"The Sunshine Man"

Emma Stonex is the author of The Lamplighters, which was a Sunday Times bestseller and has been translated into twenty-five languages. Before becoming a writer, she worked as an editor at a major publishing house. She lives in Bristol with her family.

Stonex applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Sunshine Man, and shared the following:

From page 69:

‘He’d grown accustomed to seeing the change in the weather from an up-high window in his flowery dell, a postage-stamp square of cloud and sun and pale white light, deep purple at night, but to be in it and feel it and smell it were things he’d forgot, not forgot exactly for the detail was still there, still in him, buried beneath the thickets of the years, delayed but not lost, rising notes he recognized from when he’d been a boy and the rain had smelt the same then, of a ha’penny kept too long in his pocket, but Donna said it wasn’t ha’pennies any more, it was pounds and fivers, and he wasn’t a boy now, he was a man.

It was true what they said, that you didn’t know up from down, left from right, spin him around and tell him which way and he wouldn’t know still, not a fegging clue, would likely go stumbling out into the road and that would be curtains, day one and then done, and sure they’d say after it was destined that way, he’d had a dent in him right from the start, stupid too, gone in the head, evil and dumb (what it was to be both), as evil and dumb as they come. But he’d been banged up an eight-stretch in a cell it took five seconds to circuit, five point five to be precise, two steps down one side, three down the other, back to the door where the voices came in – “Open up, Walsh! Open up, Parker! Open up, Maguire!” – then slop-out in the troughs and back to his bunk for a diet can of porridge, an ounce of sugar if he was lucky, trapped in the walls and the hours and the fug of his brain, in the haze of weed and the waste of his life, slow and slack and forever stopped still, yet out here it was everything everywhere, all in a hurry in a place too busy, too many, lights changing and rain chucking and the world tremendous and too much.’

The Page 69 Test works eerily well for The Sunshine Man. Page 69 is the first time we get our male protagonist, Jimmy Maguire’s, perspective, on the day he’s released from prison; from this point on the plot deepens and becomes more complex. It’s uncanny how the gear of the book shifts from page 69 and readers are invited into the dual narrative.

The Sunshine Man is a revenge thriller about a woman, Birdie Keller, who hunts down her sister’s killer after he’s freed from jail. Up to page 69 we receive Birdie’s viewpoint only, and side with her radical mission: she’s an ordinary wife and mother, sending her children off to school and seeing her husband off to work, then she puts a gun in her handbag and heads off to London to meet and pursue her adversary. We’d imagined the picture was clear – Birdie’s in the right, Jimmy’s in the wrong – but page 69 changes everything. We see inside Jimmy’s head, and, as the novel progresses, we start to question all we’ve been told.

Although page 69 is written in the third person, it’s an involved third person because it taps into Jimmy’s train of thought and manner of speaking (in other chapters we hear from him in the first). This gives the reader a fine idea of the tone of the book and the significance of this unreliable narration: neither Jimmy nor Birdie are trustworthy protagonists and their ‘truths’ shouldn’t always be believed; their pasts are inextricably entwined and each one has an agenda.

My greatest hope with The Sunshine Man was to complicate the idea of a villain – is anyone ever a hundred percent evil? Can a villain also be a victim? Is it possible to retain, every time, those binaries of right and wrong, good and bad, or can there be an in-between? Jimmy’s entrance on page 69 captures this element for me, because Birdie has portrayed him thus far as an out-and-out devil, yet here we see somebody human, vulnerable and overwhelmed. From here Jimmy is unknowingly chased down to the south coast of England by his shadowy predator, and soon he and Birdie will meet again. Who will walk away from their confrontation, and which will win out – forgiveness or revenge?

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Q&A with Emma Stonex.

--Marshal Zeringue