THE SPACE BETWEEN, TRILOGY? (Work In Progress) The initial idea of The Space Between was based on the actual disappearance of one of Wilde’s manuscripts, The Portrait of Mr W H, at the time of his arrest in 1895, and then its reappearance in America in 1921... I wanted to fill in the missing gap with a mixture of my own fiction and history. I’m still unsure at this stage (October 2009) how many novels the sequence of events will fit into exactly, as it stands there is only one completed novel, which is called The Spark, and the second novel, The Space Between (itself) which I’m only halfway through. The Spark is a historical novel and is set in the 1890s, it fuses historical fact with fiction. The novel involves historical characters such as Wilde, Robbie Ross and Charles Ricketts, along with fictional ones, some taken from my earlier novels. Although Wilde does feature and the novel is set in London during his lifetime, I wanted to steer away from actually portraying Wilde directly, as he has already appeared in two of my novels. So I chose instead to concentrate on his friends Robbie Ross and the designer, Charles Rickets; both were involved with the early publication of Wilde’s manuscript up until its disappearance from public view. I chose to bring in my own character, Harriet from Killing Time, as she is a Victorian character. Although the novel finishes with the death of Wilde in 1900, it is obviously not at an end, as the manuscript is still around in the background. I wanted to leave several threads deliberately incomplete, leaving the way open to go into the next novel, The Space Between.
THE SPACE BETWEEN The Space Between is more unashamedly fictional, although it still uses historical characters – Ross and Ricketts are still there, and also Kathleen Bruce who had a brief relationship with Charles Shannon (the partner of Ricketts). Also in the novel are Lucien and Esther Pissaro – I chose to concentrate on these two, partly because of their link with the anarchist movement. As always I was extremely wary of making the novel too historical and chained to reality, so just as central to the story are fictional characters such as Adrian Singleton from Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray who interacts with my own character, Gustave, from The Turn of the Century Party. I may choose to move the next novel to a completely different country. I’m considering developing the link between Kathleen Bruce, and her eventual marriage to Captain Scott ‘of the Antarctic’ fame. I think it would be wonderful to take Wilde’s manuscript to the South Pole; but the way this novel will turn out, I’m not quite sure, as the time scale is quite different from The Spark. The intended trilogy may well stretch to more than three novels, as Wilde’s manuscript wasn’t discovered until 1921.