H.G. Parry: When We Read Books, We Bring Their Worlds Into Life

While all fiction writers can pull characters from their imaginations and commit them to the page, most readers can’t do what Charley Sutherland can: pull characters from the page and commit them to the real world. Sutherland’s fantastical ability is at the center of H.G. Parry’s debut novel The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep. It is both a mystery (Sutherland and his brother must find and stop a stranger who shares Sutherland’s ability but is using it for nefarious ends) as well as a celebration of literary criticism.

Like Sutherland, Parry has a Ph.D. in English literature (her research focused on children’s fantasy, his on Charles Dickens). She lives in Wellington, New Zealand (where the The Unlikely Escape is set) and teaches English literature, film, and media studies.

In her conversation with Rob Wolf on New Books in Science Fiction, she discusses literary interpretations of Uriah Heep, how storytelling can be dangerous, why she created a grown-up version of a plucky girl detective, and how interpreting books is similar to interpreting people.

From the episode:

Rob Wolf: Let’s start with Uriah Heep. His name has worked its way into the English language as a synonym for a sycophant, or, to put it more bluntly, an ass kisser. For listeners who may not be familiar with him, can you explain who he is?

H.G. Parry: Uriah Heep is the antagonist from the book David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. He’s a clerk who works for a lawyer, and, as you say, he’s a uniquely unpleasant piece of work. He’s obsequious, slimy—the kind of person who’s going to be always sucking up to people while planning their downfall. And he’s a parody of what he knows the upper class wants him to be and also a critique of the upper class, who like being flattered.

RW: He’s one of the first characters we meet thanks to your main protagonist, Charley Sutherland, who has a unique ability to pull characters from books into the real world.

HGP: Charley Sutherland was a prodigy who became a literary scholar. His specialty is Victorian literature, particularly Charles Dickens. The premise of the book, essentially, is that he has the power to read characters out of books—which is something he can do on purpose, but at times it happens by accident. They come out shaped by his interpretation of them, like, for instance, Uriah Heep. At the time, Charlie was coming up with a hypothesis about how Uriah Heep is a social shape shifter—that he becomes what society wants him to be—so when Charlie reads him out of the book, he comes out as a physical shape shifter, with particular abilities and powers.

As the story goes on, he and his brother start to encounter other characters who Charley hasn’t read out of books; they seem to be coming from somebody else. Who that person is and what their intentions are is what they’re trying to work out throughout the book. They also encounter a street full of people—a hidden Victorian street off a street in Wellington—full of characters who came from ordinary readers, who, at some point in their lives, had a very powerful connection with a character, a particular flash of insight, and when that happened, unbeknownst to the readers, these characters were born into the world. They’re half the way they are in the book and half how their reader has interpreted them.

RW: One of the fascinating results of this process is that there can be multiple manifestations of the same character. There are multiple Uriah Heeps and five Mr. Darcys from Pride and Prejudice, and, as you said, each is slightly different from the other because whoever summoned them into reality has left their mark on them.

HGP: With the five Mr. Darcys, I was half playing with the fact that there have been so many television adaptations of Mr. Darcy. People talk about “Who’s your favorite Darcy?” and so I was having fun picturing that. The first Mr. Darcy comes from the 1800s, so he’s very much the way an original reader might have read Mr. Darcy. Darcy Number Five is the one that looks exactly like Colin Firth and is a lot more taken from the 1995 [television mini-series] than from the book version of him. There’s a Darcy that’s very shy and reclusive because one of the debates that I’ve had with fellow Austen fans and with students is how much is Mr. Darcy proud and haughty and how much is he just very shy.

RW: It would seem as if it would be a really fun and wonderful thing to be able to bring these characters to life. But it’s been a big problem for Charley his whole life. Ever since he was little, his family has lectured him about the need to suppress the urge.

HGP: There’s a long tradition of characters with magical abilities who are being told to keep it hidden and to stay normal, and it comes from the fact that a lot of people grow up feeling like what makes them special is something that’s weird or strange, and they try and keep it in. The other side of it, though, is that books are incredibly powerful and there’s a real danger to stories and storytelling. When you bring something into the world, it’s got the power to do extraordinary things, the power to save the world or to harm it. And there’s a real responsibility that comes with reading, interpreting and storytelling.

RW: The process by which Charley can read characters out into the real world parallels kind of snugly with a writer bringing a character out from the neurons firing in the writer’s head.

HGP: Absolutely. Both writing is an act of creation and reading as well. A character’s just words on a page until a reader brings it life, and it’s not just a simple matter of sticking a character on a page and a reader is going to get exactly what you put into it. They’re going to bring their own feelings, they’re going to notice things, they’re going to identify with things, there’s going be things that you don’t necessarily create yourself or aren’t aware of creating that someone from a totally different background or a totally different perspective is going to see, take and bring to life. So yes, reading is also an act of creation. You’re creating your own version of a character as you’re reading it.

There are many origin points for this book. I was thinking about reading and writing but also about literary analysis. There’s a lot of books out there—particularly, a lot of science fiction books—that celebrate the science of physics, engineering, astronomy, all that kind of thing. There are books that celebrate historical research. But I haven’t seen an academic character that’s involved in literary analysis and yet there is something that’s very intellectually exciting, very detective work-like, very thrilling about the act of literary analysis, and the act of reading a book, seeing clues, building your interpretation, building a particular version of the story for yourself that I wanted to celebrate.

It’s meant to be a very literal way of talking about the way we bring things to life when we write but also the way we bring things to life when we read and the way we bring things to life when we engage in any act of literary critique, whether that’s just a simple matter of reading a book for pleasure and coming up with your own opinion of it or whether that’s something that’s far more academic and building a case about a character. That’s always felt quite magical to me.