Fiction, Sport, Regulation
An Endless Chain is my second novel and, while not a conventional sequel, is related to Walk the Line, with some of the same characters. But, rather than the deliberately loose structure of the first book, jumping back and forth across the years and shifting its focus between a group of characters, it focuses on one, Michelle, and follows her from her mid-20s through to her mid-60s. It tracks the story of her relationships and friendships across three periods of time - 1982/85, 2012 and 2020 - as the plot accelerates.
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You can find it at Olympia Publishers | An Endless Chain by Gavin Stewart, as well as Amazon and Foyles.
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I am interested in the relationship between our personal lives and the external events we live through and how this influences us as we get older. So it's not coincidence that the book opens on the eve of the Falklands War, with its second half taking place against the background of the Covid pandemic. And while the book is not about either, both have an impact on Michelle and the other characters while shifting the story's direction.
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In Michelle's case, we first see her as part of several groups of characters, working out, through trial and error, how she wants to spend her time and who with. In the second section, which takes place almost 20 years later, she is in the process of re-setting and reinventing herself, although the shadow of past relationships keeps trying to drag her back. In the final section, these two strands come together with unexpected results.
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I had always planned to set the second half of the book during 2020, but obviously didn't anticipate the pandemic. So, when Covid hit, I was forced to imagine the story in a radically different context, and as a result the story and its ending both changed - a real life example of the impact of external events... You can order the book here.
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Internal & External Life
One of the subjects I try to explore in my fiction is the border between our personal lives - what we think and feel, and our friendships and relationships - and what is happening in the world around us. It seems to me that where this border lies for each of us and how we react to and are affected by the events we live through is a defining characteristic of many lives. How much we let them shape us lies at the heart of who we are and who we become.
Politics is one of the areas where our internal and external lives potentially meet, and An Endless Chain opens on the eve of the 1982 Falklands War, a politically and socially defining event that helped shape that decade. Even more fundamentally, the book’s second half takes place in 2020, with the Covid pandemic as an inescapable backdrop. In neither case am I concerned with the rights and wrongs of what happened, but the impact of both shifts the trajectory of the novel and its characters.
In the first instance, the Falklands War divides Michelle’s Labour Party friends and nudges her towards looking outside her normal social circle, the consequences of which play out through the first part of the book. The later impact of Covid is much more direct, constraining and shaping the lives and actions of the main characters and kicking the story in a new direction.
Michelle and Mary’s friendship, central to the story, is also shaped by external factors. Some of this is their relationships with their respective partners, but Mary’s increasing success and political drift to the right also matters. It is not clear how directly these affect their friendship, but it changes the context and disrupts the certainty of their shared assumptions.
I've always found it hard to explain what sort of book "Walk the Line" is. It's not obviously part of a genre, though at a stretch you could describe it as historical fiction, and I hesitate to call it "literary".
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The story follows a group of friends over four decades, broadly from 1968-2008, via two alternating strands. The first runs from July 2005 - the week of the London 7/7 bombings - to the end of 2008, while the second covers a series of disparate episodes in the characters' lives between 1968-2005. These episodes are arranged in sections - titled "Perspectives" - and are more loosely structured and much less linear than the first strand.
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The novel's title refers to the various boundaries we navigate through life. Most obviously, it tries to explore the line between our personal lives and the external world, and part of the genesis of the the novel is my fascination with understanding how the events we live through influences our characters and choices. But it is also concerned with the boundaries in our personal relationships and in how we view ourselves compared to how others see us.
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I've deliberately drawn the main characters - Sam, Michelle, Mary, Philip and Carol - only partially, and there are large gaps in what we know about them and why they change over time. This is because I don't, for the most part, believe in definitive character judgements. For me, we each see each other through our own lens and little is set in stone.