She is able to observe and comment on the situation in the Brooke household with a fresh eye, as the much sought after objective and reliable narrator. Mary is the perfect narrator during the first section of this three-part book. She has a big heart and a deal of common sense though she is an uneducated girl fresh from Ireland when she arrives in the house of Cynthia Brooke, shortly after Cynthia’s husband has been interned under Regulation Rule 18B due to his membership in Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. She is purely fictional and came to me as that rare gift-to-a-writer of a ready-made character with a strong voice and opinions of her own. Mary Byrne is undoubtedly my favourite character, and the heart of the novel for me. OB:ĭid you find yourself having a "favourite" amongst your characters? If so, who was it and why? AH: This form gives me way more freedom than a biography or a straight memoir, for which I would need more reliable facts than I have. So, what we have is a novel, or perhaps a fictionalized memoir. I continued to add to those notes over many years of research and plumbing of memory until, in 2012, I finally came to a decision to write the story as a fiction, based on the facts of my research, and upon the life of my family in WW2 England.
It was an appropriate place to begin because the story of Mad Hatter takes place in England, centred around World War II, spanning the 1930s to the 1950s. I started Mad Hatter in 2000, in a pub in London UK, writing with a fountain pen in my notebook, with a glass of red wine at my side.
Open Book:ĭo you remember how your first started this novel or the very first bit of writing you did for it? Amanda Hale: She tells us about (very appropriately) starting the manuscript that would become Mad Hatter in a London pub, her long-buried family connection that inspired the story, and the book's stunning dedication. We're excited to welcome Amanda to Open Book today to take part in our Long Story novel interview. A story of war, politics, a marriage, and more, Mad Hatter is taut and insightful, a moving story from a time that feels both far removed and hauntingly relevant. Farm girl Mary Byrne is hired to help out and watches as the family slowly unravels.īut when Christopher finally returns home, things somehow become even more complex, with Mary suddenly dismissed without cause. Christopher Brooke is arrested and imprisoned under Regulation 18B for his membership in a fascist party, leaving his wife and three children alone as war breaks out. It's this fraught moment in history that Amanda Hale mines in her intense and absorbing new novel Mad Hatter (Guernica Editions). A desperate step in a desperate time, around 1000 men and women were imprisoned under 18B during wartime. In 1939, the United Kingdom passed Defence Regulation 18B - a sweeping rule that allowed the indefinite internment of anyone suspected of Nazi sympathies, without charge or trial.
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