The Making of Torn Pages River: An Introduction

Ah, summer.

Summer 2024 kicked off in July, for me. We here in the UK had just elected a Labour government for the first time in fourteen years. I was pretty excited about it. That was the first day of writing Torn Pages River. And things only got better from there. My life was going so well, and things were going so great late into the summer, that I started to think Ernest Hemingway was my lucky charm.

I love Hemingway. I've read A Farewell to Arms more times than I can remember. That's such a beautiful novel: it starts with a picturesque tableau of the natural landscape around the narrator's house and, by the end of the first chapter, War has already disrupted it. By the end of the book, the narrator can only feel rain and they're walking back to a hotel. It's such a brilliant novel. Hemingway brings a lot of baggage, with him being a damn fine writer and all, but he also bring a touch of melancholy, an old-fashioned traditional vibe, and a masculinity that can be both confident and assured or, otherwise, reckless and pathetic. I wrote Ernest Collins as a tribute but I wrote with dry-eyes and both eyes on the road, so to speak; he's not an out-and-out celebration. It's a complicated character portrayal.

The Bruce Springsteen album The River also influenced this book and I got to see The Boss live during the making of it. I was pleased he played "Hungry Heart" live. That was never my favourite song of his but, amazingly, during the writing of this book I became endeared to it, especially the title drop of the album: "like a river that don't know where it's flowing..." . I started to draw a comparison between myself, walking out of my doctorate, and Ernest walking out on his wife and child.

By the book's end, though, I wasn't too concerned about that stuff anymore. The last day of writing Torn Pages River was nearly perfect and then, like Hemingway himself, it ended all at once, all too suddenly, and all too soon.