Every artist takes. What else do we do but endlessly recycle stories? It’s been going on since the ancient Greek tragedians
, not only disturbed me greatly , but have made me reflect on my process as a writer. I’ve always used the work of other writers in my own.It’s a rare writer who doesn’t. Borges’ Pierre Menard, three hundred years after the original, wants to re-write Don Quixote, word for word. Jean Rhys wants to retell the story of Jane Eyre. Peter Carey wants to give new life to Charles Dickens. JM Coetzee, Daniel Defoe. It’s a question of degree.
My whole writing life has been a dialogue with the books I love . It’s what people mean when they call me an allusive writer. In the preface to my second book, Someone Else , I write that:It was as if I had created a novel in my head, the characters would not be still, they rose up from the pages of their different books and argued and fought and merged and grew inside me, but with an autonomy that made them as real to me as you are, sitting here now.
Australia is a strange place. It exists only in its imagining of other places. This is not just because of recent migration, it’s been happening since the colony’s inception. We’re born here and imagine being there, in Asia or in Europe, readingliterature.
For most of its life, The Dogs was called Lateness because I wanted to write a novel that took such ventriloquism as its theme and whose protagonist feels forever late to the party, discovering that even his own life has preceded him. What remains of those original drafts is contained in Part II of The Dogs, called Ruins for obvious reasons.