Writer's horizons broaden behind bars

Elspeth Sandys found visiting a Paremoremo inmate a key source of inspiration for her latest novel, writes books editor MARGIE THOMSON.

At the outset of A Passing Guest (HarperCollins, $24.95), Elspeth Sandys' heroine Renate Anderson, like her creator a woman in her middle years, middle-class, kind and perhaps a little vulnerable because of that, pays her first visit to Paremoremo prison. She's uncomfortably aware of the way she stands out, unsure of procedure, easily shockable, yet not wanting to jump to conclusions about guilt or innocence.

She has gone there to meet, for the first time, an inmate named Max Nene who has written to the Society of Authors (of which Renate is a member) asking for creative writing tuition.

Sandys has shared some of this experience, in that she was asked by a relative "who had a right to ask a favour of me" to take over a commitment to visit a particular inmate once a week.

"I very reluctantly said yes, not really wanting to go and give up my Saturday mornings. So I wasn't actually looking for anything at all. If anything I was quite irritated. But out of it came an extraordinary conversion to a state where I did not have any answers. I was humbled, and I realised I did not know anything about anything."

This, of course, could be the same feeling experienced by anyone who inadvertently strays off the beaten path of their own life. At the time of that initial Paremoremo visit, Sandys had not long returned from 21 years' living abroad and she had discovered - as does Renate - that she needed to get to know her country again.

Paremoremo led her to understand she knew little of Maori experience, and the conversations she subsequently had and the relationships she built up with the person she had come to visit, and also with many others inside, gradually gave her a sense of context, a feeling of belonging rather than of being a mere tourist in other people's lives.

Out of that visit also grew the seed of her latest novel, which features Renate's friendship with Max and her struggle, after his untimely death, to uncover the truth about his life and their relationship. Some of it is sad, ugly stuff - violence, loss, gangs, rape, murder, drugs.

But, while the book is partly about Max's life, we are also drawn into Renate's past relationships, and so, as Sandys says, it is really an investigation of kinds of loving.

Many authors hate to be asked about the relationship between themselves and the characters in their novels. One asks it of Sandys because it begs to be asked. Her novel contains so many parallels with her own life: the woman of her own age and type who has lived in England for many years but who has recently returned home, a writer who openly discusses her philosophy and practice of writing - even the relationship between the writer and the characters.

Pondering one of her own novels, Renate muses that the boundaries between real life and fiction had become too blurred - although elsewhere, she puts paid to the idea that one should read too much into these parallels when she describes a character as "the woman who could be said to be me, but isn't".

Sandys herself, although she says A Passing Guest is not an autobiography, does not deny what she terms "autobiographical connections".

"I feel very strongly that writers who deny autobiographical connections are not telling the truth - ever! Even if a book is set in the Middle Ages it's still being written out of the author's experience of life. So there is a very strong connection for me with Renate - but there are also aspects of other people I have had strong connections to. She isn't me: there are crucial differences. I've had children, and she hasn't. I haven't dodged the issue, though, of how I feel about writing and whether it tells the truth or not.

"This story comes from a meditation over years and years on some fairly significant events in my life, and experiences in friendship, and stories that I've heard, all of which I have reshaped in fiction."

Like Renate, she has enormous confidence in the transformative power of writing in people's lives and has become a passionate advocate of a scheme she has designed to get writers working in prisons. It's rather like the one organised by Fiona Kidman and the Book Council several years ago (which had its funding cut by Jenny Shipley's Government), but would be professionally based (ie, the writers would be paid) and conscientiously rehabilitative. It's not a good time to be pushing for a scheme like this now, in an election year, she acknowledges - no government likes to look "soft on crime" - but she has great hopes for it further down the track.

Because, she says, helping these battered, bruised (and battering and bruising) characters to write is like "taking a cork out of a champagne bottle ... We take it for granted that we can articulate our thoughts and feelings, but some of these men hardly have language. Education is not something in itself that makes you happy, but it gives you the familiarity with language and literature to discover what makes you happy."

Sandys began her adult life as an actor with Auckland's Mercury Theatre Company in the 1960s, before heading for England where she married a fellow actor. With two children, her own career took a back seat, and the family led an often unsettled existence in rented digs, following her husband from show to show. To fill in time she began to write.

An agent happened to come for dinner and was most encouraging, and that meeting eventually resulted in her first published novel, Catch a Falling Star, about the life of John Donne, which in turn resulted from her first screenplay for the BBC. Since then, the novels have flowed - A Passing Guest is her eighth - with River Lines being longlisted for the 1996 Orange Prize.

Somewhere during those years she became a solo mother, but managed through regular writing contracts with the BBC to earn enough to support herself and her children. She has written 16 radio plays, some of which have been broadcast here, and that work continues even though she has been based back in New Zealand since 1990.

She met her husband-to-be, the writer Maurice Shadbolt, through her husband-at-the-time in England. It wasn't love at first sight but over the next 10 years they stayed in touch and developed a friendship. After Sandys' marriage ended, Shadbolt embarked on a successful seduction of the ex-pat writer.

Sandys came back to New Zealand for a visit, during which Shadbolt took her on a tour of the country - a real charm offensive. "Everywhere we went he had fantastic tales to tell," she remembers. The following year, she sold her home in the Cotswolds, gave up her well-established life there, and came home to a country she hardly knew.

She was with Shadbolt for seven and a half years until the relationship ended when he began seeing other women. He is now very ill and in a nursing home in Taumarunui.

Sandys has been rather nomadic since then. Her flat "turned to custard" because, ironically, of gang involvement in the area, and she hasn't been able to bring herself to make another home yet. "I'm working on it," she says, speaking from her daughter's Wellington home.

Life is busy. She makes fairly regular trips back to England on work projects, and will soon visit Melbourne to workshop a stage play she has written about Australian novelist Martin Boyd, and is also involved in a joint venture between the BBC and ABC, writing a three-part serial adaptation of a Boyd novel. She has been invited to take part in the Sydney Writers' Festival in May, and will visit England again after that. She is a regular book reviewer for the New Zealand Herald.

Her speech is peppered with literary allusions - not out of pretension but simply because she has a keen nose for other people's wisdom.

At the beginning of A Passing Guest, instead of the more usual setting-the-scene quote from someone famous, she has four. They're all good, but perhaps this one from Jean Malaquais describes her passion best of all: "The only time I know something is true is at the moment I discover it in the act of writing."