By Iona Fleming, Jess Scaffidi Saggio, Lucy Powell, Katie Farr and Ayman Sabir
Sue Amos’s novel Teardrop, set in a rapidly modernising Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), intricately combines both old and new worlds within the island. In order to evoke such a rich, historical setting, Amos “started with a wide reading of novels based in Sri Lanka, both contemporary and historical” and “then researched the 20th century political history, looked at maps, read accounts of the island in that time and place, both from the Sri Lankan point of view and the viewpoint of visitors and also the British from their days in power.” As for the depiction of Colombo in particular, Amos referred to real sources such as “postcard images in an online archive of Colombo in the 1950s” and “listened to [her] father talking with his siblings and [her] cousins about the old days.” “The trick,” Amos states, “is to absorb everything and let it all mingle in your mind until the story is ready to reveal itself.”
To reflect the interweaving of the old and new worlds, Amos was “fortunate to have visited Sri Lanka a number of times” and has consequently “seen for [her]self how the past and present collide.” The Dutch Burgher Union building in Colombo, for instance, “appears early on in the novel” and “is the same white gabled building as it was a hundred or more years ago when it was built with money raised by the Burgher community” and is still “a fabled place” in modern Colombo.
Sri Lanka is known as the Teardrop Island because of its shape, but Amos’s novel envisions “the ‘conjuring’ of a teardrop” based on a true story; this meant that Amos had to be careful not to draw attention to those still affected by the event. While in an early draft the teardrop narrative was part of the main story, “this sent the novel into the realms of magical realism” and didn’t work with the story. In response, Amos “changed the timeline of the story so that Jazz, the main character, imparts the ‘supernatural’ part of the tale to the reader by including it in her own novel.” Teardrop is, then, “a story within a story.” Amos hopes that “this has allowed an easier acceptance of the folklore elements that would not usually be found within a conventional storyline.”
The novel’s protagonist, young fledgling reporter Jazz Barthelot, was not initially the point-of-view character, with early drafts being written from the perspective of crime reporter Sonny de Roye. Amos discovered through feedback from early readers that “the end of the story didn’t satisfy when delivered from Sonny’s point of view.” The story felt more satisfying when viewed from Jazz’s perspective, allowing the setting to be seen through the eyes of “a modern young woman in uncertain times, making her way in a man’s world.” Changing the perspective also had the effect of mollifying Sonny’s character; as the protagonist he was “an irritant,” too full of “angst and uncertainties,” whereas through the sympathetic eyes of Jazz, he becomes “a more-rounded, likeable person.”
While Teardrop is principally a historical novel, aiming to highlight “the diminishing circumstances of the Burghers of Ceylon, in the aftermath of independence,” as well as weaving through the story of the teardrop, it also includes elements of the crime genre. The idea of a murder came to Amos in the planning stages, becoming “the background to Jazz and Sonny’s story.” Amos describes the newspaper investigation as “the body of the novel,” with the relationship between Sonny and Jazz its “heart and soul,” and “its skeleton, the spine, (if you’ll pardon the pun) is the murder.” However, readers shouldn’t expect a typical crime conclusion, the resolution instead resting on “the decisions that Jazz and Sonny have made regarding their futures.” In “a multi-layered novel like this one,” Amos states, “there is room for ambiguity.”
Amos states that one of the main sources she used to write about post-colonial times was actually her father. She explains how her “father’s tales” about the 1940s and fifties, were “captivating; unimaginable.” From this, Amos was influenced to set her novel in the same London suburbs, at the same time as her father’s stories. Her father also informed her of stories about the Burgher community to which Amos reflected on how the Burghers are “still quite traditional in many ways, food culture, family ties and big get-togethers are as relevant today as back in the fifties.” This, therefore, made the writing process easier for Amos because, as she wrote, “it was easy to imagine it then as it is now.” Google also played a crucial part in Amos’s research, specifically researching the names of “brand names, music, clothing styles, transport,” which created a great sense of reminiscence for Amos because she could “wistfully” remember “bygone times.”
When asked about her own personal experiences and beliefs with superstitions, Amos responded by saying how she doesn’t “have any familiarity with the Tamil population,” other than her research. This was also affected by her father’s family moving away to more “westernised countries” where “superstitions slip away.” However, Amos expresses their significance in the novel by explaining the events of when “a well-meaning swami performs a mystical ritual” and the effects of this. As Amos tells us, the outcomes were quite negative because “they are Christian and such things are offensive; alien to their belief system,” and it was incredibly interesting to find out why this was the case.