By Ayman Sabir, Iona Fleming, Katie Farr, Jess Scaffidi Saggio and Lucy Powell
Nat Reeve’s new novel Earlyfate is the sequel to Nettleblack, set in the same world but “threading that story through other people’s heads,” with characters Pip and Cass taking over as principal narrators. Reeve knew “from Pip’s first scene in Nettleblack” that they’d be “running the show” in the sequel, saying “writing their opening dialogue was electrifying.” Pip is left in a “thoroughly frayed” situation at the end of Nettleblack, which Reeve knew they had to “give them a chance to fix,” or “at least to pick up the nearest swordstick and fall apart while trying.” A similar situation also applies to Cass, who has “run out of corners in which to hide” by the end of Nettleblack, leaving Reeve “keen to bring her out of these corners.” Though Pip and Cass have very different arcs in Nettleblack, they share the issue that despite being “strong communicators,” they’ve created “a public face that’s becoming increasingly stifling for the person behind it.” Earlyfate sees these characters “dealing with the fact that the characters they’ve created for themselves won’t hold up anymore – and work out who they are when those characters finally break.”
Setting the books in the eccentric fictional town of Dallyangle in Surrey allowed Reeve to “hold a dialogue with the broader ‘Victorian’ world” of 1893. The town affords the characters “a pocket of escape from the limitations of that world,” in which the characters are free to run a “sort-of-detective-agency” or a “self-sustaining cravat shop.” However, the setting is not entirely idyllic, with “sharp pieces of history poking in.” Characters fear the Labouchere Amendment (a law penalising homosexuality), with prisons and asylums lurking “only a carriage ride away.” Class issues are likewise present to contend with, as “the local aristocrats treat the town as their playground,” preying on marginalised people who “don’t have anywhere else to run.” Reeves concludes that “this neo-Victorian universe exists in a precarious balance: between the subversive space offered by an isolated location full of innovative people, and the threats that surround it, shape it and create the need for such an escape to exist in the first place.”
When asked if it was harder or easier to write a book after their debut novel, Reeve said that it was “more difficult. Much more difficult.” Reeve spent a lot of time reading KJ Charles’s “excellent blog post about the struggles of finishing a trilogy,” while exploring a series of ideas and plot possibilities that they ended up casting aside, including a “hypothetical crime syndicate.” Reeve’s mother, “the epitome of cosy Welshness,” helpfully provided suggestions of “increasingly gruesome twists to sharpen up the troublesome climax.” Through these struggles, Reeve learned that “you cannot simply charge at the thing and hope your solitary might is enough to fix it.” In other words, Reeve highly recommends sharing your work with the people around you. Instead of charging at it, “borrow[ing] a spark from someone else’s torch to flare yourself back into creativity” is perfectly fine. In the end, Reeve is “fiercely proud” of Earlyfate, especially for wrestling it back from that hypothetical crime syndicate.
Queerness is a central part of Earlyfate in its neo-Victorian setting. Any idea that it could be viewed as a “modern trend” was something that Reeve adamantly resisted. Instead, they were interested in exploring how people might have “articulated [their] own sense of personal sense of queerness [...] without modern terminology.” Most characters are queer in the novel, and all have “idiosyncratic ways of expressing it.” For non-binary Pip, Reeve imagines them as a “curious mix of privilege and vulnerability” – where existing in the world with this gender identity “sharpens everything about themself.” Where Reeve’s first book, Nettleblack, spent a lot of time focusing on “being giddy with the joy of coming out,” Earlyfate follows a character who is “still reeling from the fact that [...] coming out has brightened but not fixed the entirety of their life.”
Reeve’s academic studies into queer literature intersected with their experience writing Earlyfate. They specifically reference So Mayer’s A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing, with Mayer’s idea of queer archive-making particularly impacting Reeve’s writing and research. Reeve shared that queer archive-making refers to “the moment when you start recording queerness as well as expressing your own” and explains how this is present in Earlyfate’s protagonists. For example, Reeve describes Henry as “quite a polite, if self-deprecating, queer cataloguer,” whereas Pip struggles with this same task. “Maybe that’s the academic influence,” Reeve tells us, as they are deeply fascinated by the way that things are talked about, framed and conceptualised. This fascination has clearly made its way into Reeve’s books, especially in Earlyfate, through Pip’s “trying and failing to write a dramatis personae” without feeling the need to apologise to those involved.
As for novels that inspired them to write Earlyfate, Reeve attributed a lot of its influence to Victorian fiction, particularly bildungsroman or epistolary fiction. The main character, Pip, had “poached their name out of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations” whilst items like Cass’s phonograph were taken out of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Reeve gives a nod to contemporary fiction too, particularly the author Christine Lehnen, whose “deep-dive into the practicalities of telling different stories about the past [in her book Remembering Women] was hugely inspiring.”
Reeve’s next novel is written and currently in its editing process. Whilst its “eventual destiny” is still yet to be determined, Reeve was able to share with us a bit of their next novel’s flavour… It will be a queer historical fantasy, set in the same century as Earlyfate, but taking place in a new universe. Some of its key tropes include “overzealous valets, morally conflicted storytellers, Tudors out of time… lots of poltergeists.” Keep your eyes peeled, and in the meantime, pick up a copy of Earlyfate!