Output details

Breath

This novel arose out of some of the same research as The Half-Healed, in that it concerns issues of conflict and reconciliation. However, whereas the poems explore the distant echoes of conflict, how wounds persist, the novel Breath looks at a society still raw, divided, only partially rebuilt, following a bloody civil war. The story takes place on a single night, and concerns the journey of a transplant lung from its donor (a teenage boy in the former ‘south’) to its recipient (an elderly man with a shadowy past in the former ‘north’). Building on the conflict research undertaken for the WNO libretto and the poems of The Half Healed, MSR undertook specific research into the scientific and medical processes of lung transplants, with a consultant in transplant surgery (Victoria Gatehouse, who works across Yorkshire hospitals), and a pilot who had flown solo flights with transplant organs (Stephen Benson, based at Manchester airport), as well as consultations (crucial for the book’s climax) with consultant anaesthetist Anthony McCluskey of Stockport’s Stepping Hill Hospital. For details of the road traffic accident (and police processes) at the beginning of the book, MSR conducted an interview with Inspector Michael McCulloch, a former traffic officer with Greater Manchester Police. The novel addresses religion as a source of conflict, but also as a source of healing and reconciliation, and in its attempt to address these themes in fiction draws on the stories and letters of Flannery O’Connor, the Letters and Papers from Prison of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the novels of Marilynne Robinson. In its analysis of the treatment of belief (and unbelief) in contemporary fiction, John McClure’s Partial Faiths: (Univ Georgia Press 2008) formed an important part of the critical research process. Breath is currently being adapted for a feature film screenplay, funded by Creative England