Canadian novelist Lauren B. Davis.
Canadian novelist Lauren B. Davis, a resident of Princeton, was longlisted for the Giller Prize in 2012 for her novel Our Daily Bread. ChiZine Press will publish her latest novel, Against a Darkening Sky, on April 28.
Q. Tell us about Wilona and Egan, the protagonists of the new novel.
A. Both Wilona and Egan have had experiences of the Sacred that put them at odds with institutions of power, both secular and religious.
Wilona is the only survivor of a plague that wiped out her village. She stumbles out of the moors into the village of Ad Gefrin, one of King Edwin’s compounds. Here she becomes the apprentice of Touilt, a wise woman and healer. When the King arrives, calling everyone to convert to Christianity, Wilona’s devotion to the old gods puts her very life in danger.
Egan is Irish. He built a small boat in order to follow his vision of a divine messenger across the sea. After becoming a monk at the monastery on Iona, he’s sent to Ad Gefrin as interpreter for the Roman Bishop Paulinus, who recently converted King Edwin to Christianity. Egan’s experiential faith and preference for simplicity and solitude is incompatible with the pomp of royal court, and his respect for those who practice the old ways does him no favors.
Q. Much of your work could be described as gritty realism, but Against a Darkening Sky has elements of “magic and mystery” in it. Was it fun to expand the scope of what is possible as you explored these characters and this world?
A. It was so much fun. I was less constrained by hard fact than in previous novels, and so I drew from a number of ideas— Scandinavian, Celtic and Native American ritual practices, for example. All fiction is a work of imagination, obviously, but this book permitted me to stretch, and the lack of constraint was delicious. I dropped into a spot in my subconscious I don’t think I’d accessed before, providing me with all sorts of symbols. In fact, I enjoyed it so much, I’ve just finished a draft of my next novel, which is inspired by a fairy tale and set in a world quite, but not exactly, like our own. It has, for example, flying caribous. You don’t see them too often.
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