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Bleedout
Interviews
Joan Brady: Anger management
The Independent, April 08, 2005, By Christie Hickman
Joan Brady’s recent courtroom battles have inspired her to write a legal thriller. This granddaughter of a white slave tells Christie Hickman what fuels her rage.
In September 2001, when Joan Brady should have been making her first appearance at Totnes Magistrates Court, she was in Tromso, Norway, representing Britain at an international conference to celebrate the centenary of the Nobel Peace Prize. The theme was War and Peace, and Brady’s lecture was on sources of hatred in war. She proudly shared a stage with the great Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko. ‘Not only that,’ she says in a soft, modulated voice which, after half a lifetime in England, still bears traces of her origins on the east and west American coasts, ‘but I ended the evening in a pub reading his poetry for him’.
Brady’s speech could not have been more apposite. She won the 1993 Whitbread Book of the Year award for her second novel, Theory of War, based on the story of her own grandfather, Alexander Brady, who, as a white child, was sold into slavery at the end of the American Civil War. Hatred, she says, was the glue that held the story together.
But hatred of a different kind was about to make her own life hell for three years. Brady had been living in the quiet Devon town of Totnes for over 30 years when, in 2000, South Hams District Council granted planning permission for a small shoe factory in a building adjoining her house.
Apart from the noise, she thinks the fumes from the chemical adhesives were so toxic that they affected her health, and when she protested, the council found a reason to indict her instead. She fought back and over the next two years attended court 15 times. Unable to concentrate on anything much except the legal battle, she abandoned the literary novel she was writing and poured her fury into a tense and ingenious legal thriller called Bleedout (Simon & Schuster, pounds 12.99).
Issues of justice, betrayal and revenge resonate through Brady’s work, but even though this is her fifth novel, it is her first entry into territory that writers like Grisham and Turow have made their own. The setting is Springfield, Illinois, and the two central characters are Hugh Freyl, a murdered blind lawyer, who narrates his story from the grave, and his protege, David Marion, a young convicted killer whose release from prison Freyl has orchestrated. As the novel opens, he stands accused of Freyl’s murder. Marion finds himself caught up in political corruption and an intricate financial conspiracy.
David Marion, we learn, was an abused child. Rebellion and punishment followed, fuelling a residual anger that only revenge will appease. This same cycle of abuse and rage informed the character of Jonathan Carrick, the white slave boy in Theory of War. And while Brady concedes that South Hams council and the violence of her own feelings were partly responsible for Bleedout, the emotional legacy of her grandfather’s slavery has cast a long shadow across subsequent generations.
Her father was one of Brady’s seven children, and one of four who killed themselves. Her sister, she says, ‘gets very angry and shows her anger. When she read Theory of War, she went to see a therapist, who told her that she had exactly the same sort of angry frustrations that children of alcoholics show.’ The difference, as Brady points out, is that their father was the son of a slave.
Brady claims not to be an overtly angry person (‘except when cornered’) but anger is the force that links her books and gives her male characters such power and resilience. ‘I do seem to do well with angry men for some reason,’ she says. ‘I don’t understand why people denigrate anger. I don’t think you can really survive in a world like this without it.’
Off the page, it has empowered her with a core of strength and resolve not immediately apparent beneath her good-humoured charm. Nor is she given to self-pity or sentimentality. She is a slight, grey-haired, elegant woman, who dresses in various shades of black, and lives now in Oxford where, for the moment, she rents a small neat house near the river.
Brady has led an extraordinary life. She was born in San Francisco, and brought up in Berkeley where her father was a blacklisted economics professor. Her mother was a brilliant consumer economist and both parents were writers. It was an unstable marriage and Brady, against parental opposition, became a dancer, first with the San Francisco Ballet and then, in 1960, with George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. At 21, she gave it all up to study philosophy at Columbia, and in 1963 married the writer Dexter Masters, with whom she says she fell in love at the age of three.
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