Margot Livesey’s ‘A Boy in the Field’ Blends Coming-of-Age With Classic Mystery

“I believe the truth matters yet sometimes the truth can’t be known,” Livesey explains. “As Matthew says — he’s unwittingly paraphrasing the work of the famous psychologist Beth Loftus — how a question is asked shapes both our responses and our memories. If you ask how fast the car was going when it hit the wall, a person might answer 20 mph. If you ask how fast it was going when it smashed into the wall, a person might answer 40 mph. In each case, they believe they’re telling the truth. Karel, the boy in the field, no longer knows what word he said. I don’t think anyone heard it correctly.”

Perhaps it is because the siblings are exiting the safety and sensibility of childhood for the uncertainty of adulthood, where words lose their meaning, or have multiple meanings, and people are not who they expect them to be. This is certainly the case for the novel’s detective, Hugh Price, who is exceptionally clean-shaven unlike many of his gritty counterparts depicted in television , or the siblings’ devoted father, Hal, who, they discover, has a secret he’s been keeping.

“We need conventions in both life and fiction, but when they replace insight then we become victims,” Livesey explains. “I wanted to subvert some of the conventions of whodunits — hence, making my victim a boy, not a girl, making him injured, not dead, and my detective is not someone who loves orchids, or drinks too much, or has romantic problems.”

Another prominent theme is the unspoken word or communication without language: the meaning conveyed by the sameness of two pairs of hands, the attraction of a stranger’s eyes, or the movements of the Langs’ adopted dog, Lily, who periodically “speaks” to the siblings. Livesey, herself, grew up in the Scottish countryside and says her childhood was “full of animals who were trying to tell me something.”

“My impression is that many people, without necessarily believing in the supernatural, feel a sense of communication with animals or small children or houses or plants,” she says. “The trees in my garden often seem to murmur after rain. I hope I’m not alone in believing that the world is animate.”

Art also plays a part in the book, through Livesey’s eyes. There are many references to art throughout The Boy in the Field (Livesey’s husband, Eric Garnick, paints large abstract oil paintings), such as Giorgio Morandi’s still life paintings of bottles. “I see myself as an artist in the early pages, but, as a novel progresses, I become increasingly an investigator — would Zoe really do this?  Would Duncan say that? I’ve created a world, and I need to make sure it makes sense. I love those moments in fiction when a character does something both surprising and absolutely plausible.”

Livesey grew up in the Scottish Highlands, where her father taught and her mother, Eva, was a school nurse. After receiving a B.A. in English and philosophy at the University of York in England, she spent most of her 20s working in shops and restaurants and learning to write, which, she says, she learned by reading. “But not from reading as I normally do — falling through a trapdoor into the world of a book,” she says. “I had to learn to slow down and pay attention to how an author was creating her characters, how she was persuading us that we wanted to spend time in that world.”

Over the years, Livesey, who is in her late 60s, has taught creative writing/fiction at Boston University, Bowdoin College and Brandeis University, to name a few, and is currently teaching at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the N.E.A., the Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Livesey says writing became an essential refuge. “Last March, when I realized I wasn’t going to be going to Scotland again soon, I began a new novel set there so that I could visit every day,” says Livesey, who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Reading was also a refuge, and I feel fortunate that Boston booksellers worked valiantly to keep us supplied with books.”

When asked about her favorite authors, Livesey says, “The answer changes every day. Today I would say Kate Atkinson, Andrea Barrett, Britt Bennett, Willa Cather, Lan Samantha Chang, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hilary Mantel, Ian Rankin, Jim Shepard and Joan Silber.” Although she can’t recall when she first fell in love with words, she remembers the first book she ever read. “It was about Percy, the bad chick, and I was thrilled that someone like me, small and badly behaved, rose to rule the farmyard,” she says. “I do have certain favorite words that I’m always trying to use in my novels and seldom do: crepuscular, tintinnabulation, indigo.”

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In addition to trying to sprinkle in some of her favorite words, Livesey tries to sprinkle her novels across geographical and chronological timelines: Her book The Flight of Gemma Hardy (2012) is set in early 1960s Scotland, and Mercury (2016) in contemporary suburban Boston. The Boy in the Field takes place on the brink of Y2K, in England, although when Livesey first imagined the novel it was set closer to the present; however, the ubiquity of technology — mobile phones, in particular — threatened to ruin her plot.

“I also liked the way Y2K mirrored my theme,” she says. “We thought danger was coming, but we were looking in the wrong direction.”

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