and it's not that you're given options, you're just given kind of variations on a theme. You can pick the one you like best, so you feel like you have input, but it's definitely nuanced input. An author can object if they don' like it... but I think a lot of authors don't.
Most people I've spoken to who have loved their cover have been really involved in it, which I think is quite indicative. And it shows! Which is also really awful because there might be a real gem of a book inside a cover that might put people off because they will have connotations about other types of books, and they won't necessarily read it.
I can think of a book, and I won't name names, but it was an absolutely stunning book, brilliant book and the cover was awful. I mean I had this conversation with a few people, so it wasn't just me, people generally thought this cover was awful. But you know, but we all have different senses of what works and what doesn't, you know?
I do! Well, at least we know we both judge them!
This full conversation is featured in our Generational issue.
