It was a narrative that fizzed with amazing intensity to a renowned storyteller.
A guest finds some wild mushrooms while wandering about the Scottish estate of his wife’s brother and sister-in-law and takes them home to cook in butter and parsley for the family dinner.
The four diners are taken by ambulance to the hospital the next day after becoming extremely unwell.
Their dinner-table mushrooms had been fatally toxic rather than edible, and lethal poisons are already wreaking havoc on their bodies.
The guy who accidently poisoned his family learns, to his horror, that each couple’s will give the other custody of their children in the case of death as he teeters on the brink of death due to severe renal failure.
He phones his attorney and has a fresh will sent to his bedside because he worries that all of his children may soon become orphans.
The four fight on, but three of them are left with damaged kidneys and need years of dialysis to survive.
The quest for a donor match for their new kidneys takes three years until the man’s adult daughter convinces him to accept one of her own and saves his life.
His wife and brother-in-law are still waiting for a transplant, which causes the family’s remorse and disease to run rampant.
Author Nicholas Evans’ 1995 first book, The Horse Whisperer, which sold 15 million copies and reached the top of the bestseller list in 20 countries, might have easily come up with such a brutal plot set against the dramatic Highlands.
It was transformed into a movie, which Robert Redford produced, directed, and starred in. It has been translated into 40 different languages.
The mushroom event, however, was a horrifyingly factual tale rather than an epic page-turner.
The tragic events of that innocent foraging in woodland on the Altyre Estate in Moray 14 years ago, which left Evans, his songwriter second wife Charlotte, who wrote the Sugarbabes 2001 hit Soul Sound, and Charlotte’s brother and sister-in-law, Sir Alastair and Lady Louisa Gordon Cumming, fighting for survival, were being recalled yesterday as news of Evans’s death from a heart attack at the age of 72.
Up until that mushroom-hunting trip in the summer of 2008, Nicholas Evans’ life seemed to be adorned with success.
A 14th-century manor home in Devon was made possible by the film rights to The Horse Whisperer, which also featured Kristin Scott Thomas and a teenage Scarlett Johansson.
The Loop, The Smoke Jumper, and The Divide were three other bestsellers.
But when he went to gather a basket of ceps, which he believed to be delectable, everything changed.
They were really Cortinarius rubellus, popularly known as the Deadly Webcap, a fungus that produces orellanin, a toxin that damages the liver, kidneys, and spinal cord.
Evans had gathered ceps 10 years before, but he had failed to notice a key distinction: ceps lack gills, but the ones he had dug up had. Poisoning struck quickly and heavily.
He later said, “At first, not only did I believe I may die, but I sort of wanted to since it was so terrible and horrible.”
Evans underwent thrice-weekly dialysis for three years before receiving a kidney from his daughter Lauren, who was 29 years old at the time, at the age of 61.
He subsequently recounted, “I was informed that the typical longevity on dialysis is five to eight years.” I completed three, at which point my heart began to concern me.
Even though his daughter was a biologist and their blood types matched, he had been hesitant to accept her assistance up until that point.
Despite the fact that statistics indicate there is very little danger to the donor, he said, “Your natural impulse is never to do something to damage your children.”
After surgery at London’s Hammersmith Hospital, father and daughter eventually woke up in adjacent beds after Lauren successfully convinced him to reconsider.
It was wonderful, Evans said. “The word gratitude is wholly insufficient. It feels like an angel has blessed you.
Evans was almost through writing The Brave, a bestseller about the destructive effects of family secrets and shame, at the time of the poisoning.
Nevertheless, it is paradoxical that his own life has unintentionally included a unique tale aspect.
He was laying in a hospital bed for the second time in his life, wondering whether he would pass away before finishing a book.
While working on The Horse Whisperer in 1994, he received a diagnosis of malignant melanoma, the worst form of skin cancer.
Later, after completing therapy with success, he discovered that the novel—about a young girl and her horse—recovering from a terrible car accident—had taken a new turn due to his own real-life drama.
He said, “I felt a newfound empathy.” It became a lot more emotional, as said.
Both the horse and rider are traumatised by a horrible catastrophe in this touching tale of redemption and resiliency.
The girl’s mother then learns about a guy who is said to have the ability to treat troublesome horses.
The narrative takes place in the beautiful countryside of Montana.
Not only did Evans become famous and wealthy as a result of the book’s and movie’s popularity.
It also gave recognition to American Monty Roberts, who had assisted in breaking several of the horses owned by the Royal Family.
Two films were made on Roberts, who was generally regarded as the model for The Horse Whisperer. Evans, though, denied it.
He said, “When I met Monty, I realised he was not my role model. “That was fixed for me by his sharp business sense, the Rolex, and the cashmere sweaters.”
Evans was a dissatisfied filmmaker who was in over his head in debt at the time it was written.
He had always wanted to work in film as a TV executive, but projects kept falling through.
With two children from his former wife attending private school and a £65,000 overdraft, the bank was becoming impatient.
He made the decision to devote four months to writing a book rather than getting a second mortgage.
Before the annual Frankfurt Book Show, a buddy read the first 200 pages and submitted them to publishers.
Evans received $3.15 million (£2.1 million at the time) through a bidding battle, plus an additional $3 million for the picture rights.
Nobody was aware of his skin cancer diagnosis or the fact that he didn’t know whether he would survive even six months, much less long enough to write the book.
“The day following the surgery [to have the melanoma removed], I was visiting publishing firms trying to seem suave and normal, but I was in a cold sweat, I was simply dying, and I was in such agony,” the patient said.
But I reasoned that if I told anybody, they would assume that I was about to pass away.
Evans made it through, and his book went on to become one of the all-time greatest bestsellers and the stuff of literary mythology.
Evans enjoyed the attention since he was so attractive.
Women would line up for autographed copies of the book while staring at me as if I could explain the meaning of existence.
“I know people perceived me as Tom Booker,” said Robert Redford, “the charming horse whisperer in the movie,” “but that wasn’t true at all.”
He also compared himself to “messed-up Annie” (Annie Graves, played by Scott Thomas, the mother of the traumatised girl who was helped by the horse whisperer).
Fortunately, he said, “there was a little portion of my brain that warned me it was perilous to trust in other people’s perceptions of you.”
But he later admitted, “My feet didn’t touch the ground for three or four years.”
Shortly after, his 20-year marriage to Jenny ended, in part due to the instability caused by his overnight fame.
There were many things he cherished around him, but he once said, “There is a certain lunacy that occurs to us males once we reach our mid-40s.”
We tend to look beyond our immediate circumstances because we see things slipping away.
He wasn’t the first successful guy to get preoccupied with fame and wealth.
Evans moved in with Charlotte Edwards, the daughter of a Scottish clan leader who had also gone through the agony of divorce, three years after parting ways with Jenny.
They later had a son, Finlay, who is now 20 years old.
Evans’ own background was scarcely rustic for a writer who specialised in the vast American outdoors.
His early years were spent in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, where his father worked as the sales director for an engineering company. He was born there in 1950.
He was enrolled in a boarding school at age eight. He added, “I believe growing up having to fend for oneself was beneficial for me.” It took me a while to realise I wasn’t a corporate kind of person, but it made me feel like I should.
Before enrolling at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, to study law, he completed a year of Voluntary Service Overseas, during which he taught English in Senegal.
He used this experience to inspire his novel The Smoke Jumper, which is about men who are parachuted into forest fires to put them out.
Then, against his father’s wishes, he decided to pursue journalism instead of law.
He worked briefly for the Newcastle Evening Chronicle before joining TV’s Weekend World as a researcher.
He married Jenny, whom he had met at Oxford, in June 1973. They had a trying time when Evans had an affair with a work colleague who gave birth to his son.
He remained with Jenny, and he has always given her credit for assimilating his son Harry into the family along with their own kids, Max and Lauren.
Evans, on the other hand, worked for The South Bank, a programme hosted by Melvyn (Lord) Bragg, before going independent as a documentary filmmaker in 1984.
He then left out of concern that he was becoming into a corporate guy.
He said, “I had a business automobile.” “I distinctly recall parking it in Bay 32 and asking myself, “What am I doing? When I turn 52, I should start doing this.
David Lean, his mentor and renowned filmmaker, gave him the advice to start producing movies that were important to him.
Julie Walters appeared in the movie Just Like A Woman, which Evans directed. Both critically and financially, it was a small success.
Life And Limb, his subsequent endeavour, did not do as well. His confidence also waned as a result of the lack of funding.
Of course, what happened next will go down in history. He said that he felt more at home in a culture other than his own when asked why he chose to place his works in the American West. He said that the size of rural America touched him.
Evans never let the success of his first book stop him, and he never experienced second-book syndrome.
You’re on a hiding to nothing, he warned, if you start worrying about what other people think of you and what your readers want.
You must locate a story that thrills and inspires you, then write it as best you can.
He only received one really terrible review for The Horse Whisperer, which was called “a cheesy romantic book gussied up with some sentimental claptrap about the emotional lives of horses” by a New York Times reviewer.
Evans’ readers, who were the real critics, couldn’t have disagreed more, judging by his astounding success.