Michelle Johnston had most of the key ingredients for her third novel: she knew what she wanted to write about and who her main characters would be. All she needed was to find a war.
That search would take the WA emergency doctor and author and her surgeon husband Richard to the tiny Russian republic of Dagestan, a beautiful but dangerous sliver of land that lies along the Caspian Sea and which shares a border with Azerbaijan and Georgia.
“I remember I said to my husband, ‘honey, we’ve got to go to Dagestan’,” Johnston says. “And he said, ‘what, what-e-stan?’”
The couple would endure an early-morning interrogation in a tiny room by Russia’s feared security service, eventually being allowed to enter the country after she mimed doing CPR.
Johnston is an emergency physician at Royal Perth Hospital, whose long-time love of language has propelled her into a parallel writing career.
The Revisionists, her third book, is a significant departure from the medical settings of her first two works of fiction, Dustfall and Tiny Uncertain Miracles.
It is a confident novel which questions how we remember the past and is set in the world of conflict correspondents — hence the need for a war.
“The very first throb of this story was a couple of different themes I wanted to explore,” Johnston says.
“A woman who has done very well for herself, had a glamorous life, and 25 years later responds to something that happened in the past. Then she gets a knock on the door saying that’s not what happened.”
The Revisionists is dedicated to Marie Colvin and Anna Politkovskaya; pioneering journalists whose lives were cut tragically short.
US-born Colvin was 56 when Syrian security forces shelled a media centre during the siege of Homs in 2012, killing her and photojournalist Remi Ochlik. Politkovskaya, a Russian investigative reporter, was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment block in 2006. She was 48.
“I had read about them and I was absolutely compelled to explore their lifestyle and where journalism is going at the moment,” Johnston says.
The character of Angela in The Revisionists embodies the compulsive tenacity of Colvin and Politkovskaya. Now, Johnston needed her war.
“I wanted it to be around 2000, late 1990s. Honestly, you know, this is embarrassing, I was scrolling or googling and I came across the invasion of Dagestan, which set off the Second Chechen War.
“Dagestan. I’d never even heard of it and to realise this tiny little episode in history, which is when Putin first came into power, it was so terrible and it felt like this was the place to write about.
“And I read so much about it; I read so many books and did so much research. I’d written the entire novel and I thought, you know what, I have to go. I have to show up. I have to speak to the people, see the mountains, sleep in the village.”
Chechen forces invaded Dagestan in 1999. The ensuing conflict with Russian soldiers left many casualties and tens of thousands of Dagestani civilians were displaced. The country remains the target of Islamic insurgents.
“I’m kind of papering over in my mind how dangerous it could be,” Johnston says. “And then I find it’s on the DFAT list: do not travel under any circumstances.”
Plenty of planes will take you to Dubai but, once there, you are delivered to a different airport for flights to such places as Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan.
Johnston picks up the story. “So we fly into Makhachkala and I still think we are going to be fine. We are the only Westerners and I still have that sense of superiority: Western, money and the rest of it.
“We got off the plane and the passport people took one look at the visa, one look at us, and said, I don’t think so. They didn’t actually say anything in English because nobody spoke any English.
“And then they haul us out, put us in a little room and they start waking up the big guys: the FSB, Russia’s Federal Security Service.
“There’s all these Russians, no one is speaking any English and it turns into an interrogation. Who are you working for? Who are you meeting? Give us your documents.
“I’d made an agreement with my husband that we wouldn’t say I was a writer because we didn’t think it would go over terribly well.
“We just told them we were just a couple of doctors who really like mountains. I had to explain what kind of doctor I was, miming doing CPR.
“It went on for hours and hours — it got to about four in the morning — and then they were like, ‘OK then, come on in’.”
Dagestan and its people were as beautiful as Johnston hoped they would be.
“I never really felt that unsafe,” she says. “There is a travel company called Soviet Tours and they had lined up a couple of beautiful guys who did our interpreting for us, took us around, drove us around, couldn’t do enough for us.”
The trip didn’t change the essential nature of the book but Johnston knows she couldn’t have released it without taking the journey.
“It’s about doing it honourably; about respecting the people and their culture and their history,” she says.
Johnston had turned 50 by the time her debut novel was released. It was a literary journey which began when she was a child.
“I learnt to read way before I went to kindergarten,” she says. “I was one of those weird children sitting on the floor teaching myself to read.
“I have just lived a life of books. It’s actually the love of what language can do and what sentences can do.”
Her medical career was well established when the age of the blog lit the spark for her to start writing literary medicine. “It was a little bit whimsical, more poetic, a bit left-field, challenging, not writing in a standard way, and it got a lot of validation,” she says.
In this new frontier, Johnston found her niche and started to find her voice, eventually summoning her courage to write a novel: the medium she adored.
“When you start to write, you think you understand a great sentence and a great paragraph and how to transport people by words but I had no idea,” she says.
“I realised how long it was going to take for me to start to develop anything like a voice that was worth hearing, reading and listening to. The first book took me about seven to eight years.”
Independent publisher Terri-ann White was then director at UWA Publishing. Johnston had met her on several occasions and summoned the courage to approach White at a party and ask her to cast her professional eye over Dustfall. Their next meeting would shape her life.
“She summoned me to her office,” she says. “Basically I got a very stern talking to and I thought, ‘oh my God, you hate it’. But she said, ‘no, I don’t hate it. Just go off and do it again’. So I went off and rewrote it for her and she said yes.”
Johnston calls White her queen: “The foot in the door is incredibly difficult, very challenging, for a first novel.”
Dustfall, which explores the medical fallout surrounding asbestos mining in Wittenoom, was nominated for the prestigious MUD Literary Prize for a debut literary novel.
Johnston lost out to Trent Dalton, whose Boy Swallows Universe would grow into a behemoth. Acclaimed Tasmanian author Robbie Arnott also was nominated.
“I didn’t have a chance. Not within a bull’s roar,” she says. “But I take that listing very happily, the shortlisting was incredible.”
Her second book, 2022’s Tiny Uncertain Miracles, was set in a large public hospital and now, after her third book, she says she’s a novelist who sometimes goes to work as a doctor.
She works fewer hours in medicine — she is contracted for 26 hours a week — and spends some of that time teaching those who are about to become emergency specialists, which she loves.
“I don’t know how it is all going to go in the near future but if there is to be a change I think it will go more towards the writing,” Johnston says.
She stops to think how her medical life has influenced her writing. “I would love to say that being a doctor, being a writer, that they hold hands together, that they complement each other, that I draw on each of them to make the other one better but in many ways it’s not true. It is and isn’t true.
“In the last 10 years I’ve gone to work with a notebook in my scrubs pocket, sure that I am going to make notes about the fabric of society and the complexity of the human condition and I never write a thing. My brain is not the same brain.
“Having said that, this 35 years amongst the most incredibly complex way that humanity presents in trauma: it all is in there.
“It’s taught me a lot about myself, too; kindness, love, how to listen to people and how to open myself to other people.
“By just living that life, I think it has absolutely, 100 per cent, influenced the sort of writer that I am, the sort of themes that I want to explore.”
Though keen not to be pigeonholed as the doctor writer who writes about doctors, her next book will take readers back into the medical world, on a journey to discover where Johnston finds beauty in that world.
She already has her title: 50 Small Wonders, an emergency physician’s search for an answer.
“It’s actually about finding those things that are wonderful and magical and funny and beautiful, such as the way the human body works,” she says.
“People may look at a clot and not think it’s very beautiful at all, but it’s magic how it’s evolved, what it does, how it works. You couch it in interesting language and it becomes fascinating.”
The Revisionists, published by HarperCollins, is out now