In which I annotate my own book, and think about Jane Austen

One of the (many) wonderful things about the publication of a novel is the chance to re-enter its world as it enters the wider world; to live again in its places and with its characters, to talk about them as they become real for other people, too, not just their author.

As the publication date of Diving, Falling approaches I’ve made a small Japanese notebook a place for annotations, where I record ideas, feelings, symbols, and associations that went into the writing of the novel. It shows how things work with other things, in the book and outside it. It reveals the rhythms of the book, its emotional logic, its origin stories, its returnings. The annotations contain explanations of passages and scenes and themes. There are lists and character outlines and some of the pages bear my own symbolic marks (the spiral, the waves, like my tattoo). Its headings are things like ‘The Title’ ‘Origins’ ‘Inspiring elements’ ‘Obsessions’ ‘Sex’ ‘The Final Scene’.

 One heading the notebook did not have until very recently was ‘The Austen Connection’. I mentioned Woolf again and again in its pages, but never Austen. Because I wanted to be the novelist ‘me’ writing down these meanings, not the academic who writes about Austen and her long and varied afterlife. But I thought upon it one Saturday, after reading an article, and as I consider what I might be asked about Diving, Falling and its writing.

 And so here are some broad connections between Austen and Diving, Falling:

 A blend of lightness and seriousness.

A focus on a small circle of family and friends.

A certain spikiness at times in narratorial tone.

An interest in inheritance, in all its forms.

A taking seriously of female friendships.

 In these musings, I thought of Persuasion, especially. Austen’s novel of and about maturity, and time lost and regained. Its questions around the weight of influence on the lives of people around us. Her ocean novel.