By Anna-Marie Krahn
Valley Record
Janey Bennett describes Crete as a place of "hard rock, hard sun and guns." She chose the Greek island as the setting for her first novel, The Pale Surface of Things, because, she said, "I wanted a place for [main character] Douglas to fall apart against."
Bennett started the book not knowing where it would end up. She spent the first of seven years of work on the novel just fleshing out her characters.
"If you let a story come from the characters," she said, "then they determine the actions." She wanted to take a young man who, like many young Westerners she sees today, is disaffected and joyless, and "see what it would take to heal him."
After writing 5,000 pages, most of which she discarded, she figured it out.
"I hit him with every blow I could think of. After I finished the book, I thought, 'What is the single thing [that healed him]?'"
She realized it was accountability. To really live as himself, Douglas had to acknowledge the truth about his actions and accept responsibility for them. After that realization, she spent another year rewriting the novel. Bennett had been to Crete once before she started writing, but she needed to get the geography right, so she went back again and spent three weeks driving around between book locations with her camera.
Health issues prevented her from returning to Greece, so she read as many books about Crete as she could find.
"I just absorbed them. I read 200 books," she recalled. "My understanding of life on Crete got deeper without getting specific."
When she was further along in the book, she consulted Greek friends and experts of all kinds about specific details. She became especially good friends with a young American Greek Orthodox priest. The two spent a lot of time exchanging e-mails, not only about book details, but also about ethics, and what would happen to priests who faced the dilemmas that two priests face in Bennett's book.
"I think it gave me the courage to go a little bit deeper, to what agony a priest could go through," she said.
Bennett's academic experiences also informed her work. She was trained as an architectural historian, and paid attention to the sociology of the past while researching architectural history.
"Novel writing is one step deeper than that," she explains, "but it's the same skill." Both involve "trying to define the essence of what life in a certain circumstance was like."
Her background in history also helped to give Bennett a feel for the history of Crete, and influenced her decision to set her novel there.
"There's just history everywhere. It's an amazing place."
Bennett divides her time between Hornby Island and Bellingham, Washington. She has just become a landed immigrant in Canada.
"I love the way people use language in Canada," she says. "People here speak with a vocabulary that's just wonderful."
She is thrilled with her landed immigrant status."I belong here," she enthused.
