CB: Was there in fact something slightly rebellious about writing fantasy?
DWJ: I suppose there was. It was rebellious mostly against the mores of the time more than leftover parental stuff. The books were all so very do-goodery in those days, and very uneventful, and full of political correctness of a certain rather dismal kind.
CB: I can see why you’d say somebody ought to write good fantasy books, because that’s what your children and probably other children liked and there weren’t enough of them. But having started, you kept on doing it. It clearly suited you.
DWJ: I think the final thing that twitched me on was my oldest son Richard saying, “There aren’t enough funny books.” And I thought, well, that can be settled. So I wrote Wilkins’ Tooth, which made me laugh, and then The Ogre Downstairs, which made me laugh even more. In fact The Ogre Downstairs made me laugh so much that people kept putting their head round the door and saying “Are you all right?” I was just sitting on a sofa, yelling with laughter. I always tend to do that with the funny bits of books actually.
CB: You get quite drawn into them.
DWJ: Oh goodness, yes.
CB: You’ve talked about absentmindedly putting people’s shoes in the oven when writing, which suggests somebody who’s very much bound up in the experience.
DWJ: They are terribly real to me, and I find this of other people’s books too, if they’re good, almost to the point that you can’t criticize them. I always find it quite hard to write reviews, if it’s a good book. It’s like criticizing a piece of real living—it just happens, like life, you know?
CB: I wonder what you feel about the lot of the children’s writer today, who seems to be expected to keep a blog and make YouTube trailers, and basically do a lot of marketing, as well as writing the books.
DWJ: That’s the thing I feel that publishers are supposed to be doing. I don’t know why they don’t.
CB: Although you’ve done your fair share of school visits over the years—
DWJ: Lots. At one point I used to go at least once a month. But I don’t think, except for one shining occasion, visiting schools ever repaid me, though I do hope they did something for the unfortunate kids. The exception was a visit on which, because of my travel jinx, I arrived two hours late anyway. We were drawing out of Bristol Parkway and a man in his sixties who was seeing his wife off (she was going to visit her sister in York) realized he was still on the train as it left. Luckily they don’t gather speed very much leaving Bristol Parkway because there’s a big bend, if you remember, and they go pretty slowly round it, but as it was attaining its maximum speed for the bend he rushed to the door and tried to open it. I was absolutely riveted to the spot. I thought, “I do not believe what this idiot is doing.” I should have done something, I suppose, because I was the person nearest the door, but I just didn’t believe it. And he opened the door and jumped out.
Everyone got out of the train afterward, except his wife, who was afraid of being left outside and the train going without her. They were obviously very neurotic about the whole business. Anyway, what happened was that the draft round the train caught him, and first of all he soared in the air—really odd, it was—and then he was sucked in toward the wheels. Somebody pulled the emergency cord, and there was a horrible grinding and rumbling, and I thought, “My God, we’re running over him. This is awful.” But no. In fact he was lying on the pebbles at the side of the rails. He was streaming with blood, but not really hurt. And of course that meant that we had to stop and the ambulance had to be called and he refused to go in the ambulance, and lots of argy-bargy. And the guard and the driver got out and argued with him, and people came out from the station and argued with him.
CB: He felt he hadn’t caused enough trouble yet?
DWJ: Quite! And everybody ran round outside for at least an hour, which meant we had missed the train slot. So we were forced to wait until the next slot. And that meant all the trains were late going up north, where I was heading—I was going to the Midlands somewhere—and they were even worse on the way home. Anyway, I arrived two hours late, and there were all the kids, fortunately, and it was in the town hall and they’d had other things to occupy them. And it was there that a boy gave me the idea for Howl’s Moving Castle. So it did pay off.
CB: That was a good school visit, then?
DWJ: It did make up for the idiocy. And I’ll tell you a further outcome of this ridiculous man and his exit, which was that about a fortnight later I went to a school in quite the opposite direction, to Chippenham. Where I got lost, naturally, but I did eventually find the school and get talking, and I started talking about my travel jinx, which by then was really quite evident. And after a bit, people put their hands up and asked things, and a boy at the back put his hand up and said, “That person you were calling an idiot is my grandfather!”
CB: That does seem most unfortunate! Was the boy upset?
DWJ: Not really. He was slightly annoyed that I was calling his grandfather an idiot, but I suppose he had to admit that it was an idiotic thing to do.
CB: Over the last fifteen years or so there’s been a well-documented revival of fantasy. Before that you were writing fantasy, not quite as a voice in the wilderness but at a time when fantasy was not seen as particularly fashionable by publishers. Now, over the last few years, you’ve been writing in a world where suddenly publishers’ lists are awash with fantasy.
DWJ: Yes, isn’t that nice?
CB: Is it purely nice? Or do you find some negative aspects to it? Also, do you write differently because you have a different sense of what people will have in their heads before they pick up your book?
DWJ: I don’t think that’s an issue, except that I do try to write differently with every book, but I do find that there are drawbacks, in that fantasy becomes almost a fetish, and you’ve got these fluffy werewolves—no, I don’t mean werewolves . . .
CB: Sparkly vampires? I’m sure there are fluffy werewolves too.
DWJ: Yes, I’m sure there are. Pink ones. You know, it can get very, very silly. And then there was the thing I was complaining about in The Tough Guide, the Tolkien imitations, which were extant before the fifteen years actually, in huge numbers, though probably not accounted valid in the way they would be now. And they were all so similar! Most people felt that they had to do the same as the other person. I’ve never known why. This mass imitation and proliferation does upset me a bit. I don’t read them, but I know about them, and I find it all a bit unnecessary and kitsch.
CB: Is fantasy more like poetry than other narrative fiction? Is it more like play?
DWJ: Yes to both, actually. Poetry tends to work with metaphors and ellipses and things, and so does fantasy. The beauty of fantasy is that it doesn’t have to rhyme, it just has to have the right kind of plot, which you can actually draw a diagram of if you attend closely. What was the other thing?
CB: Is it more like play? Is there some kind of freedom in fantasy which isn’t available with other genres?
DWJ: There is. Yes. You have a license to enjoy yourself thoroughly—if you want to get yourself thoroughly scared, get yourself thoroughly elated, get yourself thoroughly mystified, thoroughly awed, and all those other things that are rather splendid that you get from play.
CB: To what extent does fantasy offer those kinds of freedoms in a way that other fiction doesn’t? After all, it’s not as if fantasy is without rules, and it’s not as if other kinds of fiction don’t allow you to make things up, by definition. So is there something about fantasy that offers peculiar freedoms, beyond those available to other fiction writers?
DWJ: It’s because it’s not got to stick to the rather dreary tenor of ordinary life, which people are a bit serious about, aren’t they? If you were to draw a graph of a mainline book you’d find it would just be smoothly wobbling up and down like ripples on a lake, whereas fantasy would have peaks and troughs and be generally bouncing about—sometimes a whole set of peaks and troughs, like on a seismograph.
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CB: Something you’ve drawn on quite a lot in writing fantasy, and very notably in your fairly recent book The Game, are different kinds of existing folktales and mythologies. You’ve made use of a wide range of them, in fact, from Norse mythology in Eight Days of Luke, to Greek mythology there in The Game, Celtic mythology in several places—
DWJ: And Grimm’s fairy tales, and various other things. All the European things, basically.
CB: Yes. Of course, there’s no reason one can’t use mythology in non-fantasy fiction—there’s Ulysses, for example—but it does seem to have a particular affinity with fantasy, doesn’t it? Is that another attraction for you?
DWJ: I don’t know. Myth is, in its way, fantasy fiction itself, isn’t it? It’s just that myths were done so long ago that they’ve been honed down into a shape that makes a basic appeal to everybody, and you know that they’re going to get there and resonate, you know? I don’t think I’ve ever based a whole book on a particular myth, though you can correct me on that.
CB: Well, not on one. You could say in a sense that Fire and Hemlock is based on the ballad of “Tam Lin”—
DWJ: Yes, that’s true. . . .
CB: But even there it’s only one of many myths that are in the mix. None of your books are retellings, or anything like that.
DWJ: No, I wouldn’t want to do a retelling. I think that would be very boring. You take it and run with it, basically, whatever it is.
CB: If you know in advance exactly how it’s going to turn out, then that is going to detract from the interest?
DWJ: It is in a way, although it can sometimes work out very well. There are people who can tell a thing in such a way that it works even though you know what’s going to happen. In Tolkien’s case he tells you what’s going to happen and it does, but it’s still breathtaking. You’re not sure it’s going to come off, and you worry and wonder, and read on avidly.
CB: You’ve long been big in Japan. There’s Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle film,3 of course, and many translations, but presumably they aren’t able to draw on the same stockpot of myth that you use, or at least not with such ease.
DWJ: No.
CB: I wonder how they read you, given that?
DWJ: I really don’t know, but they seem to enjoy it. I think it is because, as I said, all these myths and legends and fairy stories and so forth, even though they’re from a foreign source, have been honed into the right kind of shape anyway so that people pick up on them. I can only think that it’s that. But I’ve been very lucky in Japan: the publishers that I have seem to be prepared to publish anything that I write, which is awfully good of them. They had tremendous trouble with The Game because their whole galaxy and mythology is quite, quite different, and I hadn’t realized how different until they started sending me emails saying, “Jupiter doesn’t mean this to us, it means something quite other. How are we going to handle that? And what about the two young men, one in the sun and one in the shade—are they supposed to be ruffians or high-born?” High-born? That’s a Japanese concept. And I had to say, “You’ll have to do them high-born, I think, if it’s important.” Oh, and all sorts of things. The Pleiades are different to the Japanese as well, of course.
CB: Do they have their own astrology?
DWJ: Oh, they do! Yes. But I only got glimpses of it. I got sent a summary of it by the main publishing lady, but it was so different from anything we have here that I almost couldn’t take it in. So I really don’t understand the popularity of things in Japan—but it does seem to work!
CB: Are there any mythological figures or stories that you would steer clear of? I’m thinking of a preface that Garth Nix wrote to one of his stories, where in the first draft he’d used some kind of Aboriginal material and he’d been warned off because this was seen as trespassing on the cultural property, if not identity, of—4
DWJ: The Aborigines warned him off?
CB: His publisher did.
DWJ: Yes, the Australians are very sensitive about that, I know. I would avoid Aboriginal myths because I don’t really know them. Though you can see that the land is actually engorged with them, really. When I was in Perth, a whole road was closed and we had to take an enormous detour avoiding the river because apparently there was a river spirit in there, a very large one, and the Aborigines said it would be disturbed by cars thundering along the bank of the river. So every day there were huge traffic jams trying to get round the secondary roads.
CB: The river spirit wasn’t there all the time, then?
DWJ: It had suddenly appeared and taken up its station. It seemed to occupy about an acre of river—quite a lot, anyway, and it may have had strands running off it, I don’t know. Anyway, the Aborigines had brought caravans and camped by the place to warn people off. And the town council had said, “Yes, of course we will do what you want,” because there was an awful lot of guilt, understandably, about the treatment of the Aborigines.
CB: Perhaps we could talk a little about influence? You’ve mentioned in the book the impact Tolkien had on you, for example, but what does influence actually mean, for you? It’s not the same as “taking ideas from,” is it?
DWJ: No, I think it’s more about the way to do it. With Tolkien, as I say in this book, it was “Gosh, you can write a whole three-volume fantasy—this is marvelous, let’s do this thing.” With other influences like C. S. Lewis, the “how to do it” thing that grabbed me was that he was always so completely clear about what was happening. You are never in any doubt who is where, and doing what—and much more complicated things than that.
CB: He had a very well-organized mind, I think.
DWJ: Yes, though you wouldn’t know it to look at him. And—let’s see about other influences. . . .
CB: When I interviewed you on a previous occasion, you mentioned George Meredith as an influence. Can you expand on that?
DWJ: Well, Meredith has this perfectly serious, and even overly serious emotional account of things in his books, but every so often they burst into—well, not exactly fantasy, but things that are so fantastic that you might think of them as fantasy. Also, they’re very funny. It’s the mingle, the seamless mingle that he does between things that are funny and things that are extremely serious. The Egoist is a very good example, but there are others. Evan Harrington is one. I shouldn’t suppose anyone has read it. In that book, somebody is masquerading quite unintentionally as an aristocrat at a weekend country house party. It isn’t sidesplittingly hilarious, it’s just continuous-chuckle hilarious. It’s also really very sensitive about this bloke’s feelings. And then there’s Diana of the Crossways, which again in its central parts is extremely serious, and it gives me a start of guilt when I think of what that woman did, but it still has these extraordinary comic bits, which are seamlessly plaited in. And that really is something I do find I like to do, and how I would want to do things. I wouldn’t want to just tell a serious narrative, or just a hilariously silly one.
CB: So it’s not just “Here’s a serious scene, and now it’s time for a bit of light relief so let’s have a comic scene,” but somehow plaiting them more closely than that?
DWJ: Much more closely, yes. And one’s arriving out of the other.
CB: I also remember your image of Langland’s way of writing Piers Plowman being like the tide creeping up the shore, one wave after another and a little higher each time, and that this lies behind the structure of Fire and Hemlock in some way.
DWJ: Yes, it did. But it’s very difficult to describe how.
CB: What I’ve just described is fairly amorphous. You couldn’t pin down a passage and say, “Yes, here’s the page where she does that!”
DWJ: I suppose it’s the threat turning into more-than-threat that’s gradually creeping in Fire and Hemlock.
CB: Things that were merely translucent becoming opaque.
DWJ: That’s right. Which is one of the awful things that tends to happen to you in puberty, actually. Everything suddenly becomes opaque and confusing and
too complicated to cope with. And you have to fight your way out of that. But never say that any of my books are about growing up!
CB: No!
DWJ: Or I shall reach for my gun!
CB: Or about the necessity of coming to terms with it!
DWJ: Quite, yes! As if anyone ever really does.
CB: I know you’re dyslexic and left-handed, and in both those ways you’re coming at things from a slightly unusual angle, and I wonder if you feel that has had any relevance to the way you see and therefore write about the world?
DWJ: It probably has, but the trouble is, you see, that it’s normal for me. All it is is a struggle to try and keep level with right-handed ways of going on. I wouldn’t know about that, because the way I see things is, to me, normal. But I think you’re probably right and I think it probably does.
CB: I was thinking of that part in The Merlin Conspiracy where it turns out that Grundo’s magic is at ninety degrees to the magic of the universe he lives in.
Reflections: On the Magic of Writing Page 30
