How to explain faith? Alice Broadway does it with cake. “Faith is not just a slice of your life that fits in nicely, it affects everything. So if your faith goes, then everything is slightly changed by it, too – family life, friendships, the choices you make. I imagine it like a cake: it wouldn’t be a slice you could remove, it would be more like the flour. You can’t get rid of it, and it looks very different without it.”
Broadway knows – personally, painfully – what it is like to have faith and then lose it. Born in 1980 and raised as an evangelical Christian by her family in Thame, just a few miles from Oxford, she would later spend 10 years living in an evangelical community in a small town near Preston. But life at the church, where her husband was employed as a youth worker, became difficult. Broadway says she and her family “experienced some bullying and fairly abusive, controlling manipulation. That then led to a proper crisis of faith.”
By 2014, things reached breaking point. “We chose to leave a church where the leader and leadership couldn’t be questioned or challenged,” Broadway says. “We were told that we were disloyal and ‘pharisaical’ for disagreeing with those in charge. As a family we felt we couldn’t stay.”
Losing her Christian faith, she says, was the worst thing she could imagine. But she found some consolation in one activity: writing fiction. “Writing it was a means of processing it … when it felt like the feelings were very strong,” she says. “Looking at a different world, a different person, a different faith crisis was much easier.”
Gloomy and depressed, Broadway found herself circling around ideas of death, questioning the beliefs about judgment, afterlife and eternity that had formed the bedrock of her existence. “There is a lot of emphasis on ‘future hope’ in evangelical Christianity: the idea that every hard thing in life is worth it because we’ll be with God in a perfect new creation when we die,” she says. “I guess it’s inevitable that I became a bit death-obsessed!”
A documentary about ancient Egypt set her wondering about different attitudes towards mortality, about what in a life should be preserved. And when Broadway came across the work of UCL academic Dr Gemma Angel on preserved tattoos, she found herself able to imagine a culture that wasn’t afraid of death – sowing the seeds for her debut novel, Ink.
Set in a world where each character’s life is written on their skin, the people in Ink add tattoos to mark significant events: marriages, births, a new job or even a love affair. After death, in Broadway’s world, the body is flayed and the skin of those deemed worthy is preserved in books that every family keeps in their home.
Citizens deemed unworthy of this tradition are cast into oblivion, with their skin books destroyed publicly, thus consigning them to be forgotten – a fate considered worse than death. There are also those who refuse to be tattooed – the ghostly “blanks” – who have been forcibly resettled beyond the town walls and are rumoured to steal souls.
Ink starts when 16-year-old Leora loses her father and discovers that, before she was born, he was convicted of helping the blanks and marked with a crow symbol on the back of his neck – a tattoo he hid because if seen, it would result in his skin book being destroyed. Leora teams up with a friend to stop the authorities from finding out about the mark, to save her father’s skin book from this second death.
The novel grew out of Leora’s loss. “I didn’t mean to kill her dad, but somehow it happened,” Broadway says. “The first thing I wrote was her seeing his dead body and then him coming back as a book – that difference between the end of life and the beginning, in their view, of a new life.”
The gruesome process of peeling and preserving skin that Broadway describes might strike some as a little strong for a young adult audience, but Broadway says she always had that audience in mind, being a fan of the likes of Patrick Ness, Suzanne Collins and Meg Rosoff herself. Reactions to her grisly subject matter have so far been divided: “I’ve definitely had some people say that they just can’t cope with the idea of flaying, or that they’re really squeamish and just the thought of it puts them off, which is fair enough. But then I’ve also had people say, ‘I’m fascinated by tattoos, I’m really excited about this.’”
It’s a fascination the author shares, though she hasn’t yet found the courage to go under the needle. “Part of me is desperate to get a tattoo. Doing the research has made me a bit obsessed. The artists I’ve come across have been incredible and the people I’ve spoken to with tattoos – it’s such a culture, it’s amazing and yet I can’t bring myself to begin it. I’m not sure why. I think there’s lots to do with the permanence of it, the statement of it, how you feel about your body.”
Ink ends with Leora at much the same point in her spiritual journey as her creator. The novel is the first part of a trilogy – Broadway is currently writing the second book and has plans for the third. “I’m now at the stage where I feel like I’ve dismantled everything and I’m left with the rubble, and I’m just working out whether I want to build anything else. A very weird place,” Broadway says. “Having gone from a worldview that was very clear and was very [much] based on certainty to being genuinely agnostic is quite uncomfortable, it’s a long journey.”
There are ways in which the novel is writing her own story, she continues, “and I’ve not reached an ending. I’ll be really interested to know at the end of the trilogy whether Leora has a neat ending.” But writing fiction about something as painful and scary as loss of faith is a way to exert some control as she “can choose who’s going to win.” A brief laugh and a shrug. “Doesn’t happen in life, does it?”
- Ink is published by Scholastic at £7.99 and is available from the Guardian bookshop for £6.79.
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