Chimps, Hunters and a Cornish Village: Inside The Angel of St Piran by John Ironmonger

Not every monster lurks under the bed. Some arrive by private plane with a hunting licence and a camera ready for the trophy shot. That’s the kind of villain at the heart of The Angel of St Piran, the new novel from John Ironmonger. I loved talking to him about it on the latest episode of Ghost & Quill: Conversations with Authors.

I read the book in a single day while I was in Kenya, which felt fitting, as you’ll see.

A childhood in Nairobi

John was born and raised in Nairobi, and East Africa runs through everything he writes. He went on to study zoology, and as a teenager he spent a summer counting elephants in Tsavo. We spent a happy stretch of the conversation wandering through the wild places we both love. Those included the lakes of the Rift Valley, Amboseli in the shadow of Kilimanjaro, and Ol Pejeta. It’s rare to talk to an author who knows those landscapes from the inside, and it shows on the page.

What if you could climb with the chimps?

The novel follows Angel Restorick, a young gymnast from the Cornish fishing village of St Piran. She travels to a remote African island to study chimpanzee communication. She doesn’t watch from a distance. She lives with the apes in the treetops.

John told me that the spark came from a TV documentary, which left him with a simple question. What if a chimp researcher could actually climb the trees with her subjects? Real chimpanzees at Chester Zoo helped inspire the characters. Angel’s way of talking to her apes draws on genuine linguistics research into how wild chimps communicate through gesture. That includes work led by Dr Kat Hobaiter at the University of St Andrews, so there’s a Scottish connection hiding in the canopy.

Why trophy hunters make the perfect villains

This is where the book bares its teeth. When a group of wealthy trophy hunters arrives on the island, Angel must use her bond with the chimps to outwit them. We talked about why trophy hunters make such satisfying antagonists. They’re real, they’re unrepentant, and they treat living, thinking creatures as ornaments for a wall. You don’t need the supernatural to make a reader’s skin crawl.

A pandemic novel before the pandemic

Fans of John will know St Piran from The Whale at the End of the World. Written years before COVID, it imagines a small Cornish village facing a global pandemic. When 2020 arrived, the book took on a strange second life and became a phenomenon in Germany. John shared the story of how that unfolded, and it’s a fascinating lesson in how a book can find its moment long after it’s written.

“Write what you know”? Maybe not.

One of my favourite parts of the conversation was John’s take on writing advice. He thinks “write what you know” might be one of the worst things you can tell a writer. As someone currently wrestling a horror novel into shape, I found that freeing. We also traded our favourite opening lines and confessed to the classics we’ve never quite got round to reading. Mine will stay between me and the microphone.