Double-Wolf

"Even a triple timeline. So it takes place in the late 1970s in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, a place where people go to recover and rest. Also Vienna in the early 1970s, and pre-revolution Russia. It’s the story of one of Freud ’s most famous patients, who was called the ‘Wolf Man’ because of this really significant dream of white wolves that he had as a boy. Honestly, I don’t really understand this book, but I’m incredibly compelled by it. I find it very interesting, and I love that it’s about something so different. Why not write a book about the Wolf Man and a strange, perhaps, con artist who is writing about him and tracking him through history? The entire book is parenthetical, so it begins with an open bracket and ends with the close bracket. Again, I don’t know why. Perhaps it suggests that all these ideas of psychoanalysis and duality—that the book is confined to the realm of the psyche—that maybe none of what the author is suggesting is real. So I mentioned that it started from the surgeons’ journals, which are obviously from a man’s point of view. I was more interested in the women’s points of view. There was a massive gulf between the surgeons and the women. The surgeons were medical men, highly educated, some of them were titled. They not only had medical authority but also a kind of moral authority over the women on the ship. They would create rules, they would hold women responsible and deliver punishments. There was one who, it was said, gave “a paternal embrace” when a woman repented. So it felt to me like absolute vulnerability. If this man happened to be someone principled, it might be okay. If not, well, good luck. And there was the extra vulnerability in many of these women having children with them. They were mostly young women, single mothers, in these terrible confines with high infant mortality rates—versus these men of standing. The surgeons were half-medieval in their practices. There was blistering and bloodletting and, I think, an unnecessary number of enemas. Things that the mothers might naturally say no to, if they were being offered to their child as treatment. But, reading through the journals, I was struck by how the surgeons would ultimately acknowledge the right for the women to advocate for their children. They would do it begrudgingly, but they would do it. That cast what seemed at first look like a very black and white situation into something far more complicated. The novella is centred on a girl who is so traumatised she’s consciously cut herself off from memory and from anticipation of the future. This is her way of surviving: she focuses very deliberately on her present moment. So the entire novella is on this small wooden ship in the middle of some ocean, presented through the eyes of someone who is wilfully denying herself any context. This means she has to piece together who she is in relation to all these people almost anew. Certainly, but perhaps that will happen anyway, no matter what the story is, if it’s told with a degree of real engagement and reflection. Just interpreting the story and presenting it to a modern audience is drawing a connection, isn’t it? Holding a mirror up?"