XAN BROOKS
Journalist Xan Brooks left a staff role at the Guardian to get his first draft down, he tells Adrian Magson
Xan Brooks
NEW AUTHOR PROFILE
It‘s not unusual for writers to call on anecdotal pieces to inspire a story, often casting back into their own family history as a jumping-off point. One such is Xan Brooks, a freelance journalist from Bath, who saw such an anecdote turned into his first published novel, The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times.
Described as a dark social-realist fairytale of 1920s England, it follows orphaned teenage girl, Lucy, who is driven out to Epping Forest every Sunday to meet ‘the funny men ‘, a quartet of broken souls all of whom have been named after characters from The Wizard of Oz (The Scarecrow, The Tin Man, The Cowardly Lion and Toto). As the plot develops, we discover the history of these men and where they really live today.
‘In October 2014, ‘ Xan explains, ‘I was speaking to my dad about my great-aunt, who had died a few years before. He mentioned that she‘d once told him that, as a child, she used to be sent to the forest to meet (in her words) “the funny men from the war “. This disturbing story lodged in my brain. There was so much about it that remained unexplained – I had the impression she didn‘t want to discuss it further – but I remember thinking that it sounded like a nightmarish fairytale. The innocent girl, the deep, dark woods and the threat in the trees. The challenge was to somehow interrogate the harsh reality of the situation while still preserving that fairytale quality. At first I thought I‘d write it up as a short story. But the more I plotted it, the more questions I asked, the more the thing developed. As soon as I asked myself the question “But where do the funny men come from? “, I knew it had to be a novel. ‘