INTERVIEW:Sanjida O'Connell combines novel writing with a busy career as a TV presenter. She achieved academic success as a zoologist, and her new book is as much about religion as it is about botany. Is there anything she can't do, asks LOUISE EAST.
THERE'S ACHIEVING; there's high-achieving, and there's "How the hell does she do it?" a category which might have been invented for Sanjida O'Connell. We meet in a cafe on Marylebone High Street in London to discuss her third novel, but the interview could just as easily have been prompted by her role as presenter on BBC2's Nature's Top Forty, her ground-breaking PhD, her two non-fiction books, or, oh heavens, the fact she was a producer on Tomorrow's Worldat the age of 24, or the documentaries she made for the prestigious Horizon strand. O'Connell is agreeably matter-of-fact about the number and variety of strings to her bow, saying simply, "I think I'll always want to do different things. I've got that sort of mind, and one thing feeds into another."
The PhD, she explains, provided the subject matter for both her first novel and a non-fiction book, and later fed into a Horizon documentary, The Demonic Ape. The novel she's working on now was sparked by research for a non-fiction book on the sugar trade. But come on, how many 20-somethings rent a house right beside their workplace, as O'Connell did when she started at the BBC, and then forgo the extra minutes in bed to write a novel?
“I’d look out the window when I was typing, see my boss going in and drop everything.”
The resulting novel, Theory of Mind, was published by the time she was 24.
Rather consolingly, her latest novel, The Naked Name of Love, took 10 years to come to fruition. By the time O'Connell rented a cottage in Midleton, Co Cork and started writing, she'd waded through an epic amount of research and undertaken a trek through the wilds of Outer Mongolia, trying to piece together the world through which her hero, a 19th-century Jesuit-priest-turned plant-hunter, might have wandered.
"I was intrigued by plant-hunters. They had these incredible Boy's Ownadventures in far-flung places, enduring all those hardships for, you know, a plant."
Father Joseph Jacob, the hero of The Naked Name of Love, tackles blizzards, soldiers, ravines, broken limbs, leopards, and most dangerously of all, a challenge to his faith, in the shape of a beautiful tribeswoman, Namuunaa. O'Connell's own Mongolian odyssey was hampered by the modern-day equivalent of blizzards and ravines – luggage sent to Moscow, never to be seen again – and ultimately proved to be something of a wake-up call to sentiment.
“I travelled to the other side of the world to meet these people who still hunt with eagles, only to find a tribe with one rather ratty eagle who weren’t prepared to go out and show me anything,” O’Connell says, ruefully. “It was a case of ‘Have a cup of tea and off you go’.”
Perhaps unusually for a scientist, the novel is as much about religion as it as about botany, with Joseph's faith tested not just by his love for Namuunaa but by the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species. O'Connell does not have a religious faith herself, but she knows a lot of people who do.
“I’ve grown up around religion,” she says with a smile. “My father was a priest before he met my mother, my biological father was Muslim, my mother was a Christian, who decided to be a Quaker for a bit, and I’ve always been interested in Buddhism. I’ve never asked any of them directly what their beliefs are, but I did spend a lot of time debating Science versus God with my father.”
O’Connell’s mother, who hails from outside Belfast, was an MA student in England when she met O’Connell’s biological father, a mathematician from Bangladesh. The pair moved, first to Pakistan and then to Nigeria, before the marriage ended and her mother met the man O’Connell unselfconsciously calls her father, a Cork man who was both a priest and a teacher.
“He was going to leave the priesthood anyway, but for his background, I’m sure it was very hard.”
Although there's a parallel storyline running through The Naked Name of Love, O'Connell decided against quizzing her father on the subject of leaving the priesthood.
“I didn’t want to pry into his relationship with my mum and how it came about. Obviously it influenced the story, but I didn’t want it to be influenced directly by their lives.”
After leaving Nigeria (the family was given 24 hours’ notice of the 1976 coup), the O’Connells returned to the UK, moving first to Wales, then to Belfast and on to Yorkshire.
“I was only in Northern Ireland for two years, but it was the longest I’ve lived anywhere in my whole life and all of my mum’s family were there. It felt like home for the first time.
“I didn’t feel connected to my heritage but I felt I like I ought to be because I was so different to everyone else. When I was in Ireland, there weren’t any other Asians and then when I moved to Yorkshire, I had a Northern Irish accent and I was also the only non-white person. There was a lot of racism, and I spent a lot of time trying to find out where I fitted in.”
Like a lot of small girls, O’Connell was passionate about animals from an early age; her earliest memory is of staring into the long grass of the family’s Nigerian garden, wondering how on earth she’d catch all the insects. Unlike most small children, she stuck to her guns, opting to study zoology in Bristol University.
Despite O'Connell refusing to participate in dissections (she was vegan for 20 years), and taking a break to join the Tomorrow's Worldteam ("my supervisor never thought I'd come back"), her PhD proved for the first time that chimpanzees possess theory of mind or the ability to understand what other animals or people are thinking.
To test her thesis, O’Connell adapted classic theory of mind tests for children (often used to test for autism) to make them suitable for chimps. So what were the results?
“It’s interesting,” she says with a sly smile. “The female chimpanzees passed the test but the males didn’t. I’m not saying the males are thick but whereas the females sat and looked at what I was doing, the males were intent on dominating me, by chucking stuff at me and peeing on me. If you’re doing all that sort of nonsense, you can’t tell where the sweets are hidden.”
Despite her academic success, O’Connell joined the BBC on leaving university, reasoning that television offered the best opportunities to pursue a passion for conservation.
“Documentaries are a really good way to get people interested in conservation. When I left university, science was fashionable and green issues were not. Now of course, it’s the other way round.”
Several years of producing and directing science and nature documentaries followed, before O'Connell moved to the other side of the camera to present BBC2's Nature's Calendarseries. Since then, she has become a fixture of wildlife television, reporting on seasonal outbreaks of basking sharks, orchids or bluebells.
“You don’t really get very many Asians in the countryside, so I hope that I can make it seem a little bit more accessible.”
When it came to writing novels, O’Connell was equally determined to wrap one of her passions inside the other: “What I set out to do is to write literature that had science in it. On the whole, that’s done very badly. If you look at somebody like Michael Crichton – he’s great at plot, but when it comes to the science bits, it’s: ‘And here’s a paragraph on GPS’. Ian McEwan is, again, a very accomplished writer, but his science is very clunky. I wanted the science to be woven into my writing in the same way people write about the arts.”
It seems that for O’Connell, everything has a purpose, and nothing is done without a plan.
“There are different ways to change things,” she says with a smile. “My way is to write.”
T
he Naked Name of Love
is published by John Murray, £12.99