Tremain’s Terrain

Talk at length with any writer of fiction and you will discover a particular terrain that the writer likes to inhabit. This terrain might be an actual country or city; it might be that lost domaine we call childhood; it might be an area of psychopathology; it might be one of a thousand places of the mind -- and one of these is the past. What attaches a writer to his or her terrain is that, in this place more than any other, the writer’s imagination feels both liberated and at home.

The seventeenth century has been my terrain of preference for more than twenty years. Or rather, I have had an on-off love affair with that period of history for all this time, abandoning it frequently in favour of the contemporary but then returning to it over and over again. If I had to paint a picture of how I see ‘my seventeenth century’ the ground of the painting would be a deep, thick, black with, at its centre, a pale empty space, like an arched window. The moment I catch sight of that window, my mind longs to wander through it.