{"id":170120,"date":"2022-10-14T11:12:06","date_gmt":"2022-10-14T01:12:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/?p=170120"},"modified":"2022-10-27T10:06:10","modified_gmt":"2022-10-27T00:06:10","slug":"sean-wilson-tells-us-about-his-novel-gemini-falls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/2022\/10\/14\/sean-wilson-tells-us-about-his-novel-gemini-falls\/","title":{"rendered":"Sean Wilson tells us about his novel, Gemini Falls!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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When I think about how I settled on the idea of a story about Australian life during the Great Depression \u2013 with its strange blend of hardship, suffering, freedom and camaraderie \u2013 I have to go back as far as I can remember, to the stories I heard growing up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My grandparents lived through the Depression. My mum\u2019s dad was one of thirteen children. He had to trap rabbits along the Swan River to help feed the family. My dad\u2019s parents grew up in Greater Manchester. Grandad was abandoned in a village market by his mother; Nan had an alcoholic mother and shell-shocked father, and was raised by her sisters. Decades later, my grandparents still saved everything, even the wrapping paper on presents, yet they were the most generous people I\u2019ve known. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fast forward to 2015, and I\u2019m on holiday in San Francisco. There\u2019s experimental technology everywhere, sportscars on the steep streets. And there are also thousands of people sleeping rough, avenues of tents downtown and throughout the Mission, armies of people doing gig work. Back home in Melbourne, I would read reports of people sleeping in cars or huddling together in tents in local parks, a trend that would only increase as housing became more and more expensive. I started to see the parallels between the Depression and now \u2014 greed, inadequate housing, displacement, insecure work and thin social safety nets.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Mix in two of my favourite novels set during the period: The Grapes of Wrath<\/em>, with its depiction of migration and labour camps, and To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em>, a story about a town where the forces of justice, prejudice, fear and kindness play out in a community under pressure. Then the pandemic hit us, and I saw an analogue to the polio epidemics of the thirties. I decided I wanted to write an accessible, engaging story set during the Depression \u2013 one that explored the social issues of a community with many similarities to our own. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are many differences between now and then, but the similarities should give us pause for thought. When Arthur Miller wanted to comment on McCarthyism, he turned to the Salem witch trials. Shakespeare explored civil war in Julius Caesar<\/em>, a play that premiered the year Oliver Cromwell was born. Historical fiction can tell us a lot about ourselves and how we act in times of crisis. We get some distance from our own time, and I think that helps us focus on our issues. That\u2019s what I wanted to do in Gemini Falls<\/em>: to set a story in a time with similar challenges to our own, to dial up the pressure on a community and see how the residents would behave. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The camp of itinerant people on the outskirts of Gemini is perhaps the most accurate part of the fictional town. Slums have been a feature of Australia since colonisation. The boom and bust cycles of colonies built on land speculation, gold rushes and corruption left slums throughout cities and regional towns. By the time of the Wall Street crash in 1929, generations had already been living in shocking conditions in places like Carlton, Redfern and Fremantle \u2013 but the scale of displacement brought on by the Depression was new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I first read about the \u2018tin towns\u2019 and \u2018bag towns\u2019 of the thirties (named after the materials commonly used for construction) I was struck by their prevalence. They were all over the country. Shelters cut out of the sides of hills, huts made of flattened kerosene tins, shacks propped up on stilts to avoid the high tide. They were on our doorsteps, and they were there for many years. Many people tried to help, but many others turned away. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the years, we\u2019ve used many words to describe people forced out of stable accommodation, each loaded with meaning: vagrants, beggars, homeless, drifters, rough sleepers. Some have fallen out of fashion, but others will be familiar. In Gemini Falls<\/em>, I wanted to explore what happens in a society when the gap between the haves and have-nots widens, where life becomes a desperate struggle to survive and mass migration triggers prejudices. To me, places like these make for a tinderbox. Gemini is a place primed to burn, and murder is more than enough of a spark to set it off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gemini Falls<\/em><\/strong><\/a> by Sean Wilson (Affirm Press) is out now. <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read an extract of Sean Wilson’s debut novel, Gemini Falls!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":170123,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[4,9,24,1],"tags":[723,741,8432,10482,9445,1598,1910,1974,15258,15257],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Sean-Wilson.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170120"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170120"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":170376,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170120\/revisions\/170376"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}