AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Train platforms, by their very nature, are transient places - usually just a stop between your starting point and your final destination. But in Ilona Bannister's new novel, "Five," one specific train platform is the final destination.
ILONA BANNISTER: (Reading) Someone will die here this morning at this suburban train station. It will happen in the next five minutes when the 706 to London Victoria arrives. Four others have died here previously.
RASCOE: The novel tells the story of those five minutes and delves into the lives of the five characters waiting on the platform. One of them will be death No. 5. All of them will be forever changed by that morning. Ilona Bannister, thank you so much for being here to talk with us about this mystery, this pulse-pounding mystery.
BANNISTER: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so delighted to be here.
RASCOE: This is heart-pounding. It's five minutes. Somebody's going to die. How did you come up with this premise in the first place?
BANNISTER: Well, I had one of those lightning-bolt moments that sort of only happens very, very rarely, I think. I had brought a different story to my agent, and she didn't like it. So I was on my way home on a London bus. I was sitting on the top deck, and I was thinking about stories.
And I thought, well, if I spoke to every person on this bus and asked them about their life story, I bet it would be so much better than any fiction that I could write because you wouldn't believe what people have survived and triumphed and seen and done and the grief and the loss and the joy. And then in the background of my mind, I sort of - there had been a very tragic cycling accident near my home that week, and the cyclist died on impact. It was in the morning rush hour.
Suddenly, those two ideas came together, you know, the last five minutes. It's just before before becomes after. It's when you see after is coming. So what if we had five people and we knew their life stories and they're standing on a train platform, and in five minutes, one of them dies?
RASCOE: This format - like, this real-time format, we've seen it in, like, TV shows like "24," which took place within a single 24 hours, or something like 'The Pitt," which happens in a single 12-hour ER shift. But you are taking 200 pages to tell a story that takes place within five minutes or maybe, like, seven or eight if the train is delayed. And I was reading this, I'm like, wait a minute now, if it's only five minutes, how we got so many pages? But how do you do that?
(LAUGHTER)
BANNISTER: Well, I will say, when I started writing it and I realized the challenge I had given myself, I thought, Ok, well, maybe I've taken on a bit too much here because it is quite something to try to pack all this action into just five minutes. So what I started to do is what I always do. I'm a very research-heavy writer. So I thought, OK, well, five minutes. What can happen in a minute? So I would time the lines of dialogue. I would time how long it takes to think a particular word. I went to my local train station. I would walk up and down it. I would pace. I would count steps. I would look at the paint. I would read a sign. I tried to get every detail that I could write to make sure that what I was presenting to the reader - that I could convince you that this was plausible.
RASCOE: You open the book with Emma. She's a mother who, you know - and this is going to sound horrible, but she seriously considers allowing her child, Gideon, to fall in front of a train. And you tell us in the book that we shouldn't be harsh on her, but this is a mother who's going through a lot.
BANNISTER: Yep. She is going through a lot. And it was very important to me when I started - one of the things I did when I was starting out was that there would be a mother and child on the platform because I think it is a universal experience, both for parents who have children who have misbehaved in public, who have inevitably felt that public judgment, public attention, and it is also universal that we have all seen it. We have all seen a child kicking off and a parent struggling to cope in public. In doing that - because, of course, I'm introducing moral dilemmas about all of these characters - it needed to be a motherhood story that had its own twists and turns and darknesses in it to make it difficult for us to decide how do we really feel about this particular mother-child relationship?
RASCOE: Yeah, yeah. To be clear, like, two of your characters are neurodivergent. There's one who has ADHD, and that's Sonny. And then the other who's very deeply troubled, I think that's Gideon. So...
BANNISTER: Yeah.
(LAUGHTER)
RASCOE: Just a - OK. But you - there's a scene with Sonny, where you're telling his backstory. When he was a kid, his mom takes him to Pizza Express, and he ends up spilling water everywhere and throwing a glass. And what do you hope readers kind of take away from that?
BANNISTER: Yeah. That particular story is quite close to me because my own sons both have ADHD and dyslexia. When they were tiny, they were also very energetic, all over the place, delightful, but, you know, we had things to manage. Their story was also important for me to tell because so often parents of neurodivergent children find themselves in defense mode, in adversarial positions with school systems, with medical systems, constantly trying to explain their children's behavior and feeling like they come up against a wall because the judgment is, well, it's because you're too permissive, if you would just raise the child this way, then he wouldn't be having these issues, if you could just make him conform. But of course, these are very special people who do not naturally conform.
RASCOE: Yeah. And let's talk about the narrator's voice in this book because it is an omniscient voice, but you're also, at times, directly speaking to the reader. Like, sometimes you're chastising us, sometimes almost taunting us. What made you want to do that? And I don't know in reading if it's breaking the fourth wall 'cause I don't know if it's a wall in reading. But, like, why talk to the reader so directly?
BANNISTER: Yeah. Again, that wasn't sort of a conscious choice from the beginning. I started doing it because when I wrote the first platform and I was trying to be fast paced and urgent and just alluding to what was going to happen, it - I got very, very wordy, and it got very boring and slow, and it was lots of pages and very sluggish. And I thought, OK, well, this isn't the feeling I want. What if I just tell the reader what's going to happen? And then when I wrote that first sentence that starts the book, I thought, oh, that's a voice. That's, like, a really snarky, sarcastic voice, and that's going to be a lot of fun.
RASCOE: Is this a - this book kind of to remind us that we all will die, like, and maybe some of us will do it, you know, doing something as mundane as commuting to work?
BANNISTER: Yeah. I wanted to just explore the idea that we don't have any control over what's going to happen. We don't know when it will be or how it will be. And that, particularly when a crisis like this happens, I wanted to look at the ripple effect of what a stranger's death can have on many people - on the people around them but also the domino effect that it has, you know, across a whole city. And if we are confronted with the last five minutes, it's just a - it's an interesting thing to think about. Who do we want to be in those last five minutes?
RASCOE: That's Ilona Bannister. Her new book, "Five," is out now. Thank you so much for talking with me.
BANNISTER: Thank you so much. I really had fun. Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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