In paradise, there’s nowhere to hide
A conflict photographer retreats to a luxury wellness estate in Northumberland only to discover the threats she faces there are as dangerous as those on the battlefield.
Writers often get asked two questions at events – where do you get your ideas from, and how long did it take you to write this book? My usual answers can be pretty flippant (‘Fortnum and Masons’, and ‘longer than it should have done’), but that’s only to cover up the fact that the actual answers tend to be pretty complex. I find myself saying things like ‘it depends what you mean by ‘write’, or ‘ideas’’.
OK, the simple (but not flippant) version first: I tore the ideas for The Last Retreat straight out of the headlines. The novel opens begins with Tash Kent, a conflict photographer, caught in a moment of horrific violence in a Ukrainian forest during the current war, and then the story drops her into the lap of luxury in a wellness estate favoured by the ultra elite. Tash is now caught up in struggles between corporations and governments who are fighting to control the power offered by blanket surveillance and machine learning. All very concerns of the moment, I think. Like many authors I’m currently caught between hoping for a payout from the companies that ingested my novels to train them, and worried someone will accuse The Last Retreat of being written with AI. (How does an LLM detection model account for the fact the models were trained on my work to begin with? Riddle me that, Altman.)
But The Last Retreat doesn’t just come from doomscrolling. It comes from my childhood, university, and career in TV, so you could say I’ve been gathering ideas for it my entire life. The character who gives Tash her first camera is based on (and named for) the shopkeeper who gave me my first camera, and on my grandfather who developed his photographs in a tiny study in his house next door to ours. The idea of Tash as a conflict photographer was planted when I first saw the work of Don McCullin thirty years ago. It grew while I was working in TV, and Richard Parry, who has regularly worked as a cameraman in conflict zones, was editing his film about the business, Shooting Robert King, at our offices. I studied Russian at university, so first visited Kyiv in the early nineties. Then there’s Alnwick, the glorious town where The Last Retreat takes place. My father’s family come from there.
And how long does it take to write? Well, I got diverted into other projects and then preoccupied by my father’s last illness, so I was very, very late delivering. But also I wrote the first draft in three months, in a state of barely controlled rage. Rage isn’t necessarily a great state to be in when you write, but it does give a certain leanness and focus to the writing which I think works in a thriller. If you read it, I hope you’ll agree.
It’s always strange to see which parts of one’s own history and experience make their way into a novel. Then we have to trust that the mysterious alchemy of the imagination will cook all of those elements into something which is more than the sum of its parts, or, at least, richer because of the many sources it draws on.
The Last Retreat by Marina Palmer is published by Hodder
