Inbali Iserles reveals her lifelong affection for animals and talks to Write Away about her first novel, The Tygrine Cat.

Inbali was born in Jerusalem but moved with her family to Cambridge at the age of three when her father was offered a research fellowship at Kings College. Obviously destined to be a writer from a young age, she recalls, ‘At the age of eight, I wrote a poem called 'Rich Cat/Poor Cat' that received an accolade from the teacher. I recollect with distant delight the sensation of hearing it read to the class and seeing it emblazoned on the wall. In fact, I can still recite this poem verbatim. Several years later, I wrote two stories that won, respectively, runner-up and first prize in a class competition. But it would be years of secretive scribbling before I was to revisit feline themes in my first book, The Tygrine Cat.'

Synopsis:Lost and alone, Mati seeks acceptance from a community of street cats at Cressida Lock. But Mati is no ordinary cat ... and the mysterious assassin on his trail knows it. Mati looks different, with his golden eyes, large ears and russet coat. He also acts differently - he anticipates danger with bristling whiskers; hears voices from the feline spirit realm that he cannot understand. To defeat his enemies, Mati must unlock the secret of his true identity. In doing so, he must learn to harness an ancient feline power - a power so deadly that it threatens to destroy not only his friends but every cat on earth...

Download the full version of this interview in PDF format

Like your Tygrine Cat, you are well travelled; can you tell us something about your travels?

Well, I have to admit that in any spare time I love travelling and the further away the better. I didn’t think I would visit anywhere cold because I’m a sun lover, but Iceland is quite extraordinary. It doesn’t really look like anywhere I’ve ever been before. It’s not icy, but neither is it wooded like Norway. It’s just very, very watery with long expanses of Jurassic landscape. I love living in the City but every now and then it just feels so desperately urban that the dream is to see set off and discover new places.

What is the most exciting place that you have visited?

I was very recently in Mexico and a huge crocodile swam up to our boat and opened his mouth, lavishly displaying his teeth - that was quite exciting! We kept asking the guide, “Are you sure these crocodiles don’t eat people?” When I was in the Daintree Forest in Northern Queensland, the crocodiles did eat people, and in fact when we were there one had recently jumped up onto the bank and pulled someone in. They’re quite aggressive in Queensland, but fortunately the Mexican crocs are more chilled out!

So have you visited Egypt, the home of the Tygrine Cat, on your travels?

I’ve been to Sinai but I’m ashamed to confess that I haven’t visited the pyramids.

Having written an animal story, I wondered if you are an animal lover. I read that you have a collection of Degus, which sounds very exotic.

Back in Cambridge, I had a school friend who went on to become a vet at the RSPCA Animal Hospital in Finsbury Park. When I was researching The Tygrine Cat we had some conversations about the different appearance of feral and domestic cats. Their faces thicken, they get quite tough round the mouth. Overall they have a broad look, but very narrow bodies. I arranged a “Cat Safari” to the Animal Hospital to get a firsthand impression. We toured the cages looking at the poor old ferals who’d been brought in. You could spot them a mile off because all the other cats, desperate for love, were banging against the cage purring and mewling, but the ferals were back in the corner hissing and snarling.

 Some months later I went back with a friend and visited the exotica room and that’s then I noticed these odd little rodents. No one at the Animal Hospital had seen anything like them before. They are thought to be Degus, also known as Chilean Brown Squirrels. Apparently they were brought here for animal experiments because they are diabetic. They’re not especially pretty, colourful or striped, like the rodents people usually keep as pets, but I think they are adorable. So, now I have four of them. When I first acquired them I didn’t know how to care for them. I was given a Chinchilla cage, which they promptly chewed through. So I bought the biggest aquarium I could. They can’t bite their way through that - though they certainly try.

Tygrine is your first published book, but had you written anything before that?

Yes. I’ve always enjoyed writing, but secretively. When I was an undergraduate at Sussex, I used to run into halls from class, shut the door and close the windows so that no-one knew I was in and I could write undisturbed. The stories were totally unpublishable. It really wasn’t until I had written Tygrine that the possibility of publishing occurred to me. I showed a friend the first three chapters and she got quite excited. Her excitement, made me think ….. “oh, maybe, just maybe.”

How easy was it once you’d considered the possibility of publication? Did you get an agent?

 After a few rewrites, I sent it to a publisher. I used the Writers and Artists Yearbook, which is the best place to start. There didn’t seem to be many agents representing the sort of thing that I write. I researched online and narrowed down the options. I didn’t have personal contacts, so I had to start at the beginning. I talked to a few agents. One wanted me to rewrite it as an epic but I was committed to trying to tell the small story within the epic. And that was the state of play when I spoke to Pat at RCW. She accepted it as it was.

So where did the idea for the story come from?

Well, I was at my parent’s house, and they had guests for Sunday lunch. Their friends have a young boy who was a bit querulous and grumpy and needed entertaining. So, I led him into the living room where we have a few piles of books. I picked up an encyclopaedia of cats which was full of dull of information about different breeds but it had lovely big pictures. We were just leaping through looking at the pictures and I noticed something about a breed of cat that the book claimed resembled the cats of Ancient Egypt and were the first domestic cats, That grabbed my attention because I’d read somewhere else that there was another breed of cats that were supposed to be the first domestics. I started to imagine what it would be like if there were two dynasties with a claim to that particular mantle. The idea went round and round in my head for some weeks before I started to think how I’d go about writing it, and before Mati was born as the character. So it was the setting rather than the plot that was the starting point.

 Did you enjoy reading animal stories when you were growing up?

 I think I’ve just always been fascinated by animals and yes I did read quite a lot of animal stories. Some of the stories had cats as characters. I remember reading, Gobbolino, the Witch’s Cat. And there was an awful book about a cat called Abandoned who was cast out and persecuted by one human after another. In the end, it had to be put down because it was run over. I still remember the last line and I just cried and cried when I read it.

Your cats are quite different  to Abandoned because although they are cats, they also have human characteristics. They’re more like the rabbits in Watership Down.

They don’t wear bonnets, and they don’t wear shoes. It was an important issue for me to broach when I started writing, just how anthropomorphized were these characters going to be. My rule was “as little as possible”, or “as much as they need to be, to be real. However, I also wanted them to be real as cats. They obviously have a complex society, but then feral cats do have complex societies with an order of dominance and subservience Even their magic is realistic in the context of cats: they just don’t sprout wings and fly around and they don’t have magic potions. I tried to keep as real as possible so, for instance, I had an animal expert review the battle scene where the cats fugue to make sure I was accurate. The descriptions of how the faces lock, the eyes lock, the body moves sideways, and how they mimic each other, is exactly how Toms act in combat. I tried to be as consistent with feline behaviour as possible, not least because I think it’s fascinating, so why would you make it up?

There’s nothing quite as eerie as hearing a cat fight.

 Yes, it’s awful. I used to run downstairs and out into the garden when I heard it and begged them to stop. But I knew that they wouldn’t stop and one of them was going to get very badly injured, unless he just turned and ran quickly. As well as soliciting the opinion of an animal expert you must have had to do quite a lot of observation. I did do some specific research about the breeds and about Vabastus and regions in Ethiopia. I read quite a lot about animal behaviour, though I knew quite a lot already because of my childhood fascination. I understand that when a cat blinks, they’re of, smiling at you when their eyes are open, they’re very alert and it can mean danger. And they’re sensitive to the movement of their whiskers and their ears.

Can you tell us something about how the mythology for your story developed, for instance, the idea of the first robin of the harvest moon being sacred?

The origin of that idea is quite dark. I was thinking about the different ways that creatures can die. I was thinking about how birds die when they’re confronted with cats, which really has to be one of the scariest things for a bird. I probably chose a robin because they’re thoroughly endearing and the idea of something bad happening to one is so distressing. Of course they’re actually quite savage birds; they’re fiercely territorial and they’d kill each other as soon as look each other!

Your cats have some fantastic names, how did you set about finding the right names for them?

Well, there is a story behind Mati’s name. It comes from the name of the Egyptian Goddess Ma’at. It’s the concept of order, justice, harmony and stability in opposition to chaos that she represents that I was particularly interested in. The Ancient Egyptians were very preoccupied with funary rights and what happens after death. They had a ritual called the Weighing of the Heart, where the corpse’s heart is placed on the Ma’ at’s scales and weighed against the Feather of Ma’at. If the heart balanced with the feather then deceased was released from the world and travelled to the afterlife. But if the heart was heavy with wrongdoing, then they would be consumed by a terrible demon. That’s what Mati represents, although he lacks any awareness of his role.

And Pangur?

Pangur is from a very old Irish poem called' Pangur Ban', which means White Cat, Pangur just means cat in oOd Irish. I saw the poem when I was visiting the Book of Kells at Trinity College and thought it was a great name. I have to admit, rather sheepishly, that in the very first draft he was called Panther but that was quite weak. Pangur is much better.

 Some of the names are more straightforward, like Jess, for instance.

 I wanted Jess to have a name that a human would give. She didn’t name herself and that’s indicative of her dependence on humans.

You have invented a language for your cats. For instance, they call human beings “hymes”. Did the language emerge when you were writing the story or did you have it worked out before you began?

 Some of the words emerged from the writing. I’d stop and think no, no, no, a cat wouldn’t say that. What would a cat say? How would a cat act? Not that I should presume to know how a cat would act, but sometimes just visiting my old cat, Wilma, in Cambridge and trying to ponder what she would make of things was helpful What would a cat associate with a dog, for instance? Well, stench and noise and general just disagreeableness and so that transferred to the awful sound that dogs make. How would they identify humans? Well, they would seem to be strong, elongated creatures that walk on tiptoe the whole time.

You’ve created a very believable world for your cats to inhabit. It reminds me of Camden Lock.

 Well, I often think that the most exciting fantasy is when you see your own world from a totally different perspective. In this book we’re seeing our own world as if we’ve got down onto our knees and from a feline point of view, but it is still our world, that’s the idea. My world is in fact loosely based on Camden Lock. Actually, I had a long struggle with that because at the very beginning it was very specifically based on Camden Lock. That presented a problem because Mati arrives by ship and although he travels before he gets to the marketplace his journey would be far more complicated than happens in the book. And the catacombs at Camden aren’t quite right, they’re like big rooms and I needed are proper little tunnels for the cats. For many hours I vexed about how to solve the problem. Then it dawned on me that you can make it up in fiction! I did originally have a lot of references to the colourful characters in Camden Market but they lost on the cutting room floor. I did spend a very, very cold afternoon, with my camera walking round Camden and taking photographs, just trying to absorb the atmosphere.

So you use photographs as a basis for your writing then?

I found that they helped me visualise. I didn’t actually refer to them very much, but taking the photographs helped me to build the tapestry of ideas.

That’s really interesting. So the process of taking the photograph rather than using them as visual referents is what really worked for you…

It’s all about the walk for me. I have my notebook and a camera, and I walk round. Random things draw my attention. I went on a tour of a hospital to help with Book 2 and it was the unexpected that jumped out: a strange discoloured warning on the wall to follow “Fire Procedures” and the fact that he fire points have six differently coloured fire hydrants next to each other. Yes the obvious thing is the smell of antiseptic and the dying spider plant in the corner, but the detail that you don’t see unless you go looking is what brings the writing to life.

Did you plan the complete story arc before you started writing?

Yes, I tried to pin down the characters and the story, though a lot of things changed as I was writing. I probably wasn’t nearly as disciplined as I should have been. After I reached a certain point, I realised that I had to go back and start changing things so that they would work later on. Certainly the main characters haven’t changed but I lost a lot of characters, to simplify things.

You’re working on your second book now, is that a very different experience? How does the pressure of having to work to a deadline affect the writing process?

I’ve had to be much more disciplined in Book 2. And discipline has also been imposed. For instance, someone has reviewed and commented on my synopsis. Also I produced a chapter by chapter breakdown for Book 2. I still leave a lot to chance because I’m that sort of person. I don’t really know what anyone is going to say until it comes out of their mouth and I’ve written it down, but I have a much clearer idea of where it’s going ultimately.