Exclusive interview with author Nathan Filer about his novel exploring how a young man deals with his schizophrenic life
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed By Gabrielle Pantera
“I gave him a name straight away,” says The Shock of the Fall author Nathan Filer. “Matthew Homes, 19 years old with a chipped front tooth, a tentative diagnosis of schizophrenia and a dead big brother who refuses to stay dead. I first began thinking of this novel ten years ago. I was a student mental health nurse at this time. I remember walking home from a shift one day when the beginnings of a story came to me. What came to me were a couple of lines, long since discarded, and a sense of a character who might have uttered them.”
The Shock of the Fall is the story of a young man with schizophrenia and his struggle to understand what happened the night his brother died. It’s a character portrait of Matthew. The family dynamic and his sense of guilt are explored. Due to his mental illness, Matthew uses a typewriter to try to understand what happened. Filer uses drawings and font changes within the book to show when the typewriter is being used.
While on vacation with their parents, Matthew Homes and his older brother Simon sneak out in the middle of the night. Only Matthew comes home safely. His older brother Simon, who suffers from Down Syndrome, were camping with their parents. The two boys go out at night and only Mathew comes back. Matthew is diagnosed with schizophrenia who writes out his life story, or what he thinks is his story.
“This was such a challenging story to write,” says Filer. “A search in the dark, when often I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for. I have drawn so much from my own childhood. Most of my research was simply accessing memories. Although that can be harder than it sounds. Of course I needed to know other things too.”
“At one point in my novel Matthew Homes is locked up in a police cell overnight,” says Filer, who visited a local police station and asked to look around the cells. “I was too embarrassed to say it was research for a novel in case I never got published, so I just said something vague about being interested in such things. They were very accommodating, the police, not the cells, but doubtless thought I was a bit odd.”
The Shock of the Fall is Filer’s first novel. Filer says he was shocked when it won the Costa First Novel award and went on to win the Costa Book of the Year. “The Costa Book of the Year is a very big deal in the UK. Aside from the Booker Prize it doesn’t really get any bigger in terms of media interest. I certainly wasn’t the bookies’ favorite. At the ceremony, immediately following the announcement, I was whisked away into a pressroom to face a bank of journalists, photographers and TV cameras. There is a generous cash prize and one of the journalists asked me what I planned to spend it on. I said that I hadn’t thought about it, and at this the journalist turned to the back of the room where my wife was sitting. He asked if she had any plans for it. She answered, ‘I was 100% sure he wouldn’t win.’ The next day her quote appeared in several national newspapers.”
“It’s funny,” says Filer. “Only published authors get asked what inspired them. If you had peered into my bedroom, office, entire world, three years ago, I reckon you’d have gone with possessed. Perhaps compelled is the right word. I felt compelled to tell his story.”
Filer was born and still lives in Bristol.
Filer will be in at the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival in Palm Springs, California, from January 21st to 24th.
The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer. Paperback: 336 pages, Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin (January 6, 2015), Language: English. ISBN: 9781250028136
