Justin Cronin on the books, films and TV that inspired The Ferryman

The Ferryman

Justin Cronin

Orion (UK); Ballantine Books (US)

The Ferryman was born on a starry autumn night.

I was taking a walk before bed when, all of a sudden, two things dropped into my head. The first was a word: “Oranios”. The second was a scene: an old man on a pier experiencing some kind of breakdown, and a second man, somebody official, trying to talk him back from the ledge. I had no idea what these two things had to do with one another, and the word Oranios wasn’t even one I knew. (It’s a variation on the Greek God Uranus, father of the Titans and lord of the heavens.) But they had to come from some place, and I wanted to know where that was.

It took me a long time to turn this little flash into a novel; I was guided only by the feeling that something was asking to be written. But, bit by bit, a story emerged – the story of a distant future in which people don’t die, but are instead ferried to an island where their bodies are refreshed, their memories wiped away and they can begin life anew. It’s also a story with a huge twist, one that pays homage to a favourite sci-fi conceit of my boyhood – thus, something I can’t tell you about without spoiling the book. But every novel has a range of prior stories – other novels of course, but also movies, television shows and plays – standing over its shoulder and whispering in its ear.

Here are five of The Ferryman’s:

Planet of the Apes (1968). There was a time when it was possible to watch Planet of the Apes without knowing the ending in advance, and when I saw it in the early 1970s on my parents’ little black-and-white TV, the film’s famous final moment blew the top of my head off. We’d been on planet Earth the whole time! Of course! It astonished me how a single image – Charlton Heston pounding the sand at the foot of a ruined Statue of Liberty – could so perfectly renovate an entire story in hindsight. I felt like I’d watched the movie twice just by watching it once, and I wrote an entire novel to try to pull off this trick. I even included a small nod to Pierre Boulle’s original novel (also excellent, with a head-smacking surprise ending) in The Ferryman’s final chapters.

The Tempest. I was nearly halfway through writing The Ferryman when I realised that William Shakespeare’s play was the novel’s primary source material. A remote island. A storm-making magician. His teenage daughter, a teasing sprite and a savage monster. I’d even called the place Prospera, one small vowel away from Prospero, and named my main character Proctor, a slight linguistic variation. But here’s the thing: I hadn’t read The Tempest in 40 years, and I had never seen a stage production of the play. All I’d done was read it in the spring of 1982 in a college class. But obviously, it had taken residence in my brain for later use. When, late in The Ferryman, I quoted from Shakespeare’s play, I didn’t even need to look up the words; they were all still in my head.

Never Let Me Go. Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian masterpiece astounds me every time I read it. No author applies such gorgeous language to the writing of speculative fiction. He’s an artist with no boundaries, no inner critic telling him what a Booker prize-winning Nobel laureate should or shouldn’t write – and in Never Let Me Go, he takes on the biggest question of all: what makes someone human?

Lost (TV series) Again, right up my alley with its island of strange goings-on. But this history-making show also has magnificent storytelling. The show’s writers were always happy to toss in new, outlandish elements without apology, which was tonnes of fun, but the focus remained on the characters and their relationships, and the universal themes of loyalty and friendship. Did the writers ever explain the polar bear? Not really. Did I care? Not one bit.

2001: A Space Odyssey. Both the movie and Arthur C. Clarke’s novelisation capture something that I often feel has been mislaid in the post-Star Wars era: a sense of pure awe in the face of an infinite and unknowable cosmos. The film is slow moving by current standards, but that is the point – it is less a story to be watched or read than one to be contemplated. You stand in the presence of 2001 in the same spirit that the ape creatures of its prologue stand before the monolith: knowing you are a witness to something grand that your mind will never be able to grasp completely because the universe is so much bigger than you are.

The Ferryman by Justin Cronin is published by Orion. It is the first pick for New Scientist’s new book club, for which you can sign up here