Flowers for Poppy - An Author's Preface

There won't be, I think, many books of mine that will need any sort of preface, partly because I hold strongly that a story itself should satisfy the most serious questions and context. Though this finished book is exactly where I intended it to arrive at—to end—I am not reassured that it tells the entire story, making it worthy of an honest preface. Flowers for Poppy emerged, raw and crudely, from an unlikely place: an old cemetery. I’d just gone to Oxford to finish writing The Black Friars, a task requiring me to seek an audience with the Dominican friars who bore the namesake and theology of characters I intended to create for a mystery. After an afternoon of tea and biscuits with the most generous and welcoming Prior Fr. Dominic, I went to confession at the Oratory Church of St. Aloysius Gonzaga, just off St. Giles Street. I had few companions on this excursion, and, left largely to the perils of my own introspection, felt overwhelmed by an unshakable guilt. The guilt stemmed from a gradual spiritual awakening that had since stalled, leaving me with a sense of trepidation about what was to come and what to do next. It was time to bury the hatchet, I thought, and start plain again with God. 

After this was completed, I sat in a nearby cemetery alone, surrounded by old Celtic crosses and angels, and journaled to myself. I wanted to preserve something that was felt on that day, in that cemetery where the world seems to sit forever in time. The feeling was striking; that of a powerful love, a kind different from all other renditions of it I had experienced in my life. Rather than something I felt within as a response, it seemed to be a force upon me, like a wind, external, seemingly with a body of its own, lifting me by the shoulders above the dark, cerebral recesses that had grown to be my “normal world”. I experienced something so wonderfully loving then that to this day, I have struggled to form words for it. Needless to say, from then on, I understood well enough that I had been there, in Oxford, sitting among the dead of that ancient ground, for a reason. The task became thenceforth one of encapsulation—to trap the feeling within the narrow leaves of a novel.

There were, of course, many practical insights gleaned during the trip that made for a sufficient starting point. One was that my fledgling story needed to be older, perhaps with a more antiquated firmness of the kind found in earlier novels, ones that bore scars of war, and of declining empire. Additionally, it had occurred to me then that Father Thomas, the protagonist from my last novel, acted a bit out of his time, a foible that still seemed to serve a larger message about monastics in our day. For the next story, I resolved that, rather than force an antiquated voice upon the modern era, I would set it where it belonged: at the end of the Second World War. Even then, there are those who would regard such a period as far from antiquated.

The draft began with a prologue that took me nearly a month to get right, and even now, as I sit here with the finished work, a part of me wonders whether I ever did. The rest would take several months, during which unemployment and financial insolvency loomed over me all the while. I chose not to work in this period of my life, allotting myself a rather short runway of months to write, most days of the week, 4 to 6 hours a day. I didn’t speak to almost anyone during that time, in part because I didn’t need to, and in part because, often, there was no one to speak to. I firmly hold now that it is during those solitary times when God speaks with a stronger accent, though not left idle were many works of Godly men from which inspiration was drawn. I recall reading several spiritual men along the way—St. John of the Cross, St. John Henry Newman, and, most impactfully, the ever-humble and awe-inspiring St. Anthony Mary Claret of Spain. The tender Spaniard has a way of making a man ashamed of even his shadow! 

Fiction also played a significant role in this journey, revealing, before my tired eyes, a final finish line. I believe that to write a good book, one must also be reading a good one, and several earned their place as suitable companions for this project. First, there was Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock and The Power and the Glory, then Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (an unexpected surprise from a dear friend), and finally The Return of the Native, also by Hardy. Greene is a man one turns to when he wants to write about the ever-mysterious whisper of God, and Hardy is who one turns to when he wants the world to speak of it. 

As many writers who have mentored me have admitted, there isn’t really a “correct” way to write, which, for a green novelist such as I, is at once a consolation and an inconvenience. Insofar as I can speak of the way my own brain meanders, I’ve found writing analogous to the distinction between a composer and an arranger—one needs both to form the tune, though it always begins with some black upon the page. More often than not, the real story seems to emerge out of the one I set out to make; the characters seem to concretize on their own. With this foreknowledge, I allow the initial draft to have enough holes to breathe into a proper shape. I’ll admit—perhaps to my own detriment—that occasionally a leak remains, and perhaps a tuba was introduced where a flute ought otherwise articulate.

With a mind to have one last go at British vernacular before returning to my native register, Brighton was the next clear choice of venue for a tragedy. To an American, it exudes historically and presently something of a contradiction: joyous beachgoers under sullen skies, eager to escape wartime destruction and the slow death of an empire. Such imagery calls to mind, by no means of condescension, the mannerisms of children. Children have an ironic hopefulness to them, ignoring the grime around them for the fantasies buried in their heads. This is how I imagined a post-war child and (more generally) a post-war England to be, dragging the older and embittered generations into a hopeful unknown. From this lens, Poppy was born. I believe children are necessary for addressing things adults cower away from. They’re blunt and earnest, cutting through the noise of custom, right into the heart of a given matter. It is said that teaching students is itself formative of the teacher, and so too do I believe that children, in many ways, though unknowingly, form their parents. In this book, they are, for that reason, essential.

The book’s real transformation occurs alongside its setting at the start of Part III, a move from England to Arabia. There was much preparation, including studying the tenets of Islam and watching back the tapes preserved of the major Saudi cities: Jeddah, Mecca, the Hejaz highlands, and the larger desert region of Najd during the 1950’s oil boom. To this day, I am not confident I successfully encapsulated either the locale or the faith to native sufficiency, but one imagines a reader living in Saudi Arabia might find England a more adventurous setting anyway. The novelty of Arabian adventure is primarily one of a Western construction, a fact I humbly acknowledge from the outset, and tread upon as carefully as one can. In Part III, the perspective shifts from first person to third, and I want the reader to consider, after ingesting all that Felix Anderson is and has become, why this change has occurred.

Though this is by all accounts a book about religion, namely the Catholic one, it is rather intended to introduce some new considerations to someone who is not of any sort of faith, or perhaps on the verge of possessing one. Many of my own friends at various points in their lives seemed to exist in this “middle area,” as Poppy calls it—the place where one proceeds narrowly with their own plans, expecting little else to change. What consideration they would have paid to a larger purpose is forestalled; instead, they often remark they will sort it all out in the morning, or in the following month, or whenever is most convenient ultimately for them. In the interim, they work themselves near to death, pursuing ephemeral moments and material possessions with which to measure themselves against one another. Flowers for Poppy, I expect most of all, will speak to those people; a story of life revealing itself when one is least prepared. For me, it was also a nudging self-examination.

As a final aside, there is much talk today about “accessibility,” from the likes of literary agents, teachers, and even friends of mine— “economy of words,” they say, and so on. I make no disagreement with the notion that a writer’s chief concern ought to be ensuring that his world is as visible to his readers as it exists fully in his own mind, but surely fiction offers more than mere cleanliness. If it were meant to be explained in the simplest and most expedient manner, it would be a poor substitute for television. No, I should hope in my own work to be the man discovering the cosmos within the veins of a small leaf, rather than the one who merely counts the stars in the sky.

Given that I write without any expectation of earning a living as an author, my primary concern is with the furtherance of those innumerable and wondrous artifacts I have found in past works, which, over time, have formed my own conscience. They weren’t always easy for me as I wrestled with them, but they asked of me more than to observe. Much of my former life has been of a comfortably scattered character, and literature provides enough discomfort to remind me of how much more there is. When I observe the rest of the world, I see much of it as having fallen asleep; it has grown acclimated to its own comfort, its own scatteredness, and though my aims are indeed low, if one should speak of my work in years to come, I only hope they might say, “at least I never fell asleep.”

Aaron McAfee

Flowers for Poppy will arrive online and in select stores June 12th 2026