Nathan Filer and The Shock of the Fall: Real work is grist to a good novelist’s mill
The Costa First Novel award has been given to Nathan Filer for The Shock of the Fall, his powerful story of mental illness. Described by Jo Brand as the best account of mental health she had ever read, its authenticity is hard won. Mr Filer teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University, where he is a colleague of mine; he is also a graduate of the course. That, however, isn’t the sum of his professional experience: he also had a career as a mental health nurse. It may be sensible for him to continue doing the occasional shift at the hospital, if it produces more novels as good as his debut.
Novelists and other writers used to come from a wide variety of professional backgrounds, and often went on practising a more reliable profession for years after breaking into print. This is largely to do with the salary but, on closer inspection, it might be something to do with finding something worth writing about, too.
Interestingly, one of the most productive authorial day jobs is Mr Filer’s original profession of medicine. It’s a moot point whether more great writers have a degree in English or in medicine: from Smollett and Keats to Chekhov, Somerset Maugham, William Carlos Williams, Alfred Döblin, and contemporaries such as Ethan Canin and the Egyptian Alaa Al Aswany (a practising dentist), great writers have been inspired by a training in the body’s details.
It doesn’t take much to draw a connection between Keats’s indecent fascination with the physical process of blushing and the shameless manners of the medical student, just as J G Ballard’s obsession with physical grotesquery and severed limbs comes straight out of a Cambridge dissection room, some time in the Forties. The medic’s exactness of observation and the poet’s or novelist’s turn out to be surprisingly similar.
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It doesn’t take much to draw a connection between Keats’s indecent fascination with the physical process of blushing and the shameless manners of the medical student, just as J G Ballard’s obsession with physical grotesquery and severed limbs comes straight out of a Cambridge dissection room, some time in the Forties. The medic’s exactness of observation and the poet’s or novelist’s turn out to be surprisingly similar.
More
