Helen Sedgwick on The Comet Seekers

It all started with the Bayeux Tapestry. “On one of the borders there’s an embroidery of a woman, who is staring out at the viewer in this very proud way,” explains Helen Sedgwick, author of The Comet Seekers. “And beside her there’s a cleric; he’s reaching out and he might be touching her face or he might be trying to hit her, it’s not quite clear. There’s a bit of writing alongside it that says ‘Aelfgifu and a certain cleric’ so people think that maybe it was a scandal of the time. I thought how fascinating that [there is] this woman – who is given a name, and who looks so out of place and very modern, so defiant. So I thought I had to create a story for her.”

That story was one of many serendipitous flash fictions that Sedgwick wrote and wove together to make a short story, published back in 2012. Each piece came from a completely different time and place, moving from France in 1066 to a research base in the Arctic Circle, back to a powerful and fearless woman building her own house in the 15th century and forward again to chase childhood sweethearts through Irish fields.

“When I originally wrote them it was a sort of experiment; I wanted to write a short story composed of lots of different flash fictions that seemed unconnected, but by the end, the connecting factor would appear. And the connecting factor was the comets.”

She then embellished this initial outline, filling in extra pieces of life and pulling out more and more stories from the people along her timeline to create The Comet Seekers. Only ever seeing her characters when a comet is in the sky, we are left with great gaps in the timeline that help to retain that feeling of the short story – the impression that there is a lot going on, that there is a whole world here, we just can’t see into it right now.

Since the early days of astronomy we’ve been tracking these heavenly bodies as they pass by: some return years or millennia later; others shoot past us without so much as slowing down. It is these fleeting glimpses and this orbital motion that serve as central themes to Sedgwick’s debut novel: a patient and moving love story between earth and stars.

We spend a good deal of the book staring at the sky with Roisín, who follows her passion for astronomy all around the world in a series of academic posts. Sedgwick’s own background as a research physicist helped to shape this, but the detail comes more from her amateur interest in astronomy: “My research was between engineering, biology and chemistry; the astronomy has been an interest of mine but not related to my career at all. It’s just something that I’ve been interested in since I was very young.”

Sedgwick has spoken and written about how both scientific research and creative writing require creativity, intensity and a lot of dedication – things which could conceivably be disrupted by moving around a lot. “Jobs that are really interesting generally do take a long time,” Sedgwick explains, from her own experience, “In my own life I’ve had these careers that certainly take a long time, and yet I’ve moved from one to the other.” Sedgwick moved from lab work to a Masters in Creative Writing, and ever since has worked in the literary and artistic world. “I’ve got a bit of me that wants to be dedicated to one subject, but I think I am quite a reckless person in a way, I want to be exploring all the time and doing new things all the time.”

While evaluating this conflict, real or imagined, between dedication to one thing and desire to do others, Sedgwick wanted to explore the choices we make and the reasons we make them, without ever holding one route up as the ideal. “I wanted all of the characters to prioritise different aspects of their lives, and see how that played out for them individually.”

These choices made by characters in their pairs or on their own create a tension that is all too familiar – how do we cope with loss and heartbreak? How much can we factor in friends, family and lovers when choosing how to live and what to do with our lives? The latter can sound like a very modern problem, but in The Comet Seekers we see families decide to part or remain together again and again over a thousand years, from Aelfgifu and the tapestry up to the present day.

“If anything, I think in our past there was a great deal of travel; people would have formed family groups that moved together. Travel is easier than it’s ever been before, but in a way that makes it less real. In the past we would have been walking, we would have been experiencing travel in such a different way, and I think that’s where the longing for travel comes from.”

Throughout history, the choice to stay in the family home or go out into the world was not available to everyone. Certainly Aelfgifu, living and dying around 1066, would not have had as many options as her cleric, and the effect of gender on our choices was one that Sedgwick was keen to explore. While our physicist Roisín gives in to the wanderlust and makes her way from the Irish fields of her childhood to an Arctic research base, Severine, living in present-day Bayeux, feels incapable of leaving because of her fading ties with her own family.

“There’s an obligation that so many women feel, and so often they find themselves at the centre of a family, holding the family together.”

For Severine, this family is a strange one: ghosts of the departed who Sedgwick intentionally writes as ambiguous and lovable. She says that, for Severine, staying in one place is “rooted in both love and obligation. I wanted to explore that and show how she is both really frustrated and also incredibly grateful for the people around her.”

Just as Aelfgifu has moved between fact and fiction, and the comets themselves appear and disappear almost as apparitions, Severine’s ghosts also bring us to questions about reality itself. “Human beings do use imagination to cope with a lot of things, and when you’ve lost someone you keep talking to them in your head. You can imagine what they would say in certain circumstances, and in a way they’re still very real to you.”

Seeing the unseen, or waiting for it to return, is a talent that all of Sedgwick’s principal characters possess, and it’s what they choose to do with that knowledge that draws out the thread of the story over the centuries. Built on flash fictions and short stories, the finished piece is full of life: languorous, homely, fleeting and heavily affected by its past.