Justin Cartwright is the award-winning author of In Every Face I Meet, Leading the Cheers, White Lightning, and The Promise of Happiness.

His latest novel THE SONG BEFORE IT SUNG is based on the lives of Adam von Trott and Isaiah Berlin.

Described by the LA Times as “a quiet masterpiece”, it traces the friendship between charismatic Axel von Gottberg, an aristocratic German, and Elya Mendel, a socially awkward but brilliant Jewish scholar, in 1930’s Oxford.

Sixty years after meeting von Trott, Mendel asks a former student, Conrad Senior, to unravel his collection of letters and papers.

Justin Cartwright was born in South Africa but, since graduating from Oxford University, has lived all his adult life in London.

We met in Toronto in October 2007 during The International Festival of Authors and later corresponded by email. 

What was the inspiration for The Song Before it is Sung?

It was seeing the showtrial of Adam von Trott and others in the Imperial War Museum, London

You’re perhaps best known for chronicling the foibles of contemporary society in your novels. Was it a challenge to write a story drawing on historical fact?

It was. The difficulty is in making judgements about what aspects of the story could be treated fictionally, and which had to be faithful to some underlying truths.

How did you start researching the book?

By watching the film and then meeting families of the resisters in Germany and the UK.

The Bodleian Library in Oxford provided the originals of letters from Von Trott to Berlin.

Conrad Senior, the researcher in The Song Before it is Sung, is often overwhelmed by his work. Did you ever feel the same way?

Yes. Knowing where to stop is the problem

Does the film of the executions actually exist?

Not as far as anyone knows, although it was made.

Oxford, which is one of the settings in the novel, is close to your heart and I understand you’ve written a book about the city called THIS SECRET GARDEN: Oxford Revisited. Why is it such a special place?

For me, fresh from South Africa in the sixties, it was as if I was visiting a place and a landscape of another but parallel life.  The mythology of Oxford was, and is, very powerful.

Both Mendel and Von Gottberg as immigrants to England seem to aspire to some kind of ‘Englishness’ - a somewhat elusive quality - which (correct if I am wrong!) is something of a recurring them in your work. Where does your interest in what it means to be ‘English’ come from?

The English had an enormous talent for mythologizing their past and their character. Although it is out of fashion, it still has a hold well beyond the confines of one small island.

Another recurring theme, it occurs to me, is that your protagonists often seem to be struggling to find their place in the world. Could you talk about that little?

I think consciousness and the sense of self in a vast universe is the subject of my novels, although not too overtly.

The fictional friendship between Mendel and Von Gottberg is fascinating. It’s full of incongruities and contrasts, and yet the two men share a strange affinity. How closely does it mirror the actual friendship between Berlin and Von Trott? 

In some aspects it’s very close. They were friends, but probably not nearly as close as I have made them in the book. That said, I think it is true that Berlin was in some ways an intellectual hero to Trott.

Do you think Von Trott was a hero?

Yes.

Could you explain the origin of the title, The Song Before it is Sung?

It’s from a saying of Alexander Herzen, which Isaiah Berlin loved: Where is the song before it is sung? To which Berlin replied, it does not exist. It exists only in the singing or the writing. And by this he meant it was like a life, which exists only in the living of it.

Part two of this Q & A will be posted tomorrow.