Bron Sibree interviews Christy Lefteri

The Book of Fire

Christy Lefteri

**** (4 stars)

Christy Lefteri doesn’t so much research her best-selling novels as imbibe the real-life emotions and experiences of those she talks to in shaping them. She imbibes them to such a degree, she admits, “that the stories haunt me afterwards and I always feel a lot of guilt”. A sense of guilt is only part of a swirl of emotions she is experiencing in the wake of her fourth novel, The Book of Fire, says Lefteri. She even found the runaway success of her best-selling 2019 novel The Beekeeper of Aleppo, which grew out of her experiences volunteering at an Athens centre for refugees displaced during the Syrian civil war, hard to handle, “because of this guilt".

Lefteri, who previously worked as psychotherapist, cheerily confesses to having “a lot of therapy, otherwise it just becomes heavy. I feel like it will take time. When you’re speaking to people who have been through a lot, when they're living in camps or suffered from devastating fires, and you’re leaving them to live in a nice comfy place, you cannot not feel guilty about that.”

It’s difficult to say which is the more disarming when conversing with this London-born daughter of Cypriot refugees: her naked honesty; her palpable empathy for others; or her penchant for tackling the traumas associated with global issues such as war, human displacement and migration — and, more recently, climate change.

But one thing is certain, her almost preternatural ability to connect with and evoke the emotions and experiences of others has ensured that her three previous novels — The Beekeeper of Aleppo, which told of a family Syrian refugees, Songbirds, inspired by the real-life disappearance of migrant workers in Cyprus, and her debut novel about Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Cyprus, A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible — have sold more than 2-million copies worldwide and have been translated into 35 languages.

Lefteri first saw a runaway forest fire in Greece in 2017 during her second summer volunteering at the Athens refugee centre.  But it wasn’t until she was back in London writing Songbirds, she says, “that I remembered that fear, and a combination of things got me thinking ‘I really want to research this.’” By the time she went to the town of Mati, Greece, to speak to locals about the horrific fire they’d endured in 2018, she was three months pregnant with her now two-year-old daughter Evie. “I decided I wanted to speak to people to find out about their experiences and to see the land and also hear about the changes that had happened after the fire."

Letferi can reel off countless heart-rending stories people told her of how they managed after the fire, many of them recounted in a café where survivors regularly gathered, a place not too dissimilar to the café featured in her poignant narrative. “Yet while in Mati, particularly in that café,” recounts Lefteri, “whenever I mentioned climate change the atmosphere changed entirely and I was to learn that people were very angry. One or two people explained to me that a journalist had come to Mati to interview them about the fire, and they’d shared their stories but because the journalist had written about their stories of trauma but also about climate change, they’d felt terribly betrayed. I wasn’t expecting that and it put me into a dilemma.”

It was only when she realised “that two things can exist at the same time, that the reality of the trauma and the reality of climate change can exist at the same time", says Lefteri, that she allowed that dilemma and associated questions to play into the writing of The Book of Fire. The novel takes its readers inside the heart of an Anglo-Greek family engulfed in trauma, via its narrator Irini, a musician who teaches children to read and play music. Irini keeps a journal to come to terms with her life before and after the fire, which took the lives of so many, including that of her father-in-law. The fire has also burnt and scarred the hands of artist husband Tasso, leaving him no longer able to paint the forest, and left their young daughter, Chara, scarred for life. Irini is consumed by a roil of emotions, in particular rage — at the man, a developer, who started the fire — and by guilt for a split-second decision made when she came upon the dying developer in the forest.

Arguably one the most potent aspects of the novel is the way it not only threads questions about the role of climate change into the tangle of trauma and very real human errors that led to the fire — be they those of the fire brigade, the police, the developer or the government — but explores the deep human need to blame someone or something tangible in the wake of such devastation. For as she writes in an author’s note, “I came to understand how desperately people needed to blame a tangible entity — a person, a group of people, the government."

Lefteri believes her ability to convey trauma so tellingly in her novels stems from living in the shadow of her parents' war experiences. “I’ve seen the effects of it and how these effects can have ripples that go from generation to generation." As for her own deep concern about climate change that pervades The Book of Fire, she says, “having a child has brought that into my reality a lot more. It makes me fearful and sad, and I’m asking questions in the novel that I don’t have the answers to. But it stems from wanting people to ask questions of themselves and their place — of our own human place in the world.”

CHRISTY LEFTERI ON BOOKS THAT HAVE INFLUENCED HER

Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial by Peter Stott. A climate scientist, his book was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2022, and for the Royal Society for Literature Christopher Bland Prize of 2022. It's basically about how hard the fight was to get international recognition of human-induced climate change and how various people worked to sabotage that science. He writes about how there was a huge battle to rise above the climate change denialists. I read this as I was finishing my book and when I was doubting myself. But after I finished reading the book, it settled me. When I met him I thanked him and we’ve been in touch ever since. We’re doing a talk together for the Oxford Literary Festival in March.

Engaging With Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives by Sally Weintrobe. She is a psychoanalyst. It is a collection of essays from different psychoanalysts and people from the social science disciplines. Whereas Stott’s book was largely on how to get sceptical governments to recognise climate change, this one is about our personal human response to climate change and why it’s easy for us to deny it. The pieces are analytical and delve into different emotions in slow motion. 

Drive Your Plough Over The Bones Of The Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. She won the Nobel prize a few years ago. I read it when I was writing Songbirds but it stayed with me. It's a set in a remote Polish village and at the beginning of the book there is a murder. Through its main character, an old lady, you learn about Polish history, the landscape, the animals and the way we treat our environment. It’s beautiful and I loved the way the murder mystery is a gentle aspect of the novel, but it holds it together. There’s a lot in there about animal rights and how animals are treated, which influenced me when I was the writing of The Book of Fire.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. This is probably my favourite book and has always influenced me no matter what I’m writing and the reason for that is its style. It’s the way she gets into the character’s mind, the stream of consciousness she uses — I don’t over use stream of consciousness. However it influences me in how she gets into her character’s emotions and the political and social things that are going on in the background, and the way she allows those things to drift into the story. I love the way that the reality of the world exists in the mind of this woman. The fact that she’s gone outside for flowers — such a simple mundane thing — and you learn so much about her world, and her relationship with that world and the war, and with people.

The Overstory by Richard Powers. I read it just before writing The Book of Fire. I enjoyed the different stories encapsulated and the beautiful stories about trees. As you read it, you kind of get the overstory, which is the story of the humans and the understory, which is the story of nature. I love that he’s created these different narratives, these different people’s stories, and within each of them is their relationship with nature. However, I must admit it got a bit repetitive towards the end. In spite of that, I adored it, and it stayed with me.