“IT’S NOT the big book that is going to explain America”, says Tracy Chevalier of her latest novel, T e Last Runaway. And yet, published four months aſt er the US presidential election and set in Ohio, the state that proved so crucial to Barack Obama's re-election, this novel is more illuminating than many attempts at a ‘great American novel’. Chevalier is known for a collection of novels that are unifi ed by being set in the past but she does not see herself simply as a ‘historical’ writer. “I suppose I see myself as a novelist who seems to have written primarily in the past, rather than a historical novelist. I laugh that I turned out this way, as it was never part of the plan.” Chevalier’s second novel, and the
one which made her name, Girl With a Pearl Earring, was inspired by a poster of Vermeer’s painting which had hung above her bed for years, though the fi nished novel was the result of detailed research into the painter’s life. T e idea for her latest book also came from a concrete object – this time a commemorative bench she discovered on a visit to her old university town of Oberlin, where much of the book is set. “Years ago Toni Morrison mentioned in an interview that there were no memorials to the African American history of slavery, not even a bench by the
“Doing interviews for a book, I am always dissatisfi ed with my answers. It feels only 70% is there. T en I realised that the 100% answer is to read the book”
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road. Someone took up that line and decided to put up a series of benches at places of signifi cance for African Americans. Oberlin was one of those places.” T e resulting novel, rich with atmosphere and tension, is set in 1850s Oberlin and its surrounds, as Honour Bright leaves Dorset with her engaged sister Grace for a new life in America. But within weeks of their departure Grace is dead, leaving Honour alone in a new country, making her way to a man she does not know and an existence she is utterly unprepared for. Painfully aware of the distance home, she begins to stitch together a new life, albeit one that is unrecognisable from her former life in the English countryside. As she battles the diff erences in temperament, society and climate, Honour fi nds herself confronting further strange territory: Ohio’s infamous ‘underground railway’. A discreet, elusive network of secret connections running across the state and up to Canada, the underground railway was one that ran without steel tracks – it was a metaphorical name for the various routes, via sympathetic helpers, that escaped slaves used to get out of the US. A Quaker, Honour feels compelled to help the escapees she discovers, leaving out food, hiding them and passing on messages,
“I’m in the middle of a collection of essays called Pulphead by John Jeremiah
Sullivan. They’re about all sorts of things, from Axl Rose to Hurricane Katrina. I don’t read non-fi ction all that much unless I’m researching so it feels like a bit of an
exception. I’m looking forward to reading Instructions for a
Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell. She is
fantastic at dissecting family relationships”
but she soon realises that her decisions have huge consequences. Chevalier’s own upbringing had
a strong Quaker infl uence – she spent seven years, running into her teens, attending a Quaker summer camp in Maryland, and she still occasionally goes to Quaker Meeting. T e religious movement famed for its emphasis on quiet and peacefulness seemed a perfect match for the book and its developing characters. “With Honour, the fi rst thing that came was her name,” she explains, “and the second thing was that she would be Quaker. At the same time I was thinking about the underground railroad; I knew that a lot of Quakers