Shifting Focus: From Setting to Character Development
Five questions with Helen Walsh on her debut novel Pull Focus
There is little actual violence in the book, but the threat of violence is constantly looming over Jane. There is a Hitchcockian feel to the tense paranoia, like that of North By Northwest and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Were the films of Hitchcock an inspiration for you?
Yes, I love Hitchcock! But also this book is about the lived experience of women in a world where gender and power are indivisible, particularly in the entertainment industry which has been fraught with sexual harassment and assault. A sense of risk never fully goes away for women who’ve suffered violence. I chose a condensed narrative timeframe of 10 days so that threat is ramped up, but if you ask women if they cross the street at night when someone’s walking behind them, I’d bet the majority would answer yes. Especially if they’ve ever been assaulted.
Although settings are named, they are only lightly described, in contrast to the characters, who are presented in great detail. The overall effect is a strong sense of being in close quarters with these characters, almost smelling their perfumes or the alcohol on their breath. Did you use this technique specifically for the situations that Jane finds herself in or is this a style element in all your writing?
The usual benefit of writing first person narration is that the reader gets inside the character’s head, and often feels a a closer engagement.
That’s more difficult with a character like Jane who, because of her childhood and life experiences, is very private and guarded. There’s no Oprah-level of sharing. In order to get the reader to root for Jane, I felt I needed them close up, experiencing Jane’s response to challenges and people as they happen. And that meant minimizing other story elements like setting.
I also think there is a sea change going on with readers’ expectations and patterns of cultural consumption. With long-form television (via the streamers), what matters are characters, their relationship to each other and the world in which they inhabit. Plot or setting is secondary. (Though this is less true for film.)
Readers are increasingly bringing that expectation to books. Ironically, it makes me think back to all the Victorian novels I studied in my English Literature degree. It’s no wonder they make such good adaptations.
Often books of the thriller genre start following a three-act structure that presents us the status quo before introducing a threat and dialing up the tension. Pull Focus immediately puts the protagonist, Jane Browning, into a high-stakes situation and the tension doesn’t stop until the final chapter. Was that your intention from the very beginning, or was it through rewriting and editing that you reached the conclusion to have Jane thrust into a figurative whirlpool from the outset?
The novel always started with opening night, which by definition meant the whirlpool had to begin at the outset, given the vortex that festivals are. Plus, the intersection of Jane’s personal and professional storylines meant that seeds needed to be planted early. But with each revision, the story I was trying to tell about power became clearer to me, and the plot details consequently more complicated.
I’ve always been interested in the moment when the ground shifts beneath us—because of an external event or internal epiphany—and everything in our lives is viewed with greater clarity, or greater suspicion. I wasn’t interested in playing coy with the reader by placing that at some pre-ordained structural point.
The genre question is interesting. Pull Focus is a crossover novel so there was a lot of discussion about classification and comparators. In bookstores it’s stocked under General Fiction; online retailers list it as Mystery/Thriller.
I think in Canada we’re finally moving beyond siloed genres, in part because a younger generation of writers don’t feel bound by them. A recent study showed slightly decreased sales in the US for thrillers over the first five months of 2021. It’s not that people are less interested in suspense, the study argued. It’s that traditional elements of thrillers are now being written into books classified as general fiction, women’s contemporary fiction, and YA.
Pull Focus although feeling very contemporary, feels in many ways like a Cold War thriller, complete with communist agents and a Russian femme fatale. What prompted you to craft a plot worthy of Ian Fleming or John LeCarre in the setting of a major film festival in Toronto?
I loved John LéCarre novels so that’s a compliment, but I see all the plot details as comtemporary.
For years I belonged to a G7/G20 research group at the University of Toronto and attended summits, global governance meetings (World Bank, IMF, etc.) as well as civil society protests around the world, including in Russia. Geopolitical tensions today are not vastly different from 50 years ago. Dozens of Russian journalists have been killed since President Putin took power in 2000. Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent last year then jailed in a draconian “labour colony.” Other Putin critics have met similar fates. Traditional allies like Belarus are close to reintegrating with Russia and I doubt if Ryanair or Roman Protasevich feel the Russian threat is an old one.
The evidence is clear that Russia interfered in the US election, and their starring role in international money-laundering is undisputed by anyone but them. (I did a lot of research and interviewing of anti-money laundering—AML—experts in Toronto and the UK for a follow-up novel to Pull Focus.) But most worrisome, is the state-sactioned Russian involvement in cyber crime. In recent years, the Irish Health system, the Ukraine power grid, the entire country of Estonia and the Slovak government—considered by Russia to be a foe—have been held ransom. And only a tiny fraction of that threat is revealed to the public.
With China, censorship is well documented. This year, we witnessed the effort to eradicate any mention of Oscar-winning film director Chloe Zhao because she once made mention of spies being everywhere while she was growing up in China. Her nomination for an Oscar prompted China to ban all viewing and even mention of the Oscars, including restricting internet flow.
The crackdown in Hong Kong, including detained or disappeared journalists; growing movement against Taiwain, an absolute refusal to acknowledge Tiananmen Square . . . Pull Focus’s plot points are today’s headlines. They were the headlines a decade ago when I first started writing the book. And I predict some iteration of them will be the headlines in a decade to come.
Following up from the last question, the plot of Pull Focus seemed suited to locations such as Montenegro or Istanbul. Did you feel that it was a challenge to set the story in Toronto, or is it finally time that we see Toronto as a world-class city replete with international intrigue and worthy of being the setting for this type of thriller?
I didn’t feel there was a challenge to setting the story in Toronto. It’s a global city with significant flows of capital and all the machinations that come with that.
As a country, we’re complete laggards on anti-money laundering regulations. The federal government finally promised in April to put in place a registry of beneficial ownership—a basic and long overdue step needed to combat money laundering. Not the first time it’s been promised, so we’ll see if it actually comes about.
Money-laundernig is not the 0.1% hiding their money in Panama or the Bahamas, who, by the way, already implemented registries. Dirty money comes from the trafficking and/or smuggling of drugs, weapons and people. As the AML experts told me, if you have the routes and systems set up, you move anything that turns a profit.
There’s also significant levels of organized crime in Canada (primarily Toronto, Hamilton, and Montreal). The intersection of the mafia, the construction industry, and politicians—one of the character’s back stories in Pull Focus—is well-documented in Québec but it happens in Ontario, as well.
And, finally, those film investment dollars don’t all come from Telefilm, Hollywood, or daddy!