Source: Yorkshire Evening Post
Suffering from a severe case of writer's block, welder-turned-author Matthew Yorke had all but given up on his career as a novelist.Grant Woodward heard how a fate and a strange incident in the Amazonian rainforest conspired to change his mind.
There's a bit in Matthew Yorke's brilliant new novel where the heroine dabbles with an hallucinogenic plant called Ayahuasca.
It's used by Amazonian shamans – sort of faith healers crossed with witch doctors – as a vehicle to commune with the spirit world; and it seems Matthew took his research very seriously when it came to finding out exactly how it works.
"I had a friend who was apprentice to a shaman in Peru," he tells me, in the sort of casual way you would talk about a friend who's a computer programmer.
"He persuaded me to come on a nine-day shamanic workshop in Iquitos on the Amazon. I suppose it was a bit of a mid-life crisis, I thought if I don't do it now I never will, so I jumped on a plane and found myself in the middle of the jungle, sampling Ayahuasca.
"It was such a frightening thing to do that I think what one really learns from it is that one's stronger than one thinks. You do come through these things, that was the empowering aspect of it.
"It's quite hallucinogenic and you have visions, but it's fairly benevolent if it's used in the right way. You can resolve some issues and," he pauses as he grasps for the right words, "it gives you a different perspective in which to view the criteria that underline your existence."
Blimey.
Well, whatever it was that happened to Matthew in the jungles of Peru, it certainly seems to have helped clear his writer's block.
After winning a prestigious award for his debut novel The March Fence in 1988, he suffered a near-terminal case of Difficult Second Novel Syndrome.
"You sit back and there's not a lot of material left but you've won an award and people are waiting to see what you're going to do next," he says thoughtfully.
"I wrote a book but I'm really glad it wasn't published because it was under par, but it really took my confidence away so I concentrated on engineering from then on in."
Matthew's family on his father's side had an engineering company in Hunslet and after leaving school he was an apprentice on the shop floor, working as a welder and fabricator.
But he also had an urge to write, hardly surprising given his family tree. Matthew's grandfather was the acclaimed novelist Henry Green (real name Henry Yorke) whose best-known work is Loving, which tells the story of the servants in an upper-class Irish household during the
Second World War and has been hailed one of the great British novels.
"He died in 1973 when I was 14 or 15," he recalls. "He was quite a recluse, he read a book a day, watched a lot of sport on television and didn't see many people.
"But he was a good grandfather, he was a bit of a raconteur and had plenty of interesting stories. We didn't talk about writing because I was a bit young I think."
Matthew put together a collection of some of his grandfather's unpublished stories in the early 90s and says it was a richly rewarding process.
"Henry Green is still living really through his work, which is what a writer would like to feel that after they're gone," he says. "Every author hopes that people will still read their books and they will live on through their work.
"It's interesting because he published his last novel when he was 52 and here I am, beginning again at the same age."
Having all but given up on his own writing career, fate intervened when Matthew broke his hip and was told to rest for three months. He decided to write a book for teenagers, which set the ball rolling for Pictures of Lily, which takes its name from a song by The Who.
The story follows the fraught journey undertaken by Georgia Myers, who was christened Lily before being given up for adoption. About to turn 18, she resolves to track down her biological parents.
"I have two friends in Leeds who were both adopted and they were in the process of searching for their own biological parents," he says, explaining how the novel took shape. "Their stories seemed so compelling and interesting that they got me thinking and it went from there.
"One of them gave me her adoption file so I was able to look at all the correspondence from the early 60s and use some of it in the novel, which gave it a real feel of authenticity, I think.
"A cauldron of emotions are at work; those of the adoptee who doesn't know what they're going to find and those of the adoptive parents who might feel the affection bestowed on them is being transferred to the biological parents.
"Then there are emotions of the biological parents themselves and you don't really know how they're going to react, they might not welcome this contact or they might have been waiting for it for a long time.
"I thought it would make for an interesting story. You get a good tension with that, there's a quest; a beginning, a middle and an end and you can structure a story around it."
As for his heroine, the Ayahuasca-sampling, dub reggae fan Lily, he spotted her one night, walking the cold streets of Leeds.
"I was driving through the city and I saw the heroine of my book. She was going to a club and didn't have a jacket on, probably because she didn't want to spend £1.50 putting it into the cloakroom.
"I suddenly thought: This is my heroine. I have a teenage son and daughter so I thought, how would they go about describing this experience if it was happening to them?
"Leeds was very important as a setting for the novel too," says Matthew, who lives in Hyde Park. "I've always felt the city has got a slightly forbidding, dark flavour to it. It felt fitting for the story I was telling."
Pictures of Lily has already garnered rave reviews from some of the nation's most influential book critics, but after seeing his writing career come back from the dead Matthew's not about to take anything for granted.
"Of course, you hope there will be more good reviews but you can never guarantee anything," he says. "Basically I think you just have to write as well as you can then sit back, keep your fingers crossed and hope for the best."