Louis de Bernières: Fascinated by the two world wars
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Louis de Bernières’ writing life revolves around a shed – it’s one of two places he sits down to work. The shed is next to a vegetable patch, but writing in The Guardian, de Bernières admitted that he can get “uptight about the pigeons and squirrels.” He added:“I tend to write things in there that don’t need any research because you can’t keep many books in a shed or they go rotten.”More often though, he writes in his library, surrounded by thousands of books, piled high into stacks. Lately, he’s been working (simultaneously) on parts two and three of a trilogy that began with the 2015 publication of ‘The Dust that Falls From Dreams’.
The sprawling saga follows the lives of three families who live next door to each other in Eltham: the McGoshes, the Pendenisses and the Pitts. The McGoshes have four daughters, the other two families have five sons between them. Come the war, of course, gender is destiny, with the boys going off to fight and the girls (mostly) working on the Home Front.
De Bernières has been fascinated by how differently the two wars were perceived in the national psyche.World War I was a static war, all trench-foot and mud, while, 20 years later, World War II was all about national defiance and courage.
De Bernières is the author of 11 books, among which the most famous is Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Says the author:“Captain Corelli was my second-best novel, but it was my most successful. It is an albatross about my neck, but fortunately it never goes rotten and stinky, and I love it without wanting to try to write it again under a new disguise.”
The ‘Dust That Falls from Dreams’ is his eighth novel, and was inspired by the story of his grandmother’s first fiancé, who died of wounds sustained in the First World War.
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The author has been writing and planning little bits and pieces of this trilogy for 20 years, saying: “It’s part of a huge project – I’ve already written the last chapter of the last book.” Even though his family lost loved ones, as did so many others, de Bernières wasn’t interested in writing about the futility of war, simply because he did not think it was futile. “My mother’s father was maimed, and shot three times, but he never thought it was a wasted effort. Germany had invaded France through two neutral countries: it was as important to resist the Kaiser as it was to resist Hitler.”
His thriving career as a writer was something he could never have predicted. De Bernières has told journalists he wanted to be either Bob Dylan or a cowboy when he grew up, and though he can still “throw a lasso with about 30 foot of rope” after a year spent working as a cowboy in Colombia, the closest he’s come to being Dylan is singing a cover of the Dylan song, ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit.’ He has been in various bands and is accomplished at playing the Greek bouzouki, clarinet, classical guitar, and, of course, the mandolin.
He also had stints as a landscape gardener, a mechanic, a cadet at Sandhurst and a schoolteacher, not to mention that year as a cowboy. “I had no direction, I was improvising a living,” he says. “Everything I wrote before the age of 30 was rubbish, which is seriously disheartening to someone who is sure they’re meant to be a writer. You have to do it at the right time.”