Interzone 244 Jan - Feb 2013

by TTA Press

  Like ‘Aunts’, many stories have the feel of dark fantasy but can be read as science fiction. One such is ‘Brita’s Holiday Village’, where the narrator stays in a resort unchanged since the seventies. In May, “white, plum-sized pupas hang clustered under the eaves” of the bungalows, and in June she dreams of distant relatives who stay in the cottages and hold increasingly odd summer parties. ‘Pyret’ takes the form of an academic article, presenting evidence that this mythical mimic is not “a cryptid but a real being”. After examining historical accounts of the creatures, including, most eerily, the Sjungpastorn, who held mass and sang a wordless song to isolated churchgoers, the writer comes to worrying conclusions. Title story ‘Jagannath’ is the last in the book, the second longest (albeit at just eleven pages), and the most straightforwardly science-fictional, in which the much-altered survivors of a great disaster live and work inside Mother – but she can’t survive forever. She’s the last and most important lost woman of the book.

  Ann and Jeff VanderMeer are highly respected editors, and their first publication as proprietors of Cheeky Frawg is sure-footed, from the intriguing cover onwards. The print edition is handsome, the ebook perfectly set up (rarer than it should be, even with major publishers), the introduction ideal, the author’s afterword fascinating. The print version is perhaps slim for its price, so the cheaper ebook may prove attractive for UK readers, but the stories are so intensely emotional that you wouldn’t necessarily want it to be any longer. I spent much of my last holiday reading the much shorter books in the Penguin Mini Moderns series: Barthelme, Calvino, Petrushevskaya, Borges, Jackson, and so on. The remarkable stories of Jagannath would be perfectly at home in that company.

  The stories in Jagannath cover a wide range of subjects and genres. When asked what kind of writer you are, how do you answer? Do you think in terms of genre, and possible markets, when writing?

  I usually tell people I’m a writer. It annoys some people who think it’s more important what genre markers my authorship carries rather than what themes or narratives I work with. I don’t consider genre or markets, except when writing commissioned work.

  Which of the stories in the collection is closest to your heart, and why?

  ‘Jagannath’, I think, because it was such an excursion into an alien mind. It really took me to a new level as a writer. I do have a soft spot for ‘Who is Arvid Pekon?’ too, because I feel sorry for all the things I made Arvid go through.

  One thing the stories share is an intense emotional quality. Even ‘Aunts’, with barely human characters doing unspeakable things to each other, is unbearably sad. Is it draining to write such emotional stories – and to then return to them again for translation, and publication? How has your relationship with these stories changed over the years?

  Readers seem to have a different emotional response to my stories than I do. They’ll tell me a story is sad or creepy, but I don’t have that kind of relationship to my stories. I write them from the inside, immersing in the personalities and atmospheres. Looking at a story from the inside is different than reacting to it as a reader. ‘Aunts’ wasn’t sad or draining to write because I had the perspective of creatures with a different emotional register. Maybe it’s this contrast between the characters and the reader that creates sadness.

  Returning to these stories for editing and publication is fun, especially with the older ones. It’s interesting to see what themes I’ve picked up over the years and how my technique has changed.

  Elizabeth Hand has written a lovely introduction to the book, and talks of how the book surprised her with its “strangeness”. Similarly, Ursula K. Le Guin has “never read anything like Jagannath”. Why do you think that is?

  It’s of course insanely flattering to hear this from two of my heroes, and two writers who have themselves gone deep into the strange and experimental as writers. But you’d have to ask them, because I’ve no idea and I wouldn’t dare to speculate.

  Jagannath is the first title from Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s new imprint, Cheeky Frawg Books. How did that come about, and what was it like working with them? Have you had the opportunity to preview any of their other forthcoming books?

  Jeff and Ann knew of my Swedish story collection and asked to see some translations from it, and liked them enough to want to see the rest. We added a bunch of new stories and that was that.

  Working with the VanderMeers is a dream. They’re both completely dedicated to their mission and aren’t afraid of taking risks in getting new and interesting fiction out there. I don’t know anyone who works as hard as they do. They’re both excellent text editors – they can see exactly what you’re trying to do with a text and are great at helping a story to reach its full potential. They’ve also been very patient with my English boo-boos, hehe. The rest of the team working on Jagannath have also been a blessing: Adam Mills, Teri Goulding and Jeremy Zerfoss, all working their asses off to make it happen.

  I’ve heard about the stuff that’s coming out soon, but I haven’t read much of it. Very excited about the Amos Tutuola collection though, he’s an old favourite.

  You attended the Clarion writers’ workshop in 2010, and that appears very prominently in your bio. Why was the course so important to you, and what effect did it have upon your work?

  Clarion was tremendously important because it was my way into writing in English. I learned a lot about myself as a writer and made huge leaps in both storytelling and English usage. I drafted ‘Cloudberry Jam’, ‘Reindeer Mountain’ and ‘Jagannath’ at Clarion, and I consider them among my best stories to date.

  I also learned a ton about the industry and made friends for life. Our class still keep in touch and function as a support network for each other. We have a lovely reverse-psychology contest going to encourage each other to submit stories: whoever racks up the most rejections of the year wins. It’s been very effective – our class has been incredibly successful post-graduation.

  Philip K. Dick used to have a much larger presence in French bookshops than in English ones. Are there any fantasy and science fiction writers who do particularly – or surprisingly – well in Sweden?

  Foreign authors are huge in Sweden because our indigenous production of fantastic fiction is small. Interestingly, translations from other languages than English are on the rise. Readers have switched into reading in English because there was such a dearth of translations before, so translating from English to Swedish is not as lucrative now. Some popular names are Dmitrij Gluchovskij and Sergei Lukyanenko (Russia), Andrzej Sapkowski (Poland), Cornelia Funke (Germany) and Maria Turtschaninoff (Finland). Some of these are relatively unknown in English, as I understand it.

  Which writer have you read more than any other? Who is your greatest influence?

  I can’t point out a single writer, but there are a bunch of authors whose work I admire and frequently read: Ursula Le Guin, Elizabeth Hand, Tove Jansson, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore and China Miéville.

  What can you tell us about your new novel? Are there plans to make it available in English?

  Amatka was published in September 2012, and is a story about colonising a world where physical reality responds to language. It explores language’s effect on perception and reality, and the effect of a strange and hostile environment on what starts out as a socialist utopia. It was also a prose experiment: as language is strictly controlled in the story, the prose had to mirror this. Among other things I had to cut out overt metaphors, homonyms and similes without killing the prose.

  I’m working on a translation, but it’ll take a while because the prose is relatively advanced compared to how I usually write in English.

  When we arranged this interview, you were on holiday in a small fishing village. Did you come away with any good ideas? Was ‘Brita’s Holiday Village’ based on a previous vacation?

  I did get some inspiration for environments while exploring the mountains of Gran Canaria. You think of it as this over-exploited tourist beach, but once you leave
the coast and go into the mountains, it’s something completely different, like being on another planet: vast mountain valleys, volcanic cliffs rising into the clouds, angry little succulents.

  I don’t base stories on events, but I stole part of the setting for ‘Brita’s Holiday Village’ from an old holiday village on the slopes of Åreskutan (a mountain in Sweden). The cottages were dark, monstrous things in some sort of modernist seventies style, probably cosy in winter but completely misplaced in a summer landscape. Later on some creatures showed up in my brain and asked to live there, and kept pestering me until I let them. Some people have no manners.

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  The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

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  Rise of the Guardians

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  the twilight saga:Breaking Dawn Part 2

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  Sylvester McCoy in a birdspatter wig on a stunt sledge drawn by rabbits: I think we can say that was pretty unexpected, and suggests that Guillermo del Toro’s passing into the west from THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY may not have been such a disaster. At the very least, it’s forced New Line to break their vow never to work with Peter Jackson again, and Jackson his own vow never to direct another bloody hobbit picture. And while this first serving of the Jackson version is still an astounding warg’s breakfast, the film adaptation’s epic journey from there to back again has managed to burgle some unexpected treasure from the hoard.

  The Hobbit was a strange book to start with, and only got more so after Tolkien started fiddling with it to force it into coherence with the larger story of Sauron’s quest for the Ring. But the actual 1944 rewrite of “Riddles in the Dark” (incorporated by a happy mixup into the 1951 and subsequent editions), and the subsequent well-documented smaller changes to the text, are all but incidental to this story, which centres instead on matters that never made it into the book at all: above all, the retrospective expansion of the single sentence explaining Gandalf’s detour to eject the Necromancer from Dol Guldur (which Tolkien admitted in correspondence was merely an ad hoc contrivance to take Gandalf out of the story for nine chapters) into the climax of a 2000-year prequel to the War of the Ring. The effect of this radical retroception was to turn The Hobbit into a Rosencrantz & Guildenstern view of the real story, which is the White Council’s assault on Dol Guldur and the resultant flushing-out of Sauron from Mirkwood to Mordor. That offscreen epic, which Tolkien himself never told circumstantially in any form, makes the defeat of Smaug and the Battle of Five Armies a footnote in a much vaster and more consequential saga, which Peter Jackson and his partners in burglary are now trying their sincerest to tell as it deserves. And while eyebrows may levitate at the late decision to expand the two films shot into three, Jackson has been here before; until Jackson blagged New Line into bankrolling a trilogy, Miramax had been trying to shrink what were then two films into one for $75m with half the hobbits killed off. Indeed, three three-hour films is actually quite a modest frame for this very large and ambitious expanded Hobbit, especially if (as has been intimated) the third film will reach past the end of the novel and deep into the untold hexecontaetia beyond.

  Unfortunately for Jackson, the film rights to the Hobbit narrative are notoriously messy – far more so than those for LotR, which is why Jackson had to abandon his original 1995 plan to make The Hobbit first, why the 2010 MGM bankruptcy was so devastating to the production in its del Toro two-film incarnation, and why almost everyone involved – Jackson, New Line, Saul Zaentz, the Tolkien estate – has sued everyone else along the way, before a dwarvish recognition of mutual benefit from a shared quest imposed the present uneasy alliance and fellowship. Tolkien’s colossal blunder in his 1969 contract with United Artists sold away the film and merchandising rights in perpetuity, thus effectively freezing his heirs out of any share in the profits. This was then compounded by the estate’s own 1976 sale to Saul Zaentz, who had bought the film rights from UA, of trademarks on all the named characters, places, and objects in both works: a deal as monumentally disadvantageous to the vendor as Fox’s surrender of the Star Wars licensing rights to George Lucas the same year. But Zaentz unaccountably failed to pick up the distribution rights for The Hobbit from UA, whence they passed to MGM in the 2004 merger; and even with a defibrillated MGM aboard as co-producers, Jackson and New Line have access only to what was sold by Tolkien in his lifetime. This includes the published Hobbit and the text and appendices of LotR – but not the posthumously published material owned by Christopher Tolkien from The Silmarillion onwards, including anything in the 12-volume History of Middle-Earth, or the unpublished Hobbit drafts, revisions, and plot notes subsequently gathered in John Rateliff’s 2007 history of the text and its 2011 addenda. Thus, for example, the film Gandalf’s catalogue of the Istari includes “the two blue wizards; I forget their names” (audience: “Alatar and Pallando! Keep up, Ganders”), because the names only appear in CJRT’s commentary in Unfinished Tales. Crucially, the unowned material includes not just the abandoned 1960 rewrite, which set out to harmonise the tone with LotR until someone who may have been Naomi Mitchison torpedoed it after two and a bit chapters, but the 1954 retelling “The Quest of Erebor” – versions of which have been published by Tolkien fils in Unfinished Tales and in Douglas Anderson’s annotated edition of The Hobbit, and which remains the only version to attempt a causal explanation of the puzzlingly synchronous relationship between Bilbo’s adventure and the White Council’s campaign. Jackson may yet use this, if he can find a way to reverse-engineer it from the surviving hints and fragments in “Durin’s Folk” and the Tale of Years, or simply to appropriate it without fear of a renewed legal tussle with the estate. Without it, he has a significant problem.

  An Unexpected Journey is tentative in its address to these issues, but is at least encouragingly aware of the opportunities to resculpt the novel into something more closely resembling JRRT’s own unrealised post-Rings conception of its real story, no least by cashing in the new tolerance of both audiences and studios for more expansive and generous multi-part adaptations. Post-Potter audiences are perfectly used to long films which give space to the scenes and characters they want to see from the books, and which aren’t in a rush to conde
nse and abbreviate. And as the distended editions of the original trilogy show off very well, Jackson is perfectly able to sustain a dense, pacy narrative on a scale a third longer again than this, while his familiar weaknesses as a filmmaker – slack plotting, tin-eared dialogue, watery-eyed sentimentality, coarse melodramatisation, lazy Hollywood-formula motivation, an abhorrence of understatement, and jarringly crass injections of low-end kiwi humour – are if anything better masked by the longer running times he’s continued to explore in his post-Rings work. It’s admittedly a bold choice to devote half the first act of a gigantic 3D IMAX HFR epic to a single cramped scene of fifteen characters squeezed into a hobbit-sized breakfast bar expounding their ample guts out; but the leisurely dwarvish comedics play well to the younger audience who need to be brought onside early if they’re to put up with much of what’s coming, and those who grumble about the pacing must have mercifully unremembered the interminable Cirith Ungol stretch of Return. Tiny throwaways inflate like airbags – the stone giants are a single sentence in the book – and time has been found not just for the pocket-handkerchief and the thrush but even for the dwarves’ washing-up song and for Gollum’s subterranean doggerel ditty.