Who Is Controlling the Plot? An Interview with Sam Mills
It’s not traditional pastiche because Jaime is simmering beneath Fate’s creation. Fate wants to control Jaime, yet he also wants to harvest him, two desires he can’t reconcile. And so the language, the sentence structure, and so on, represents an uneasy tussle between Victorian and modern, between imposing narrator and rebellious author. Eventually, when Jaime does realise that he is a ‘real’ person who has been trapped in a novel, he still finds himself unable to entirely shake off the authorial style that Fate has imposed on him. Even his memories of his ‘real’ existence, as they rush in, are flavoured by the man who has drugged him, a mash up of past and present.
Sam Mills is interviewed by Peter Labilliere about her new novel, The Watermark.