Shy Creatures is Clare Chambers’ tenth novel and like her previous novel Small Pleasures, which was longlisted for the Women’s prize, is set in the English suburbia of the 1960s. In conversation with the novelist, Kate Weinburg, Clare Chambers told the Litfest audience where her ideas for the novel came from and explained the four-year writing process of bringing the novel to fruition.
The novel revolves around the character of William Tapping, 37, who has lived his life virtually undocumented and sequestered away from the world by elderly aunts. Chambers had read a newspaper article from the 1950’s about Harry Tucker in Kingsdown, Bristol who had existed under the radar of neighbours, living with an elderly aunt. He was admitted to a psychiatric hospital but later escaped and jumped in the river and drowned. Chambers explained, “I decided to base my novel on this article and to create for this Hidden Man a plausible past and a more hopeful future. I decided to set the story in 1964 which was an interesting period of change in both psychiatry and society.”
Chambers plans her novels meticulously and carries out necessary research. “I need to know where I’m headed emotionally and every other way before starting to write. The heroine, (in this novel – Helen the art therapist) becomes the reader’s proxy on the journey with them. I like unanswered questions and for those questions to be answered by the end of the book.”
As Helen, the art therapist uncovers William’s past, the story in the present moves forward. So, the story is told backwards and forwards in dual timelines. Chambers found it challenging to manipulate this and to ensure that revelations didn’t come too early in the book.
Chambers researched the history of psychiatry of the 60’s. There were the new progressive ideas of R.D.Laing and art therapy was a new discipline. There were however, still these huge psychiatric institutions which were closed to the world and people could be incarcerated in them for decades.
In order to ensure that the cultural references in the novel are correct Chambers always carries out careful historical research and reads fiction of the period to ensure she uses the vocabulary and language of the people living at that time.
Social class is another consideration when planning a novel as “class was inescapable in the 50’s and 60’s. I always start with class and then move onto characters. What are the morals of the characters I create? What are their guiding principles?”
Chambers originally called the novel, The Iron Home, which she felt gave a reference to the closed institutions that constrict people, but she was persuaded to change it to Shy Creatures as this linked more closely with Small Pleasures.
Chambers is already writing her next novel which is set in the 1920’s and 30’s and is “a fictionalised account of my grandmother’s ‘rags to riches’ life. She was stubborn and opinionated and would have had a richer life if she had lived at a time when women had more education and opportunities. I only knew her when she was old so it’s been fun trying to imagine her as a young woman.”
Marlborough Litfest audience are eagerly anticipating the publication of this novel.
LitFest ’25: The Big Town Read – ‘The Night in Question’ by Susan Fletcher
