Writing From The Ruins

English author AN Wilson has put aside his historical biographies for a novel inspired by a visit to quake-devastated Christchurch – a city where he expects the book will get a tough reception.

- Sally Blundell

British biographer, novelist, journalist and essayist Andrew (AN) Wilson knew there had been an earthquake in Christchurch. A “small earthquake”, he says on the phone from his home in Camden Town, London, had been widely reported in the UK.

But nothing prepared him for the wrecked city he saw during three days in the garden city last year. “I had no idea when I was driving into Christchurch from the airport what I was going to see – namely, a city that had been destroyed. I was staying bang in the middle of the city and I found it haunting, heartbreakingly awful yet wonderful – it was so interesting in a gruesome way.”

What did he do? What would the author of 50 works of fiction and nonfiction, including a seminal biography of Queen Victoria (recently dramatised in the new television series Victoria) do? He bought a DVD of the earthquake from the city’s museum and began to write a work of fiction, a love story set in a colonial city in a faraway land that suffers a life-changing earthquake.

Why not a work of non-fiction? Despite his reputation as an accomplished biographer – he will complete his book on Albert, Prince Consort, before the bicentenary of his birth in August next year – Wilson regards himself primarily as a novelist, and besides, he says, Fiona Farrell’s 2015 investigation into the Christchurch earthquakes, The Villa at the Edge of the Empire, “is so good. It would be ridiculous for someone coming from outside to write that story.”