Author Wayne Johnston draws inspiration from real-life horrors for his most personal book, The Mystery of Good and Evil

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Twenty-five years ago, Wayne Johnston left his home in Toronto with an enormous manuscript under his arm.

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It was a 600-page first draft of what would become his most recent novel, The Mystery of Good and Evil. He didn’t bring it to a proofreader or editor. He wanted him to go.

“To move on to another book, I literally thought I needed it to no longer exist,” said Johnston, in an interview with Postmedia. “One day I went down to the street where we lived at the time. I had it in a box and when I saw the first dumpster I threw it in and then turned my back and literally ran home and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to resist going back … and trying to retrieve the book. “

For those who have read The Mystery of Good and Evil, Johnston’s actions may seem to mirror those of his character, Rachel van Hout. In the novel, she is a young woman of South African descent who reads the same book, The Diary of Anne Frank, over and over again and obsessively writes non-stop in her own diary. She mainly writes in a secret language of her own invention. But much of what she writes, she destroys.

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Readers who have reached the end of the book at the author’s note, meanwhile, will learn that Johnston also destroyed oars of his own writings, much to the chagrin of literary archivists. For the first time, the renowned veteran writer reveals that he suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, which he says began in his early teens. Her symptoms included hypergraphia and hyperlexia. Hyperlexia made him read incessantly. The hypergraphia made him write incessantly. While the latter may seem like a practical and even slightly romantic muddle to a writer, Johnston assures readers that it is neither. Much of what he wrote in those manic episodes has been destroyed.

But it turns out that he was not satisfied with the literary merits of this first draft. Johnston now suspects that he would have to wait until the death of his in-laws, Jan and Mary Langhout, before he could properly write the Mystery of Good and Evil. They died nine days apart in 2014. Jan Langhout is the inspiration for Hans van Hout, a South African accounting professor with a troubled past who moves his wife and four daughters to Newfoundland. As readers quickly learn, he is a man with many dark secrets.

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“I couldn’t get away from some kind of revenge-seeking in the book,” says Johnston of his first draft. “I was creating a character that was too overshadowed by the real thing and came across as a sort of cartoon villain on my first attempt. I couldn’t find a form for the story because the story was still unfolding. It was, for me, completely unsatisfactory, too one-sided. It was too dark without any redemptive note.

For those who have read the novel, the idea that it was once darker than it was may seem hard to believe. The mystery of good and evil is unshakably intense, a heartbreaking portrayal of a family mired in madness, dark secrets and the long-term impact of sexual abuse that will remain with the reader long after the last page is turned. . The fact that it draws on the story of Johnston’s wife, Rosemarie, and her three sisters makes it all the more unsettling.

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This is Johnston’s eleventh novel in a series of works that have earned him nominations for the Giller and Governor General’s Literary Awards, great critical acclaim and a reputation as one of the greatest writers of fiction. from the country. But this last book stands out for the author.

“I consider it the book of my life so far, at least in personal terms,” says Johnston, who will be attending an online event for Wordfest in Calgary on September 23. “I don’t want to make my own judgments about how good and bad it is, but I think in personal terms it’s the most personal of all my books.

Told from alternating points of view, The Mystery of Good and Evil tells the story of Wade, a twenty-something and somewhat naive Newfoundland writer who meets the troubled Rachel van Hout in St. John’s. in the 1980s and fell in love with it. Rachel shares with him her obsession with Anne Frank and her obsessive journaling and reveals a story of mental and emotional depressions. He eventually meets his family, which includes parents Hans and Myra and his three older sisters. Wade quickly discovers that van Hout’s four daughters are in pain. Bethany is suicidal and anorexic. Carmen is a drug addict. Gloria, the eldest, is hypersexual with four ex-husbands. Hans, meanwhile, is bossy, racist and arrogant despite his many career failures. He also claims to be a war hero who was part of the Dutch resistance during WWII.

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The characters and plot lines are not far from the real-life horrors suffered by Johnston’s wife and her sisters. All four of them encouraged him to write the novel. But this is fiction. In the book, he gives Rachel hypergraphia and hyperlexia, which his wife does not suffer from, as he could speak about it with authority. Much of the novel’s intricate backdrop, which includes WWII, Nazism, anti-Semitism, and apartheid-era South Africa, directly reflects the real story of Jan Langhout. Johnston and Rosemarie also spent time in South Africa during this time, and some of the novel’s most disturbing sequences flow directly from their experiences there. But Johnston also found connections between the use of power and indoctrination of the Nazi and South African regimes and the dynamics of the van Hout family that helped him flesh out the major themes of his book.

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“Look at Hans and think of all he is,” says Johnston. “He’s an anti-Semite. He may or may not have been a Nazi during the war, but he was certainly a collaborator. He is a practitioner of sexual abuse. He’s a psychopath. One of the things I found common to all of these things, both in real life and in the book, is that fascism is about the need to assert power over someone else. That is literally what fascism is. If you put it in a slogan, it’s “force is good.” “”

One of the more intriguing aspects of the book is that it includes pages and pages of poetry, which Johnston could not have done in a direct memoir. It comes from both Hans and Rachel. The first uses an epic poem called The Ballad of the Van Hout Clan, which he chillingly recites in a singing iambic pentameter, as a bedtime story to indoctrinate his daughters. Rachel’s poetry reflects the state of mind or fantasy world she enters as she obsessively read or write while on the verge of depression. It is a powerful device. But Johnston admits that part of it came down to efficiency, a way to advance plot points and revelations without adding more girth to a novel that was already over 550 pages long.

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As for her own revelations about her OCD in the author’s note, Johnston says that part of it was based on the hope that it might help others who are suffering from it. But his motivations went beyond that.

“Since real life had inspired the sisters and my own real life inspired my ability to create the character of Rachel and I had made so many revelations – not without them knowing it, they knew it and they did not know it. ‘are not opposed to it. – I thought I owed them somehow to tell them the most intimate secret I have, which is that I have, without treatment, a pretty serious case of OCD, “he said. . “It was almost solidarity with the real prototypes and characters in the book for me to finally introduce myself and take this piano secret from my shoulders. It’s exhausting to keep a disease like that a secret.”

Wayne Johnston will be chatting with Steven W. Beattie at an online Wordfest event on September 23 at 7:00 p.m. ET. Visit wordfest.com.