Landscape - and a couple of beers! My interview with John Dickinson by Steve Gladwin

When I first came up with the idea of doing these monthly blogs interviews with writer friends, I looked forward to the banter, to the back and forth not just of ideas about landscape and everything else, but a chance to get with the authors into the spirit of their own worlds and - where possible - humour. I imagined that my friend John Dickinson would provide us with a great example of all these factors, but here in a wide range of responses to my questions, John has given us the full range of his personality, sense of humour, worries about koalas and of course his inspirations in both written and visual form as a writer. I hope you enjoy the interview and images as much as I do.

John, thanks for agreeing to be our subject for June. Can I ask is landscape in general something which means a lot to you? Maybe you can offer specific examples?

When you go on holiday, what do you look for? Sun? Beaches? Art galleries?

My wife and I look for scenery. An ideal holiday for me would be spent following snaking paths over scented hillsides, past ruined castles, finishing each day with supper on a terrace looking over a grand view, sunset, chilled wine, fresh bread and olives.

Of course your loves fuel your writing. A long weekend spent in a peel tower on the coast of Galloway, surrounded by mists and low, twisted thorns, gave me the setting for one of my first full-length stories. The mountain scenery I describe in ‘The Cup of The World,’ around Ulfin’s house in the hills, was taken from three days in the Bolivian Jungers, on the foothills of the Andes. The steep, wooded valleys of the March of Tarceny,with their hidden rushing streams – I know I’ve seen them in this world, but I can’t remember where…. No, I can’t remember where.

So, where was home and if you can, describe for us what you would see from your window or on a walk in the local area?

My childhood was split between London, near Holland Park, and Hampshire, and I suppose both contributed to the material in my mental attic. Hampshire is chalk country, with gentle, rolling hills and valleys, broad rides and elfin paths that score through the bare earth at your feet and beg you to come exploring. My brother and I carved out imaginary empires wherever there was a scrap of common land that someone hadn’t fenced off. We made castles from trees, javelins from dead cow-parsley and weapons from anything we could lay our hands on.

We also visited Gloucestershire, where I now live. My uncle owned a large, ruined garden with little eighteenth-century follies peeping through the forests of brambles. I can still remember the moment I discovered this Gothic alcove while adventuring in the woodlands. It was a magical thing, like the moment in Prince Caspian when the children stumble on the ruins of Cair Paravel. These days the garden is restored. You can come to see it. But the wilderness is gone, and the childhood adventure-land has been overlaid with other things. 

I have to say, John, that's one of favourite moments in fantasy fiction, especially following on as it does from the scene between young Prince Caspian and Doctor Cornelius at the top of the tower, and you put that idea so well here.

In a varied career, before you even became a writer, you must have seen some varied landscapes. How important a part of a writer’s armoury, or a reader’s expectation do you think landscape is?

It depends on what you are writing. It’s possible, I guess, to write a good novel with very little attention to any kind of setting. Tinker Tailor, for example, is little more than a series of interviews.

However, if your story is set in an alternative reality, then your world itself should be as important as what happens in your story.  In some of the most memorable fantasies, the landscape (or city-scape) is a character in its own right. It’s impossible to imagine Gormenghast without the castle. It’s impossible to imagine Lord of the Rings without Middle-Earth. Peter Jackson and his film studio people laboured long to create that world as Tolkien had described it. They had to.

Take Narnia. I’d say the first character you meet in Narnia is not Mr Tumnus. It’s the lamp-post, standing mysteriously in the middle of a snowy wood. Lewis describes it in a sentence. Yet as you imagine that lamp glowing on the snow amid dark trees, you know at once that you have entered a strange and magical place. You know that even before a faun comes trotting out of the trees and drops all his parcels at the sight of you.

I asked Kath Langrish, my go-to Narnia person, about the lamp-post. She suggests that Lewis borrowed it from a dream story of Kipling’s, where each adventure starts on a road running up to a street-light. If so, it’s a landscape-image that shouts across generations).

Landscape offers ways of commenting on the action, like an old-fashioned chorus in a Greek tragedy. True, a mountain’s a mountain, and once you’ve plonked a mountain in your landscape there’s a limit to what you can do with it. It doesn’t change independently of the light or the weather. It’s not as versatile as music would be, if we introduced music into the background of our stories – as you are doing with your own book, The Enchanting of Vaughan Williams. 

Yes, music is certainly versatile, John and speaking as someone who's written to a background of Vaughan Williams musical landscapes, for nearly half my life, I'd be lost without it. Other writers, whoever, react with horror at the very thought of allowing music to interfere with an existing inspiration. One thing's for certain. As this series of blogs have proved, landscape can enhance and even be the dominant idea, particularly in fantasy fiction. 

Yes, indeed. Or just help it along. Green, open fields give you one mood; dark-brown, brooding moors another. If your characters are plotting deviously, maybe you could walk them down some twisted paths through tangled woods as they plot.  If you want to mark a significant break with the previous action, just change the scenery. 

The thing about writing is that you’re probably doing this anyway, without thinking about it. I based Phaedra’s home on the Welsh and Scottish borders I knew: solid, chunky places with massive towers.  And I gave it a solid-sounding-name, ‘Trant.’

Then she makes a runaway marriage and I took her to her new husband’s castle.

“She had ridden out of the forest and found herself on the lip of a broad, level valley in the hills, with the castle rearing from its steep and lonely spur opposite. The floor of the valley was covered in olive groves and had looked, from above, much like a huge garden. The afternoon light had played on the walls, and on the masses and masses of white flowers that grew in the tangled briars of the castle spur. As the cavalcade had poured down towards the trees the hills had rung with horn music.”

(This vision is directly inspired by Britten’s setting of Tennyson’s The Splendour Falls, incidentally.)

I gave this castle a name that was both like and unlike to Trant: more airy, with a little sibilant. I called it ‘Tarceny.’ I contrasted its slender towers with Trant’s solid fortifications. This much was deliberate.

White Castle in Monmouthshire - one of the inspirations for the Castle of  Tarceny in 'The Cup of the World'

What was not deliberate was that I based Trant on a real castle, but Tarceny on a fantasy. Trant, in the end, stands for duty and for honesty. It’s a touchstone place. Tarceny is  where Phaedra’s dream becomes a nightmare. The reality of one, and the fantasy of the other, will have had its effect on me as I wrote of these places. Something of that effect will have translated to the reader, even though neither of us will have been fully aware of what I was doing.

*I was so glad when I picked up ‘The Cup of the World’ and began reading it. Not only was I quickly caught up in your main character Phaedra and the impossible situation she finds herself in, but there is a wealth of landscape, beginning with a wonderful map of the kingdoms. Do you love maps in children’s books as much as I do?

I love maps, except when they are mine.

A map is a half-told story. It isn't the whole thing, but it allows you a tantalising guess at what the whole thing might be like. Because maps are detailed, they imply that the story or the land that they illustrate will be rich in detail too. What they say is, “You could go here. You could go and have a look at all these places.”

I remember after I'd read The Lord of the Rings, when I was about thirteen and I had the urge it draw the whole map - which I did, painstakingly and to a fairly decent standard I could go nowhere near attaining nowadays. I have no idea what led me to do it - just, I suppose, some deep-seated desire to enter Tolkien's world more completely.

Maps are Very Exciting!

Except, as I say, when it comes to my own.  I remember receiving the draft map for The Fatal Child (number Three in the Cup series.) At first I was delighted. It was clear, and  beautifully illustrated with castles and heraldry and knights galloping romantically about.

Then an awful thought dawned. It was sent to me for proofreading. All the places in the story had to be put in exactly the right spot. And yes, most were more or less right. But when you got down to it with the text in one hand and the map in the other... Hey, surely that town has to be north of this one? And the other one, here, can't have an outlet to the sea. And it's all got to be consistent with the maps in numbers One and Two, hasn't it? Why did we do that on the last map anyway?

In theory none of this is difficult, but it's got to be right. And that's what really gets me about my own maps. They aren't tantalising hints any more. They're complicated engineering diagrams, like blueprints of the International Space Station. You can't just put stuff in fuzzily and leave the rest to the imagination, which is the way I like to work. You’re supposed to know every blade of grass in this land. And fix it in its place.

This is where you have to give it to the reader and say ''Look - this is how it is.” And if you get it wrong, there will be readers telling you so. 

Deep breath. Pencil. Rubber. Coffee…

More coffee...

Possibly something stronger, even?

The landscape and tone of your trilogy series has been described as medieval. Is that a description you agree with, or were consciously trying to produce?

It’s a society loosely based on western Christendom in the fifteenth-century. I read The Pastons and their England for background, and I gave it a Mediterranean climate. So when I started building the world I had an idea, for example, how many manors a lord might own, how many people lived there and what they might grow to support themselves. I didn’t have to parade that detail in front of my readers, but when I brought my outlaw knight Aun to Trant for the first time I knew what would interest him about the place.  That gave me a solid, credible world, so that when I started to introduce the magic and the nightmare the contrast would work.

For inspiration:  I consciously steered away from Tolkien. Middle-Earth has such a dominating effect on the genre that you need to pull away hard if you want to escape it. I owed a lot to TH White’s The Once and Future King, and to the knightly characters in Kipling’s Puck Of Pook’s Hill short stories.  You may also recognise the infuence of MR James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. James has a gift for keeping his ghosts and beastlies largely hidden as his stories unfold, so that it’s only at the climax that you confront the nightmare. 

Your later science fiction novel WE presents a very specific landscape problem, in that in a sense there isn’t one. It’s a claustrophobic world and very chilling for me, always bringing me back to that idea of a lonely death in space. Having recently read a Ray Bradbury short story on that very theme, I wonder if there were conscious sci-fi tropes or ideas you wanted to work with?

Yes, this was a deliberate attempt to get back to classic SF, where the science is still a recognisable development of current technology and the worlds are those of this solar system, rather than alternative fantasies. It uses the Adam and Eve story, which is standard SF material. It also owes much to classic dystopian fiction such as 1984, which is about the balance between the individual and the collective will.  

But there is a landscape in science fiction. It’s there all the time, even though mostly you can’t see it. It’s deathly and barren and utterly cold. One of the challenges of writing that book was to make the reader sense how cold it must be out there – so cold that a human body, falling to the ground in that light gravity, will shatter like glass. You’ll never escape it. There’s no return to Earth from here. All you can do is live there in your little bubble and project on your walls images of the blue skies and green fields where you will never walk again. The real landscape is out there, all around you, as dark as twilight and as cold as death.

Now it’s fair to say that quite a lot of your career pre writing was spent around the landscape of politics and politicians. Do you feel that that might have enriched that aspect of your work in things like coup and counter coup, say?

Actually, it was working in a big government department that gave me the first clue about how the WE would operate. When you’ve realised that nobody, really, is in charge of things, not even the people at the top, and that it’s the process that’s making the decisions – that starts you thinking.

But you are right that Whitehall and my history degree between them have allowed me to write with confidence about things like politics, intrigue and the way that power-brokers speak and think.  If that confidence comes through to the reader (as it should) then it will be easier for the reader to believe my power-struggles as they unfold. 

I try not to explain too much to the reader. I deploy the characters’ words and actions pretty much as I think they would have said them, and I leave the reader to catch on, as if they were ambassadors from a foreign country earwigging in the background. It’s their job to understand this culture, and to work out what’s been left unsaid from what they have heard. It makes it more real, I think.

So, taking you back to your childhood with your father, Peter Dickinson, a double Carnegie winner. Was there an urge to do what he did, or perhaps to do the opposite?

No, but yes. I wasn’t going to be a writer. I was going to be a Big Hero. And when I found out that there wasn’t much chance of becoming a hero (I was lacking too much of the basic material) then I was going to be a power-broker myself, and the corridors of Whitehall would tremble when I spoke.

(Ah, me…)

But as I was really just a socially inept and over-educated male, what I did in my lonely early adult evenings was sit down and write.  Not because I wanted to be like Dad, but because he had shown me that it was possible.  So I did. 

It was a lot harder than he had made it look.

I’ve been dying to ask you about your work writing on The Phoenix, the rather wonderful comic which David Fickling Books produce. How did that come about and do you have any special memories or favourite stories?

Ah. Well,writing for the Phoenix Comic came about because I was already on the payroll as the accounts department, which was my day-job at the time. If you are going to let an author of fantasy fiction take charge of your finances, you might as well put him to good use while you are all waiting to see if the numbers turn out the way he says they will.

So as well as sitting on my high stool adding up columns of figures with my quill pen I was also allowed to write a few jolly short stories, and also a script for a costume comic-strip adventure called Red Jack that I’m currently trying to turn into a novel.

Favorite memories? I think what most people don’t realise is that working in an accounts section is always a barrel of laughs. No, really it is, and that’s not just in a start-up in an industry like publishing where your business model is teetering on the far edge of plausibility. It’s like that all the time. Especially when the expense claims come in, and you start having those interesting little conversations with colleagues each month. ‘Ah, Mr Gladwin. This receipt for an evening at a lap-dancing club… Shall we say that was for, er, “Client Entertainment”?’ 

It’s very important to keep a straight face when you do this.

Thanks for letting the cat out of the bag, John. I was trying to  keep that one quiet!

But joking apart, this work in turn made you much more aware of what, I suppose, we should call the ‘Koala Affair, which begs the simple question. How much involvement do you believe the koalas have in the current crisis? Could there be a hidden global conspiracy? Do you think people may have to wake up and treat the koala crisis seriously?

I think that at times like this we have to discard our prejudices and look at the facts. The plain facts are:

·        whatever it was, the koalas did it;

and:

·        koalas never do anything without a reason.

Koalas would not blink at mass suffering, if it extended their domination. (There’s very little they do blink at, but that’s because they’re pretending to be asleep for twenty hours a day.) But their methods are devious.  We need to look at what’s moving under the surface. Then we’ll see where the furry little beasts have laid their fore claw. If the Directors of Zoom and the makers of sweatpants are receiving secret instructions written on gum-tree leaves, we need to know.

NB And for those of us reading this who think we’ve both lost it, I can only refer you to this link of John’s below, which will lead you to his story ‘King Crime Koala’. But I’ll warn you – your world will never be the same if you do.

https://www.john-dickinson.net/2018/01/king-crime-koala/

Sshhh! Steve, for goodness’ sake! They have ears everywhere!They’ll hear you!!

Gosh, sorry, John. I forgot! I hope there aren't any consequences for you as a whistle-blower. I'd better let you go.

I think its best if I leave as unobtrusively as possible, Steve.

Thanks John.

Sssh!

Sorry!