A journey story for our time

David Guterson East of the Mountains (Bloomsbury)

David Guterson's follow-up to his bestselling Snow Falling on Cedars is set in the mountainous country of Washington State, where a retired heart surgeon, Ben Givens, is embarking on a last hunting expedition. Suffering from cancer, and widowed, he intends to commit suicide. As the journey unfolds in ways he had not planned, he recalls growing up on his parents' apple orchards, and going to fight in Italy during the Second World War.

A film version of Snow Falling on Cedars, starring Ethan Hawke and Sam Shepard, is due to open in the UK in late spring.

"I think of this as a different work from Snow Falling on Cedars. I didn't want to repeat myself—I don't think I could repeat myself. I would have gotten bored. I felt that I had exhausted the prose that I could write about western Washington, so I chose for this book a different place, a different structure, and a different set of concerns.

"I've always found that the act of writing is so difficult that external pressures, to do with your career and what your audience might expect, are entirely secondary. They seem superficial by comparison with the difficulty of the page you're working on. I can only write what I have to write; I don't feel I have a choice.

"I almost always begin with two things: a landscape that I feel driven to write about, and a set of meanings that I want to explore. Then I seek characters and a plot that will allow me to work in that landscape and address those themes.

"I have a deep feeling for my home, Washington State. I think that's reflected in Snow Falling on Cedars, and in this book as well. The landscape plays a very strong role in my work; it speaks.

"I had a loose plan for East of the Mountains, but—and you've probably heard this before—the process of working on the story taught me what it was about. I had to follow where it wanted to go, and it became increasingly picaresque.

"I think this book operates within the age-old tradition of the journey story, which goes back probably to the beginning of storytelling. As ever, there's a literal journey and an inner journey.

"In many journey stories, the protagonist is young, and the story is about the transition to adult life. Of course, there are exceptions—Don Quixote comes to mind. But I wanted to write about an old person.

"I've spent a lot more time in the past two years intimately relating to older people, and seeing them as human in a way that I didn't before. I think we're mostly oblivious to their humanity. When we come across them in the grocery store or in the bank, it's as if they're not there.

"I also wanted to find a way to write a journey story set in our own time. Some mystical element that used to be in the world seems gone; I wanted to find a way for a mystical journey still to be possible.

"With the film of Snow Falling on Cedars, I was involved with consulting on the screenplay and on location scouting, and I was on hand during the filming. I have enormous respect for the director, Scott Hicks [who made "Shine"]. I've seen a version of the film, and I think it's incredibly masterful cinema."