Ruth Wykes, Sisters in Crime’s review editor, spoke to Riley James, about The Chilling, her debut novel set in Antarctica, which has been widely praised by readers and critics alike. Riley James is the pseudonym of Jacqueline Broad, a Melbourne Professor of Philosophy but don’t expect anything dry and academic from this wonderful story.
The Chilling follows two separate groups of people. The protagonist, Kit Bitterfeld, is part of a research team who have come to work for the season at a base at Antarctica. The second group of people have fled their ship after it caught fire, and are trying to survive in impossible elements out in the open.
Weeks after Ruth finished reading The Chilling, she wondered why she was still thinking about it. A closed community, thrown into a situation nobody was ready for, isolated with limited resources, and people being stripped to their core character. Was this a subconscious metaphor for Melbourne’s harsh COVID-19 lockdowns?
You picked such a stark and isolated setting for The Chilling, a closed community in a vast, inaccessible and unfriendly environment? Why?
This was absolutely central for generating the story behind The Chilling. It was essential for the drama and the tension that the story be held in this incredibly hostile environment. Why? In everyday life, you might think about how people would respond in a crisis. You know a bit about them but you never really know what people are like until they’re out there.
In one case, they’re stuck on the ice, there’s dwindling food supplies, dwindling water supplies, and the weather is hostile – it could kill them, and they don’t know where they are. What are people really like in that kind of situation? Many people are going to be stripped to their bare survival instincts. But then there are others who are going to maintain a certain fellowship, a warmth towards others.
In the other case, they’re stuck on the station where things off-kilter.
I wanted to watch their trajectory, see what happens when people are thrown together and have to work out what they’re going to do. I wanted to see what people would do when they couldn’t call for help, where help wasn’t ready to hand. It was also really handy that no one had a mobile phone, because that helped the plot move along. That’s really rare in this day and age, that you can’t draw on your phone and work out a solution. So, I thought that a closed community in a vast, inaccessible environment would be a good place to stage the action.
How did you get on with Kit Bitterfeld, your protagonist? Were there times she did things that annoyed you or made you want to throw your laptop at her, and what did you love the most about her?
I called her Kit Bitterfeld after my next door neighbour’s doctor. I liked the name because it was like ‘a field of bitterness’. That’s kind of where Kit was at in her life. She was a bitter woman. She’d been betrayed, she’d been abandoned, and, of course, her mother was unwell, so she was at a very low point in her life. I don’t know if that’s what I liked about her, but that’s how I came to feel for her. I felt compassion, and I felt she was someone I wanted to see find a happier place. I also liked that she was a lot braver than me. She needed to be in order for the story to move forward! I wouldn’t have gone back into the ship to find out what was in the cool room. I wouldn’t have disobeyed orders. I wouldn’t have followed Nick out to the mountain ranges by myself. On the one hand, Kit was terrified by the isolation and the remoteness of the place where she was, but on the other hand, she didn’t let it stop her from pursuing what she thought was the right thing to do. So I liked that about her.
Did it feel like you were telling two different stories at times? There were the characters who were living at the research station who seemed to inhabit a different world to those who were lost in the wilds of Antarctica. How did you approach those different worlds, as a writer, and set them apart?
Yes, sometimes, it did feel like I was telling two different stories. And I suppose the reason for that is that I wanted to keep quiet about the story on the ice, at least for the first third or quarter of the book, to generate suspicion and paranoia about Nick as a character. To begin with, I didn’t want to let the reader know whether the people on the ice had survived, at least until we were some way into the book. From then on, the subplot about the Petrel crew on the ice served an important function. It helped me to drip feed to the reader certain clues about what had happened on the ship, which Nick may or may not have been responsible for. So in a sense, there were two stories, because what was happening to the Petrel crew was quite separate to what was happening on the base.
And in Nick’s case, he couldn’t remember any of those characters. He couldn’t remember their personalities and what had happened to them on the ship. So the two plots and sets of character were kept quite separate. But, of course, the two stories converge and everything is revealed . . . It was a lot of fun writing the story about the people on the ice. To begin with, I only had a couple of chapters from Curly’s point of view, and then someone suggested that I change everything to Marion’s perspective, and that was much more interesting. And that’s when I added certain scenes, like the sea leopard attack and going off in a smaller party alone. And those scenes were very exciting to write, they enabled me to draw on some of my favourite parts of the Shackleton voyage, about the ice splitting apart and everything being such a desperate struggle for survival, which is what I love most about the polar exploration genre.
There are several themes that emerge throughout The Chilling. For just one example you’ve shone a spotlight on global warming. Another thing that struck me was the way isolation changes people. Was that intentional or an organic part of your storytelling?
The isolation wasn’t just part of the story, it was the central theme, especially the way that isolation changes people. So yes, it was entirely intentional. I’d read some accounts of polar exploration. I read a book about Ernest Shackleton and some of the articles about Ranulph Fiennes and so on. One of the things that Fiennes said was that when you’re out there [on the ice], you want to be with people who don’t turn sarcastic under pressure, who don’t start challenging your every move, that work with you and maintain a certain calmness of emotion. You don’t want them to get too excited either. You don’t want them to get too optimistic when things are going well, because you want them to have that caution and that kind of risk averseness. You want them still to be thinking about what could happen that could send everything into decline.
From there the themes emerged. Some of them were accidental. Some of them were just following through on the question, ‘what would happen if these people were thrown into these circumstances?’ But some of the themes that emerged were already in the back of my mind. They were about Stoicism and about how in situations we can’t control, the important thing is not getting things right, in terms of your actions, but in terms of your intentions.
It’s in thinking through the best thing to do, and coming up with a decision that you think is right. It’s character and character disposition that matters, being the best person you can be, and using your reason and trying to try to come up with the best solution.
What surprised you or frustrated you about writing fiction? You’re a highly accomplished academic writer, and that’s almost a different language.
I think the surprising thing might have been some of the similarities between academic writing and creative writing. I had to lose a lot of the stiffness that was in my writing. Like instead of saying ‘she had’, I had to abbreviate it to ‘she’d’, and things like that. And dialogue had to be a lot more natural. But I found that following the story and working through a narrative, in some ways, is not completely dissimilar to coming up with a thesis when you’re writing an academic article. By that, I mean, with academia you do a lot of research and then you try to come up with something original, build on other people’s work, and so on.
With The Chilling, I didn’t do a lot of research but what I did was follow through on inspiration in the same way that I do when I’m writing academically. So perhaps the surprising thing is that academic writing is actually quite creative, because you’re coming up with something original, something that no one has devised before or hit upon before. It’s not just the research. It’s also something that emerges out of the research. And creative writing surprised me by being a lot like that, where you have a single idea and you think ‘what if I followed through on that?’. But of course, it is a different language. I had to learn to loosen up, and that’s something that was probably a bit of a challenge to begin with.
Can you describe what it’s like in that first moment when you hold your brand new released to the wild debut novel in your hand?
Funnily enough, I can’t quite remember that exact moment. I can recall that I was very happy. But the happiness kind of crept up on me gradually over days and weeks after the book had been released. I’d published academic works before when I published my first book at the age of 30, and I was holding it in my hand, I was like: “Well, I’ve done it. I’ve published a book!”. But, of course, that was just an academic book. Few people read that book.
But The Chilling, my first novel, was immediately being read by family and friends, and that was very exciting, because as the weeks went by, people would get in touch with me. My mother-in-law read it, and my partner’s stepfather read it. He hadn’t read a book in decades. And then my grade five teacher rang me up, and that was very pleasing to me. It made me very happy, because that’s why I wanted to write fiction.
Academia serves a very important purpose, and my work has been uncovering the lost history of women philosophers from hundreds of years ago. I’ve felt really politically motivated to do that, to get women’s voices out there in the history of philosophy. But in this case, with the novel, I wanted to entertain. I wanted people to have a good time. I wanted them to kick back on their holidays or on an airplane and just have a rollicking good time while reading it. And most of the reports back were that people really enjoyed it. So that was the really great thing, not just holding the book for that first time, but rather hearing feedback from family and friends.
People have raved to me about how much they enjoyed The Chilling. What are your plans for a follow up novel? And do you feel the Book Two pressure?
I can’t tell you about the follow up novel, because I’m keeping it under wraps! I think I’m afraid I’m going to jinx myself by talking about it. I felt a bit of pressure before I went into the writing, but I’m in a privileged position at the moment where I’ve got long service leave, and all I’m doing is writing that second novel. I don’t feel the pressure because I’m in that creative moment. I’ll probably feel it afterwards, when I have to edit and I go, “Oh my goodness, why is that gaping plot hole there?” But thankfully, at the moment, I’m not feeling pressure. I’m just feeling absolute, pure joy in the writing.
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