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.
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, 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.
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…
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?
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/
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.
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!
Sssh!
Sorry!
3 comments:
Very enjoyable and instructive interview - well done both!
Fascinating interview, Steve and John. (Must read "The Cup of the World"!)
Great interview - there's nothing like stalking your friends to find out more about their writing worlds! 😆
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