Interview: Brian Stoddart talks about Outcast

Professor Brian Stoddart is an acclaimed writer on history, culture, and immigrant experience in New Zealand, Australia, and Asia. His biography A People’s Collector in the British Raj: Arthur Galetti explored the life of a maverick officer in the Indian civil service, as part of his broader work on nationalism in British India. Playing the Game: How Cricket Made Barbados explains the central role that sport played in shaping island society following the abolition of slavery. Brian has also written extensively on sporting nationalism, politics and media. A House in Damascus: Before the Fall chronicles his time working in Syria and living in the Old City immediately before the war began in 2011. Brian’s screenwriting has won awards in the United Kingdom, Canada, India and Australia, and his recent credits include Roads Old and New, which explores the journeys of South-Asian migrants to Australia. Brian is also an author of crime fiction and has been longlisted in the Ngaio Marsh Awards for his Le Fanu series of crime novels. Brian talks to NZ Booklovers. 

Tell us a little about Outcast.

This is the story of a troubled French teenager who ran away to 1870s New Zealand where he struggled with a new social setting in which aspiration was usually trumped by reality.

Etienne Jean Brocher became Stephen Bosher (and other Anglo variations of the name) but always ran afoul of civic leaders who set the “standards” for this new place.  So he retreated to and married into Akaroa’ French enclave, a venture that began well but ended badly.

He then disappeared from New Zealand. Only to reappear in France before being dispatched to north Africa on national service that for him mostly consisted of spending almost a decade in military prisons.

That ended but, banned from re-entering France, he again headed for New Zealand to become a Wellington market gardener and Salvation Army musician. He married again – despite having a living wife in Akaroa with her own story – and life soon caught up with him as he fell in among the loan sharks.

Then, in 1896, he became nationally prominent when a Petone storekeeper couple were murdered. Initially prime witness, Bosher/Brocher soon transformed into chief suspect then victim, hanged for the crimes in what many thought was a complete miscarriage of justice.

He was, then, a genuine social Outcast, albeit one who made unwise choices, and the book explores the challenges facing someone like him trying to get ahead in an idealised society where reality was vastly different.

What inspired you to write this book?

It happened by accident. I was researching another project when Stephen Bosher aka Etienne Jean Brocher began appearing in the records in interesting ways (not the least being his name).

That set me off, being a professional historian and archive rat, several other projects shelved while I explored this new rabbit warren, the Brocher story producing quite different insights into the complex nineteenth century evolution of modern Aotearoa New Zealand.

In part, my fascination was with just how very different a New Zealand Brocher inhabited from the one many of us learned about in school (where we learned anything at all), and even later at university – in my Canterbury course back then there might have been just one New Zealand history paper during the entire undergraduate degree.

That narrow aspect broadened during my doctoral research on nationalist politics in modern India that led to a fascination with what became known as “The Other.”  In turn, that led to other research activities investigating the stories of people and activities hitherto excluded from the historical record. My other recent book, for example, is Playing the Game: How Cricket Made Barbados which explains how the game was central to the re-stratification of society by colour, class and caste following the abolition of slavery.

Another of those investigations was A People’s Collector in the British Raj: Arthur Galletti, my biography of a square peg in a round hole Anglo-Italian in the Indian Civil Service. As I got to know Etienne Jean Brocher I was reminded of Galletti – a “foreigner” in an alien environment and trying to survive. I guess I have always been interested in the misfits!

What research was involved?

A huge amount, in part because as a “professional” I have difficulty in deciding when to stop. These days, though, sites like Papers Past, Find My Past and all the rest make it easier to put the basic storyline together. The challenge is in locating the fine grain detail, and for this book New Zealand Archives offices in Wellington and Christchurch were marvellous for locating court records and a host of other materials.

Much of this will be familiar to anyone doing family history research, a genre influential in reshaping how we think about history more broadly. It was my own family history project Brocher barged into, and doing that has made me think harder about how we portray individuals and families in so-called “proper” history. It is harder to be judgmental about people you have some connection with that about the grander figures of history! The popularity of family history has also persuaded archives to think about providing greater digital access – anyone who has used Scotland’s People will know what is possible. For me, the research is both fun and challenging – how do I discover more about these people?

What was your routine or process when writing this book?

For me, once the story line starts shaping up then more targeted research blocks in the key elements. That then morphs into the main writing work.

I set a daily 2,000 words target and work until I achieve that. Some days it takes just a couple of hours, but others take way more than that. And on yet other days, I might end up doing 3-5, 000 words. That is the essence of writing. When people get discouraged by having to write, say, 75,000 words, I suggest they start with a 100 word a day target, then build from there.

Most writing days start with a review of the previous one’s product, effectively the first stage of re-editing. Elmore Leonard’s famous writing rules include being spare in the prose, so many words are cut at this point.

Once the first draft is done, the editing really starts. My own editing comes first, then the real work with the in-house specialist. With Outcast, that was the wonderful Dr Lawrence Patchett.

Final research and checking parallel the copy and proof editing (thank you Antoinette Wilson) until we are all satisfied (or as satisfied as we will likely be).

Some days are hard but having enough of the wonderful ones when everything “flows” helps keep writers at their keyboards.

If a soundtrack were made to accompany this book, name a song or two you would include?

Marvellous question. Although the style post-dates these story events, some jazz manouche in the Django Reinhardt/Stephane Grappelli vein would accompany the optimistic moments, perhaps along with Jacques Brel chanson era songs. Elsewhere, brooding Shostakovich works might feature.

If your book were made into a movie, who would you like to see playing the lead characters?  

This is always hard. Inevitably, whenever we watch a film/TV version of a favourite book the on-screen characters rarely match the book character images we have in our heads. None of the Rebus screen characters, for example, match my images of Ian Rankin’s protagonist.

That said, Sam Neill might be a perfect Inspector Peter Pender, the Irish-origin police boss stalking Etienne Jean Brocher.

And Melanie Lynskey would be great as Josephine Libeau, Brocher’s gutsy first (and, technically, only) wife.

Jim Broadbent would play an excellent Supreme Court Judge Worley Bassett Edwards

As for Brocher – I am sure the casting agents could somewhere find a younger version of Jean Reno.

And I would write the screenplay, the other side of my writing life.

What did you enjoy the most about writing Outcast?

I get satisfaction from learning about something or someone new, and working out where that adds to our understanding of history and how we got to be where and what we are now. And it was marvellous to have an opportunity to learn and write about New Zealand. I now live in Melbourne having been back in New Zealand for five years after having lived globally for a long time. Like many other Kiwis, I live away but New Zealand is still “home,” and I miss it a lot.

What did you do to celebrate finishing this book?

It is hard to identify a point when the book is “finished.” Most certainly not when the magic words “The End” go in (and I rarely do that anyway), because the editing is just as intensive. For most of us it is probably when we lay hands on the first real copy of the book rather than a proof. In our house that usually involves something sparkling, before returning to the keyboard and the already under way new enterprise!

What is the favourite book you have read so far this year and why?

The best thing I have read in the past year or so might well be Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow with its marvellous insights into hi-tech culture and a different generation’s outlook on life.

But Kate Atkinson’s Shrines of Gaiety is right up there as a great read, too, along with David Nicholls’s You Are Here. And so is Amor Towles’s Table for Two. Then there are all the works now crowding the New Zealand noir shelves.

And on a completely different front, Kerry Brown’s China Incorporated is a major corrective to the incessant and prevalent China bashing.

Write now I am reading Zadie Smith’s latest set of essays, Dead & Alive which is heading me back to Martin Amis’s The War Against Cliché.

Because writers like that encourage you to improve in the hope of producing something like “Dutch” Leonard’s “Fire in the Hole” short story that led to Raylan and one of my most favourite ever TV series, Justified.

What’s next on the agenda for you?

I have some ongoing writing projects and a couple more in development, both on the prose and screen fronts. Meanwhile I am involved in a great social good development in my higher education life, creating a degree program that will train imams for the Muslim faith in Australia. Meanwhile I have some cruise ship lecturing to do, and there is always some other new possibility there on the horizon.

Quentin Wilson Publishing