Wrench in the Works: An Interview with Kate Thompson

I had this idea kicking around in my mind for about five or more years. It was a slightly simpler town mouse/country mouse kind of idea, and it wouldn’t go away. I felt it didn’t have very much energy in it, and I was working on other things. But this idea kept coming back. It wasn’t until I actually sat down to write it that this character emerged. And it’s something that’s never happened to me before.

How did you come up with a teen thug like Bobby?

Quite unexpectedly, he almost appeared to be sitting on my shoulder and practically writing the narrative for me in his own voice. I write longhand and I write the first draft sort of all in one go. When I came to read it through to put it on the computer, there were bits that I didn’t even remember having written. It was an extraordinary experience.

I love that Bobby is portrayed realistically, warts and all—the foul language, reckless violence, and abusive relationship with his struggling mother. Because you didn’t sugarcoat things, the story really rings true.

Yeah, well that was very important to me, and I didn’t entirely see eye to eye with my editors [in the UK] on that. But I had to stick to my guns. Because it was an attempt to really get inside the mind of one of these troubled kids. Maybe not so much now, but certainly in the past, there have been young men who took part in the life of the country—driving tractors and making hay and doing other things—and they didn’t have the same kind of troubles as lads in the city. The book is partly an investigation of that, and Bobby had to be real to make it work.

Is the story essentially about transformation and hope?

For me, the story is about the fact that everybody has a capability. What happens to a lot of troubled young people is that they don’t get the opportunity to find it. Bobby has, really, a chance meeting with a mechanic and he discovers his passion—that [working on cars] is something he can do and that he loves doing.

Both of your parents were writers and social activists. Your father was also a prominent Marxist historian and a friend of Nehru and Gandhi, and famous folks, like Iris Murdoch, dropped by to visit. What was it like growing up in your home?

There was often a lot of interest and excitement going on, but like most children, I had my own business going on and didn’t always take that much interest in my parents’ business. But I think what it did do—and I think you’ll find this in most of my books—it gave me a sense of grappling with the problems in the world, of thinking deeply about society and how it works and how it doesn’t work, even modern medical technology and genetic engineering. I would be interested and troubled by things in society, and I think that’s probably the legacy of growing up in that kind of household.

I can’t let you go without asking about magic and fairies. Why do they play such a big role in your work?

I’m quite interested in Jungian ideas, and the fairy world is sometimes a way of playing with archetypes and ideas. In The New Policeman, for example, the basic idea that I wrote about was, Where does all the time go? Also, some of the old Irish stories I read are very beautiful and interesting. So they would have had some influence on me. And on a very basic level, if you walk around here [County Galway, Ireland], in some of the very empty and unused countryside, you almost get a sense of that magic in the air.