This is part 2 of the interview with my dear old pal Norman Mounter. After speaking about his interests in Part 1 he goes on to talk about his soon to be released novel 'Broken Oaths.'

In Jessica Gems once again from the interview she has taken out some of the phrases and language which was naturally used and has formed some very testing language questions for yours truly.

Transcription of Interview:

Speaker 1 (00:00): What about language? Because I know you've got a real interest in language as well. Speaker 2 (00:04): Yeah. I think that stems from much later on. I mean, when I was at school, I loved English. I loved creative writing. I loved reading English, but we were never really taught what I would call the discipline of grammar of rhetoric, all of those kinds of old school subjects. So it was all grammar school subjects where you'd have to learn about proper use of grammar. And that's something that I've, I've had to pick up on my own, but actually it's a fascinating area because you really start to learn the power of how you can use English to be basically most effective in what you want to say. And it's not, it's often the case that you don't need. A lot of words, you just need the right choice of word in an appropriate style that obviously suits you and also is easy to read. And grammar gives you that grammar has many other elements to it apart from spelling and punctuation things. Speaker 2 (01:03): And one of the things really interests me is the, is the word history. So understanding where a word has come from, whether it be, uh, particularly in English, whether it be through the Latin, from the Romans or the Anglo-Saxon, or, you know, even the kind of Celtic derivation, but that's always been fascinating to me. And I think that partly comes from my passion for Tolkien's Lord of the rings. Well, Tolkien's legendarium is very much based on, on a mythology that has strong links with language. You can look at any character or word in Tolkien, and there will be an underlying etymology to that word. You know, he doesn't just pluck them out of air and don't forget, this is a professor of Anglo-Saxon that actually invented his own languages. He invented Elvish, for example, you know, so that influence on me cannot be understated because he was, and still is to be honest, a massive influence on my life. Speaker 1 (02:07): Right. So, so we've sort of touched on your, your interest, especially interested, let's say, cause I know you're interested in lots of things. It's not just those three things, but that's related to the new book that's coming out. You have your, but it's not your first book, but you've, you know, you've been working on this book for a while and I thought you could tell the story where this story came from. What is the story of the new book? Speaker 2 (02:31): The new book is, as you rightly say, it is a fusion of all of these passions of mine, the English, the writing, the history, but also the medicine. It really stems from a period of my life where I was reading a lot about the third Reich and the Nazis and particularly the Holocaust. And I began to delve into a lot of Holocaust literature, particularly firsthand accounts, people that have survived, um, the camps and really, uh, created a huge mark on me. I began to feel more and more hurt by it. And in a way, particularly because I, prior to this point, no one had really ever told me about it. I was never talked about this at school, for example. And I remember seeing Schindler's list in 1994 and being very moved by that. But since then, I've constantly been interested in this part of one other called modern history. Speaker 2 (03:30): And at that point come, I can recall, you know, giving you a message saying, John, I've got, this is idea. It's coming out of me. I'm going to start off on this holocaust train. And I'm going to just see, see where it leads me and the book in that sense, just flowed out of me, probably only taking me about three

months to write if that, and it literally just flowed out. It wasn't in any order, but what it did do for me, it was a kind of purge. It was a catharsis of all of this stuff that had built up inside me over the years of research. And it did help me come to terms with some of the stuff I've written, but it also enabled me to, uh, particularly in the context of my medical training to get inside the head of my main character, my main character is called Dr. Speaker 2 (04:17): Joseph Sarkany. And he is based on a real life pathologist from Hungary, whose name was Miklos Nyizsli. And he wrote a book just after the war called Auschwitz and I witness doctor's account. And he talks about his time working in the crematorium for the infamous Yosef Mengele who had built within the main crematorium, his own laboratory, his own post-mortem room for what I would only describe as pseudo scientific kind of experiments. So again, it was this idea of looking at the medical and the pathological aspects of this man, and also what was going on, what was going on at this time in Germany, this great nation of scientists and of music and literature, this fantastically civilized nation. How could it regressed to a state where you have doctors, nurses, scientists saying what it's okay to kill people under euthanasia. If they've got mental illness or they're they're handicap, it's actually, it's okay to do it. Speaker 2 (05:31): And then of course it, it got worse. It started to go from the euthanasia centers into the wider aspects of ethnic cleansing. Once Hitler had started his war and was basically taking countries like Poland and other Eastern European countries who were deemed to be subhuman the untermenschlich. He used this as an excuse to not only kill them, but also experiment on them as well. So you, this horrible concentration of people in these camps like Auschwitz that are Jewish, but also you have Romany people, you have Poles, Czechs, all these other people that were considered to be basically subhuman being killed or tortured or experimented on. So for me, this was a terrible realization and I still really can't get to terms with it, how the medical profession could have sunk so low during that period of time. And it wasn't just in Germany. I must say the concept of eugenics, this idea of a master race was as much in the world of the American literature as it was in the European literature. Speaker 2 (06:43): But of course, what happened was that Hitler used these doctrines, all these ideas like eugenics and then twisted them and did terrible, terrible things based on these, what I would call spirits doctrines or pseudo-scientific doctrines in order to progress his own megalomania and idea of this master race, this arian race that he wanted to basically have in a brand new Europe. So broken Oaths has many themes running through it, but I think one of the main things for me is this idea of how could this ever happen and how could it have ever happened in the context of the people that were perpetrating it, the doctors and nurses, Speaker 1 (07:28): It seems it germinated into something that you needed, some kind of vent or outpouring, and the way you seem to do it Norm is on paper. You seem to start writing it seems. You know, if we go back to when we were 10 or even pre 10 you, you said earlier that it was this kind of, um, you know, making sense of the world, getting it all out and putting it down on paper and that's what was happening. It seems like you still do it. It doesn't surprise me that Sarkany, the, the lead character of the book you thought about the, the, the name means something in a, in a, in a, in ancient Greek, he was saying, that's very Tolkien

what you were saying about Tolkien. Every, every character, every word seemed to have, uh, relate back to another language, Speaker 2 (08:19): I based, this name on, on the term sark or sarj in Greek, which is basically meaning flesh or body. And I'm sorry, Sarkany for me, the word embodied this idea of a pathologist, working with flesh, working with the bodies, that was his kind of craft. And similarly, in a way, that's what I do as well. I work with tissue. I am a histopathologist and I look at the diseases of tissue through my eyes, through the naked eye, but also under the microscope. And in a way Broken Oaths is looking at this man with my own knowledge of pathology and looking at how he deals with these situations and how he talks about dealing with these situations, particularly when he's doing his autopsy work on, on twins. And he starts to realize that these twins have been murdered. Mengele had injected them in the heart with phenol or some other poison. Speaker 2 (09:17): And it's just, for me, the book was easier to write because I could at least understand what he was talking about from the, from the point of view of the, with the pathology and the medicine. And I think that gives the book as an edge for me, because it's not just me as a writer writing a piece of fiction that I do have experience in this area. So, um, it is fiction, but it's also a semi fiction in the sense that the scenarios that I present in the book are how they are, because I am, as I say, a pathologist, and I try to give the reader that sense of what we're looking at and how we interpret things, particularly how the level of the naked eye. And you can tell a lot, you know, obviously medicine is about, isn't just about cutting up people. Speaker 2 (10:07): Thank goodness. It's about taking a history and doing a proper examination and using various things. But at the end of the day, if you don't know what, what the cause of death is, and there are many cases in this country still where cases are referred to the coroner, the last port of call is the, is the pathologist who is, you know, who is able to open up the body and look at the, the organs and actually see where the disease processes are that manifest themselves clinically, but you don't know exactly what's going on until you see it for yourself. And that's the idea of a Broken Oaths. Speaker 1 (10:42): Did you know, did you work out who the lead character was going to be and what he was going to be called, or did you just write the book and then think about what, who the lead character would be and what his name would be? The book was written, Speaker 2 (10:54): And as I say, in fragments, and then once I began to see a common thread throughout these fragments, I began to build a narrative, but names came much later on John. So I didn't have a name for this person at the time. He was, he was perhaps just this man. I might've had a temporary name that stuck, but certainly some of my characters names have definitely changed since the first writing, but SAR Caney for me, this the words Sark, when you think about it's kind of medical context. So in pathology, you can have what are called sarcomas. You know, tumors are soft tissue. We get words like sarcophagus from Sark soft copper, cause literally means flesh eater. Sark meaning flesh, and feagus coming from the

Greek to eat. Hence the word esophagus and these words, I think for me, build up a richness to the texts. Speaker 2 (11:51): They're not just plucked out of nothing. Sarkany's, his wife is called Eva and she is, in my opinion, the kind of heroine of the novel. In fact, the novel for me is more about her than anybody else. I know he doesn't necessarily come across that way, but she is my true hero. And I think she's partly based on, on my mother that I lost while I was writing it or just before others, I was writing this book and Eva's biggest asset is that she is kind, she is understanding. She gives, she she's generous, she's humble. And all of these qualities are completely in contrast to her husband's and to the world as a whole. And I think for me, Eva is the, is the true, the true heroine of the book. And she goes through some terrible times and there's a scene where she's basically in Auschwitz and really suffering terribly. Speaker 2 (12:50): And she goes through this terrible torture and has to be bought back, um, out of this darkness, by her husband. But ultimately she is a good person because she's kind she's, she's given up so much for her husband's career. And part of the book is about the fact that he does not see it that way. He sees her Jewishness as his downfall. And this is the real paradox because he's lost everything. He feels because he married her. He himself is only half Jewish, which he thinks would have been fine in terms of enabling him to carry on. But because he married a Jewess as they used to call them, and it has Jewish daughters, then he's labeled full Jewish citizen. And hence he loses everything. He loses his, his job, his reputation, his career, which means everything to him. He CA he comes across as very selfish, incredibly selfish and you know, Broken Oaths. Isn't just about doctors breaking their Oaths. What about the oath of marriage? What about the marriage vows? He's completely desecrated those.