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All In His Imagination

© Paula E. Kirman

Sparrow Nights (Random House; hardcover; 224 pp.; $32.95) is a novel that stands on its own in David Gilmour's collection of work. Gilmour is best known for his tendency to draw heavily upon his own life as his creative inspiration. In fact, Gilmour's last novel, Lost Between Houses (1999; Random House), which was a best-seller in Canada and nominated for the Trillium Award, was his most autobiographical work, about a teenage boy's first heartbreak and experiences at private school. However, for Sparrow Nights, his fifth novel, Gilmour admits that he utilized a different muse: his imagination.

The novel delves into the emotional turbulence of Darius Halloway. Darius is a fifty-ish professor of French who falls deeply in love with Emma, a much-younger, waifish, foul-mouthed, and irresistibly-scented woman. Darius speaks directly to the reader as though he is therapeutically spilling his guts, and perhaps bragging a bit, about his sexually-charged relationship with Emma, how she left him, and ultimately, how he gets her out of his system.

He is a major departure from Gilmour's other main characters, men with a tendency to think with the wrong head (so to speak) but are nonetheless charming and mostly harmless. Not Darius, who is arrogant, rude, and pretentious, dropping literary references as though they were cigarette butts and peppering his sentences with French. He also has a latent violent streak. After the affair with Emma is over, Darius is left with rattling, empty coat hangers in the closet and a multitude of annoyances that he deals with vengefully.

I spoke to David Gilmour over the phone when he was in Calgary promoting the novel. Despite sounding tired and perhaps a tad under the weather, Gilmour was extremely talkative, much like he was the first time I interviewed him a couple of years ago. We discussed Sparrow Nights, particularly in terms of the direction his writing has taken, his career in television, and some of his other projects.

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Paula: When I spoke to you last time, right after Lost Between Houses had been published, I asked you about what the future held in terms of writing more novels and you said that you actually had doubts as to whether or not you would write another novel, because the writing of Lost Between Houses took so much out of you that you would not even concentrate on thinking about writing another novel for two years.

David: It was really horrible, and when I finished that book and all the attendant stuff around it I really thought, "I can't imagine doing this again." The truth is, I really haven't and I don't think I will ever do it again. That book wasn't by any means an autobiography but it was a kind of autobiographical fiction and I found it exhausting, and near the end, tedious. I just found the story of my own life - however you transmogriphy that stuff into fiction - I just found it really an exhausting and somewhat stale process. The notion of doing it again for another, less important part of my life, was just unthinkable. So, I was sort of liberated from the notion of ever having to write a novel again and liberated from the notion of having to do this kind of a novel.

The copyright of the article All In His Imagination in Canadian Literature is owned by Paula E. Kirman. Permission to republish All In His Imagination in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.