Sabina Murray’s new novel Forgery tells the story of Rupert Briggs, an American traveler to Greece in the 1960’s. Ostensibly on a search for ancient artifacts, Rupert is in fact as much running from his own past as searching for relics of a much more distant one. As we learn more about Rupert’s fraught personal history, his present also begins taking unexpected turns as his life becomes entwined with the lives of those about him– a shady antiques dealer, a radical arms dealer, a beautiful yet troubled woman and a large cast of other lively and memorable characters.

Forgery begins as a travelogue, becomes a bildungsroman and a murder mystery and, finally, melds all three genres together into a seamless whole. The result is a novel which draws heavily from past literature, current circumstance and a strong dose of the author’s imagination and unique voice.

Our discussion took several Forgery-esque twists of its own: in a wide-ranging interview, Sabina, still suffering from jet lag and the after-effects of a uniquely Greek mix of wine and Aegean sun, covers everything from her major influences to the role of women in literature– both as authors and as characters– as well as a perceptive analysis of Greek culture, both ancient and modern, and its legacy for Greece and the wider world. –AG

Adam Goldwyn: One of Forgery's epigraphs is a quotation from Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi. Rupert Brigg, the novel's narrator and protagonist, later mentions having read Lawrence Durrell's Prospero's Cell and Reflections on a Marine Venus. These works are the great travelogues of Greece. It seems to me that Forgery draws on this literary tradition of Western travelers in Greece, and is as much a travelogue as anything else. It also seems to me that there is an even more apt comparison to Durrell's Alexandria Quartet because, like Forgery (and unlike the aforementioned titles) it is more than just a travelogue: the novel is organized a plot that is both complex and suspenseful.

Also, both the Alexandria Quartet and Forgery deal similarly with their characters: everyone seems nice and innocent at first, but as the novel progresses and the narrator becomes more astute, he realizes that beneath the façade, everyone has some sort of dark and secret past in radical politics, shady business or some other equally romantic endeavor. Ultimately, no one is who they seem, and no one is to be trusted. Perhaps you could talk a little bit about the way Durrell and Miller influence you and/or your work, and which other authors inspired you.

Sabina Murray: As a woman writer, I often feel stymied by my gender and the expectation that comes with it: write small, domestic, emotionally expansive, and morally upstanding fiction. Or be quaint and funny so that a bunch of ladies cruising Barney’s can feel literary as they discuss your book. Of course Durrell and Miller felt none of that and that absolute freedom–a male freedom–to drink and fuck and explore and be held as some sort of hero is the cause of much envy on my part. I wanted to look back at some of the great American writers who wrote on the edge of sanity, sobriety, and the guilty maw of survival and that brought up Fitzgerald, Miller, Hemingway, and the like. Durrell flirts with melodrama but as we follow Justine we are reminded that great lives are lived to the very perimeter of the believable, and that–unless you’re half dead and like to read in the same way you look into a mirror to apply your make up–can make for some interesting writing. I like a sense of adventure and wanted this book to be a sort of Treasure Island for grown-ups. About grief and discovery, yes, but also about how a man or woman creates himself or herself against a background. For these large-hearted, difficult people, a certain retro feeling was necessary. You mention that everyone seems nice and innocent at first, but then slowly reveals that to be a façade. I don’t believe in moral people. I don’t believe it. What’s amazing to me is that some reviewers– this is with all my fiction, all of it–look at the drinking and smoking and sex that go on in the books and have a little “ugh” of disgust. Why? Is health and hygiene a value in fiction? It’s not in mine and if I could choose some literary company–fuck it, any company!¬–I would rather be with Henry Miller, and Fitzgerald, and Durrell than just about anyone else. For style, I’ve always liked Angela Carter although I can’t find her anywhere in this book. Forgery is more of tribute to the big American fiction of the middle of the last century.

AG: I like the description of Forgery as a grown-up's Treasure Island; it's fitting. Let me ask you about this male/female dichotomy you've created: this distinction between women writers with their "small, domestic, emotionally expansive, and morally upstanding fiction" and the "big" male fiction, "drinking and smoking and sex." In a way, I think that Forgery straddles both: it is "immoral" but also very domestic. The novel is about large domestic issues like relationships and marriages, and even the minutiae–arguments over who gets to choose the music on the record player, how to deal with illness and death, how to settle a will between in-laws. Even the main action centers on a home: Neftali's home on Aspros, where the gathered expatriates form a makeshift family. Then again, everyone gets drunk and fucks. Also, it is interesting that the main character is a male. Why did you choose a male protagonist? Could a female protagonist have worked in this novel? How did you balance "male" and "female" literary models? And should we read Forgery as a reaction or response to either the female "smallness" or the male "bigness" of twentieth century fiction?

SM: I think at this point I should clarify that I’m not talking about what inspires women to write, but rather the expectations that notable critics and readers have of books that women write. I would hope that I write for us all, rather than contrast myself against, my many admirable female cohorts. Women writers are not quite equal when it comes to being recognized as intellectuals and chroniclers of ideas: I still have to contend with the constant qualification that I am a woman writer, not just a writer, and although that may seem nitpicky, think of how hilarious it would be to refer to Chabon as a male writer. You are correct in observing a certain domestic grouping in Forgery: this is the family that the narrator makes. What’s lacking is the attendant futility of a trapped woman and the argument that the emotional life of the thwarted individual is what is truly valuable. Maybe it is, but it’s not in my book. As for making Rupert “Rupert” and not “Ruby,” I wanted that swagger. My last novel, different yet clearly one of my books, had a female protagonist who went around picking up men and eating them. This book, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, was a dark comedy that riffed on consumer culture and the American practice of empire. What amused me (I can say “amused” now since the book came out several years ago) is that certain critics didn’t have any problem with the protagonist eating people: they were more bothered by the amount she smoked, drank, and fucked around. Go figure. To have a male narrator is to not slant or color your character in any way. At least in fiction, women are still made from the rib. Rupert avoids the politics of identity simply by being male.

AG: I think that you are right about the difference between the Virginia Woolfs and Kate Chopins on the one hand and the Henry Miller and Jack Kerouacs on the other, in terms of what is expected, or what they can 'get away with.' As for male characters being able to avoid identity politics, my first instinct is to agree with you: male characters can just be, female characters are somehow always read in terms of femininity, they always come with that layer of extra interpretive baggage. But is this something inherent in literature, or is it the fault of literary criticism and feminism? Can this state of affairs be seen as a side effect of feminist literary criticism? Can your work be seen as a sort of sociological literary experiment: what happens when a female author addresses male themes in a male way?

SM: There are several reasons that female characters are burdened with unwanted baggage. I think one of them has to be the position that women hold in American society: gender equality is really for the intellectual elite. Another is recognizable heroines in the literary canon. Who do we have? Elizabeth Bennett? Jane Eyre? Nancy Drew? That’s a bit of an exaggeration. We have our Lady Brett Ashley’s, but that was hardly her book. And then of course you have Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina. Is it an inherently female thing to be victimized by one’s desire? Hardly. It’s society that demands that, but in literature—at least historically— it seems one and the same. And you have Mrs. Dalloway and her party and her subversive flower arranging. Lastly, I accept that feminist criticism has called attention to the femininity of characters. Look at me now: guilty as charged.

AG: Perhaps you could talk a little bit about how you came up with the idea. I have spent some time in Greece, and found your description of Rupert's experience of daily life in Athens and in the islands to be startlingly true to life (minus all the adventure, at least in my case), in terms of simple things like Athenian geography, but also in more complex things like the culture and mannerisms of the Greeks themselves and of the Western travelers, artists and exiles who go there. It appears that you’ve spent time in Greece in order to have been able to describe everything in such accurate detail. Did you decide to set the book in Greece and then research, or, having gone to Greece, did you decide to write a novel about it? How were you able to collect such sociological information and then to transform and render it into literary art?

SM: There’s the adage “write what you know,” and there’s my adage, “write what you’d like to know about.” I’ve been to Greece five or six times, and have always stayed for at lease a month. And yes, often find myself in fairly decadent company with other writers, artists, musicians, and a few people who are great company but I’ve never figured out exactly what they do. In my experience, no one has killed anyone yet. But some of these people are Greek and the mannerisms and carriage and joy in life has been adequately researched over many glasses of wine. I just returned from Greece yesterday and the jetlag and early onset nostalgia is figuring heavily into my responses, but there is no better place to waste your minutes than a Greek island with like-minded people from all over the world. And if I feel that way about a month a year, maybe others would like to spit their hours spending some time with pages culled from that experience, with some adventure and a little intro-Art History thrown in. I’m always looking for the story in everything and this one was easy to find. Politics, like art, is visible in every aspect of Greek life and that strange embrace was enough for me to feel confident to start writing.

AG: The other quotation you use as an epigraph is from Plato's Symposium, and it seems appropriate that a novel like yours has both ancient and modern quotations. As one of your characters says, "A year on [a Greek island] is not the same as a year somewhere else. It could be one minute, it could be a hundred years." This distinction between time and timelessness, between the present and the past, seems to be one of the important themes of the novel. Greece is a place with a rich present overshadowed by a richer past, and contemporary Greek culture has been shaped by an attempt to find a balance, not just between the ancient past and present, but the more recent past as well. All of the characters seem to have some issue from the past playing itself out in the present. Rupert himself acts as a bridge between past and present: an antiques dealer and amateur archaeologist looking for evidence of the past to display in the present. Why was it so important that all of your characters (and even the setting itself) have such well-defined back-stories, and what drew you to this theme? What is the relation between the characters and their setting, in terms of both time and place? Could this novel have taken place anywhere else? Could its characters have survived anywhere else, or is theirs a uniquely Greek situation?

SM: What is a uniquely Greek situation? Think of the Eligin Marbles: the Brits truly believe, on some level, that they are their just protectors in the same way that boys at Eton declaim their Greek declensions with a sense of utter historical inheritance. We’re all a bit Greek, in the origins of our art, medicine, philosophy. So on the one hand, sure, characters could have survived elsewhere. But the situation is truly, singularly Greek because of the small Greek inheritance anyone with a western European or North African or Central Asian (I’m getting needlessly nitpicky here but I am aware that some small boy in Bangladesh might not give a shit and I want to respect that) holds in the development of their identity. And the fact that the Greeks constantly have to define themselves against this loaded origin defines them in a way that no one else has to contend with. I was recently in Venice at a three-day party, one element of which was a guided tour of the Doge Palace. The tour guide let us know that Venice was the second nation (the first being Florence) to outlaw slavery. She said, “Yes, we were good then.” Implying national strength, but she said it with such flare that the undercurrent was ultimately, “We may have been good then, but now we’re completely fabulous!” The Modern Greek has the same sense of “we were good then” but not the “now we’re fabulous.” If you talk with contemporary Greeks about their cultural inheritance, conversation is most often about recent times of oppression and the art that flourished with it: twentieth century dictatorships (there are a couple) and music–Rembetika.

AG: I agree with you that Greeks have a different sense of Greek history than Europeans and Americans; we tend to skip everything from say, 400 BCE to the present day, whereas their reality is very much informed by much more modern history. Indeed, there seems to be an almost willful ignorance on the part of many Greeks regarding their ancient history. In Forgery, Nikos seems to me the representative of this. Early in the book, he says, "I have the Acropolis at my back every day. Every Greek has the Acropolis at his back. What I want to know is what is at the front." The opposite of this is Henri Michaud, the old French archaeologist Rupert meets at Delphi. I think one of the things that makes Greece so interesting is that it has something for both Nikos and Michaud, and that these two types of people live their whole lives in Greece and never meet. One of the great things about Forgery is that a character like Rupert has access to both worlds. How do Greeks reconcile these co-existing ancient and modern worlds? Why are Eton schoolboys still declining Greek? Why are Greeks so disinterested in their cultural heritage? You seem to have picked up on these cultural trends and woven them into the novel, but why do you think these trends exist, and how do they enrich the literary quality of the novel?

SM: I think the reason that many Greeks don’t focus on the Ancient Past is the silliness of doing such a thing in the face of all that has happened in the meantime. There has been gunfire on the streets of Athens in the last fifty years and the contemporary Greek is born of that turmoil. Nikos is from Istanbul and in his mind the purges of the early part of the twentieth century loom large, much as 9/11 heaves at the consciousness of the contemporary New Yorker. If you ask someone who attended a British public school to tell you in two paragraphs the identity of Thucydides, I’m pretty sure they could do it. But if you ask the same person, “Karamanlis vs. Papandreou?” I’m pretty sure you’d draw a blank. It’s not so much a hole in our education but the reality that our civilizations just don’t go back as far as we would like them to and when we find ourselves, from around the second century CE to the fifth BCE, a marauding bunch of pre-literate barbarians, its far more interesting to pretend that our past is shared with Socrates, Plato, Homer, and other favorites. Think of how many people went to see [the movie] 300. And they all rooted for the Spartans.

AG: Forgery is a novel about many things: it is a travelogue about Greece, a mystery/suspense novel and a novel about coming to terms with grief. Above and beyond all of those things, Forgery is a novel about relationships of all kinds: friends, lovers, families and spouses. Relationships that reflect upon one another, serving almost as competing models, and each with differing degrees of success and complication. The father-son relationship is explored between Nikos and Kostas, between Rupert and his son and between Rupert and the man who raised him, Uncle William. You also explore the spousal relationship in the context of Nikos and his fiancée, Rupert and Hester, Rupert's father and mother and Jack and Amanda Weldon. What types of relationships interested you and what issues were you trying to explore? What obstacles and problems do you see your characters trying to overcome in their relationships, and what is it they are looking for? And, assuming this doesn't require revealing any trade secrets, how did you go about constructing the relationships? Did you have the whole novel plotted from the beginning, or did the characters take you in unexpected directions? Which characters came first in the writing process? Which were easiest to write and which hardest? Do you have a particular fondness or dislike of any of them?

SM: I started this book a couple of years ago and then pissed off to Greece for a month and came back with the same sixty pages I’d left with. Predictable. One of my close friends, the poet Daniel Hall, and my husband, and I, were sick with longing for our island and so sat on the back deck at my house drinking white wine while I read from it. There were a lot of mosquitoes and we had set a fan up which would blow all the pages around at critical junctures, but somehow, in that one evening, I managed to read the whole thing. And then one of them asked what happened next, and I said, “I dunno. That’s all there is.” So I wrote in installments (I’d like to say like Dickens but people like James Wood might disagree) and then read them. So from one forty page installment to the next, I wasn’t completely sure what was going on beyond a faith in the Forgery thing. Of course serious ratcheting was necessary at the end and I do have a brilliant, forceful editor, so it worked out all right. I like all my characters. I, of course, love Rupert and wanted good things to happen to him. I love Amanda, who is flawed but only wants what other people have without so much effort. I have a tremendous sympathy for the lot. I only like seriously flawed people: everyone else is too boring. I’m going to have all my friends ringing me up now: Am I flawed? And I’ll say, “Wouldn’t you rather be flawed than boring?”

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Adam Goldwyn is a contributing writer and editor for Small Spiral Notebook. He received a BA in History from Pomona College and an MA in Ancient History from University College London. He is currently working towards a PhD in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Adam also serves as an adjunct lecturer in English and Classics at Brooklyn College.

Sabina Murray was born in 1968 and grew up in Australia and the Philippines. She is the author of the novels Forgery (Grove, 2007), A Carnivore’s Inquiry, and Slow Burn. Her short story collection The Caprices was the winner of the 2002 PEN/Faulkner award. Her stories are anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and Charlie Chan is Dead II: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian Fiction. She is the writer of the screenplay for the film Beautiful Country, which was an Independent Spirit Award Best First Screenplay nominee. She completed her Master of Arts as a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and is a former Bunting Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and a recipient of a major grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Murray is a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow. She has served as the Roger Murray Writer in Residence at Phillips Academy Andover and is currently Associate Professor of English, Creative Writing, at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.