September 2007

This will be a quick column this month, ready for the publication update on September 27th, where you will find two long extracts from my new book The Stone Gods, and a podcast of me reading some of it, plus a chance to buy it at a discount, straight from the publishers. There will also be a new interview.

This is the first time in my working life as a writer that I have felt compelled to work directly with the material in front of me – by that I mean the state of the world.

I haven’t made a polemic or a documentary, but The Stone Gods is a response to where we are now, and where this now might be taking us.

I believe that the role of the artist changes, according to the time that he or she must inhabit. I have felt strongly that in our time, the inner life, the imaginative life, the life of the mind, needed strengthening and protection, because we live so much on the outside, pretending that all our needs can be met by a bit more shopping and better technology.  I have never been much interested in naturalistic writing – a kind of printed version of TV dramas, and I have tried to use the exactness of a heightened poetic language to prompt thought and to make new connections – not surface connections, but deeper joints.

I am as uninterested in fantasy writing as I am in naturalism – both feel like escapes from a real world that is rich and strange enough. There are miracles – but these are not fantasies. There are mysteries, but these are not supernatural inventions. The creatures of myth – the minotaur, the winged lion, the blind god, the hanged man, are still with us, in new disguises. The metaphors of swallowed hearts and genies in jars remain true. We can put anything in what we write, provided that it belongs to our own fully realised central vision.

I wouldn’t call His Dark Materials, or Wizard of Earthsea, or Lord of the Rings, or The Weirdstone of Brisingamen fantasy writing; each was written from a powerful place in the writer, and each uses mythology unravelled from our own DNA. This kind of work has nothing to do with special effects Hollywood versions of dragons and heroes, or the souped-up half-baked warlords/monsters books and games that come out of and feed into a regressive undeveloped imagination that shoots up on violence and comic-book storylines.

I am always fighting for literature – the real deal – because I want a complete world. Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a complete world – so is Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady. They are very different books, very different kinds of books, and it is redundant to talk about one as naturalistic and the other as free-wheeling fantasy. The best writers always make their own worlds, which sometimes resemble the one we think we live in, and sometimes show us a place not like this one at all. Henry James isn’t a great writer because he faithfully copies the world we live in and hands it back to us – he is as partial as a photographer framing a shot. His is a stylised, selected cut that distorts in order to give meaning. The sleight of hand is that we call it what we know. If it really was what we knew we would not need to know it. We go on needing to know it because it is not what we know. It is familiar, but we don’t know it.

And that sense of recognition? The feeling that this is our book, our character, our situation? The best work is a cup that holds the liquid that you are. The miracle is that someone else, very different to you, will also feel it is their book, their character, their situation. This is achieved not because we are reading a slice of life – no slice of life can do more than fit in a few of us, but because a particular set of circumstances suddenly becomes universally relevant. This happens when a book can go deeper than the top layer of life and into the subterranean place where emotion and imagination chemically react into self-revelation. We learn about ourselves through someone not ourselves – it is like falling in love – the stranger brings the gift.

But to go back a long way to where I started on all this. I decided this time to confront my own time directly. The Stone Gods is not a linear book, and it is not a left-brain book. I know by now that left-brain linear people don’t really like my stuff, and I am not criticising them for that (though I wish they would not criticise me quite so much). I write for people whose minds move more like a game of chess than a game of chase. I never go in straight lines. I am sure that when not corralled, the mind moves more in a maze than it does down a motorway. And my mind only moves in
a-maze-ment. One thing you learn over time as a writer is quite a lot about your own mind.

So, here comes a book about a broken world and the discovery of a new planet. But you’ll find out more very soon.

The role of the writer? Well, this is not a time to be a bystander. It is a time to make a response. That is what I will do now for the rest of my life. I’m not giving up anything I have done – I am not turning to politics or docu-drama. I am working as I have always worked, but I am bringing in something else, something more. All we can do is to try and make a difference.