AT THE DARK HOUR by John Wilson-Review, Interview and Giveaway
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ABOUT THE BOOK: Release Date July 19, 2018
A loving affair is destroyed by the Blitz on London. Julia ends her relationship with Adam. Her concern is for her children and that, if she is divorced, she will lose them. What is the nature of love? Does it have gradations? Love, and it’s textures, lie at the heart of this story. Love is where you find it. And sometimes it ambushes you. And, often, it is hidden.
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REVIEW: AT THE DARK HOUR by John Wilson is a fantastic tale of historical fiction set in 1940 London, England during the London Blitz.
Told from third person perspective, following several timelines, from the outset the reader is pulled into a logistical nightmare as our anti-hero Adam Falling, a member of the King’s Council (KC) finds himself charged with infidelity- an affair with a fellow KC’s wife, all the while, himself married with a twelve year old daughter. As art begins to imitate life, Adam is the lead defence attorney for another man accused of adultery but not before Adam’s legal skills are in demand for a Czechoslovakian refugee who is charged with treason and potential threats against the English crown. What ensues is the build-up of three legal cases, defence and prosecution, and the culmination of secrets, lies, and questionable evidence that are procured and presented in an effort to protect several men whose extra-marital dalliances have destroyed too many lives in the face of the on-going destruction set upon by WWII.
John Wilson pulls the reader in 1940 London, England during the London Blitz bombing. Rationing, and the evacuation of children to the rural countryside, finds families torn apart, as the destruction of London threatens not only their lives but their spirit as well. As darkness befalls London, so too do the blackout restrictions for those whose lives remain at risk by an invisible threat from the skies.
AT THE DARK HOUR is a lengthy story line that focuses on the legal drama of Adam Falling, down on his luck, chronically ill attorney whose on-going affair with the wife of a fellow member of the KC begins to unravel as suspicion leads to accusation, lies, secrets and cover-ups. Adultery is illegal; divorce requires an admission of fault; love becomes dependant upon a hierarchy of importance for the heart. John Wilson takes the reader into the ethically questionable side of courtroom law as the world outside is vanquished by death and destruction of the nightly bombs.
The structure of the novel is broken down into four parts plus an epilogue. The use of quotation marks for traditional speech is absent but that is not to say the conversations go unmarked. Indentation and the use of hyphenation (-) denote speaking parts but the author does not always differentiate between speakers or characters; memories and events recalled are italicized for ease of context.
AT THE DARK HOUR is a wonderfully detailed, complex and focused story line with a large ensemble cast of colorful secondary and supporting characters whose role in Adam’s life culminates in a series of events leading to a frenzied trial of revelations and lies. John Wilson’s AT THE DARK HOUR is a thought-provoking, cautionary tale of infidelity and the destruction of lives. An intelligent, impressive, imaginative and profound story with spirited but flawed characters whose passion for life upsets the balance of the status quo.
Copy supplied for review
Reviewed by Sandy
TRC: Hi John and welcome to The Reading Café. Congratulations on the recent release of AT THE DARK HOUR.
We would like to start with some background information. Would you please tell us something about yourself?
Website:https://www.johnwilsonauthor.net/
John: I come from Wigan in Lancashire although my mother was Scottish. Both of my grandfathers were coal miners although my maternal grandfather had to work above ground because of the disabling injuries he received at the Somme during WW1. He became quite a figure in the Scottish Mineworkers Union and had been intending to stand for Parliament in 1939 for the Labour Party but got called down to London by Clement Atlee to work in the Directorate of Labour. A young Harold Wilson would come around for Sunday lunch and walk my grandad’s dog.
My father joined the RAF at the start of WWII and was a navigator / bomb aimer in Halifaxes with Bomber Command before transferring to 624 squadron flying special ops out of North Africa. After the war he went to Strawberry Hill to train as a teacher which is where he met my mother. I did not find out until after she died in 2004 that she had been working with the Code-Breakers at Bletchley Park.
My paternal grandfather died of a lung related disease before I was born.
My parents were naturally rebellious and adventurous and travelled widely, living in South Africa, Rhodesia (as it then was) and, when I came along Cyprus and South Korea. So, I had an unusual and peripatetic education.
I went to Cambridge to study law – where I played bass guitar (badly) in a band called the Underachievers – and then did the Bar exams. Before University I spent most of a year working in a bakery in Wigan. After Bar exams I worked in a wholefood warehouse before going to live for a while in Connecticut and then Paris where I got a job as a bi-lingual secretary at UNESCO.
TRC: Who or what influenced your career in writing?
John:I have always written and the urge to write is something I have little control over. I was much influenced by writers such as Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley and Herman Hesse. In particular, I read nearly everything that George Orwell wrote and his essay “Why I write” had a profound effect on me as I recognised in me what he was saying about the impulse to write. It made perfect sense. I was also strongly influenced by a number of Russian writers such as Dostoyevsky, Bulgakov, Zamyatin and, more recently Andrei Kurkov. I also found the writings of Sol Stein and, in particular, his books Solutions for Writers and Solutions for Novelists, extremely helpful.
TRC: What challenges or difficulties have you encountered writing and publishing your novels?
John:The biggest difficulty I had with writing At the Dark Hour was finding the time to write. I had a very busy practice at the Bar, particularly before I took silk in 2011 and so time was very short. I was also writing a lot of academic things, either whole text books or chapters in large well known standard texts. These were all contractual and subject to deadlines and, regrettably, my fiction writing had to take third place behind my practice and my contractual obligations to write text books and articles.
In terms of getting published the difficulty was in finding a literary agent who would be prepared to represent me, although I got close on two or three occasions. My novel is long and it takes some commitment from potential agents to read it when, at the outset, they do not know whether it will be worthwhile. I also found the traditional publishing model to be extremely slow. Teaming up with Clink Street Publishing has been an excellent move for me as everything has moved very quickly and they have been extremely helpful with such things as pricing and, for example, practical things like working out how wide the spine of the book will need to be.
TRC: Would you please tell us something about the premise of AT THE DARK HOUR?
John: At the Dark Hour came to me in three separate phases. As a Bar student who had never really been to London before I was spellbound by the beauty of the Temple but intrigued by the signs everywhere, in the form of plaques or Latin inscriptions that pointed to the enormous devastation that had been wrought by the Blitz. I was one of the editors of Pegasus, the Student Magazine, and decided to research this story. I went up into the galleries in the Inner Temple Library and found monographs by long dead and long forgotten barristers who had written down their experiences of being under the bombing. I subsequently discovered that these sources had all been missed by the primary historians of the age. I thought it was an interesting story but it did not amount to a plot.
A few years later I was commissioned by the BBC to write some radio programmes. We did two series. My first producer worked primarily on Women’s Hour and my second producer worked on producing radio plays. After we were done he left me a voice message asking me to write some radio plays, on a subject of my choosing, which he would then produce for radio. I agreed and decided to write some radio plays about treason trials during the blitz. However, I never had the time actually to sit down and write them. I thought that this would tie in nicely with a story about the destruction of the Temple although it still did not amount to what I thought was sufficient for a plot.
At about the same time my chambers moved out of the Temple and I did not return there until 2002. By now I was a divorce lawyer. My practice and my academic work meant that I learnt a lot about the misogynistic nature of the divorce laws in the 1940s – if a man succeeded in proving that his wife had committed adultery she would lose the custody of her children and all financial support – and it was this final strand that brought everything together in my mind. Linked to this was a long-standing supposition I had about the nature of love. Is it possible to love two people at the same time? Well, I concluded that it was but, when it comes to that sticking point you will have to conclude that you love one person more than you love that other person. In those circumstances, do you love the other person at all?
So, the book contains a series of love stories all set against the backdrop of the destruction of the Temple and of the divorce laws that had such an impact on people’s actions. Julia Pemberton breaks off her affair with Adam Falling because she does not want to be divorced and lose her children. But it is too late. Her husband has found out and petitions for divorce. Central to the story is the development and then the end of their affair. Is it really over? Is there any way back for Adam? Why did she end it? Will they even survive the blitz? And interwoven into this narrative is a further adultery trial where Adam is representing the co-respondent accused of committing adultery with the respondent wife whilst Jeremy Pemberton KC, whom Adam has cuckolded, is representing the cuckolded petitioner.
TRC: What kinds of research/plotting did you endeavour, and how long did you spend researching /plotting before beginning AT THE DARK HOUR?
John: I did my early research into the Blitz and the Temple whilst still a student. In terms of research generally, I had the benefit of reading the complete writings of George Orwell and, in particular, his wartime diaries. I read every book I could find on London and the Blitz as well as reading fiction that was written during that period such as Greene’s Ministry of Fear and The End of the Affair and Tragedy at Law by Cyril Hare. I read practically all of the Times Archive for the period, concentrating in particular on the small ads where much of the “grain” of the time could be found as well as finding all sorts of diaries from the time that had been subsequently posted online. Because the plot involved an alleged attempt to poison London’s water supplies I needed to learn all I could about the London Metropolitan Water Board. I found reference to a book online and tracked it down to an antique book shop in the West Country. I ordered it and it was delivered to my house in the South of France a few days later. It had belonged to the head of the Water Board – his signature was there with a flourish in the frontispiece and, from looking up his obituary I realised that this book had probably been languishing in the book shop for over forty years. I read a small article in the Evening Standard about the Westminster Public Record Map where all the bombs were charted and recorded during the blitz. So, I went to the Westminster Public Library and took out the original bomb maps with carbon copies of typed reports of the bombs or handwritten copies still sitting there.
In the mid-1980s I was representing a defendant in a long running vice trial at the Old Bailey. Whilst being kept in the holding cell just beyond the dock he tried to commit suicide in an imaginative way that involved tying a small piece of string tightly around his neck and then tying his tie equally tightly but with the knot at 180 degrees to the first knot. As I was waiting for the day to begin all hell broke loose and I was summonsed to the cell behind the dock. The warders had succeeded in cutting him free but he had an enormous red wheal around his neck. It was very dramatic and I thought to myself: I can use this. Which I did subsequently in ATDH. I got him off.
I suppose I began writing At the Dark Hour in earnest in about 2007 / 2008. However, I was stymied by my other commitments. My wife and I took three months off in 2008 with a view to me finishing the novel but I was also in the process of writing my text book, Cohabitation Claims which had required a lot of writing and re-writing as the law kept changing. That was published in April 2009. Then I was commissioned to write two chapters of Jackson’s Matrimonial Finance which came out in January 2012. In the meantime, in 2011, I was asked to write a second edition of Cohabitation Claims. This proved to be a lengthy and difficult job and it was not published until October 2015.
In the meantime, I was continuing to write ATDH when I could find the time and showing the work in progress to friends all of whom loved it. The turning point came for me in the summer of 2014. I was conducting a very big trial in the High Court and my solicitor asked to see what I had written. It was about 570 pages long at this point but unfinished. He read it in five days. I told another friend about this over a beer on the Friday night and he asked me to send it to him. I sent it to him at 7 am on the Saturday morning and on the Sunday at 9 am he wrote back to say that he had read it all, staying up until 2 am to finish it. He was only disappointed that, after 570 pages it was not complete. I realised that this was becoming ridiculous so, that summer, when we went down to France, I sat down and finished it in a matter of weeks. It was all up there in my head and I just knew that I needed to write it all down.
So, I suppose my research started in 1981 and limped haphazardly along. It was largely completed by 2007 although I continued to learn new things. There were then spurts of writing when I could find the time between other commitments but it was not until 2014 that I decided just to write the final parts down.
TRC: Do you believe authors of historical fiction should follow historical accuracy and fact? Do authors have a responsibility to be factually accurate?
John:Broadly speaking I think that authors of historical fiction should seek historical accuracy. It makes the story credible and it keeps the reader believing in what has been written. So, in ATDH, if newsvendors are shouting “Victories in Libya” that is what happened on the day in question. Or when a civic official is taking an oxyacetylene lamp to the railings around Lincoln’s Inn Fields that is because that happened on the day. When Julia sports a coat that she purchased from Bradley’s in Chepstow Place for twelve and a half guineas the previous season it is because that very coat was on sale that season. However, subject to that general belief in accuracy I do not think that it is essential. I have tweaked some of the facts ever so slightly for dramatic effect here and there and I suspect most readers will not spot them. There is a libel trial involving three literary siblings called the Renshaws. Only two of my readers realised that this was in fact a trial that actually took place on the days in question involving the Sitwell siblings. I don’t think that this sort of “tweaking” with the historical record causes any harm or other problems.
TRC: How did publishing your first book affect your writing style going forward?
John:I don’t think that having my first book published has greatly affected my writing style going forward in that I think that it has largely been formed now. My work means that I am writing most days of the week. I remember acting for a famous science fantasy writer on his divorce. We were having a companionable fag outside the Hastings County Court and I asked him what he thought of the financial documents I had prepared for his case. He said that he liked my prose style. I had to say to him that this was not the point: it was the content rather than the style that mattered. I have written so many things now from radio programmes to co-writing the European Youth Forum Policy on Youth Unemployment and Training that I think that my style is quite adaptable to whatever it is I am writing about at the time.
TRC: Do you believe the cover image plays a deciding factor for many readers in the process of selecting a book or new series to read?
John:Yes, I do. I was greatly assisted with the cover of this book by Gareth Howard of Clink Street Publishing. Amazingly, we both had almost exactly the same concept of what the cover page should look like. Then it has to be kept as simple as possible because, frequently, it will be seen only as a “thumbnail” picture.
TRC: When writing a storyline, do the characters direct the writing or do you direct the characters?
John:This is a very good question. With my story line I had in my mind a very clear narrative arc. However, I am also of the view that, if you direct the characters in your story, you remove their free will and they turn into cardboard. So, I would not say that I direct the characters. However, there is often a range of things that a particular character could do in certain circumstances and as long as you can keep them broadly on track they can do what they like. I found this quite infuriating at times and there was one particular character, Roly Blytheway, who caused me no end of grief as he would not do what I wanted him to do. But it was very rewarding, in the end, to let him do things his way.
TRC: The mark of a good writer is to pull the reader into the storyline so that they experience the emotions along with the characters. What do you believe a writer must do to make this happen? Where do you believe writer’s fail in this endeavor?
John:This question covers an awful lot of ground. I remember when I began thinking seriously about writing a novel, studying the writings of those authors who had the ability to “pull you into the storyline”. When our hero is pressing himself against a damp brick wall to stay hidden why do some writers make you feel as though you too are breathless and feeling that same brick wall whilst other writers will leave you cold? As mentioned earlier I found the writings of Sol Stein extremely helpful on this. The old mantra is that one must “show and not tell”. I think that this is correct but simplistic. Yes. The writer must show and not tell. However, he or she must do a lot more than this. It is necessary to imagine every scene from all particular angles. To make oneself aware of the time of day, the quality of the light, any ambient factors that would play on the protagonist and then distil those down into a few sentences. For me, every short scene had a long gestation. One needs to cut back on the adverbs and adjectives. If you tell the reader that your protagonist is nervous you are taking the imaginative involvement away from the reader. If you show the reader your protagonist trying to light a cigarette with a tremor in his right hand such that he spills all his matches on the floor you give the scene to the imagination of your reader.
I think that writers frequently fail in this endeavour because they do not make a sufficient attempt to show rather than tell. They do not fully picture the scene in question in their mind’s eye and then seek to reproduce that scene so that the reader can see it as well. I think that this is sometimes down to lazy or sloppy writing and it is a sign of disrespect to the reader who, of course, is entitled to the utmost courtesy.
TRC: Do you listen to music while writing? If so, does the style of music influence the storyline direction? Characters?
John:I don’t tend to listen to music when writing unless it is necessary for the plot. Thus, in the two funeral scenes in the novel the choice of music for the funerals was very important to me and to the scenes in question. And so I listened to a lot of classical music when trying to imagine these and trying to picture how the music chosen would affect the actors at these dramas. Pergolesi was particularly important.
TRC: What do you believe is the biggest misconception people have about authors?
John:From my point of view I think that the biggest misconception people have about authors relates to the whole question of writer’s block. When I was starting out I assumed that with “writer’s block” that meant that the author did not know what was supposed to happen next. Perhaps that is true of some writers. Bruce Robinson (of Withnail and I fame) has spoken movingly about “the Block”. However, I came to the conclusion that writer’s block is rarely about not knowing what is supposed to happen next. It is more to do with finding the paradymic scene that is more than the sum of its parts or dealing with issues such as “point of view” or “pacing”. These, in my experience, are the true sources of writer’s block.
TRC: What is something that few, if anybody, knows about you?
John:One of my favourite songs is “In my Secret Life” by Leonard Cohen. The lyrics of the song speak for themselves. I can relate to that. I have my secret life and, by and large, it remains so.
TRC: On what are you currently working?
John:I am working on a number of projects. I wrote a novella in 2016 called “A Short While” which, simplistically, is about cancer in the Home Counties. My god-daughter, Hannah Sharp, who is a very talented artist and actress, and I are turning it into a screenplay and we are on the fourth draft. I have written some children’s stories about two wombats, Wallis and Wendy, escaping from the circus on their tandem to go and play at the Ayer’s Rock Country and Western Music Festival. I am collaborating with Candida Spencer, a very close friend and great artist and she is in the process of illustrating it for me. I have another novella on the boil which starts in Gipsy Hill in the mid-1980s with a hundred mechanical parrots squawking “give me your money!” in a suburban garden. I am also working on the prequel / sequel to At the Dark Hour. I have two chapters of an academic book to write by September and the third volume of Cohabitation Claims text book is due out next year. I have decided to share the writing out with other people on this because it is too much for one person to do. I have also, I hope, recently finalised the next issue of Family Affairs, a magazine that I edit which I hope will be reaching our subscribers’ trays this week.
TRC: Would you like to add anything else?
John:I am a huge fan of David Bowie and I liked, in particular, the way that he would always seek to collaborate on his future work.
LIGHTNING ROUND
Favorite Food
Tuna
Favorite Dessert
Summer (red) berries covered in melted white chocolate
Favorite TV Show
Death in Paradise
Last Movie You Saw
Source Code
Dark or Milk Chocolate
Milk Chocolate
Secret Celebrity Crush
Ingrid Bergman
Last Vacation Destination
Iran
Do you have any pets?
Two cats: Dooley Wilson and Monty Wilson. Dooley is a black cat.
Last book you read
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
TRC: Thank you John for taking the time to answer our questions. Congratulations on your the release of AT THE DARK HOUR. We wish you much success.
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Annabeth: It’s nice to be here. Thanks for hosting me.
TRC: On what are you currently working?
David: I’m Irish, although I lived for many years in Scotland and love the place. I live on the West coast. Like most writers, I’ve had a bunch of careers, varying from the wildly successful to the unmitigated disaster.