‘Why me? Why pick on me?’ Rebelling against their fate, Françoise and her lover Ali challenged me. We battled on over several drafts. I won. There were snakes in paradise.
Françoise, too close to the diarist, too distant from him, torn apart by contradictory emotions and self-reproach, assaulted by events, is plunged into despair.
With hindsight, I can see how the husband-wife voices relate to each other like the two strands of a double helix, separate and together, starting and arriving in different spaces; the diary, the DNA which anchors the whole novel. Double helix. Deceit. Double Crossings. I became interested in pairs of characters expressing different viewpoints while echoing each other: Françoise/Marianne; William/Ali; Mr Gineste/Mr Bhatt; Ali/Leila; Olivier Barabasse/Daniel Capel; the Virgin Mary/the abortionist; Sophie/Aicha; the pig/the narrator.
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