John Dickinson

It’s happened again!

Someone’s put my book in the wrong age category. This could take forever to sort out. You’d think a single phone call would do it, but no. You call someone and they talk to someone and they tell someone else, and by the time the buttons are pressed up at Book Control Central the answer you get can be worse than the one you started with. And out in the shops the book is on the wrong shelves. If it’s made it to the shelves at all.

Categorising by age is fraught with problems. The categories are simple things: 9-12, teenage, adult etc. But the mind is not simple. It can reach in all directions. My daughter loves Jane Eyre and has read Camus and Primo Levi. But in the same month she was reading Camus she was also reading Tamora Pierce’s teenage fantasy-heroine fiction, and she was loving that too. And adults loved Harry Potter, didn’t they?

Books aren’t simple either. A rollicking child adventure story can work at profoundly different levels. So how do you categorise it? There may be no more misleading term in literature than the words ‘Children’s Fiction’.

We have to have age categories. Most authors are simply not well-enough known for their work to reach their intended audiences without some guidance. So this author does not fall down and start tearing up the carpet with his teeth just because someone might put an age-label on his book. What he objects to is getting an age-label that’s wrong.

My fantasy novels are aimed both at teenagers who like to think as they read, and at adults who loved The Lord of the Rings and who have never lost that. I don’t mind these books being categorised as teenage novels (although I would prefer to see them on the mainstream fantasy shelves, because teenagers do look there for their reading, whereas it’s a rare adult who goes browsing on the teenage shelves). But I did protest when I found them in the 9-12 category. It took months and months to get that changed.

WE is definitely mainstream science fiction. Never mind that the editor is known as a publisher of children’s fiction: that’s what it is. The hero is adult, the theme is dystopian, there is little zap-kapow and the young love quotient is nil. Sure teenagers will read it and like it for what it is, but I don’t want them misled about what they’re getting. And I want the book to be where adults will find it. When I heard that it was being put on the children’s shelves, I objected. So did my editor. Calls were made. The coding was changed, I was assured, within days of my protest. Hurrah! Maybe we’ve learned something.

Except that I was in a local Waterstones on Friday. I was waving WE’s Times, Guardian and other reviews under the nose of the counter staff. Yes, said the counter staff on duty (a polite and intelligent young man called George,) they did have the book in stock. Great. And, er, what category was it under?

George checked his screen. Nine to twelve, he said.

Sounds of teeth in carpet.

Here’s another question I hear a lot. ‘What kinds of books do you write?’

Fair enough. The guy says he’s an author. So what kind of author is he? I say – ‘Well, three of them are fantasy novels…’ And my questioner nods. They know now what kind of author I am.

Except that I then say ’… and one’s a historical novel…’. And while they’re thinking about that , I add ‘…and I’ve just published one that’s science fiction.’ And maybe I will also explain that while the fantasy novels were marketed for teenagers, the historical one is definitely for adults and WE, the SF novel is, er… for both, maybe.

At this point I’m usually getting a reaction along the lines of ‘How come you do so many different things?’ And my answer is that I don’t think they are different.

Well - not that different.

There is a problem with labels like ‘Fantasy’, ‘History’, ‘Children’s book’ etc. We have to have them. If we didn’t, we couldn’t begin to distinguish between books at all. But they quickly become misleading. Fantasy and Science Fiction blur easily into one another (Are Anne McAffrey’s dragons fantasy or SF?). So do Fantasy and History. My interest in medieval history, which I ended up studying at university, began with The Lord of the Rings. And the word ‘Children’s’ is the most misleading of all. Compare the intellectual content of The Dark Materials with that of your standard formulaic thriller that flies off supermarket shelves in thousands, for example.

If you look at my books, the covers will tell you that they are all completely different. They will say ‘Fantasy’, ‘History’ and ‘Science Fiction’. That’s marketing, and it works. But if you read them…

Ah. If you read them…

In each one, the central character makes some kind of moral or spiritual journey. It involves suffering, duty, maybe sacrifice, and in the end leads to a greater understanding. That, I think, is common to all of them.

On that journey there is usually an encounter with the devil, in some form. It is not an actual encounter. It is metaphorical or symbolic. It’s about thinking thoughts or hearing words that will lead you into darkness.

And what are the paths of escape? Well, love may be one. Sacrifice is certainly one. Perhaps just a greater understanding of yourself and your own weakness. On this journey the way to the devil is easy. It’s finding the path back that matters.

I write in different settings and with different voices. That’s important for freshness. It’s a rare author who can do the same thing for book after book without losing quality (never mind that that’s what the public and the marketing department want him to do). But it seems to me that I’m writing about the same thing, like an artist walking around an object and sketching it from different angles. One view can’t capture the whole. Maybe no number of separate views will.

But if I ever did feel I had captured it?

Sure. I’d go and write something different.

And now I come to Atti, the Fatal Child herself.  ‘She’s the real heroine’ our artist said after reading the novel.  Maybe he’s right.  She is central, she is brave.  She has moments of humanity and compassion even when things are at their very worst for her.  Much of what goes wrong around her is actually the fault of others, who love her too much and whose love she is unable to return because of her inner nightmare.  It is this nightmare, this terror, that is her defining flaw.

How do you invent a character, particularly one who is so complex and important to the story?  I know where I first saw her, in the image that came to me of a young woman standing quite still in a garden while a massacre went on not far away.  And I knew what I wanted from her.  She was to bring the series of three books full circle.  She would share many things with Phaedra, the heroine of The Cup of the World (a dark beauty, a scarred and lonely childhood, a husband who courts her in her dreams).  Yet now it would not be the man who would lead us down the path towards darkness, but the woman.  Where Phaedra had fought her nightmares and won, Atti must fight them and lose.  She would be the earthly embodiment of Beyah, the goddess who weeps forever.  She was to play the role of Guenevere.

All that was the easy bit. I did not so much plan it as find it rising to the surface of my brain when I was working out the story.  As always, the hard part is filling in the stuff that doesn’t come naturally.  In this case it was harder still because one of the important things about Atti is that she doesn’t want you to get to know her.   She turns away, doesn’t look at you, doesn’t let you see what she’s thinking.  She has a coldness that is defensive.  As the various redrafts went by I put in first one new chapter, then a second, at the start of Part Two, learning more about her through the eyes of the peasant girl Melissa.   The final redraft, when I’d got just about everything else sorted to my satisfaction, was devoted pretty well entirely to Atti, to wake her up and round her off, and also to give her an exit that would balance her first entry, stepping out across a muddy, torchlit yard with single spots of rain hissing like arrows from the sky.

The Fatal Child is told through the eyes of two characters: Thomas Padry, a high-ranking servant of the King, and Melissa, an orphaned peasant girl.

The choice of viewpoint is a fundamental decision for the author.  Is the reader to be in the head of one character, or more than one, or standing back from all of them?  If one character, should it be the ‘I’ voice, or the third person? How far should the reader identify and sympathise with this character - totally,  mostly or not much? (”Not Much” is very risky!)   More viewpoints give the writer more freedom. We can plausibly witness a range of scenes without having to find reasons why one person is there to see them all.  But of course there is more work to be done in building characters who are satisfactory companions for the reader.  The answers to these questions will colour the whole story.

In this case I did not have to think very hard.  The Fatal Child is a story of two camps - the King’s and the Queen’s.  I needed a witness in each camp.  I also had - it often seems to happen this way - two characters who had taken minor parts in the previous novel (The Widow and the King) and about whom I wanted to know more.  Better still, they were very different. The contrast between them became part of the telling.

Thomas Padry is a former teacher, a man who has a big brain and knows it. But his soul is not quite built to match.  He means well, thinks of himself as someone who does good, but is blind to his own faults and commits a grave error.  Over the course of the novel he finds that all the products of his brain will come to nothing.  His good works will be overtaken, his advice is ignored, his peacemaking is futile.  This should be a moment of destruction for him but it is not.  He is redeemed by the way he has come to love his king, and by his willingness to suffer in service.

Melissa too loves the King - this is the one thing she has in common with Padry.  But she sees him from a wholly different perspective.  Her journey in the novel is to understand the difference between a love that idolises and one that is realistic, and to choose the second rather than the first.  She is simple and practical.  The intrigues of the court are way over her head.  Where Padry is a doer, Melissa represents the down-trodden and the done-to.  But her moral compass is better than his.  When the powers speak, at the end of the novel, it is through Melissa that they find their voice.

The Fatal Child launches in UK today.  I should be used to this moment, but I’m not.  It’s scary.

I’m talking to at least five audiences over the next few days, starting with the pupils of the High School for Girls and the Kings School in Gloucester.  My talk there is on Ideas, and it’s the first time I’ve done it (Somehow I always have to write a new talk for each occasion).  But what’s really scary is that this time I’ve chosen to support the talk with visual aids, so I’m using a laptop and projector.  Projectors are like sulky stallions.  They know when they’re in the hands of a tyro, and they can’t wait to throw you.  And for an encore they pick a fight with the laptop.

The other immediately scary thing is that walkers in Eastgate, Gloucester, have been hailed for the past few days by big posters in the Waterstones bookshop window, announcing my appearance there on Saturday.  What if I get there on the day and find them queuing around the block?  Or if I get there and no one comes in at all?  (Far more likely - if they’re queuing around the block it’ll be a case of mistaken identity.  There’ll be some rock star with my name that only I have never heard of, and they’ll all think it is him.  Or the posters have got muddled up and everyone thinks it’s Barak Obama doing the signing.)

And then there’s the book itself.     The Fatal Child.  My child, so to speak.

It’s not so much what’s in the book.  I know that’s good, and different.  It will please a majority of people who read it (one nice review already).  What nags at me, worries me, is the bit between the moment it hits the shelves and the moment that readers start turning its pages. Why should they pick this one out of so many?  In a world of thousands of thousands of books, very few make it in meaningful numbers.  What can I do about it?  Very little.  I can talk, to those who will listen.  I can carry on talking about the book even when I think people probably aren’t listening.   But mostly I can only watch.  The child has gone out into the world now.  She must make her way on her own.

I worked at NATO for a while.  There was a lot of sitting in big meetings hearing diplomats take turns to speak.  The best speakers often began with the phrase “Thank you, Mr Chairman.  I have just three points…”

You’ve got something to say - a joke, a speech, a story, it doesn’t matter.  How do you keep people listening to you?  Try putting it into a structure of three.  “There was an Irishman, and Englishman and a Scotsman…”  How many is that?  Three.  How many people passed the wounded man on the road to Jericho? Three, the third being the Good Samaritan.  The oldest fiction in the English language is Beowulf.   It’s a story in three parts, of a man who fights three monsters, and the third causes his death.  (Did anyone see the film?  Not a bad effort, I thought).  Our minds like things that come in threes. The first time we just see what happens.  The second time we recognise it.  The third time we are ready for the twist or the punch - whatever it is that’s coming.  Three has a power.  For the storyteller, it’s like a force of gravity.  It bends things into a new path.

I was not planning a third book in The Cup of the World series.  I could almost hear the yawns.  Another fantasy trilogy?  Who was going to take that seriously these days?  The Widow and the King had a good, solid ending, and I thought of leaving it there.  I also thought at one stage of breaking The Fatal Child into two, to make four books, just so there wouldn’t be three.  But the power of three is very strong.  Right from the start I had given myself - yes - three monsters.  They were Phaedra’s husband Ulfin, his mentor the prince Paigan and the goddess Beyah.  (This in itself is a good illustration of how the power of three works:  I actually had at least ten monsters, the other seven being the brothers of prince Paigan.  But what the mind sees is the pattern of three.)  By the end of The Widow I had dealt with the husband and the prince.  I had not yet dealt with the goddess.

She had begun as a moment of spontaneous invention during the first draft of The Cup.  A world figure, weeping for a dead child.  (Lots of resonances there - our guilt towards our parents, a sense of original sin, our fears about the way we are treating the Earth…) At that stage I just wanted her for the mood music, pointing implicitly to the danger that Phaedra and her own child faced.  Then I decided that those divine tears must be the source of the magic.  This conveniently joined up a couple of loose creative threads.  But from that moment the goddess became one of Three - the three from whom the bitter magic of that world came.  You don’t see her often - just twice, fleetingly, in the whole series. Yet the idea of her is immensely powerful.  She underlies everything that happens.  It was because of her that the third book was written.

Today my first copy of The Fatal Child has come through the post from my publishers.  I have put it on the shelf beside The Cup of the World and The Widow and the King.  There they are together, unashamedly three.

It’s time to talk about The Fatal Child. And to do that I need to start by looking at The Cup of the World and The Widow and the King as well.

Readers often comment that the fantasy element in these stories is limited. That is true. There are no wizards, no armies of goblins or trolls, no dragons (well, there is a dragon, but he is one of a small number of spirits who stay in the background and don’t often appear). The action takes place in a small medieval kingdom that happens to be somewhere else, among humans whose attitudes, technology and religion are approximately those of Europe in the 14th or 15th centuries. There is very little magic. This is quite deliberate.

One of the lessons I learned at my father’s knee is how hard it is for the story-teller to keep magic “real”. The more you have of it, the harder you have to work to create rules for it that readers can understand and accept. If you get it wrong they’ll be wondering why the hero can’t solve all his problems with a well-aimed zap in chapter six. Another lesson is that extraordinary things cease to be extraordinary if they are exposed too often. Take monsters. A monster that has no name, is kept in the shadows, is never seen clearly (think of Alien, or the ghost stories of MR James) is far more scary than one that emerges fully into the light, slobbering and festooned in the guts of its victims. Why? Because the first sort is amplified by the audience’s imagination. The second seems to assume - pardon me - that the audience has none.

And now we’ve got to it. It’s that word “imagination”. It’s not magic that makes a fantasy. It’s what the audience is asked to see in their minds: the landscapes, the colours, the buildings (I think JK Rowling had far more fun building Hogwarts than she did deciding what should come spouting from Harry’s wand). In fantasy the imagination of artist and audience is allowed to roam beyond the world we know. If you are up for that, then you start your journey with a sense of excitement that you won’t get elsewhere. And this freedom to create should support the narrative. The landscapes of the Cup series - the lake, the castles, the warm woods and the cold mountains - are essential to the vision of that beautiful and troubled little world.

Fantasy allows a further freedom to the author, which sometimes we use well and sometimes we use badly. This is that it is possible to deal with questions of good and evil more openly than in a conventional setting. There is usually an Evil One who has to be confronted. So much the worse, you may say, and you may be right. It is misleading to externalise evil and suggest that you can solve it by hitting it on the head with a battleaxe. But often the central characters in fantasies recognise a likeness in themselves to the thing that they confront. They see their own capacity for evil, and must avert it or endure the consequences of what they have done. The malign forces in The Cup of the World series are not the sort that send out armies to conquer everybody. They work through the way the characters behave, the way that love turns to blindness and suffering to revenge. The people in these books are like us, only set in another place. The otherness of that place enhances their story.

That is why these books are fantasies.

I love maps. Except when they are mine.

I’ve always loved maps - road maps, historical maps, maps in books showing places that have never existed. One way of passing time as a child in the family car was to get out the road map and see if I could find home. (I always could. If I hadn’t been able to it would have been less fun. That’s what I was like.) An early inspiration for The Lightstep came from looking at maps of the Holy Roman Empire. If The Lightstep is a complicated novel it may just be because it was stimulated by one of the most complicated pieces of political geography ever invented by man. And maps in fantasy novels were best of all.

A map is a half-told story. A trailer. It isn’t the real thing, but it allows you a tantalising guess at what the real thing might be like. And 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. Maps are Very Exciting.

Except, as I say, when it comes to my own. I’ve explained before this (in “Putting Fiction on the Map (or not)”, 17 March 2008) why The Lightstep was supposed to have a map, what kind of map it was going to be, and why it didn’t get one. Now, about the maps in The Cup of the World and The Widow and the King… I think we were just too ambitious. We tried to put too much detail onto them. What’s more, the technique the artist used did not lend itself well to scanning and reproduction. So the result - well, you can find on them the places that the characters visit in the narrative. And there are some nice pictures of castles too. But everything is swimming in a sea of not-terribly-well-defined penstrokes, some of which are clearly rivers and some terrain, but it’s a bit hard to tell which is which.

The map for The Fatal Child arrived through the post yesterday. At first I was delighted.  It is much clearer than its predecessors, and beautifully illustrated with castles and heraldry and knights galloping romantically about - just what I would have asked for, if I had thought of it.  And then the awful thought dawned.  It was sent to me for proofreading.

Is that a problem?  Yes it is.  All the places in the story have to be put in the right place. At the moment they are distributed fairly evenly, in situations that are roughly correct at first glance and look very nice. But when you get down to it with the text in one hand and the map in the other - hey, surely that place has to be north of this one? And the other one, here, can’t have an outlet to the sea. And it’s got to be consistent with the last map, 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 space shuttle.  I can’t just put stuff in fuzzily and leave the rest to the imagination, which is the way I like to work. I’m supposed to know every blade of grass in this land.   This is where I have to give it to the reader and say ‘Look - this is how it is.’ And if it’s wrong, there’ll be hundreds of people telling me so.  And no one to blame but me.

Deep breath. No excuses. Pass the pencil. And the rubber.

And the coffee.