Livia Franchini: Rising Tides, Darker Secrets

Flitting between the 90s art scene and the modern day, Livia Franchini’s High Tide is a reimagining of Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s doomed Italian summer

On its surface, Livia Franchini’s latest novel High Tide is a beach romp with sun, sex and suspicious partners. It’s also a modern reimagining of Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s time in Italy before Percy’s untimely death. Flicking between the early 90s and the modern day, Mary is our narrator and guide. She falls hopelessly in love with the chaotic and charismatic Peter Shelley who needs to flee the South London art school they both attend when the police bust a YBA-style art show he puts on in a not-as-abandoned-as-he’d-imagined shopfront.

Franchini is Italian and from Pisa, so this less-explored part of the Shelley story had an additional draw for her. Where Franchini’s previous book Shelf Life was a novel told in fragments about a woman trying to get her life together after a breakup, High Tide is an enormously empathetic portrait of Mary Shelley in disarray, unable to handle or control what life is throwing at her. It’s also a parallel story about the British art scene of the 90s.

Here, the author discusses how she decided to tell the Shelleys’ story in a new way, the ways her Pisa background informed the story, and how Courtney Love was an inspiration.

Jemima Skala: What drew you to the story of the Shelleys and how did you approach retelling it?

Livia Franchini: Well, the book is about Mary Shelley but it’s not about Frankenstein – this comes from a completely different place. I’m from Pisa, born and raised, I lived there until I was 20 and then moved to the UK having no links to the country, just for university, and stayed. It’s been 20 years of my life there and 20 years of my life here. This is by no means a secret piece of the Shelley story, the time they spent in Tuscany, but it’s lesser known in pop culture. Shelley was very well connected with other radical intellectuals of his time and his idea when they went to Italy was to try and attract other British intellectuals there and form an intellectual circle, which he did to some extent. It’s quite a collective chapter of the Shelley history. They used to call Pisa the ‘nest of singing birds’, and it’s this anglophone enclave; they didn’t communicate with the locals, which is interesting to me as somebody who is from there and moved to the UK, and who started writing and thinking in English.

JS: How did you decide which relationships to bring out and which to leave behind?

LF: This book ended up being so much about Mary Shelley and I’m really glad. I had a more satirical book in mind because of my viewpoint. In many ways, I’m at a slant to everything that’s going on in the book, also with the part set in the 90s at an art school [Livia works as a lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths]. But Trelawney [the English adventurer and novelist best known for his close friendship with Percy Shelley] ended up being interesting to me – he’s kind of a villain to some extent but also really dear to me. When I knew that he was going to be at the heart of the story, I went to visit Shelley’s grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome and I discovered that Trelawney’s grave is right next to it. He outlived Shelley by 40 years and moved back to the UK, but he asked to be buried next to Shelley 40 years later. On the grave it says: “They were two friends, whose life was undivided / So let them mingle. Sweetly they had glided / Under the grave. Let not their dust be parted / For their two hearts in life were single-hearted.”

But he only knew Shelley for about a year. When I saw that I was overwhelmed, I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is a secret massive love story’. So the love triangle between Trelawney, Shelley and Byron became important to me – Trelawney went to meet Byron because he’d modelled himself off the Byronic hero.

“It was fun to imagine Mary Shelley as a massively successful horror writer of Stephen King proportions” – Livia Franchini

JS: This is the first time you’ve written fiction about Italy and Pisa. Did your own experience of growing up there inflect the book or writing in any way?

LF: I don’t really work from life at all. I find it quite uncomfortable territory. But I always find out at the end of a project that it speaks to a particular time in my life. In the construction of my first novel, it was very fragmentary and when I look back now, nearly ten years later, it’s fragmented because my life and language was also fragmented. I’d only been in London for about five years. This book processes the time immediately after. My English has improved in the last 20 years, but this book speaks to the early years in London.

For the parts in Pisa, the authenticity comes from the fact that I know it intimately, but it’s completely a work of imagination. It’s very much a displacement of perspective – how do I render the lens of alterity? Teresa’s an interesting character. She’s a bit underdeveloped as she’s mostly an enabler for Mary to remember. Teresa is always in the scene and she’s the person that helps Mary heal. I wonder if I shied away from that because it would have been a whole different novel – like what does it mean to be the Italian person in the room with that group? This is kind of my life now. My son’s Italian-British; he was British for six months before he became Italian because Italian bureaucracy moves so slowly. We had this situation of, we’ve got an English son and he’s probably going to have an English accent. I really am ‘between’ in my life right now.

JS: There are essentially two Marys in the book, the older and the younger. How did you inhabit Mary at the different points in her life?

LF: I wanted her to be an observer, so the voice of the current Mary came earlier. Though it’s a tough time for writers at the moment, it was fun to imagine a massively successful horror writer of Stephen King proportions. An important reference was Courtney Love: The Real Story by Billy Martin [published under the pen name Poppy Z Brite]. In that book, she talks about being Kurt’s partner, how difficult it was to deal with him as a very sensitive person. It’s a real dynamic, in Patti Smith’s Just Kids, too, where the male artist has to be pandered to because they’re emotionally vulnerable, and you end up having to be the protector, except when things go bad, you’re blamed for everything.

The real surprise was the younger Mary. I had a sense of her as quite a sour person, and there are some aspects of her voice that are so ridiculous. I wanted to be more satirical about it, but I had this problem that she’s actually very young. I didn’t want to write her with distance because I don’t think she would have had distance. I had to project myself back to being aged 20. You’ve got to honour your characters, right? And I ended up really loving her but it was a true unveiling of vulnerability.

High Tide is published by Doubleday and is out now