|
True Lies — Page 2
YArticles about Galloway tend to emphasize his youth—his
goofy spirit and boyish looks. The Globe and Mail once
went so far as to liken him—with his shaggy hair
and big brown eyes—to a cocker spaniel puppy.
“I will say, in my own defence,” he retorts,
“I have never peed on the rug when excited. But
yeah, I guess I’d rather be a cocker spaniel than
be described as a hipster.” He chalks his success
up to nothing more than hard work. “People always
think this is self-deprecation, but it’s not:
when I was a student at UBC, I was almost always one
of the worst couple people in the workshop. My work
was not that sharp. I didn’t get into the undergraduate
program my first try. I was wait-listed for the MFA
program.” But being a writer isn’t about
talent. “It’s mostly attention to detail
and a willingness to work hard.” Most beginners,
he’s come to believe, arrive convinced of their
own greatness. “The sad reality is you’re
nowhere close to a genius. If you’re a genius,
you don’t really need to go into a writing program.”
The tools that birthed The Cellist of Sarajevo weren’t
the candles and feather quills of romantic garrets but
gear you’d find at Staples: whiteboard, index
cards, coloured markers. (He used green for the “leapy
parts” that propelled the story.) And time: “Now
that I’ve written enough novels I can almost do
that first-draft part conceptually; I don’t actually
have to write it. I can kind of just sit there and imagine.”
Six months staring at the whiteboard left him with a
spare framework of three interrelated experiences of
the siege, and the determination to keep politics out
of the story. He intentionally kept the book short—it’s
an uncluttered 272 pages—and structured it to
unfold like a sonata, with an exposition, the development
of three braided “voices” (with the female
sniper the alto to the men’s basses), and a coda.
This echoes the music that the cellist Smailovic plays
to commemorate the 22 dead: the “Adagio in G Minor,”
a salvaged fragment of a lost sonata by Baroque composer
Tomaso Albinoni.
“One of the things I tell writing students on
the first day of class is that there are two good reasons
to be a writer. Number one: if the idea of spending
all of your time living in a room by yourself in an
imaginary world doesn’t turn your crank, you’re
done.” Writing isn’t fun, he stresses, but
it is satisfying. “The other is to realize what
you get from being a writer. The example I usually use
is being an orthodontist. That strikes me as a job where
you probably get great hours, good pay, not a lot of
stress. If you fuck up the braces, you can just redo
them.” What the writer has instead, he says, is
a soapbox. “You get to have your tiny, mostly
insignificant little squeak about how the world is or
should be or shouldn’t be. Frankly, both of those
things excite me a lot. I like spending all my time
in a room by myself. And I like the idea that when my
time on this earth is up, I got to squeak a bit.”
Alexander McCall Smith, creator of the No. 1 Ladies
Detective Agency novels, says Galloway can do a lot
more than squeak. The two met during a trade show in
Los Angeles, and McCall Smith has championed Galloway’s
books internationally ever since. “He’s
got a great imagination,” the Scottish author
explains, on the line from his home in Edinburgh. “And
he’s got a tremendous interest in people. You
realize that when you meet him. He’s very sympathetic—he’s
simpatico—and you pick that up immediately. Plus
that imagination and that sense of humour—all
the ingredients are there. It’s very refreshing
when there’s so much rather pretentious, contrived
stuff being published that you get somebody you think’s
a real writer who’s got—how would one put
it?— just got the right vision, for want of a
better cliché.”
From a practical point of view, Galloway says, he was
impelled by more than his imagination: “Before
this book was finished and selling, it looked very much
like I was going to have to enter the job market. My
wife’s business was failing. We had two kids.
I’m not able to look after them both on a full-time
basis, partly due to my inability to lactate, but also
I’m essentially a child too. I would eat ice cream
for lunch.” His job prospects, he says, were dismal.
“The only job I thought I could do was driving
a cab, because I can drive and I’m sarcastic.”
On the way out of the restaurant, we discover he’s
been towed
|
SUBSCRIBE 
