A letter to my characters on their tenth birthday

Ten years is a strange amount of time for a book to be alive. Long enough for the spine to soften and the ink to settle deeper into the page, short enough that I can still remember the morning I typed the first line. Today, on the tenth birthday of the novel, I am writing not to my publisher, not to my readers, but to the people who lived inside my head before they lived on the page. This letter is for them.

I have written to you, my characters, in many moods. In the small hours I have bargained with you. In the bright Australian afternoons, when the light through the window of my study turns the desk golden, I have thanked you. You are the only inhabitants of my imagination who have refused to be evicted, and I owe you an account of the decade we have spent in each other's company.

To Gideon, on the road you were given

Gideon, you were the first to arrive, and you arrived whole. A man's shoulders, a man's hesitation at a doorway, a set of hands that had done labour I had only read about. I did not choose your name lightly. It means "feller" or "hewer," and I wanted a name that carried the sense of someone who had been cutting through something difficult for a long time before the book began. You were not a hero when I met you. You were a man trying to get from one Tuesday to the next without losing the people you loved.

I built your road first, and only afterwards did I let you walk it. That was a mistake I made once and have not made again. When I wrote you into a town in the American South, I gave you a summer so hot that the tar on the road would have stuck to a boy's bare feet, and I have regretted that detail only because I never sent you anywhere cool. I owed you an ocean. I owe you still.

To the children, who grew whether I wanted them to or not

Your tenth birthday is also, in a way, your tenth birthday. I watched you grow on the page with the helpless admiration of any parent. I gave you a year, and then a season, and then a sentence you spoke that I had not planned. You were supposed to be eight at the opening, and then nine, and somewhere around chapter six you became ten, and the maths of the novel shifted beneath me like the floor of an old house.

Children in fiction are difficult guests. They refuse to do as they are told, and they take up more room than they are given. I tried to keep you quiet in the early drafts. I cut your dialogue. I muted your laughter. Then I understood that you were the reason older readers came to your door, because you asked the questions the adults in the book could not afford to ask. I learned to step back, the way a parent steps back at a school concert and pretends not to be nervous.

On names, and the silence that follows them

I have always believed that a name in a novel is a kind of small contract. Once I name you, I have made a promise about who you are. I have written about what my father's bookshelf taught me about literature, and how the writers I grew up with treated naming as a form of care. A name was not a label. It was a key cut for a particular lock.

Some of you I renamed three, four times. The boy who would not tell me his name for the first fifty pages eventually became someone whose syllables I could not imagine changing. I think of the moment in the manuscript where you finally say it, out loud, to another character. I remember typing that line and putting my hands flat on the desk the way a man steadies himself on a moving train. I still do not fully understand where you came from. I am not sure I am meant to.

The country I built around you

You were placed in a particular place, in a particular year, and that place has done as much to shape you as any decision I made. The dust, the heat, the church on the corner, the bus that ran through town twice a day, the porch where you sat and watched the light change. I have written a whole other book, An Irish Experience, about a different country and a different set of roads, and I now understand that a novelist is really a cartographer of small territories. Each of us draws a few streets, very carefully, and pretends the rest of the world is implied.

In the years since your book came out, I have travelled more than I ever expected to. I have stood in reading rooms in Sydney and spoken at a literary dinner in Melbourne where the wine was excellent and the questions were harder than any I had been asked in a decade. I have taken the tram along Collins Street and thought of you, because one of your characters once described a streetcar in a city neither of us had been to, and the woman at the dinner that night told me she had grown up waiting for a similar streetcar in Adelaide. You had predicted her, and I had not known it.

What a decade of breathing has done to you

Ten years is enough time for a book to become a different object in different hands. A teacher in Brisbane told me she had read your story aloud to a class of twelve-year-olds, and one of them had wept. A man in Perth wrote to say that the church in your town reminded him of the one his grandfather had been forbidden to enter. A bookseller in Hobart, of all the small and stubborn places, kept your novel on a face-out shelf for nine months and sold sixty copies without ever asking me to sign a single one. I have come to understand that you no longer belong to me, and that this is the only proper outcome of being written at all.

The Australian reading public has been, I think, kinder to you than I deserved. Independent shops in Carlton and Newtown and Subiaco put you in their windows. The state libraries bought multiple copies. A small press in Brisbane printed a study guide for schools that I had nothing to do with, and I was grateful and a little ashamed that I had not thought of it first. This is what I mean by breathing. You are breathing in places I will never visit, in hands I will never shake.

Some of the people who have carried you further than I could:

• A high-school teacher in western Sydney who assigned your novel to a Year 9 class, and was gently reprimanded by a parent who had then read it herself and written back to apologise for her first complaint.
• A librarian in regional Queensland who, in the year of the floods, read aloud from your final chapter to a reading group that had lost its meeting room.
• A retired magistrate in Canberra who told me, over a flat white at a literary festival, that you had been the first novel in twenty years to make him weep, and that he had not minded.
• A bookseller in a small town outside Geelong who hand-sold your book, one copy at a time, to fathers who had come in looking for something else entirely.
• An older reader in Darwin who wrote to tell me that your final chapter had been read at her mother's funeral, and that the reading had been a comfort.

The words I almost gave you, and the ones I am still owed

There are sentences I cut from the manuscript that I miss. There are scenes I removed because they were too long, and I have come to believe that length is sometimes a kind of honesty. There is a letter one of you wrote and never sent, and I think of it often, the way one thinks of an unsent letter of one's own. The act of writing is largely the act of choosing what not to say, and on this, your tenth birthday, I want to confess the omissions.

The things I almost gave you, and the things I did:

• A second summer, after the long one, in which the river came up and changed the town's shape.
• A scene in which you sang in church, although I have since learned that one of you would not have sung in church, not in that year, and the lie would have been unforgivable.
• A sister who arrived too late in the draft and was cut for reasons of pace, and whose name I still hear in the silence at the end of chapter nine.
• A meal you ate with a stranger, a single plate of food, that would have said more about who you were than any of the speeches I let you make.
• A line in which you forgave someone, which I withheld because I did not yet believe you capable of it. I have since decided you were.

What I still owe you, and what you have given me in return

The list of what I owe is longer than the list of what I have paid. I owe you rest. I owe you a quieter house. I owe you a chapter in which nothing at all happens, and the chapter is allowed to be beautiful for that reason. I owe you, most of all, the company of a writer who is not exhausted by the news of the day when he sits down to be with you. That is a debt I have been slow to settle, and I am settling it now, on the page, in this letter.

What you have given me, in return, is harder to say, and easier. You have given me the habit of attention. You have taught me to listen for the sentence that is missing. I have read a great deal of other fiction since I finished your book, and I have heard, in the best of it, the same patient attention that you demanded of me. A recent essay on Tolkien's sense of the sea reminded me that the writers we love are the ones who let the longings of their characters breathe out toward a horizon we cannot quite see. I have tried, in the years since your book, to let my own longings do the same.

If this letter has made you curious about Gideon and the others, I would be glad of your company. The book is still in print, and a new edition has just been prepared for readers who missed it the first time. You can find it through the links on this site, or order it from any independent bookseller in your own town. Tell me, if you do read it, what you see in them that I have not. A novel is finished only when the last reader has put it down, and I have not yet heard from the last one. If you have read them already, consider lending the book to someone who has not. That, more than any review or any prize, is the thing a novel needs in order to live another ten years. The door is open, and the light in the kitchen is still on.