Power play: Meg McKinlay on ‘A Single Stone’

Meg McKinlay’s novel for younger readers A Single Stone (Walker Books, May) ‘manages to pose big questions about gender and power, and thoroughly entertain’, writes reviewer Frances Atkinson. She spoke to the author.

It was refreshing to read about so many strong female characters of
all ages in your new book. Was this intentional?
I certainly intended to create a society in which female influence loomed large; because of the way this story evolved, I knew it would have female characters at its centre. But as for the strength of those characters, I can’t say that I consciously set out to write them with that trait in mind. To my mind, they’re just female characters who happen to have the strengths and weaknesses of ordinary people, regardless of gender. 

It’s also worth noting that the notion of ‘strength’ is itself not uncomplicated. The Mothers, for example—the matriarchal figures with whom much of the power resides in the novel—are strong in many respects but they’re also blinkered; there’s weakness there disguised as strength. In some ways, I think that’s what dogmatism is—that notion of rigid adherence to doctrine, to the literal; a kind of failure of imagination—and that’s certainly at the heart of the novel. 

So it’s worth thinking about that too. While I’m of course delighted for readers to see my female characters as strong, I hope they won’t stop there but will also give some thought to the various shades of complexity that are at work.  

The Mothers are a group of women who are powerful, nurturing, but also manipulative. What inspired you to create this set of characters?
When the idea for the book was evolving, I was thinking about the different forms oppression can take and how some of these can appear benign—even benevolent—on the surface. I’m interested in the ways in which cultural and religious practices are transmitted, and how what is a deeply held belief can, over time, become a mechanism of oppression for certain groups within a society.

For me, the early stage of the creative process is really just a chaos of half-formed ideas, with associations and fragments being pulled in from all over the place. Somewhere in that mix, I began thinking about foot-binding. I knew that in China this was generally practiced by women, with mothers binding their daughters’ feet in the belief that this would make them more attractive and give them better prospects in life. I then began thinking about Western standards of beauty, about what’s being imposed on our own daughters now, and about who’s responsible for the perpetuation of these ideals. It was a fairly short hop from those thoughts to the Mothers. 

Myths and ritual are central to the book. What kind of research informed your story?
The book is informed by all sorts of thoughts about myth and ritual but I can’t really say that I did any actual research in those areas. It’s really just the outcome of my own observations about how such things function in the world, my own experiences of how actions and practices can become detached from their original meanings. I’ve been interested in this since I was a teenager, attending an Anglican high school and spending a fair amount of time in church-based youth groups. Also around that time, I was introduced to Kafka, and became very fond of his aphorisms. It’s one of these that actually formed the initial seed for the story: ‘Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.’ I was very much taken by this at 16 and used to repeat it to myself during school communion services.

I did do some research for other elements of the story—into things like caving, abseiling techniques, osteoporosis in pregnancy, the links between diet and bone strength and so on. The reading I did in these areas underlies aspects of the story but may not be visible to the reader. 

What are you working on next?
Unexpectedly, I find myself working on a sequel to A Single Stone. Although I never intended to do so, in the process of fine-tuning this manuscript for publication, I’ve found new ideas growing, questions suggesting themselves, snippets of scenes coming to me in fragments. I do think there’s more story to be told, and am really happy to spend more time with these characters, so it’s quite fun at the moment.