Mick Jackson: The Widow's Tale - A Reading Guide

About The Widow's Tale

The basic idea first occurred to Jackson when he happened to read a wonderful article by Katherine Whitehorn in the Guardian about how drastically her life changed following the death of her husband.  When he read the piece he happened to be staying in a cottage in one of the villages on the north Norfolk coast in mid-winter and the combination of character (namely, a recently-widowed woman) and location (bleakly beautiful, with the salt marshes stretching out towards the sea) seemed to fit together perfectly.

He liked the idea of writing about a woman who was in her sixties or seventies.  Hadn’t considered working with a character like that before.  It was a couple of years later before he did anything more about it.  And it was probably only after he came up with a couple of minor twists to the narrative – one which is best avoided here in case you haven’t read the book yet … the other being that she is unwittingly on a sort of pilgrimage – that the novel started to take on a life of its own.

Writing The Widow's Tale

The first draft of The Widow’s Tale came relatively quickly.  It was written in three blocks of roughly twenty thousand words, over a period of about twelve months.  Compared to the time it took Jackson to write his two previous novels, this is a bit of a sprint.  The idea for the book had been around for three or four years, so perhaps he’d had time to turn over the possible components in his mind.  Also, the tone (first person / immediate) created a certain momentum of its own.

Still, as usual it took a ridiculous number of rewrites before Jackson felt happy in finally handing it over.  There were probably three or four further drafts after the bound proofs.  The last changes were made roughly two months prior to publication.

If he’s honest, Jackson will admit that he was worried about writing in the first person, from the point of view of a woman who’s in her sixties.  The fact that the voice that he finally came up with was so utterly unapologetic (and why shouldn’t she be … she’s just lost her husband) helped him get over that.  And once he’d written the first few pages he began to think that he might be able to pull it off.

As part of his research Jackson interviewed several women who had lost their husbands in recent years.  He also read a wonderful book about loss and grieving by Virginia Ironside called, ‘You’ll Get Over It’.  But he’s at pains to stress that unlike his first two novels this was not a book weighed down with research.

For what it’s worth, the writing was a thoroughly enjoyable experience.  Of course, it doesn’t necessarily follow that reading it is going to be equally enjoyable.  It also helped, he thinks, that for the two or three years he was working on The Widow’s Tale, he was also adapting one of his previous novels into a screenplay, so he’d spend two or three months on the novel, then six weeks or so on the screenplay.  He’s convinced that this is the ideal way of writing.  Unfortunately, it was only by chance that these circumstances came about.

Little Known Facts

•   When he first came up with the idea of a story based around a newly-widowed woman renting a cottage on the north Norfolk coast, Jackson considered trying to write it as a screenplay.  It was his editor at Faber who suggested developing it as a piece of fiction.  To be fair, it would have been a very atmospheric little film, but there wouldn’t have been much action.

•   Whilst the book is far from autobiographical the author did incorporate into the text several incidents from his own life – for example, the experience of being a life-model.  In the mid-’80s, Jackson posed for the painter Simon Edmondson who had a studio in the old perfume factory on Carpenter’s Lane near Hackney Wick (presumably now part of the Olympic site).  And those old Victorian buildings are extremely cold … brrr.

•   Jackson also went on retreat for five days, just as the protagonist of The Widow’s Tale does.  He actually stayed at Buckfast Abbey, near Buckfastleigh in Devon.  He was a singer in a band at the time and just fancied having a few quiet days, to work on some poems and short stories and to catch up with some reading (he remembers taking along the collected works of Philip Larkin and a Victor Hugo novel).  To be fair, he was also curious about the monastic lifestyle, though there was never any real danger of him being invited to stay on full-time.

•   As anyone who happened to drive along the north Norfolk coast road about five years ago will testify the home-made speed camera, built out of plywood, really did exist.  As the protagonist says, it was the fact that it was painted the right shade of canary yellow that had you slamming your foot on the brake.  A second glance told you that it was clearly knocked-up in someone’s shed.  There was a similar one in Cowfold, West Sussex.  There’s something quaintly British about people building their own speed cameras, but certainly the last time Jackson was up in Norfolk the camera mentioned in the novel had been removed.

•   The ‘Holbein’ element of the book was quite coincidental.  Whilst Jackson was in the area, carrying out some research, he happened to see a collection of Holbein’s prints in a second-hand bookshop in Burnham Market and considered buying it for a friend who’s a bit of a Holbein fan.  He decided to leave it, but when later in the day his friend responded to a text and said that he would most certainly like it Jackson returned to the shop.  Of course, by then it had gone.  Unfortunately, the author is the kind of person who will get a little obsessed about such things.  He never could track down that particular edition, but decided to attribute his obsessions in that department to his protagonist.  ‘Christina of Denmark’ being a young widow was a little bit of serendipity, which one could argue tends to come about, given the right circumstances.

•   The information in the section relating to ‘underpainting’ and paint restoration comes courtesy of an artist of Mick’s acquaintance called Stig Evans.  Stig has a studio along the corridor from Jackson’s office, so the two of them stop and chat quite regularly.  If asked, Evans will almost certainly over-state his input, but Jackson is keen to point out that he bought him a bottle of rum in return for his contribution and that as far as he’s concerned that’s the end of it.

•   Like the protagonist, Jackson occasionally suffers from blind spots, which are a result of migraines.  He’s been thinking of using it in a piece of fiction for quite a while and it just seemed to fit in this novel, especially following the entry about the apostles from the church at Salthouses.  (If you haven’t already read the novel a lot of this stuff is going to make no sense at all.)

•   Jackson’s favourite beer is Woodforde’s Wherry.  He has a vague hope that by mentioning it in the novel (the protagonist has the odd glass or two of it) the brewery will reward him with a lifetime’s supply.