Few writers can lay claim to the triple crown — the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize — of CanLit award nominations. M.G. Vassanji pulled it off two years ago with The Assassin’s Song, and Rawi Hage followed suit with last year’s Cockroach. This year, Vancouver writer Annabel Lyon joined their illustrious ranks with The Golden Mean, her first novel for adults. Depicting Aristotle’s tutelage of a young Alexander the Great, The Golden Mean is a gripping, thoughtful dramatization of one of the most intriguing relationships in ancient history. Tonight, Lyon joins the other four writers shortlisted for the Giller in Toronto for the award ceremony. I spoke with her over champagne during the International Festival of Authors.

Before we talk about The Golden Mean, can you tell me about the experience of being nominated for all these awards?

I feel like I’ve been hit by something large. It’s overwhelming, and the days have become very long. It’s a lot of media and it’s a lot of readings. I’m used to being at home in my room and my book being this little personal thing, and all of the sudden it’s just out there. Of course, I’m not complaining at all. It’s wonderful, but it is very overwhelming, and I’m a pretty shy person.

How did the experience of writing a novel compare to writing the shorter fiction you’ve published?

It was really hard. I feel like I’m a short story writer. I always compare it to running: it all depends on what you’ve got the body for, and what you’re wired for. You might be a short-distance runner, or you might be a long-distance runner. I think I’m a short-distance writer. I feel confident when I do that, in control. The novel was a long, hard slog, and it didn’t come naturally at all. There were many points where I thought, “Can I just make this back into a short story?” I wanted to give up. But the story was just too big; it needed the scope of a novel.

Do you plan to write more novels in the future?

I have an idea for a sequel to this one. It was always a two-book project in my mind. I would love to write more short stories and I plan to, but it’s not like I have all these great novel ideas racked up and waiting to go in a production line. It would have to be something pretty compelling to get me to dive back into that again. Did I mention it was hard?

Why write a novel about Aristotle today?

I was a philosophy major as an undergrad. I liked ancient philosophy and ethics, and he’s the towering figure when you put those two together. I always loved to read his work, which I realize is incredibly geeky, which I am. In times of stress I would read Nicomachean Ethics, because it calmed me down. It’s someone trying to think things through in a very steady, calm, orderly way. To give you a trivial example: I would come home from going on a date which was kind of miserable, and I’d feel gross and wasn’t ready for bed right away, and I would start reading Aristotle. No wonder I didn’t get more dates. The period after September 11, not quite so trivially, was a stressful time. I started thinking, as did many people in the arts, “What’s the relevance of what I’m doing? Who needs fiction right now? What am I doing after all?” I started reading Aristotle again, and I was struck by how relevant and how contemporary he is. He’s asking questions like, “What is it to live a good life? What is it to be a good citizen? How do you avoid extremism?” All of which is hugely relevant. I remember reading that tiny little bio that was in the front of [his books] and thinking how I would make that into a novel. I’m a fiction writer, and eventually the fiction brain comes back. It took a long time before I realized I was actually going to write the novel, because I was just doing it as an exercise to see how I would write the novel if I was going to do it. [Finally] I accepted that I was really working on it.

Are there particular lessons you think Aristotle has for us today?

That idea of the golden mean, the avoidance of extremes and trying to find a middle ground. I think that is relevant, for obvious reasons in the world today, and something that will remain relevant, at the personal level and the political level, as long as there are human beings. My bigger project was that I really wanted people to know who Aristotle was and remember what he gave to the culture, because he’s at the foundation of so many things. He was one of the first empirical scientists. He went out and got his hands dirty, where the Greek philosophers before him just sat in chairs and thought things through. He was the father of logic, which led all the way to computer science and gave us the world we have today. He was one of the first people to do dissection on animals, which gave us modern medicine. Then there’s his ethics. And not just western culture, he was a huge influence over medieval Islamic scholars, as well. He’s like a Leonardo DaVinci or a Shakespeare — one of those once-in-a-thousand-years brains. I have little kids and I realized they can go through twelve years of school, they can go to university, they can get PhDs, and never have to learn anything about Aristotle. That felt wrong to me. I just want people to realize that deep down under everything the world is today, he’s there. It’s all built on top of what he did.

How close is your portrayal of Aristotle to what we know about the actual person?

There are works of historical fiction that play a lot more with characters and invent scenes that never really happened. That can be wonderful and really fun to read, but since my goal was to kind of give Aristotle back, I didn’t want to give him back in a warped or twisted way. I wanted to keep it pretty straightforward. Obviously, there’s not a lot that’s known because he lived 2,300 years ago, so I had to extrapolate a lot from his writings. For instance, it’s known that his father was a physician, so I assumed that he would have learned some of his father’s trade. I don’t know that for sure, but it’s a pretty safe assumption.

Can you talk a bit about your decision to portray him as essentially bipolar?

Again, that’s extrapolation from his work. He wrote in a book called Problems about the link between what he called melancholy — but we would call depression — and the creative temperament. It sounds like something he knew intimately and wrote about from experience. Then you look at the sheer amount of work that he produced. It’s a manic mind that could never switch off. He was just insanely curious about everything. Metaphysics, law, politics, theatre, marine biology, astronomy, astrology, the Olympics — you name it and he wrote a book about it. So at the other end there was this kind of frenetic mind that just never seemed to stop. You take those two things and then look in the Ethics where he writes about the golden mean being his ideal. I thought, that doesn’t sound like somebody who’s arrived at that, it sounds like someone who desperately wants that.

What is it about this particular period in Aristotle’s life — when he began tutoring Alexander the Great — that attracted you to write about it?

Those seven years were the most tumultuous of his life. He spent the first twenty years of his adult life in Plato’s Academy as basically a student and then as a teacher. And then he had this period of travels where, after Plato died, he went to Asia Minor, he went to Turkey, and then he lived on the island of Lesbos before being summoned back to his birthplace, Macedonia. He spent seven years there, and during that period Macedonia conquered the rest of the southern city-states. He was away from Athens, which is the center of the world for an intellect like him. Then he tutored the young Alexander, who must have been a force to be reckoned with. After Philip, the king of Macedonia, died, Alexander took the throne and went off on his big campaigns. Aristotle went back to Athens and stayed there for pretty much the rest of his life. Once again he was in a university writing books. Externally and internally, I thought that seven-year period really had the most going on, and it’s also a nice, discreet period for a novelist. It has a beginning, and a middle, and an end. For me, coming to it from short stories, I needed that framework to hang it on.

What was the research process like?

I wrote a very embryonic, complete first draft of about forty pages before I did much research at all, and then went out and did a lot of reading. I came back and realized I’d gotten all this stuff wrong, so I went back and fixed it. It got longer: it was eighty pages, then a hundred pages. I went out and did more research, and then I came back to writing again. The neat thing about something set in ancient times is that there’s a limit to how many primary sources you can read. You can get to the end of it, whereas if you’re writing about Shakespeare you can go on researching forever. So in a way, [The Golden Mean] being set so long ago made the research a little easier. But I didn’t go to Greece. I was having babies at the time that I was writing this and I couldn’t get away from them. More to the point, you can’t go to ancient Greece. Things that I would have wanted to see just weren’t there anymore.

Did working on the novel so long change your relationship to Aristotle’s work?

The more I worked on him, the more he became a frail figure in my mind. He starts out seeming like this monolithic, huge brain. Such a reputation, such influence down the ages; you think he must have been this solid, confident figure. Yet the more I read his work and the more I thought about the character, the less true that seemed. He increasingly became someone who I felt worried for.

Throughout the novel, characters use contemporary vernacular, including profanity. What went into your decision to take that route?

When I started working on it, I found that I was using a very British diction, which was really annoying, because that’s not my diction. My dad’s English, so I sort of have that voice in my head. A lot of historical fiction, especially about the ancient world, is written by Brits. It’s become a convention to have characters speak British diction. I started questioning why I was doing this, and why I couldn’t just use a North American diction. I ended up having the Athenians speak like Brits, because the Athenians are from of an older, more refined culture; they certainly looked down on the Macedonians for being a very young, very wealthy, barbarous society that had to import all its culture. I gave the Macedonians my vernacular, the North American ways of speech. I’ve had reviewers trip on that sometimes and say, “Well, why do they speak this, it sounds anachronistic, it sounds too contemporary, would they really swear like that?” Well, why would they say “bloody hell” like a British person? That doesn’t make any more sense. [Using contemporary vernacular] also seemed a way of saying this isn’t British history that I’m writing, this is Canadian history. We’re a democracy, and where does that come from? We watch Hollywood movies that are in three acts, and who wrote about that first? This is Canadian history, it’s North American history, it’s world history — so why can’t I use my own voice?

Since this is your first novel for adults, I wonder what differences you noticed between writing for adults and children, both in the composition and the reception.

I’ve found children’s writing easier. It’s a more joyous thing to do. I look forward to sitting down at the desk, and it comes very easily. Obviously there are certain things you wouldn’t write about in a children’s book, and the level of language has to be different. I had to learn to do that, and I had a great editor who helped me through it. The Golden Mean was definitely harder, darker. As far as reception goes, I think the real contrast is with publishing short fiction. People often think The Golden Mean is my first book, when I’ve written prior collections. Short fiction really doesn’t count. I’ve spoken to poets about this, and they’re also often asked, “Are you just a poet?” In the same way: “Are you just a short story writer?” It still amazes me that people are buying this book. As a short story writer, I’m used to selling my 400 copies. You sit at the tables waiting to sign, and you watch everybody line up for the novelists. Now people are lining up for me, and I still have that kind of feeling: “Really, you bought that? You bought my book?” I have no experience with this. This is crazy.

(Photo by Phillip Chin)