A Q&A With Andrew Pyper

Athena McKenzie | February 17th, 2011

Click here to watch Andrews Pyper’s live chat with book editor Athena McKenzie.

His four previous thrillers left readers breathless. Now, Andrew Pyper returns with The Guardians (Doubleday Canada), a chilling story of four friends from small-town Ontario who learn that some secrets won’t stayed buried, even though it may take decades for the bodies to surface.

Athena McKenzie: You’ve said you think this is a Zoomer book. Why?

Andrew Pyper: At its heart, it’s about then and now and the future. It’s about a midpoint in life. And on a personal level, seeing how your contemporaries are turning out, whether for good or for ill. People who are contracting illnesses that are debilitating, divorces, professional mishaps or explosive success. Everything is about becoming and establishing yourself and falling in love and seeing what you can do, and it seems like overnight that turns into a survey of what has gone before. The time ahead is shortened and there is this sense that the pressure is on. How quickly that transition happens is frightening. So, in that sense, it’s a book for people who are able to access the past, specifically their friendships and what characterizes the friendships that have lasted.

AM: Your main character, Trevor, has Parkinson’s.  Why Parkinson’s?

AP: We’d all like more time, and Trevor doesn’t have a whole lot. It kind of raised the stakes of him being forced to address the past, the secrets, his own involvement in crimes. He has less to lose in the sense that he can go into the future maintaining all these secrets. That was, for me, reason Number 1. But there evolved over the writing, a second reason that overtook this — the idea of real heroism. Trevor is a flawed character. All of my heroes are. But he overcomes physical disability in the end, without giving too much away, to do things and surprise himself. He is able to, for short periods, beat the disease through acts of heroism. That wasn’t in the outline for the novel. It took on a life of its own that I really liked.

AM: Trevor feels the disease is stealing his manhood. Did you want to explore the idea of manhood through the novel?

AP: Different angles on that topic are present in all of my novels, but in this one more than any other because it is about a male world and what it means to be a good man. Exploring masculinity in the sense of how it is defined or exhibited. At this period of life in particular, there’s a lot of peering over the neighbour’s fence and comparing your lot with others’. Not necessarily materially but what goes by the name of lifestyle. I think it surprises men more than it surprises women. Women seem to be more aware of where they are at the different stages of their lives whereas men get consistently blindsided by mid-life. It’s almost as though they believe they’re immune to time, and all of a sudden they’re blindsided.

AM: So, I have to ask: have you yourself had any encounters with a ghost?

AP: No, I haven’t. I wish I had. I’m fascinated by ghost stories. That’s one of my dinner party questions after people have had a few glasses. “Has anyone here seen a ghost or had an encounter that they can’t explain?” It astonishes me that there’s always someone. Sometimes those people will tell me after the fact, as everyone is putting on coats or waiting for the taxi outside, “You know, something did happen to me.” They are often embarrassed to say in front of the group because it may correspond to a tender, emotional period in their life. In fact, that tenderness may be the cause of their experiencing something unusual, whether you believe in ghosts or not.

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