Beware the Muse...

On the highs and lows of writing my debut novel, Sanctuary

Sanctuary was conceived in the arrivals queue at Stansted airport. It was my first time and the whole thing was over in a matter of seconds.

‘What if,’ the muse whispered sensuously in my ear, ‘an immigration lawyer like you were to claim asylum in your own country?’

I closed my eyes and saw an immigration officer beckoning me forward. ‘No have pasaporte,’ I told her, affecting a Hispanic accent, whereupon the officer sank into a trap room, the stage revolved and there in the middle distance, I could now make out the shimmering concertina wire and yellow brick walls of Herringsworth Immgiration Removal Centre. I walked up to the door and opened it. The writing had begun…

Had anyone warned me about the ten-year gestation period for debut novels, I might have tried to resist the muse’s charms. But for all the toil and sacrifice, the rejections, the ghostings and the lonely ‘who am I?’ moments, I remain grateful to her. First, nothing beats the creative freedom we’ve enjoyed together. Secondly, just as protagonists rely on obstacles for their development, so too do their creators. And - trust me on this - there can be few challenges quite like writing a novel.

First, you have to finish the project before losing heart. And here’s the paradox: if you’re sensitive enough to want to explore your thoughts and emotions on paper – arguably a prerequisite for being a good novelist - the odds are against your completing the task. Then, there are those ‘external obstacles’ to contend with – you know, the crippling hindrances that tend to knock protagonists off course and force them to change direction. In my case, most of these came courtesy of the Home Office.

Long before Sanctuary was delivered into the world, I worked in the field of immigration and asylum law at a top-ranked solicitors’ firm in Tottenham, where I developed an indignant (at times, I fear, self-righteous) disdain for our government’s treatment of vulnerable migrants and asylum seekers; suffice it to say, if we are all the protagonists of our own lives, the Home Office was my antagonist. Day in day out, we fought them on our clients’ behalf – essentially, to protect their basic human rights – and rewarding and interesting as the casework was, boy could it be gruelling. Later I transferred to the Bar, where the work felt more balanced, but musing about the novel remained something of an escape.

Another thing happened too. I began to see the novel’s potential as a vehicle for exploring the social and legal landscape around me - and for taking readers along for the ride. None of us would return unchanged; I started to view creative writing as an alternative form of advocacy... So when the Home Office destroyed my plot, it felt doubly personal.

The first time it was technically Callum Tulley, the former Home Office employee who in 2017 blew the whistle on abuses perpetrated in Brook House Immigration Removal Centre. ‘It’s just like your story idea,’ a friend enthused and my heart sank: first for the recipients of the abuse, second for all of us Brits in whose name these facilities were being run, and finally for my fragile story. Tulley went undercover but he wasn’t a lawyer, I reminded myself; I resolved to write faster and to make the crime at the heart of my novel so heinous that it couldn’t possibly happen in real life…

Working as a barrister and representing marginalised communities is a privilege but unless you have a brain like Lord Sumption, it leaves little time for much else e.g. writing. Still, hope was around the corner. For all the tragedy and havoc it wrought, an upside of the pandemic was the chance it offered some of us to take stock – to write that novel, even. By this stage, my dear wife was working as a consultant paediatrician in Gibraltar and we were living across the border in Spain with our two-year-old and her newborn sister. Time remained a scarce commodity, though write the novel I did. Hooray! But, alas, all good villains have a tendency to reappear.

I had just completed my first draft when the rumour broke that Ghana had agreed to process asylum claims for individuals relocated from the UK. It turned out to be false. Then, a year or so later, of course, Rwanda did just that. The policy always looked unlawful at best, but that didn’t stop it causing huge distress to those affected. Much, much less importantly – but irritatingly nonetheless – there were close parallels between our government’s proposed conduct and my reworked plot. ‘I’d hang fire on submitting your manuscript to anyone,’ a former literary agent friend advised me. Was life to be forever beleaguered by the Home Office? I wondered. My ‘escape’ had become my confinement.

I decided to assimilate these and other Home Office misdemeanours into my manuscript, and to bung it off to some literary agents anyway. Then, to cut a long story short, I landed a wonderful one (Tom Cull). We attracted some interest from publishers too, including – good god - an offer! My deeply cherished father was on his death bed when I told him and the hope was that it would make him smile. But a few minutes earlier my sister, Molly, who had just been commissioned to paint three large portraits, had relayed her own good news to him. His reaction, then, was one of polite scepticism: ‘Tommy, dear chap, are you making this up?’

That deal fell through and we went with a different publisher in the end. Before we did, though, I experienced what those in the business sometimes call ‘the dark night of the soul’.

Some ten years had passed since my chance encounter with the muse, my increasingly remote legal aid practice had given way to childcare, and I had devoted a seemingly inordinate amount of thought to a novel which - I forced myself to accept – was yet to feel complete. Most troublingly, I couldn’t put my finger on what had possessed me to write the story in the first place. The muse, sure. But where had she come from? Why - how - had I been so susceptible? And if I didn’t understand my compulsion to set off on the novel, what were the chances of my protagonist understanding his own journey?

Reluctantly, I put the book to one side and began blueprinting another. Indeed, it was only when developing a new character - specifically the part of her that struggles with freedom and responsibility – that the mystery began to resolve itself. I realised that this tension was a theme in my writing. And without wishing to spoil the novel, should you one day read it, one mini epiphany led to another.

In loose terms, I saw that the inspiration for Sanctuary was built on a deep-rooted need to explore, express and expose things that trouble me – in this case, our treatment of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants - and an aspiration to do so in an engaging, elegant, honest, human and persuasive way, with humour, peril, passion, twists and romance. With hindsight, I recognised in myself the four motives that Orwell famously said ‘…exist in different degrees in every writer’, namely ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ (see ‘Why I Write’). And I learnt that - as with all fictional creations to a greater or lesser extent (not least debut novels) - my protagonist was cut from the same cloth as me. It was time.

I rushed back to my baby, imbued her with the inner story she had been crying out for, renamed her Sanctuary (her working title, The Muse and The Mole, had never suited her) and took her to meet her kindly foster parents, Cinto Press. They made her presentable; bought her a beautiful burnt orange and red Mecob jacket; introduced her to supportive friends, Read Maxwell; and released her into the world.

And here we are three months later. My little one is healthy and doing well. And whatever others may yet say about her, if they criticise her imperfections – if they come to ignore her entirely, even – I’m proud of her. We’re proud of her, I would say. Only, as she proved to me during that fateful encounter all those years ago, the muse speaks for herself.