The Weighing of the Heart: Q&A
Nathan O’Hagan of Obliterati Press interviews Paul Tudor Owen about his novel The Weighing of the Heart, which is on sale now
The Weighing of the Heart is set in New York, where you worked from 2015-18. Did you start writing the novel whilst there, or was the idea for the novel part of what took you there?
Yeah, so as you know, the premise of the book is – it’s about a young British guy called Nick Braeburn, living in New York, and he moves in with a couple of rich older ladies as a lodger in their opulent apartment on the Upper East Side. And he gets together with their other tenant, who lives next door, and together the two of them steal a priceless work of art from the study wall.
And my wife Eleanor and I have just come back from a few years living in New York. But actually I started writing this book a long time before we ever lived in New York, and it was all part of a sort of long-time fantasy I’d had about living in New York, going back to my teens, when it felt like all these great novels and films and songs I loved were set in New York – The Great Gatsby, Mean Streets, Simon and Garfunkel. It felt like a place where anything could happen, it felt like a great crucible of art and culture where anyone who was anyone either came from or had made their name or had depicted it so memorably.
And that led me to study American literature and American history at university, and the third year was a year abroad, and I went to the University of Pittsburgh, and that was when I was able to visit New York for the first time myself.
And walking those streets, all the unmistakeable iconography of New York around you – the fire escapes, the yellow cabs, steam rising from a manhole, the skyscrapers, the rivers – it just felt like I’d walked into one of those books or films that I’d loved.
And I not only wanted to live there, I wanted to be part of this great tradition of depicting New York and romanticising it.
And when we did move there, it really did feel a bit like life imitating art. I’d written a pretty good draft of the book, before I’d moved there, but I was still working on the ending, and I wrote the final version of the ending in the public library in Soho, round the corner from where David Bowie lived.
But our lives were not in the end very much like Nick’s life in the book. We lived in the East Village, rather than the Upper East Side. But I did used to enjoy walking the same streets that Nick and the other characters in the book would walk, when we went up the Metropolitan Museum or Central Park. There’s a real apartment block up there that I used as the model for the Peacock sisters’ apartment block.
But I did sometimes wonder if this was really happening. I don’t know if you remember the episode of Red Dwarf, the sci-fi TV sitcom from the 90s, where Lister got hooked on this computer game called Better Than Life, and it was like a fully immersive VR game, and he thought he was living in Bedford Falls, the town from It’s a Wonderful Life, and he was loving it, he didn’t want to leave, it was better than life.
And sometimes I got a bit worried I was in Better Than Life, and I’d wake up and I’d be still a teenager in Manchester reading The Catcher in the Rye, fantasising about New York.
New York is integral to the book; it couldn’t have been set anywhere but there in my opinion. What is it about New York that fascinates and intrigues people so much?
There’s this line in The Great Gatsby: “Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge.” That sort of sums it up for me – that sense of possibility, the energy and the drive of it. And somehow the way it looks is a visual metaphor for that – buildings piled on top of buildings, everyone crushed up between these two rivers. And living there, you feel like you’re at the centre of the universe, culturally. On the street where we lived, WH Auden, Trotsky, William S Burroughs used to live there. Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground ran a club night there. Jeff Buckley recorded his amazing first EP in 1993 at a club on the street. You just feel like you’re at the heart of everything.
Where did the idea for the Ancient Egyptian theme come from?
So the other side of the book is the Ancient Egyptian imagery. The work of art that Nick and Lydia steal from the Peacocks’ wall is an Ancient Egyptian scene. And then, as the stress of the theft starts to work on them, the imagery of Ancient Egypt, the imagery in the painting, starts to come to life around them, and it’s unclear whether this is something that’s really happening or whether it’s in Nick’s head.
And when you’re trying to write a book, there are some ideas that, once you’ve thought of them, you just can’t believe you ever tried to write it without this element. And this was one of them. Originally it wasn’t an Ancient Egyptian scene. It was a 1960s pop art work. And I always seem to get quite a lot of ideas from art exhibitions, or museum exhibitions, and I went to this amazing exhibition at the British Museum, called The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. Basically it told the story of what the Ancient Egyptians believed happened to you when you die.
And it was so fascinating because they had this idea called ‘the weighing of the heart’, which is actually a very similar idea to the Christian idea of St Peter at the gates of Heaven, deciding whether or not you have lived a worthy enough life to come in.
The Ancient Egyptian weighing of the heart ceremony
So in the Ancient Egyptian version, you have this very ornate mythology that had formed over centuries and millennia, where you have Anubis, the god of embalming, presiding over a set of weighing scales, and on one side of the scales you’ve got the dead person’s heart, the person who’s being judged, and on the other side you’ve got a feather.
And if the heart is in balance with the feather, then you get to go to Heaven, which they called the Field of Reeds.
But if it’s heavier than the feather, then you get eaten by this appalling monster called the Devourer, who has the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion, and the back legs of a hippopotamus. So it’s obviously a combination of three of the most dangerous creatures that Ancient Egyptians would encounter.
And the key thing is, the reason they’re weighing the heart, they thought that the heart, rather than the brain, was the home of a person’s mind and their conscience and memory.
But it was clear from some of the spells you could say to try to help you before you got to this point, that one thing the Egyptians were afraid of was that sometimes the heart would actually try to grass you up during this ceremony – that it would speak up and reveal your worst sins to Anubis at this crucial moment.
But there were some other things you could do to help you at this moment. If you had a little scarab, called a heart scarab, you could prevent your heart testifying against you.
So I just thought all this imagery was brilliant and fascinating, and I loved the way it was so familiar in its overall concept but so strange and unfamiliar in its details, and I decided that the painting Nick and Lydia should steal should be an image of this ceremony, the weighing of the heart.
And it’s so fitting because the book is essentially about guilt and innocence, and it’s about you weighing up as a reader how much you trust Nick as a narrator, and it’s about Nick himself and the people around him weighing up how much they trust him, what they think of him, what they know about him and his character. And without spoiling that for anyone who hasn’t read it, I hope that I found a way to knit all that imagery in really effectively towards the end of the book. And that was the hardest part to get right – I tried a number of different endings.
And then once I’d settled on this, there were a number of strange coincidences. I found out there was an artist who used to work for the British Museum, who had become quite well-known for producing reproductions of Ancient Egyptian scenes. His name is James Puttnam, and I went to see him speak about his artworks at that strange museum in Hackney, the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, and so I based the artist in the book on him.
And in the book, at one point Nick recalls his childhood in London and he recalls a school trip to the British Museum, where it seems as though he might have stolen one of these heart scarabs that could protect you during the weighing of the heart ceremony.
And so I wanted to get the details for that scene right, so I looked through the British Museum’s collection of scarabs online and identified the closest one. And then I went to the British Museum to see it, and when I got there I found the case where this scarab was supposed to be, and there was just a note that said “heart scarab (lost)”. It was another strange moment of life imitating art.
‘Heart scarab (lost)’
You’d obviously been writing for some time. How challenging was it to find a different process for writing fiction, as opposed to journalism?
They’re two quite different things, really. I’ve mostly been in news journalism rather than feature writing, so your main priority – as a reporter, and as an editor, as I am now – is to communicate as quickly as clearly to the reader as possible.
Whereas when you’re trying to write fiction, I think you’re trying to do many things simultaneously – establishing characters, making sure the mechanics of the plot work, working the themes in, writing convincing dialogue, and then I hope also trying to do something interesting with the structure, trying to subvert the reader’s expectations, trying to do something the reader hasn’t seen before, or at least not in that form. You might actually not want something to be clear as quickly as possible – you might want the opposite, you might want to hold that idea or that fact back.
It might be that in feature writing and some forms of long-form journalism or creative non-fiction, people are juggling some of these ideas. But not really in news.
But I think where my journalistic career has helped me is probably in an ear for dialogue – I used to really love, when I was a local newspaper reporter, trying to get people’s patterns of speech exactly right. And then also I don’t get writers’ block very often. If I want to get from A to B in a chapter, and I’m not quite sure how, I can just get there in a pretty straightforward way, move on to the next thing, and come back to that bit later. I don’t sit there agonising over it. And I think that’s come from my journalistic training.
Were there any particular New York authors who influenced The Weighing of the Heart?
I think because New York is a city of immigrants and a melting pot for artists just as it is for everyone else, some of the best writing and art and music about New York often comes from outsiders and newcomers to the city. Fitzgerald was from the Midwest. PJ Harvey is from Dorset. Paul Auster is from Newark. But that said some of my favourite New York writers are from the city - Don DeLillo is from the Bronx. James Baldwin was born in Harlem. Simon and Garfunkel are from Queens. So are Public Enemy.
But some of the biggest influences on the book did not really have a New York connection.
Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, a lot of Margaret Atwood – what I like about them is they are literary authors but they are also not afraid to produce books that are page-turners – I wanted to do the same thing.
I also really wanted to create an atmosphere of ambiguity in the sense that you’re not quite sure whether or not to believe Nick as the story progresses – and there I was thinking about The Crucible by Arthur Miller and My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier – books where you can have two completely opposing interpretations of the events being presented to you, each one equally plausible.
Going back, which writers had inspired you early on, both in fiction and in journalism?
I had an amazing A-level English literature course, where we studied The Great Gatsby, Hamlet, The Remains of the Day, The Catcher in the Rye… All of those had a big influence on me in different ways.
And then at university I loved the modernists like Faulkner, Eliot, Woolf, the idea of fractured narratives, and then I did an amazing course on contemporary writers that really introduced me to postmodernism – John Fowles, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes – the idea that you could have a story within a story and play with the reader’s perception of exactly what they were reading.
And then it’s strange to say because it’s a 1,000-page masterpiece, but the book that really made writing seem like it could be manageable for the first time for me was Underworld by Don DeLillo. The way he had constructed it from several different interlinked narratives made me see that writing a novel didn’t have to be this intimidating process of starting at the beginning and then setting down 300 pages of story one after another – you could write smaller fragmented sections and eventually knit them together. In the end that wasn’t how I wrote this one, but it definitely made the writing process seem much more manageable in my head.
As for journalism, I always liked Alistair Cooke, who was a Guardian journalist like me as well as a BBC broadcaster – I loved his Letter from America. My grandpa always used to say that I should try my best to become the next Alistair Cooke, and in fact he got quite excited in 2004 when Alistair Cooke died – I think he was thinking: there’s a vacancy now – this is your chance.
After such a strong debut novel, people will be wondering what you’ve got planned next. Do you have anything currently in the works?
Yeah, I’m currently working on a new book. It’s essentially about this phenomenon of lack of trust in the media, in authority, fake news, conspiracy theories. It’s set in New York again, but it’s the good old bad old Fear City New York of the 1970s – crime-plagued, falling apart. The lead character is a reporter for the New York Daily News. He interviews a conspiracy theorist who believes the moon landings were faked, and he gradually gets dragged deeper and deeper into that world.
If you could go back in time and murder any writer, purely to be able to steal all the ideas they would have subsequently had and pass them off as your own, who would it be, and why?
Not murder, but I definitely view Donna Tartt as my literary nemesis. The Secret History had a big influence on me as I said, I think it’s an amazing book, and I remember when I had first started working on The Weighing of the Heart, quite a few years ago, I was just reading the Guardian website on my phone on the way to work, and I suddenly saw that Donna Tartt had announced she had a new book coming out, and it was set in New York and it was all about the theft of a painting. This was The Goldfinch. And I remember thinking – oh no, that sounds very similar to my idea, I hope that doesn’t make things difficult for me.
And then when I was sending out the first draft of The Weighing of the Heart to agents a few years later, The Goldfinch had just come out and it was this huge hit, it was everywhere, and every email back I got from an agent said, I really like it, but it’s just too similar to The Goldfinch.
So if I could go back in time, I wouldn’t murder Donna Tartt, but I would just sort of slow her down a bit in writing The Goldfinch – she’s already a very slow writer; it wouldn’t take much. Like I could put some superglue under a couple of keys of her typewriter. Or leave a fake note from her publisher on her desk telling her it had to be double the length. Anything to just slow her down so it could safely come out after The Weighing of the Heart instead of before.
The Weighing of the Heart is on sale now from Obliterati Press
