Canadian novelist Jane Bow on her new thriller and the writing life

This article is excerpted from Novelist Spotlight podcast #200, which can be listened to at this link: https://youtu.be/FXgfKl_neoI

Jane Bow describes love the way a physicist describes energy: as something measureless, invisible and capable of leveling everything in its path.

“Love is probably one of the most powerful forces on the planet in human affairs,” the Canadian novelist says. “It has a nuclear power.”

That conviction drives her new novel, The Angel’s Share, a romantic thriller set on the Greek island of Crete. The book follows Dion, a 39-year-old woman who has never experienced sexual fulfillment, as she travels to help her father and grandmother rescue a failing winery — and ultimately teams with a vagabond artist and her 94-year-old grandmother to steal a Russian oligarch’s $2 million bottle of cognac.

“The Angel’s Share is a romance,” Bow says, “but it’s also talking about the nuclear power of love in sex, in winemaking and in Dion’s breaking the law.”

A story rooted in the female body

The novel arrives at a moment when conversations about female sexuality have entered the cultural mainstream, and Bow is unambiguous about her intentions: She wants to tell a story that most popular culture still fumbles.

“We see sex everywhere,” she says, “but we don’t see the difference between the male and female experience, and we don’t see much about what love has to do with it.”

Bow argues that the female body is frequently misunderstood — by men, and often by women themselves. “It’s only in the last few decades that we have even understood what arousal is in the female body and how that works,” she says. “There’s a lack of information; there’s a lot of ignorance and inhibition.”

For Dion, the journey toward self-knowledge begins not with a lover but with her own body. When the novel opens, the character steals away to a remote gully behind the winery to sunbathe nude. It is an act of modest rebellion for a self-described conservative Canadian who has never felt entirely at home in her own skin.

“The confidence of learning sensuality in her own body — learning about herself as beautiful — that’s what gives her the courage ultimately to pull off the heist.”

When a young wandering artist appears uninvited in the gully, something begins. Not a seduction, but a slow, careful unfurling.

“It starts with sensuality, not sexuality,” Bow says. “Just becoming aware.”

The craft of the intimate scene

Asked what makes a great sex scene, Bow is precise: the key is restraint.

“If you’re writing something designed strictly to arouse the reader, that’s one thing. But what I’m trying to do is make those scenes part of the richness of the story.”

She borrows a term from the writing trade, “writing on the nose,” as the mistake to avoid. “You don’t say it. You intimate what’s going on. It has to be very deftly done for it to work.”

The approach invites the reader’s imagination into the space between the lines. “Just like sex is a very delicate thing,” Bow says, “the writing of it is also a very delicate thing.”

Four novels, no easy category

Bow, who grew up across Canada, the United States, Spain, England and what was then Czechoslovakia, has written four novels. She resists the genre labels that might make her easier to market.

“I can’t say I write romance, or fantasy, or historical novels, because my novels cross genres,” she says. Her stories, she explained, examine “how history plays out through our lives — through the adventures that make us who we are.”

Her third novel, Cally’s Way, also set in Crete, interweaves a contemporary love story with the island’s wartime resistance against the German occupation during World War II. It reached No. 2 on a Canadian bestseller list and earned her an invitation to a literary festival in England.

“People said they really felt Crete when they read it,” she says, a response that readers of The Angel’s Share have echoed. “They can smell the air. They feel like they’re there.”

Her first novel, Dead and Living, grew out of her years as a journalist covering courts in northern Canada. One case seized her imagination: a man who went before a judge to determine whether he had committed a murder — a crime he genuinely could not remember committing or not — after carrying the uncertainty for 25 years.

“I needed to write that as fiction,” she says, “because I wanted to explore the dynamics behind the facts.”

The novel was shortlisted for an award. It was, she says, the first time she felt “the real power of writing fiction to get at the truths that are behind the facts.”

The writing life

Bow writes in the early morning, after meditation. She has practiced in various forms for decades — mantras, breath counting — before settling on something closer to Dan Siegel’s “wheel of awareness,” a method developed by the UCLA psychiatrist and neuroscience researcher that moves through the senses, the body, the emotions, and then releases everything into stillness.

“There is the power of love working through me,” she says of those mornings. “I can feel it. And then I set my intentions for the day.”

From there, she goes straight to the desk. She allows herself no detours.

“The laundry level of life tries to take over,” she says. “You have to keep it at bay.”

She writes by hand when possible, a discovery she made while pregnant with her second child, too exhausted to sit upright at a keyboard. “The words get out differently than they do when you’re tapping on a computer,” she says.

Her productive sessions run about four hours. After that, she is spent.

She is not a fast novelist. Each book takes several years to complete, a pace that has kept her out of reach of major publishing contracts, which typically demand a book a year.

“This is another reason you’ve never heard of me,” she says, without apparent bitterness. “If you have a publishing contract with a big publisher, they want you churning out those books one a year. I could never do that.”

Advice for writers

Asked what she would tell an aspiring novelist, Bow does not lead with craft advice or workshop technique. She leads with belief.

“They need to believe in themselves,” she says. “They need to get rid of that little judge that sits on the shoulder and says, ‘This is crap. Why do you think anybody wants to read your stuff?’”

She pauses before adding, “You acknowledge that judge as an energy in you, and then you say: I’m not paying attention to you. I’m doing what’s mine to do.”

And writers must make peace with failure on the page.

“You have to expect yourself to write a lot of absolute drivel,” she says. The only way to find the good material, she explains, is to write through the bad. A mentor once framed it for her this way: If you knit a sweater with three arms, the third arm isn’t wasted. You take it off and use it as a tea cozy.

“You have to be willing to do that,” Bow says. “You have to realize what every scene has to do with every other scene.”

While teaching creative writing at a Canadian college, she counseled her students that writing is its own reward when it goes well.

“When writing is working,” she says, “it’s the closest thing a human can do to flying.”

“The Angel’s Share” by Jane Bow is available now on all major bookselling sites.