Sara Baume: “I’m attracted to artists who find new ways to tread the same ground”

The seven towers is the third novel by Sarah Baume, an artist and writer who grew up in County Cork, Ireland, where she still lives. It’s about a couple called Bell and Sig who have moved from the city to a dilapidated cottage near the sea in the south-west of Ireland, where they live off “welfare payments and dwindling savings”. The novel spans seven years as Belle and Sig gradually lose touch with friends and family, become “poor and shabby without noticing” and almost completely stop interacting with other people. Instead, their main relationships are with each other, their dogs Pip and Voss, a local farmer, the cattle in their garden, a pair of donkeys along the route of their evening walk, and the local landscape – including the mountain “full of miniature eyes” that looms over them , but which they can never seem to climb.

Baume has already been shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize twice – her second novel, A line made by walkingmade the list in 2017, Natasha Brown, one of this year’s judges, said of The seven towers: “The dark, beautiful prose resonates like a ghost story: haunting and unforgettable.”

Anna Leshkevich: The seven towers sometimes it seems to hover between poetry and prose. How did you arrive at this particular literary form?

Sara Baume: At the very beginning, I wanted to see if I could take a fixed landscape and squeeze a universe of detail out of it—starting with very little and transforming it into as much as possible with language. I wanted the language to be parsimonious, a little biblical, and conjure up vivid pictures. There were times, very often at the end of a paragraph, when I felt that one space did not create enough pause between words, so I added a few extra spaces or moved to the next line. Then throughout the novel there are certain sentences and certain patterns that repeat themselves. It makes sense to me that the novel form also plays a role in telling the story.

This is a novel about isolation. To what extent did your experience of the Covid-19 pandemic influence the writing of this book?

Hardly, which seems odd even to me. I suspect years from now I’ll remember The seven towers like my pandemic novel, but it was actually almost finished by early 2020. Publication was delayed a year, and during a light edit I added a few sentences that hinted at some kind of societal breakdown happening, quietly, in the background. Essentially, the novel is about a couple who choose to withdraw from the human world, and at a certain point I thought it might be interesting to suggest that this world had changed irrevocably in their absence and they hardly noticed.

[See also: Maddie Mortimer: “My book is just furious it’s not a ballet]

Belle and Sig’s withdrawal from the world often seems less intentional and more the result of paralyzing anxiety. Are you interested in the experience of feeling “stuck”? Is it a feeling you ever recognize in your own creative process?

This observation is very true to the novel and a little chilling to me personally. I’ve never felt catastrophically blocked creatively; instead, I feel like I mostly have too many projects on the go and never enough time to keep up with them. But I’ve always been reluctant to take on the responsibilities of the adults in my life, and this leads to constant, low-level anxiety about the future and its stability, as well as my ability to cope with instability. I somehow failed to build the scaffolding of a normal life outside of my excess of creative projects.

Belle and Sig are in one sense deeply connected to the natural world, and in another sense very isolated from their surroundings because they have so little connection with other human beings. What drew you to this strain?

Every novel I’ve ever written has been about that in some form. It has a central character who feels at odds with other people and finds solace in the natural world. Each novel is drawn from my own experiences of living in rural Ireland. I was born in a place I’m not from, and I grew up in a place I’m not from, and now I choose to live in another place I’m not from, and so in my writing I continue to circle around this idea of ​​how to be in a home in a landscape, as opposed to a community or, for that matter, a society or a nation.

in The seven towers, your writing is particularly attentive to physical objects and how they become valuable to people. What do you care about material things? Did any objects observed in your own life inspire descriptions in the novel?

I started writing The seven towers in 2017. It came together very slowly and during that time I also wrote a short non-fiction book called handwork. handwork is about a variety of things, from my father’s death to bird migration to model railroading, but mainly it’s about the urge I’ve always had to work with my hands. I went to art school and majored in sculpture, then for a formative period I worked in a gallery where I developed an interest in folk art and ethnographic artefacts, so physical objects are often of quasi-spiritual significance to my writing. After my father’s death, my mother made a collage of small photos in a large frame as a kind of keepsake. The pictures were of many of the things he had built over the years – mostly machinery, sheds, gates, the garden path. All together made a picture of the material trace left by his life. This memorial – its sacred ordinariness – was the genesis of handwork and pursues The seven towers too.

As in some of your earlier fiction, The seven towers contains dogs who are the main characters of the novel, with different personalities. What appeals to you about portraying canine psychology?

Honestly, I don’t think too deeply about it; I just brought the dogs in, irresistible. In my real life, as in my novel, they are something of a sideshow to the banal.

Alone in their house, Belle and Sig discover that “tunes – intros, themes, choruses” from TV and radio get stuck in their brains and then “infect” each other. What earworms are bothering you?

The most touching is from a blackbird that used to hang around our garden in the spring. There was this heartbreakingly tender song that ended with two, long, hollow notes so soulful they would bring tears to my eyes. The hair went away after a few weeks, but the song is still playing in my head.

[See also: Why the novel matters]

Tell me about a piece of art, literature, or music that was important to you when writing this book.

The living mountain by Nan Shepherd was important. Also Fair game by Tove Jansson and Light years by James Salter. As I wrote, I often found myself thinking about artists who painted the same scene over and over throughout their lives, Monet being the obvious example. I also agree with Celia Paul’s point that it is almost impossible to authentically portray people and places that you do not care about or are not intimately involved with. I’m very attracted to artists who find new ways to keep treading the same ground.

Read more about the Goldsmiths Prize shortlist here. The winner of this year’s award will be announced on November 10. The winning author will appear on Cambridge Literary Festival on November 19.

Read interviews with the other 2022 Goldsmiths Prize novelists here. You can buy the selected books from Bookshop.org here.