HIS debut novel They Are Trying To Break Your Heart was described as “a tense and powerful debut novel which renders carnage with an unsettling, dispassionate accuracy”. Ana Iliescu meets David Savill who discusses his inspiration for his breakthrough book.
Teacher, writer, documentary producer, the multi-faceted David Savill sits at his desk, in an office littered with books. With a kind smile on his face, he says:
“I write because I try to understand what it’s all about,” he breathes, “What life’s all about.”
He has recently started teaching Creative Writing at the University of Salford and he’s enjoying it more that he would have imagined, although it’s taking most of his time now and writing has to be squeezed in during weekends.
“I feel writing is my vocation and it’s the thing that’s most important to me but I can’t make a living out of it.
“So when people ask me what I do for a living, I normally say I am a teacher.
“It feels the most honest thing to say, since it’s what I spend 80 per cent of my time doing.”
He did an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing and English Literature: “I began that degree because I loved writing poetry and I ended it with a love for writing prose, fiction and novels.”
Writing has always been his dream but he could not pursue it because it was financially impossible for him to support himself from doing just that.
“I knew that I didn’t have the talent to be one of those few people who become successful young debut novelists.
“Yes, it was frustrating. But you have to take a long hard look at yourself and say I am not as talented as that person so what can I do?
“I also felt like I didn’t really have an interesting story to tell nor did I have that easily available commercial talent – to be able to be that person who can write a book every month.”
His passion for politics started at a young age, he remembers:
“In the late 90s, while I was at university, I volunteered in Bosnia and went to the town of Tuzla – which had been under siege for five years – where I lived with refuges from Srebrenica and that was the beginning of my political interest in life.”
After graduating from university, he decided to go and live in Georgia (situated at Russia’s southern border) for a year. He went there as an English teacher but soon started working at a local newspaper, translating articles and interviewing people.
“I wanted to do something that felt like it was productive at some essential political level – that was my ambition.”
David Savill tells the story of a man who had his fingertips cut off because he wrote against the Russian regime, which became very popular and that is when he drifted towards journalism. Soon after, he got a job as an assistant producer at BBC. While working there, he covered the 2004 Thai Tsunami, which had a very strong impact on his life.
“I got a call on the day that happened. It was Christmas holiday and I didn’t want to look at the news my editor called me on Boxing Day, which was very unusual.
“She asked me ‘have you seen what happened?’ and I said ‘No I didn’t’ and she told me to turn on the news.”
The next day he was on a plane to Bangkok to film a documentary about the disastrous event.
“On the plane over, I realised that every single person on the plane was going there to search for somebody who was missing.
“They were all talking about it, apart from me who was sitting there with a camera.”
He spent the next six months filming a documentary in Sri Lanka about the aftermath of the calamity, but then decided that if he was ever going to write, that was the time to start:
“The magnitude of the event itself, the magnitude of death and the obituary nature of death in that experience, that you can just be on a beach one moment and be swept away by a wave the next – that changes you.”
That is when he started working on what became his novel They Are Trying To Break Your Heart. The novel received acclaim from The Times Literary Supplement and was selected by Netgalley as its Book of the Month, Without indulging in self acclamation, he says he does not feel successful yet.
“The book has quite a long life if the publisher continues to support it, so I hope that the paperback will find more reviewers when it will be launched in America in December.
“Because what I’m writing about is political, I want people to be changed by what they read.”
The book’s title, which came late in the process, is inspired by one of his favourite songs, Wilco’s I Am Trying To Break Your Heart as it looks at “the other side of the story”, something he always had in mind when creating the plot. It also symbolizes the characters’ existential struggles and social crisis.
“All these people have enormous forces against them which were sort of symbolised by the tsunami which runs through the book.
“It’s about what do we do when faced with overwhelming odds, when the world is trying to break your heart.”
He believes some people write to escape and fantasise, entering a very playful space through their work, remaining “brilliantly childish inside”.
When he creates his characters, he usually choses people who fascinate him in a way or another. “The character from the novel I’m working on now is very much the type that I’ve been around and worked with – it’s a strong, independent, female journalist. “
He is particularly interested with what drives them and makes them so willing to sacrifice so much for their work.
“I’m interested in the drive and energy and campaigning ambition a lot of them have.
“It’s sometimes a madness which I know those women would admit themselves so I’m just interested in that energy.”
'People are like those tipping cups in Japanese gardens, filled with a constant stream of water, compelled to tip.' pic.twitter.com/BXGeoZgear
— David Savill (@SavillDavid) June 11, 2016
He refers to women who work in international journalism, always travelling from country to country and going to war zones. He thinks saying they do this because they try to prove themselves in a once male dominated profession, would be doing them down.
“I just think they’re very idealistic people and they have a burning sense about the world’s injustice and I’m interested in how do you live with that?
“It’s exhausting being political: being interested every day, reading every day, caring everyday about how authority is messing with the world in one way or another.”
Another reason why he likes writing more about women is because he always made better friends with them:
“I’m not a man’s man, I don’t like male company especially in groups,” he says laughing.
He finds it interesting to look at the way this generation of students is questioning gender identity so profoundly:
“Whether we agree or not that we are born in the right bodies, I think they’re right trying to break down the ideas of male and female cultures, because I certainly never felt at home in either one really.”
His next novel, Disinformation, will look at the collapse of the Soviet Union and Putin’s political arise. He has witnessed from distance the riots from the year Putin came to power, at the beginning of the second Chechen War: “I’ve been interested in what we think has been happening at the edges of Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
He says that part of his generation’s fascination with this subject is due to the fact that was the first time a single news story changed everything they knew about the world.
“It has been kind of like the formative experience of my teenage years, a bit like 9/11 for your generation perhaps.”
He admits being exhausted sometimes by his political views: “I think sometimes you just have to take a holiday and recharge your batteries.”
Teaching isn’t a break from the politics either, since he is trying to make his students open their eyes and see what is happening in the world around them as well as question the value of their life and what they do with it.
By Ana Iliescu
@a_iliescu
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