Mireille Juchau

So we kind of move through seeing things from his perspective and often feeling really uncomfortable with the way that he talks about them.

and his preconceptions.

So yes, he lives in a sort of elevated realm.

He's studied the Greek and the Roman classics.

He often refers to some of the men in terms of those stories and he gives them names like Odysseus and he calls another one the moon of Wismar.

And so he uses this knowledge to kind of help him understand their journeys.

But I think that that actually does something else in the novel, which is to say that

She gives you both the specificity of the individual man's journey to Germany.

I think there's about 10 of them that she moves through and we get each of their stories.

But she's also showing us that this is a kind of eternal problem, this mass displacement of people, war, violence.

a search for a homeland.

So she's kind of using that classical mythology to remind us that this is not just a contemporary problem, that it's happened, you know, for centuries.

So that's quite deliberate.

But we do actually swing around and see Richard from the men's perspective as well.

I think at one point one of the men refers to Richard as the older gentleman who is very polite but perhaps also crazy.

So we...

We aren't supposed to be aligned with Richard.

I think that distance in the point of view is deliberately keeping us far enough away that we can see how he can be prejudiced himself and he can be misguided and he can be mistrusting.

But once we swing around and see him from other people's perspective, we get a different position to think about him from.

I think he's a pretty rounded character.