Sofie Laguna is still a bit jetlagged. A few days ago, she returned from a family holiday in Rome, London and Ireland, so when we sit outside in the surprisingly warm Melbourne sunshine to talk about her latest novel, she is reminded of a strange experience in the Italian capital.
She saw two old women drinking coffee in a piazza and had the bizarre feeling that they could have been two characters from her latest novel, The Underworld, in some sort of later life.
She was thrilled to be in Rome because so much of the book is immersed in the classical world, albeit from the perspective of the 1970s. There wasn’t an equivalent feeling in the “dream landscape” of the rugged and isolated west coast of Ireland, nor in London, where a visit to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre had Laguna, who studied acting and has been an actor and playwright, musing about “another life I didn’t live”.
Sofie Laguna.
It’s been five years since her previous novel, Infinite Splendours, was published. But in that time there was the small matter of lockdown – her strict home schooling encouraged her younger son to nickname her Professor Madness – and a year-long pause adapting her novel, The Choke, for the screen. In that time, she also wrote a couple of children’s books that were illustrated by her partner, Marc McBride.
At the heart of The Underworld is the wonderfully named 14-year-old Martha Mullins, unhappy at home with her cold mother, Judith; Babs, her flighty grandmother; and her largely absent father whom she adores, Andrew. “The adult world was vast and mysterious; the adults themselves only ever providing hints,” Martha thinks.
But Martha is happy among her close circle of friends – Valerie, Gene, Audrey and Fiona – at Dalheath, their boarding school. She has caught the classics drug and is entranced by the myths of the Greeks and Romans, gods and goddesses, and the ancient underworld, which her formidable teacher, Miss Brinkotter, tells her class is “only a torment for those who’d behaved badly; for the rest, it might be wonderful” and that the idea of an underworld was “as old as humanity itself; and that there were words for the underworld in almost every ancient religion and culture”.
For Martha, it becomes almost real: “How deep would you have to swim before you couldn’t see the light?” she wonders. “Before you were chthonic?”
The Underworld is classic bildungsroman and follows Martha through her teens and the physical changes they bring, emotional upheaval and then negotiating, if she can, a way into a more stable and satisfying adult life. Along the way, her conception of the underworld – and the importance of its myths in her life – changes but, nevertheless, provides her with a private realm in which to explore her feelings and sexuality. It serves as a metaphor for Martha’s loneliness and isolation, her need for escape, the imaginative power of her unconscious.
Martha is a wonderful creation. Laguna once said she fell in love with her central characters – Hester from One Foot Wrong, Jimmy Flick from The Eye of the Sheep, for which she won the Miles Franklin award in 2015, Justine from The Choke, and Laurie from Infinite Splendours.
While she demurs at using that description now, she clearly has a deep attachment to Martha. “She has a palpable presence outside myself, which is strange,” she says. “I can conjure her up in this conversation now, as I’m recounting the way she used to be. I can feel her again but [now the book is finished], my natural inclination is to move away. I don’t want her hearing that; I feel guilty saying that.”
Martha was originally conceived to serve a purpose: Laguna was writing about a different character, a man, and needed a woman to encounter him.
She discovered her while she was watching her son in a basketball training session in a high-school gym. She started writing a monologue from the perspective of that female character.
“The voice came out with incredible energy, as if keeping up with the balls that were being slammed. And she poured out the story of childhood and education and scholarship and academia and betrayal and from the point of view of an adult voice. It was furious, funny, very clever, all during skills and drills. I was writing it down as fast as I could go,” she says.
“And then the whistle blew, balls were put down, pen was put down. I knew something had happened. I knew that was a rare writing experience, but it had been intensified by the nature of my surroundings.”
When she got home, she realised that her original character – he’d been picked up and put down many times over the past 20 years – had to make way again, this time for Martha.
“This had come from a place in me that had a lot to say, and I hadn’t worked with this part before. I couldn’t turn away from it. And when you begin a new work, you have to decide, at what point in their life do I begin? What is the story I need to tell in which we know their life?”
She has been described as a writer for young adults, but says that is incorrect. She has written in voices that are young but never really explored the coming of that crucial transitional time. “I really didn’t think I was interested in it, and I discovered that through Martha, there’s a lot to say, to think, to feel and express.”
The Underworld was, she says, more difficult to write than her previous books, perhaps because the world of Martha is not that different from her own school days – boarding school, lonely until she found a group of firm friends, studying Latin, in particular. “It was very establishment and my family was unconventional, and so I was an outsider who did find her way eventually, and when I did, it was a home.”
Her earlier main characters came from more hardscrabble circumstances but with those novels, she found within three months she was off and running with the story; with The Underworld, she was plagued by doubts and vulnerabilities. For the first time, she says, she didn’t have a bird’s-eye view of what she was writing that allowed her to master the narrative.
As she wrote, the significance that Latin had served for her at school resurfaced from her own unconscious. She hadn’t realised how important it had been, the private relationship she had with it, in much the same way as Martha does.
There was plenty of research during the writing, which she loves, and plenty of Latin poetry dropped into the novel … “I’ve always been a dag for Latin quotes”.
Late on, after a traumatic encounter with a visiting lecturer, Martha turns her attention to the work of the Latin poet Sulpicia, whose six extant poems have been credited to a male poet, Albius Tibullus.
“This is the wonderful thing about research. How neat and wonderful to discover there was this beautiful young woman, Sulpicia, who was completely dismissed and still is. And students in various universities, because I read their theses, are still writing to defend her. That served my story so perfectly.”
How much have things changed, she asks rhetorically.
When I mention Sulpicia, she corrects my pronunciation. At school, her classics teacher was strict about it – “we were all very careful about it” – and she recently did a refresher course so she could record the audiobook. “The first I have done.” All those Laguna lives – school, acting, writing – coming together in one.
The Underworld (Penguin) is published on October 28.
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