"We are all main characters in our own lives"

“I don’t plot my stories out on post-its,” says Northern Irish author Wendy Erskine, “but The Benefactors grew out of a strong image.” Three women, dressed in black, handing over a large bag of cash to three other women, in the shadow of a church: “like something out of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western.”

The Benefactors is Erskine’s first novel after two collections of short stories. In a packed medieval chapel, on a rainy day in Mantova, damp steaming off the row of umbrellas in the vestibule, the author responded to Italian book influencer Ilenia Caito’s thoughtful questions. The main plot is amplified by snippets of anonymous voices. Why do they remain unnamed?

“I knew if I was going to write a novel, it would have to be maximal. I didn't want to write a longer short story.” Erskine is interested in the complexity of everyday people, the polyphony of multiple perspectives, life as a juxtaposition of joy and brutality. “People in books are unfunny, whereas many people I know are hilarious.” She cites William Blake, saying “joy and woe are woven fine.” Her characters are not vehicles to advance a plot, they reflect the diversity of ‘ordinary’ people, all of them main characters in their own lives.

The Benefactors is about sexual assault, and weaving the woe and brutality of this act into a comic fabric “can seem jarring or offensive” without careful treatment. The perpetrators are from privileged families, and their mothers are caught between aligning with justice and wanting to protect their sons. It would have been easy to make them villains, but real life is not that simple. In the face of economic and social inequality, the victim is defended by the strength of family ties. Justice through institutions would not have been realistic: the family goes for a pragmatic solution, seeking reparations through another route.

Set in Belfast, a city with “a complicated past that hasn’t been fully dealt with,” the novel has resonated with readers in Birmingham, Cork, Glasgow and elsewhere. Themes of class, misogyny and violence are woefully universal.