KEY POINTS:
Growing up in the mid-70s, Peter Ho Davies felt both rather exotic and terribly parochial.
The child of a Welsh father and Malay-Chinese mother, he stood out in his hometown of Coventry in central England. "I was one of only a handful of Asian children in my school," he recalls.
But he also had a sinking feeling that his life was on hold. "Growing up in the Midlands, you can feel a long way from anywhere," he says drily. His father was an engineer and Ho Davies studied physics at Cambridge University, but then he confounded everyone by taking a second degree in English at Manchester University.
Later, when he went to Boston to do an MA in creative writing, Americans found him an enigma. "To look Asian but to speak with a British accent completely threw people. I liked that; it felt as if I was just under the radar. You couldn't place me through accent or class or ethnic things."
It is this sense of "being two things simultaneously" that makes Ho Davies' fiction so compelling.
Published in 1998, his first collection of short stories, The Ugliest House in the World, won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize and the Macmillan Silver Pen award.
The extraordinary title story - in which a young doctor describes the accidental death of a child, and its effect on a small village in north Wales - drew comparisons with Katherine Mansfield and Raymond Carver.
Although many of the stories in the book had a Welsh character or subtext (Davies went on holiday there every year as a child), the reach was dazzling.
There were tales about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; about a Chinese uncle who drowned in an earthenware jar; and about a flatulent lieutenant in the Boer War who nearly capsizes a formal dinner party. The writing was distinctive, often laugh-out-loud funny, but shot through with loss.
In 1992 Ho Davies moved to America and published his second collection, Equal Love, which explored the complexity of the parent-child bond. The excitement around Ho Davies was palpable - he was named one of the Granta Best of Young British Novelists in 2003 alongside Zadie Smith and Sarah Waters.
But as the years passed and Ho Davies failed to deliver a novel, gossip circulated. Was there even a book? In fact, he had already sold his first novel in the US, but redrafted the book while pursuing his day job - as director of the MFA creative writing programme at the University of Michigan.
Then, finally, four years after the Granta listing, his first novel, The Welsh Girl, was published to great acclaim. It ended up being long-listed in last year's Booker Prize. Ho Davies - an endearing, boyish figure at 42 - admits his fiction comes from vulnerability.
"It's that moment in the playground where someone has cracked a joke at your expense and you don't have the comeback line, but then five minutes or an hour or years later you think, 'Oh I should just have said that - it's the perfect riposte!' And as soon as you start to write that moment down, it seems like one of the transitional points towards becoming a writer. It's something about a regret in the past that we can try to put right in a fictionalised form."
As a child he devoured junk science fiction, but then at 13 he read a book called Who Writes Science Fiction? which helped him see writing as a "do-able human endeavour. These writers weren't Gauloises-smoking, beret-wearing intellectuals. Many of them were engineers and scientists like my father."
He submitted a story about his grandmother's descent into senility to a literary magazine. It was rejected with the note "Possibilities" (he treasured it for years) - but eventually he sold his first story aged 21.
At first he saw his background as "too strange" for him to write about. His parents weren't natural storytellers: they threw out fragments, elusive snippets about their past - but clammed up when he asked too many questions.
Eventually he realised he would have to fill the gaps in with his own fiction. It was one of these snippets that triggered the new novel. His grandmother, who lived in north Wales, had ornaments on her mantelpiece - a brass tobacco tin, an ashtray, a letter opener - which he played with as a child.
Years later he learnt that they had been made by prisoners of war in Wales from old shell cases. "It felt like that first little brush with history." Excited, he immersed himself in research - from sheep farming to Nazi genocide campaigns.
The Welsh Girl opens in 1944 as Captain Rotherham (a German-Jewish refugee) is sent to a safe house in Snowdonia, Wales, to interrogate Rudolf Hess.
The intertwining stories involve a farm girl named Esther and a German POW, Karsten. The novel mixes fact and fiction. Hess was held in Wales during the war, but to this day no one knows if he flew to Britain on a peace mission, had been expelled by Hitler, or was simply mad. It is this "little bubble of history" - this blank space - where Ho Davies is able to interpose his fiction.
The Hess material is gripping, but the larger issue of the book is the nature of identity: Rotherham is in denial about his Jewish ancestry, Karsten is suffering from survivor's guilt and Esther has her own secret.
In fact Rotherham can be seen as a doppelganger for the author. "He is quite distant from me personally - I'm not half-Jewish, I didn't grow up in Germany, I'm not of the period - but the way he is caught between these various cultures, and the struggle he has with people assigning him his identity - those things feel very personal to me."
It's interesting that Ho Davies, who often gets the glamorous "ethnic writer" tag, chose to locate his first novel in white, 1940s Britain. But as he says, "I think a lot of us feel torn between multiple identities: am I this, am I that?
The truth is we're often made up of these competing influences. But that's not the shorthand that society works in. At times I struggle with that, but it's a great gift as a writer.
On the page, in a short-story collection, one story can be about this element of my identity, another about that part of my background." He moved to America permanently when he met his wife, Lynne. "My son likes to say, 'Mum and Dad fell in the love in Boston.'
I think he thinks it's the name of a river." At first he worried about losing his English accent. Even now in an English pub he says he reverts to Britishisms such as "gor blimey" and "stone the crows".
But his writing celebrates commonality. In The Welsh Girl, barriers between races keep on crumbling. In real life, he tells me, several German prisoners stayed on in Wales after the war and married local girls.
"Over that period of time it's impossible to maintain the idea of the evil one, the other." The novel is full of rich period detail: tearaway evacuees, boozy BBC broadcasters and army types. But behind it all lies the shadow of the Holocaust. Guilt is "an endless subject" for Ho Davies. It certainly drives all his characters.
What interests him is trying "to understand why the wrong thing might happen". Through the character of Esther in The Welsh Girl he explores the decision to tell a "dreadful, selfish, convenient lie" - one that by the end, the reader, he hopes, will understand and respond to.
He says he is not a polemical writer, but many of his short stories have a political subtext. The Union in his first collection is a heartbreaking account of 1899 slate-quarry strikes in Gwynedd - but it also triggers memories of the 1984 Miners' Strike.
"I was at college in Manchester during the 80s, so it was something that felt very much at the forefront of my political thinking." The Welsh Girl is about German war guilt - the novel ends with Hess in Spandau Prison where he committed suicide in 1987 - but it is arguably a post-9/11 book.
As Ho Davies observes, you can't write about prison detention centres and show trials without events in Iraq coming to mind. "A question that people in the US are asking is, how responsible are we for things being done in our name, supposedly to protect us? When something like Abu Ghraib happens, how responsible is everybody in the United States for that?
And what is it to be patriotic?" Ho Davies is ambitious for historical fiction. It frustrates him that it is often dismissed as a genre-occupied form - "that whole bodice-ripping quality". While The Welsh Girl has an unashamedly traditional narrative, Ho Davies hopes it "speaks forward" to the reader.
There is a dazzling, ventriloquist quality to his writing, which he compares to being a method actor. "Years ago when Daniel Day-Lewis was first coming on the scene, he was a skinhead in My Beautiful Laundrette, then a very effete character in A Room with a View.
I was in my impressionable teens at the time and I remember being blown away that somebody could do that," he smiles. "The transformation seemed so radical from role to role.
And I hope in some way I can do that with fiction."
* Observer Peter Ho Davies is a guest at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, Aotea Centre, Auckland, May 14-18
- NZ HERALD
