Reflections (25 page)

This garden always seems to me the seat of the mystery and the beauty that should be, if possible, at the heart of every story. It stands to me for the old tales and the life-enhancing magics that ought to be there too. And no idea for a book ever seems to me good enough if it doesn't have something of this at the heart of it. But it has to have the other two places in it as well. You can't exist or write purely on this strange and elevated plane.

So what have we got so far? I am living in a place where I am not actually living, leading a double life, while doing two incompatible things at once. I am controlling characters that behave like real people, a story that behaves like a self-programming entity, a landscape in which the seasons change as seasons should. Beneath this is an underpinning from my own experience containing the nitty-gritty of everyday life, formally patterned fantasy, a dose of lunacy, and the deep magic of myth. Almost enough to get a book moving, but not quite. Along with the season(s) the book is set in, you need also a quite indescribable taste in the head, a feeling about this particular narrative that no other has. If this doesn't come at once, or in the first few pages, I find you have to leave that effort and try again. But if you have that as-it-were taste, and with it a sufficiently dynamic idea, you are off.

It took me awhile to distinguish what is a dynamic idea. A lot of things seem to start stories, but not all of them go on. To find the right kind of motive idea, I found I had to go back once again to childhood, but this time to the sort of mistakes children make. The sort that make you very ashamed when you think of them, but are actually one of the ways children learn. Everyone must remember some of the dreamlike confusions of their childhood—they may make you squirm in the memory, but if you look closely, you usually find that this mistake moved you on. Here is one of mine, from an article
⁵
I wrote for
Foundation
in 1997:

 

A very good example is a baroque muddle of my own when, at the age of five, I was evacuated to the Lake District. . . . I was told I was there because the Germans were about to invade. Almost in the same breath, I was warned not to drink the water from the washbasin because it came from the lake and was full of typhoid germs. I assumed that “germs” was short for “Germans.”

Looking warily at the washbasin, I saw it was considerately labeled “Twyford,” clearly warning people against germ warfare. Night after night, I had a half-waking nightmare in which Germans (who had fair, floating hair and were clad in sort of cheesecloth Anglo-Saxon tunics) came racing across the surface of the lake to come up through the plug hole of this washbasin and give us all Twyford.

This has all the elements of something needed to start a book off, the magical prohibition, the supernatural villains, the beleaguered good people and, for good measure, the quite incommunicable fears that children have. . . .

 

And of course it was how I learned that germs were small and Germans were human size, simply from working out why I knew people would laugh at me if I told them my fears.

A mix-up of notions like that is nearly always dynamic. You've got it. You go. If it works, it is like a long fuse that has been lit in several places, so that it gives off at intervals sharp blotches of white magnesium light. Each white fluorescence illuminates—with luck—a ring of landscape or a room with people moving and speaking in it, scenes from the story that is making itself. Around it, along the rest of the fuse, the rest of the story occurs like a photographic negative of a foggy day—faint white objects against black. And what I do is rush from flaring point to flaring point along this fuse, often at top speed, like a fire myself. Except I am, of course, sitting down and doing it all with words. Word by word.

I don't think I can find any other way to describe the way it feels, unless it is to echo poor Carol Oneir. “It is like a voyage of discovery. . . .” And if I've got it right, it should be. It is also my way of moving out of the past into the untouched future. This can be very scary.

The Origins of
The Merlin Conspiracy

 

As with so many of her books, Diana Wynne Jones “germinated” the seeds of
The Merlin Conspiracy
, and released it only when the idea was in full flower. This piece is a longer version of an article that she wrote to promote the Japanese edition, produced by Tokuma Shoten Publishing Ltd.

 

 

I
t is hard to know where the idea for a book starts. But I do know that
The Merlin Conspiracy
was building in my head for more than ten years. It came in pieces and the pieces, at first, did not seem to add up at all.

Around the time I finished
Hexwood
, I was thinking I needed to write about a lone and powerful magician who lived on an island made of parts of several universes. But I didn't know what this magician was like. The only thing I was sure about was that his island came apart if he got ill. I spent the next ten years in and out of hospital, and it was after I came round from the anesthetic the first time that I knew my magician was called Romanov and that he was thin and ferociously energetic.

But two years before that there was the elephant. I always knew there was an elephant in there somewhere. We took my two-year-old granddaughter to Bristol Zoo, where they happened to be exercising their elephant, Wendy. We were four adults looking after one tiny girl, but Frances all the same escaped and darted across the path just as Wendy came along it. The child ought to have been trampled; but Wendy did a wonderful, agile sort of polka step with her huge front feet and missed Frances completely. She waved her trunk genially at Frances and kept walking. Wendy, sadly, is dead now, but ever since then I have wanted to pay tribute to that kindly, agile elephant. I just wished I knew how she fitted in.

And before the elephant, I had a repeated dream of a line of bright islands, which were universes, hanging in dark blue nothing. If you wanted to get to another universe, you jumped from island to island—and they dipped and turned sickeningly. Terrifying. In one of these dreams I jumped to a city that was built up the sides of several canyons; houses stacked on houses in a most peculiar way. I knew that this city was connected to Romanov and the elephant in some way, but it didn't add up to a story. Maddening.

Then, more recently, I had a strange experience in Cornwall. Exactly like Roddy in the book, I met a woman out of prehistory who dumped all her magical knowledge in my head, neatly filed under the headings of different flowers. Unlike Roddy, I couldn't use these spells, but I could put them in a book for everyone to see. It was then I realized that I was going to be writing two intertwined stories about two people with different kinds of magic.

All these things suddenly added up to a proper book when I was doing a signing in Ross-on-Wye. A boy there told me—very firmly—that he wanted to know more about Nick Mallory from my book
Deep Secret
. And I realized that I did too, and that Nick was the person who met Romanov and the elephant. Roddy was to tell the other part of the story. My only problem then was: where did Roddy come from?

A chapter in a learned book gave me the answer. I'd only read it because it was written by one of my sons. In it, just in passing, he remarked on how difficult governing the country was in the Middle Ages, because the king always kept moving from place to place, taking with him—in a vast campsite—all his courtiers and officials. And I thought: Suppose the king did that these days? With cars and buses and lorries, and the civil servants and the media following along in coaches too. Then I knew what Roddy's life was like. I knew all about the conspiracy, and I started to write the double story at once.

Review of
Boy in Darkness
by Mervyn Peake

 

Knowing that Diana admired Mervyn Peake's work,
Books for Keeps
commissioned this review for issue number 102, January 1997, to mark the first publication of “Boy in Darkness” on its own as a children's book. Diana's review was published alongside an article by P. J. Lynch on the challenges of illustrating Peake's story.

Books for Keeps
was a British bimonthly print magazine for thirty years and is now online. Its readership is primarily teachers, librarians, and children's book professionals.

 

 

T
his is a frightening book. Having said this, I must add that a large number of readers, whatever their age, actively
enjoy
a frightening book and find that it speaks to them. Furthermore,
Boy in Darkness
is the work of a genius and, as such, should not be withheld from anyone, even if that genius is twisted and baroque. Mervyn Peake always seems to me to start where Lord Dunsany and James Branch Cabell leave off, and neither of these writers can be read with perfect composure. From the very first page, when we are told it is the Boy's (Titus Groan's) birthday, and he is therefore at the mercy of rituals which “lead him hither and thither through the mazes of his adumbrate home” eventually to receive gifts presented by “long lines of servants, knee-deep in water” (gifts which are promptly removed again), Mervyn Peake is working to discompose his readers.

Part of the discomposing is done with words. “Adumbrate” is only the first of many peculiar words, used peculiarly. Later there is an “oleaginous river.” “osseous temples,” “an ulna between his jaws,” and many more, all used to strike you between the eyes, not only because you have to consider what the word means, but also how well it sounds and how intensely
accurate
it is in its context. This kind of thing is wonderfully good for children. Those who are brave enough not to give up should gain a spectacular insight into how wonderful words can be.

Insights are what all this discomposing is about. On the face of it, this story is an adventure in which the Boy, sick of the lonely, ceremonial life at home in the castle, runs away at night and finds himself in a region of pure damnation, from whence he barely escapes with his life. But from the moment of the “long lines of servants, knee-deep in water” (at which we are meant to ask “Why?” and to conclude that the Boy was quite right to escape from something so senseless), Mervyn Peake is leading the Boy beyond a mere adventure story, and into seeing and understanding. With an acute draftsman's eye, and in sentences which vary from stabbingly simple to complex and meticulously punctuated, he has the Boy pursued across the “oleaginous river” by hounds “cocksure of themselves” (that have eyes of “that kind of bright and acid yellow that allowed no other color alongside”), where the Boy encounters the odious Goat.

Here is the first major insight. The Goat walks like a man, only sideways, on hooflike shoes, and wears clothes, old and dusty and smelly, and the Boy
knows
there is something terribly wrong here. “But why? The gentleman had done nothing wrong.” But he
will
do. The Boy is fatally polite, the way children can be (and this, in the normal world, can lead to another small corpse in a hidden ditch), purely on the grounds that the Goat
seems
civilized. After that it is too late. The Hyena arrives and the Boy is caught. The Hyena is a horrid masterpiece of perfectly described body language. “The shirt he wore was cut off very short in the sleeves so that his long, spotted arms could be readily appreciated.” (For “spotty” read “tattooed” in the mundane world?) “His trousered legs were very narrow and very short, so that his back . . . was at a very steep incline.” We all know men like this. The two insights here are that the look of a person is important, and body language even more so.

The nasty pair take the Boy down into the regions of true damnation to their master, the snow-white Lamb, who has no soul and whose hands were “folded about one another as though they loved one another”—more body language and a further insight, this time of perfect selfishness. The Lamb's hands are in fact very important. With them, he changes men into half beasts. All of them have died, though, except for the Goat and Hyena—even the Lion, whose demise is truly heartbreaking. And the Lamb wants more. He wants the Boy so much that his hands “were moving so fast about one another . . . that nothing could be seen but an opalescent blur of light.” This puzzles the Lamb's henchmen. Pretending to explain this, Mervyn Peake produces the major insight to which the rest has been leading: the brain needs the body, and the body will sometimes do strange things in order to express what is in the brain. In other words, watch body language.

Then the Boy is prepared to meet the Lamb. By this time he knows what is in store for him and he has to do something. Here Mervyn Peake reverses what he has just told us. Up to now, Titus has been a mere helpless body. He has to tell himself that this body is connected to a brain, and to
think
, in order not to become another half animal. Brain can lead body, and save it. The Boy tries it. First he argues (something most boys are good at) and sows doubt in the minds of the Goat and Hyena; then he acts, with a trick, and distracts the Lamb long enough to be able to cut him in half. And the Lamb is only sudsy fleece. This could be allegory (in which case, I am afraid it is somewhat wishful thinking), or magic. Anyway, it makes a perfect ending. The combined insights expose something we see all the time and usually disregard: that the way people talk and move is part of the way they are. It may seem like nothing, the way the Lamb does at the end, but I myself would prefer every child to gain these insights from being frightened by this book, rather than the hard way, in a deserted field a hundred yards from home.

Freedom to Write

 

Using quotes from
The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
, here Diana explores fashions in fantasy.

 

 

T
he writing of fantasy is much in my mind just at present, because I am one of the judges for the World Fantasy Awards (these are really only “World” awards if you happen to speak English, and they are handed out each September in a different venue, Montreal this year). Now, these awards are largely concerned with fantasy written for adults, but not entirely. Philip Pullman's
The Amber Spyglass
is one of the books up for consideration and we are trying to get hold of Robin McKinley's latest.
¹
One of the judges even asked for my own book,
Year of the Griffin
, but I told him it was unethical, me being a judge.

Anyway, since mid-February enormous parcels have arrived for me almost daily, full of truly enormous books. The majority run from five hundred to nine hundred pages. It seems that books are long this year.

That makes them sound like skirts, doesn't it? With reason.

Writing is subject to fashions like most other things. It is one of the constraints you feel when you sit down with a pen (as I do) in front of a blank pad of paper. Oh, God, I may be about to do something dowdy and unfashionable! The lovely, crisp blankness of the paper ought to invite a huge sense of freedom. But it doesn't always. What it actually invites, in me anyway, is a challenge: How do I evade this particular fashion, or better still, turn it to advantage? How do I do this and give people something worth giving and not just what they were expecting?

What people
expect
is a very powerful element in their reading. A good half of readers, whether they are nine or ninety, are truly uncomfortable with anything that strikes them as new or different—this is why soaps are so popular—and some of these people get quite petulant if they get what they don't expect. Minor examples of this are two reviews I got recently of my book
Year of the Griffin
. One was quite short and said, more or less, “This isn't
Harry Potter
so I don't like it.” The other was longer because the reviewer went through the book side by side with the latest
Harry Potter
, saying where they didn't match. The extraordinary thing is that he should have
expected
them to match.

Now, possibly because fantasy can be about almost anything really, people are more hidebound about what they expect of a fantasy than about any other kind of writing. About six years ago, I got so exasperated with the way that too many fantasy books deriving ultimately from Tolkien were so much the same that I wrote a book called
The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
. For those of you who haven't come across it, it pretends to be a tourist guide and starts with a map—like all the conventional fantasies do. Only in this case it is a map of Europe upside down—a brilliant notion of my goddaughter's and you wouldn't believe how hard it is to recognize!—on which my agent and I had enormous fun filling in idiotic place names. The bulk of the book is alphabetical, having entries on Astrology, Dark Lord, Dragons, Galley Slave, Inn Signs (“Do not be surprised to find that every Inn Sign creaks loudly. This is a form of aural advertising”), Orcs, Magic, Stew, Temples, Wizards, and so on. The idea is that you take a selection of these and mix to taste, thus making a new book.

Of course, along with events and other features being so predictable, you get predictable language too. I had great fun picking out the most constant clichés and calling these Official Management Terms (OMTs): “reek of wrongness,” “thick savory stew,” “acrid smoke,” and so on, and marking them as they occurred. And each section starts with a saying or piece of verse that has nothing whatsoever to do with the section. I believe Sir Walter Scott started this practice—he has a lot to answer for.

Bear with me while I read you a few entries. Color Coding first:

 

CLOTHING. Although this varies from place to place, there are two absolute rules:

i) Apart from Robes, no garment thicker than a shirt ever has sleeves.

ii) No one ever wears Socks.

 

Oh, sorry. I meant to read you Color Coding. As follows:

 

COLOR CODING, section 3, Eyes.

Black eyes are invariably evil; brown eyes mean boldness and humor, but not necessarily goodness; green eyes
always
entail Talent, usually for Magic but sometimes for Music. Hazel eyes are rare and seem generally to imply niceness. Gray eyes mean Power or healing abilities and will be reassuring unless they look silver: silver-eyed people are liable to enchant or hypnotize you for their own ends. . . . White eyes, usually blind ones, are for wisdom: never ignore anything a white-eyed person says. Blue eyes are always Good, the bluer, the more Good present. And then there are violet eyes and golden eyes. People with violet eyes are often of Royal birth and, if not,
always
live uncomfortably interesting lives. People with golden eyes just live uncomfortably interesting lives and most of them are rather fey into the bargain. . . . Luckily, it seldom occurs to anyone with undesirable eye colors to disguise them . . . and they can generally be detected very readily. Red eyes can
never
be disguised. They are Evil, and surprisingly common.

 

Now Companions:

 

COMPANIONS are chosen for you by the Management. . . . They are picked from among the following (pretty well invariably): Bard, Female Mercenary, Gay Mage, Imperious Female, Large Man, Serious Soldier, Slender Youth, Small Man, Talented Girl, Teenage Boy, Unpleasant Stranger, and Wise Old Stranger . . .

 

Though a lot of these are Tolkien derived, many are cardboard figures from role-playing games, which have interacted with this type of fantasy for the last forty years.

As an example of Warrior,
The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
offers:

 

BARBARY VIKINGS wear horned helmets and fur cloaks, otherwise you could mistake them for Northern Barbarians. They swagger hugely, quarrel hugely, drink hugely, and boast hugely. The thing they like best is killing people, preferably lots at once . . . All of them are excellent seamen. And here is what the killing is done with:

 

SWORDS. You are advised to choose your sword with great care and, if possible, have it checked by a jobbing Magician. . . . Swords are dangerous. . . . Here are the hazards you should look out for:

i) Swords with runes on them. Runes are almost always a sign that your sword is:

a) Designed only to kill Dragons.

b) Designed for some other specific victim, such as Goblins or the Undead.

Both (a) and (b) are liable to let you down if you are attacked by ordinary humans. Others will be:

c) Designed for some other purpose entirely, so that when drawn it will proceed to raise a Storm or—gods protect you!—try to
heal
your assailant.

Be wary of Runes. . . .

 

The entry goes on to list nine more preposterous swords, such as Swords with Souls, Swords with appetites—these tend to devour the wielder in various ways—Swords that signal the approach of enemies, Swords that are
not
Swords—being made of glass or something, Swords in Stones and so on . . .

Now you'd think that after six years readers might have noticed some of these absurdities, or that fashion would have moved on. But no. One of the fat fantasies I had to read—a mere five hundred pages—
Faith of the Fallen
(a Sword of Truth novel)
²
has: “He was too far away to see the green of her eyes, a color he'd never beheld on anyone else. . . .” One OMT of this kind of book is that people never just
see
a thing, they always
behold
it.

Another, calling itself Book II of the Chronicles of the Raven,
Noonshade
,
³
has at the start, on the page before the map—yes, they all still have maps—a list of companions on the journey:

 

Hirad Coldheart, barbarian warrior

The Unknown Warrior, a warrior

Thraun, warrior and shapechanger

Will Begman, thief [see the role-playing game archetypes]

Denser, dawnthief mage

Erienne, lore mage

 

I think one of these was female. The next tome I hefted out of the box was
all
about a warrior woman. At the court of King Arthur, too. Worrying.

Anyway, here they all are. The same things.

And the reason is that people
expect
them. Many readers of fantasy would be highly dismayed not to have them. If someone asked them to read about ordinary people with eyes of no particular color, they wouldn't do it, even if these people had magical adventures that were really interesting. The fashion for so-called heroic fantasy, derived ultimately from Tolkien, has been going so long that it has now set into a convention, and, it seems, is quite unalterable.

This unalterable convention is now getting incorporated into books for children and young adults. One of my less fat entries—only 382 pages—for the World Fantasy Award was a book pretty well straight out of
The
Tough Guide
. In it, our heroine learns to consult a crystal. The
Tough Guide
entry for Crystal is:

 

CRYSTAL can be any color. It can be set in a ring, suspended on a chain as a pendant, or just be a lump on its own; it is Fantasyland's equivalent of the telephone, with attached vision. . . . The operator simply leans over the Crystal and concentrates. . . . Crystal usually takes over where Mindspeech leaves off.

 

Our hero is a prince forced into slavery. We have entries for both in
The
Tough Guide
:

 

MISSING HEIRS occur with great frequency. At any given time, half the countries in Fantasyland will have mislaid their Crown Prince or Princess. But the rule is that only one Missing Heir can join your tour. . . . They can be a right nuisance. All Missing Heirs shine with innocence (some of them quite dazzlingly) and most have very little brain, which means they will not pick up any hints as to their true status. . . . In addition, they all have a lot of inborn Royal Talents such as chivalry, extreme (and embarrassing) honesty, a tendency to give everything away to Beggars, and a natural desire for the best of everything for everyone. Heirs go missing for a variety of reasons. . . .

 

SLAVES, male, are used by bad Kings, Fanatic Caliphates, and some Wizards in large numbers as Guards, attendants, fan bearers, waiters and entertainment, and for Sex. Bad Kings and Fanatic Caliphates always have their male slaves in matching sets, as in the following official clichés:
a litter borne by four gigantic ebony slaves, fanned by two beautiful young boys, a troupe of slender young athletes, and the door guarded by two seemingly identical Barbarian slaves, etc.
A Wizard tends to have his slaves more mismatched but rather attentive, unless he intends to rule the world, in which case he will try to be like a bad King.

 

And there are OMTs all over the place: “Ah, my friend . . . There's said to be a mighty curse on anyone who lifts this sword for conquest.” I'm afraid my first dismayed thought was, “Oh dear! It's spread here now!” As if it were foot and mouth disease—or I suppose sword and sorcery disease.

Of course there have been quite a lot of heroic fantasies for children and young adults, many of them original and good, but this is the first one I had met that was so conventional and full of sloppy writing, and yet deemed by its publishers worthy of an international award. Could this be an advance warning of a new fashion? One thing it certainly shows, and that is that it is suddenly acceptable now for this kind of crossover to happen. Adults are free to read and enjoy books primarily aimed at young adults or children and not feel ashamed of doing it. For a long time, this was not the case at all. Books for young people existed in an impenetrable enclave all by themselves.

I'll come back to any implications of this at the end. For now, I'd like to talk a bit about the way the various fashions and conventions have affected me as a writer.

Books for youngsters are unique in one respect—their supposed audience has almost no say in their nature and contents. The books are written by adults, edited and published by adults, sold by adults, and bought by adults—teachers, parents, librarians, aunts—and mostly reviewed by adults too. Generally this has to be so. Most children are unable to say what they want in a book and why. They have to take the adults' massed word for what is a good book, because they don't yet
know
enough not to.

In one way this makes this audience a delight to write for. So many of them will be meeting whatever is in the book for the first time. They won't necessarily know the myths behind my story of
Eight Days of Luke
, say, or they won't know that Philip Pullman is plundering
Paradise Lost
in
The Amber Spyglass
—they will just see the remarkable things he does with it. That by itself does give you a joyous sense of freedom. On the other hand, they won't know a cliché from a felicitous turn of phrase. I vividly remember how
impressed
I was at age ten on coming across somewhere in a book where somebody knocks a table lamp, which then “swayed drunkenly.” I thought that was so good! I had no idea this phrase had been used a thousand times before.