Pinning down place and letting characters loose
Kate Mosse: Pic by Akila Jayawardena
Kate Mosse is one of the most exciting authors down here for the Galle Literary Festival – best known for her Gothic and ghostly tales. She famously wrote Labyrinth, the archaeological thriller and Grail adventure – not merely a Christian Grail but also of other more ancient faiths imagined by her before The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown got published.
Growing up in rural Sussex with a solicitor father, Kate would wander among bluebell woods and old English graveyards, imagine the people buried there and see ghosts lingering everywhere. She would muse about the kind of people left out of the history books; women, and other ‘non-hero’ types.
The single author who most touched Kate was Emily Bronte with her bleak and haunting Yorkshire moors in The Wuthering Heights. “The main character was the landscape,” says Kate and that’s how she herself writes – everything beginning with the place.
In sea-sprayed Galle Fort (where we sit in a whitewashed room with antiques with a green patina) Kate says she is “already starting to imagine so many characters and stories”.
The Sussex countryside with green hills, the sea, old buildings going back a thousand years from the Roman to Norman periods and the Languedoc region of France with history in “every brick and every stone”, moved her to write the novel The Taxidermist’s Daughter (set in Sussex) and the Languedoc trilogy which includes Labyrinth, Sepulchre and Citadel. The snow-capped Pyrenees in the winter “spoke” to her and the trilogy came to life in that Mediterranean world.
After pinning down the place, she would hone in on the period: she loves the Middle Ages – and also the fin de siècle (the end of the 19th Century) when people believed that the world was about to end.
Kate doesn’t worry about her novels being popular fiction. Dickens or Defoe or even Austen were not considered ‘popular’ in their own day. “I just write from the heart, the best I possibly can and the biographers and booksellers can decide what shelf to put it on.”
Asked what is most challenging about writing fiction, she says flatly it’s “finishing”. After getting the ideas and researching and writing the first draft, you get to do the “real work which is editing. So keeping going- that’s what matters.”
Kate’s books are highly plotted but her method is to create the characters, the place and make sure she knows the real history, and then “let them loose and see what story they want to tell”.
Like the best adventure writers Kate doesn’t give us chunks of her own story, but she does use some excerpts to “fuel” her characters. Labyrinth, which pivots between two time periods – contemporary France through an archaeology don and the world of her ancestress 800 years ago – linked by the secrets of the Holy Grail, was imagined because an archaeological mystery is a wonderful metaphor of the idea of uncovering secrets. And “the idea that secrets will not stay buried forever- and also that the past shines a light on the present”.
But also, the protagonist Alice was an archaeologist because in Kate’s childhood village, an old Roman palace was discovered, and there for many years while she was growing up in the sixties, were young men and women with long hair down to their shoulders – archaeologists.
“So I just suddenly realized I knew quite a lot about those kind of people and that way of life.” Set against Carcassonne in Languedoc where “the Nazis believed the Grail was” – with the central idea of “a secret behind a secret behind a secret” – she early on wanted the Grail not to be a Christian Grail but one “of all faiths”. Idea followed idea and pretty soon there were 1, 30,000 words!
“Being a novelist is like being a detective – you want to learn more till you hunt the clues till you have a story.”
While Labyrinth was exciting to research, so was The Map of Bones, as while writing it she learnt so much about South Africa. Set in South Africa in the 17th Century, it is a hotchpotch of men and women of Dutch, Indian, East African, German and British origins.
She has long championed women’s work, in 1996 founding the Women’s Prize for Fiction, today among the most recognised of literary prizes in the world. This was followed in 2024 by the launch of the Women’s Prize for Non Fiction. Her own non-fiction volume Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries, is a book that brings to the limelight women from all periods of history. “Putting women back in history is not about taking wonderful men out of history, it’s about putting the women back where they always were.”
Says Kate with emphasis, “It’s never been a battle of women versus men. It’s always been about good people who believe in equality of opportunity and respecting people for who they are…..”
Last year, Kate received a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the King’s New Year’s Honours List – recognition of her services to literature, women and charity.
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