Q&A with Craig Higginson, Author of Shadow Country

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Shadow Country by Craig Higginson is an adult literary novel with the pull of a murder mystery, set against the historical backdrop of Zululand. It moves across intersecting lives and experiences, exploring love that spans time and gender, creating an artistic, historical, and immersive narrative about humanity in all its forms. Previously published in South Africa as The Ghost of Sam Webster, we’re thrilled to be bringing this story to our U.S. audience.

Buy the book here. Book Description: In the heart of Zululand, the mystery of a missing young woman is lost in the shadow of iSandlwana, the lion-shaped mountain that looms over the residence of the valley captured in the vortex of past legends rising from the piled rock monuments guarding the bones of Zulu and British Soldiers killed in the colonial war. 

When the body of a young woman, presumed to be the beautiful Sam Webster, appears briefly on the banks of the flooded Buffalo River, the writer Daniel Hawthorne decides to visit the Websters’ luxury lodge perched at the edge of an old battlefield. Under the guise of researching a new novel about his disgraced ancestor, the lepidopterist Lieutenant Charles Hawthorne, who fought in the Battle of iSandlwana, Daniel starts to investigate the reasons for Sam’s disappearance. The lines between loyalty and betrayal, love and hate, cowardice and courage, redemption and shame, soon become blurred as Daniel gets closer to the truth. 

Written in Craig Higginson’s masterful prose, Shadow Country is at once a war novel, a murder mystery, a multi-layered love story and a robust reassertion of what it is to remain human during the most challenging times. Author Bio: Craig Higginson is a writer, theatre director and lecturer who lives in Johannesburg. His novels and plays have been published, translated and produced widely internationally and won several prestigious awards. Craig has a PhD in Creative Writing and was recently a recipient of the Hawthornden Foundation Residency, where he will be writing the sequel to his IEB matric set-work novel, The Dream House. Shadow Country is Craig’s first novel with Catalyst Press. 

1. At the beginnings and during transitions of several chapters, you include passages written without punctuation, giving them a poetic quality. What inspired this stylistic choice, and what effect did you hope it would have on the novel?

The device of having the first sentence of a paragraph becoming a heading for that section is something I’ve only seen before in poetry – where the title becomes the first line of the poem. This stylistic device came out of the poetic opening and helped to establish the tone of the following paragraph. It provided a way to enter a new section, digging a bit deeper than surface naturalism – giving the writing a more metaphorical or archetypal resonance. I started off as a writer writing poetry, and I have always considered my novels to be like narrative poems – so I am always looking for the layeredness and metaphorical resonance you find in poetry.

2. What was it like writing about the grief process? Did you draw on personal experience, and how did you navigate portraying something so deeply personal and unique to each individual?

Much of Daniel’s backstory in the novel is quite autobiographical. My sister’s death when I was ten years old, my mother’s epilepsy and death, for example. So I did have experience of this to draw from. As a father of a daughter (she is just turning sixteen as I write this) in a country as dangerous and endangered as South Africa, the idea of a daughter disappearing or being abducted is obviously any parent’s worst nightmare. Several hundred young people go missing in our country every year. A great many are never heard of or heard from again. The novel was written in part to honour the lives of those who have disappeared – and to honour the reality of those who remain.

3. The novel shifts between the storylines of the main characters and the character Daniel is writing about. What was it like navigating these different perspectives, and how did you approach the moments where they intersect and diverge?

The novel is structurally quite complex, yet I wanted it to feel easy to navigate and compulsive regarding the narrative events and dramatic structure. I feel that the world is so complex and that reality is so subjective and contested that in order to represent any time and place – even if it is fictional, and knows itself to be fictional – you need to find a form and a structure that are complex – and represent a reality that allows for different perspectives, both personal and political. As a white male writer, I am always looking for ways to displace my own centrality and my own authority over the lives of my characters and their relationships. I try to write characters that can’t be fully accessed by anyone – the writer, the other characters, or even by themselves. The subjectivity of my characters always transcends the framework of my texts. I want the reader to enter into my fictional worlds knowing that not all the questions are going to be answered for them and that they will be required to work these things out for themselves. What happened to Sam? Who is Sam? What is this ghost that haunts the pages? In literary fiction, you are not looking for closure and easy answers. You want your reader to go out into the world after reading the book still asking questions, still open, still active. One of the reasons we read or write stories is to be given the opportunity to work things out for ourselves. I don’t like it when writers appear from behind every bush to explain the meaning of what is happening to the reader. I structure my novels like plays – with a range of perspectives and no centralised narrative voice telling everyone what to think and feel.

4. Did you have a favorite character’s perspective to write from, and if so, why?

I love the challenge of writing my way into realities that my everyday life does not give me access to – so writing the battle scenes, for instance, was especially challenging. I enjoyed writing the younger characters – especially Sam. It’s also fun writing from the perspective of deplorable characters like Caroline and Bruce – Sam’s parents. We want our characters to be provocative, engaged, and engaging. People often make the mistake of thinking that characters have to be likeable. Likeable can quickly become dull. I like characters to go on proper journeys – so sometimes they need to start off in a place that might seem deeply objectionable. 

5. I thought the shifting points of view really highlighted the nuances of human behavior—how what seems right or wrong from one character’s perspective can look very different from another’s. Was this an intentional choice, and could you comment on what you hoped to convey through it?

I have addressed this to some degree above. I love the gaps between the writing. That’s why I have a lot of subtext, irony, and dramatic irony. I think this engages the reader and makes them more of an active participant. My hope is always that the reader will come away from my writing with a new interestedness in the lives of others, and perhaps a bit more humility regarding their own importance and centrality. I want my readers to re-enter the world more alive to its wonder, its miracle – and its extraordinary diversity.

6. The novel beautifully captures the history of Zululand while still engaging the reader with the mystery set against that historical backdrop. What was it like to incorporate historical facts into fiction?

The novel visits a range of genres – historical fiction, the war novel, the crime novel, the family drama, the psychological thriller – and then it unearths the humanity of the characters and deconstructs or outgrows the expectations that come with any particular genre. I seem to have been doing this across a few of my recent novels. It’s always tricky to write about well-known historical events. There are all those “experts” on the internet on the lookout for anachronisms or errors of fact. I knew that I wanted to look at these famous historical events through a more contemporary lens. The practice of whipping soldiers as a form of punishment and the proliferation of homosexual relationships amongst the British soldiers are two historical facts about this war that are seldom to be found in the literature – whether fiction or non-fiction. I wanted to write something that was human and humane and not nationalistic or overtly partisan. The historical facts themselves were also so extraordinary that they helped to write themselves – the solar eclipse at the height of the battle, for example, is something I would never have thought to invent. 

7. As readers move through the novel, they question who killed Sam and begin to suspect different characters with each unfolding chapter. Did you know who the killer was from the start, or did that reveal itself as you were writing?

I can’t answer this for fear of spoilers! But during the writing, I thought of novels like “Perfume” by Patrick Suskind, where different people are blamed for the murders due to the prejudices and other issues of that place and time. I wanted Sam’s disappearance to make more overt some of the covert tensions in the region – like the dispute over land and land reclamation.

9. Did you run into any unexpected challenges or surprises while writing Shadow Country?

It took a while to find the right structure for carrying the content. With literary fiction, there is no pre-existing formula that you can follow regarding content or form. I usually find the beginning the most difficult because you have to have the DNA of the whole already up and running. Also, I always find the first draft the most stressful – because you don’t yet know what story you are going to tell. It’s only once you’ve landed at the very end that you really understand where you need to take off at the beginning. Writing is more about the rewriting than the writing. To be a good writer, you need to be a very good editor of your own work. But it’s the rewriting that I enjoy the most – because then it’s more about the language, the way you are writing as much as what you are writing about. I love to discover what the English language can do – where it can take you. I love the process of reworking each moment to make it more available in its specificity and life.

10. What do you hope is the reader's main takeaway from Shadow Country?

I hope they enjoy a good story that is well-written and memorable. I like to take readers to new places and get them to experience new experiences. I want the novel to be a place where they want to go – and when they are there, I want them to feel more ignited and alive. This is a novel that is about war and destruction, and it passes through some of the worst aspects of our humanity. We are seeing a great deal of this in the world right now, where a form of the “death drive” is governing so much of what we are seeing in public life – and we are also seeing all the terrible ways in which these events affect the private lives of millions of people. But the novel also has these golden threads running through it – and a more spiritual awareness. It hopes to re-engage with the transcendent, the miraculous, and those more redemptive facts about the world and our humanity that are enduring. The butterflies that animate all the story worlds of the novel, for example, are fragments of this deeper awareness – fragments from the great mystery from which we have each emerged and towards which we are each inevitably headed.