Chris Worth has come a long and winding road before publishing his first book, and he’s about to send his main character on a similar testing journey, writes Mike Houlahan.
They say everyone has a book in them. For Dunedin writer Chris Worth, finding his was the work of decades.
“I’ve always had the ambition to write something, but I had no idea what kind of book.”
When he found out, he went to the other side of the world and back…and it turned out that Worth didn’t just have a book in him. He had internalized what is expected to be a trilogy.
The first part, The rabbit hunterbegins to tell the story of Second Lieutenant Neil Rankin’s wartime experiences, a fictional construct but based on sound research and informed by the first-hand experiences of others.
Rankin is from Dunedin but grew up in rural Clyde. The book begins at a leisurely pace as Rankin and his fellow soldiers slowly make their way to Greece, but things pick up considerably once the company is hurled into the rapidly retreating front line to try and stem the advancing German tide.
“Not all the things in the book happened to the same people, but most of these things happened to someone,” says Worth.
“You also have to read entertainingly, but without being flippant, and it’s a nice balance. People have to recognize the characters and want to know what happens to the characters… I didn’t want it to be a James Bond story. , because that would be disrespectful to the people who were there and what actually happened, but for the characters to come alive and interesting, you have to make them do something.
Cliche would like the career Worth pursued professionally, accountancy, to be a barren and dry one, devoid of adventure and excitement.
That may be so, but it also teaches an aspiring author valuable lessons, says Worth.
“Accountancy is a profession with discipline, but it is also about communication.
“I’ve written a lot of reports in my time and reports need to be understood but not misunderstood, so you have to be a reasonably clear writer to be an effective accountant: it’s not just about numbers, it’s about the meaning behind the numbers.”
And it can also be fearless. Worth’s career in accounting was more exciting than most, as he included a stint as an auditor in the Moscow office of multinational corporation Coopers and Lybrand (now PricewaterhouseCoopers).
“I went into the Dunedin office on a Sunday and there was a fax left on my desk saying that the Moscow office was looking for staff at all levels and I thought that would be enough although it was a little bit for everyone as a shock came home.
“The Berlin Wall had just come down, but life in Russia was still very, very grey… every second car was a taxi, probably driven by a university professor or a doctor in the hospital who couldn’t make ends meet knots, hyperinflation was rampant and it was a disastrous time for the Russian people.”
One thing that made seven years in Moscow possible was easy travel to the rest of Europe. A family vacation to Greece was highly influential in that long-suppressed book that bubbled to the surface.
“We went on holiday to Crete and the kids had no idea what had happened there or if New Zealand had played a part in it… people have asked me why I did it [write a book]why did I do all this to myself but they had no idea that in 1941 some 8 or 9000 New Zealanders landed on Crete and fought a battle, and if you go to the war cemeteries there are still many.
“Hopefully the book can give their generation some insight.”
Earlier, as a younger man, on his first OE, Worth had also visited Crete, and still gets emotional when he thinks back on the welcome he received for the simple fact that he was a New Zealander.
“It had a huge impact on me, that these people have never been forgotten, even though there have been generations later. That memory played a big part in convincing me that this was a story worth telling and that I’d like to tell you.” our way.”
That makes writing The rabbit hunter sounds like a well-planned venture, but Worth, a self-proclaimed terrible planner, slowly got to the point of realizing his vision.
After returning to New Zealand in 2003, he took a creative writing course that formed the core of what is now his debut novel. However, further work on it was brought to a halt by Worth taking up a second career as a freelance reviewer for accounting firms.
“It ended up being more of a job than I intended, so in the meantime bits and pieces were added to the book as I went along. But when you pick something like that up again, you forget what you had written, so you reread the last chapter, decide you don’t like any of that and rewrite it, and it’s easy to run into continuity problems: you don’t want someone who died on p.48 to reappear on p.96.
After research by several friends, Worth was encouraged to send it to manuscript reviewer Chris Else, who returned many pages of comments.
“Obviously there was a lot to work on, but there was also a lot that was actually starting to come together, and it was all encouraging enough to move on to the next phase and he recommended a publisher.”
Worth was still working part-time, which meant that by then The rabbit hunter was finally ready for submission, it was eventually referred to a new publisher, who were eager to collect the book.
What was supposed to be a single novel has now grown into a trilogy. If The rabbit hunter ends, the New Zealand soldiers who could be rescued are evacuated to Crete, where Rankin’s adventures continue in book two.
“As I was writing, I eventually came to the conclusion that I started at the end of the story and not at the beginning,” says Worth.
“I had to go back and recreate the beginning, which we have now and of course, as that went on, it informed book two, and then that went on to inform book three, which is how they get off Crete… or However?”
The rabbit hunterby Chris Worth, published by Renaissance Publishing, is out March 22.