|
Jubilee
Books: You've just had your first book published in
Britain, Sabriel. What can you tell us this new book?
Garth Nix: It’s the story of a young woman
(Sabriel) who's grown up in a sort of a 1918-ish version
of England called Ancelstierre. She's been at boarding school
pretty much all her life, but she actually comes from a
magical kingdom which is separated from Ancelstierre by
a wall. Her expectation is that she’ll go back there in
due coarse and rejoin her father. She’s at that point in
her life where all sorts of things could happen and she
has to make her decisions for the future. But the book begins
when she receives a message from her father which sets off
a whole chain of events where she has to return to the Old
Kingdom, the magical country. Her father is by no means
a normal person, he's actually necromancer. A necromancer
is a magician who deals with the dead and death. He’s actually
a kind of anti-necromancer who has the job of putting to
rest the dead who’ve risen, and of banishing spirits who
have returned from death to life. Sabriel, from the relatively
sheltered experience of her boarding school, is thrown into
the Old Kingdom where she has to find out what’s happened
to her father who is missing and is perhaps somewhere in
death, another place that Sabriel and her father are able
to enter.
So it’s an adventure story, it's a fantasy adventure, it’s
a coming of age story. What I wanted to write was a fantasy
adventure. Sabriel comes from a relatively stable and secure
environment and is suddenly thrust into this very challenging,
dangerous and perilous world, not only to find her father,
but she must also confront an enormous danger not only to
the Old Kingdom but also to the technological world of Ancelstierre.
I hope it’s exciting and enthralling. Readers and critics
seem to have responded well to it and have found that it’s
a book that once you start reading you don’t want to put
it down and that was my aim.
I
know that the book was published some time ago in Australia
and in the USA. Why has it taken so long for it to be published
in the UK?
It was first published in Australia in 1995 and appeared
in the US in 1996 and back when we were first selling it
around the world British publishers liked it but wanted
to buy the rights to the whole Commonwealth. This was a
common scenario when a book had already been published in
Australia or New Zealand already. If those rights were not
available, British publishers would be less keen to take
the book on because they saw their market as being much
reduced and much less chance of the book being successful.
Sabriel Canada had also come off as well because
that had been sold to an American publisher. So while there
was some interest, publishers would agree to buy the UK
rights to Sabriel but wanted the Commonwealth rights
to later books. Being an Australian who wanted to be published
in Australia and New Zealand by an Australian publisher
I had to say that I wasn't interested in that. This was
much more common years ago but I think things have changed
a lot. My agent and I decided that we would forget about
the UK market for the time being and concentrate on the
US and my home market and hopefully the books will do well
enough in America that eventually a UK publisher would publish
it just for the UK market. I think in the back of my head
I thought it might take a couple a years but it has rather
longer.
You
mentioned previously that Ancelstierre is seperated from
the Old Kingdom by a physical wall. In a fantasy novel it's
quite unusual to have these very different worlds excisting
in such close proximity, quite often the magical world and
the real world exist as parallel places. Why did you choose
this kind of setting?
The first World War is actually a main area of interest
and is an influence on Sabriel. The border between
the Old Kingdom and Ancelstierre, between the world of magic
and the world of technology. The wall, which is the magical
barrier, but on the Ancelsterrian side they've built there
WWI trench line. In a way that's a metaphor for the stupidity
of the First World War because it's manned by troops who
are directed from very far away generals who insist that
they are equiped and fight in the same way they would anywhere
else in technological Ancelstierre. This is completely pointless
with the sorts of enemies they face, they actually aren't
allowed to train their men in charter magic or not allowed
to use silver weopons, but they do because they have to
to be effective. I never thought of that at the time, as
a sort of metaphor for the brass hat stupidity of World
War I, but it is.
The
interest in the fantasy genre has grown massively since
Sabriel was first published in Australia, especially the
Harry Potter phenomenon, Philip Pullman and the Lord
of the Rings. It must almost have been a blessing in
disguise that your books did take so long to get published
in the UK.
In that time the whole climate for children's and young
adult fantasy has changed. With Harry Potter and
Philip Pullman and so on, the world climate has changed,
the things I was writing about have become much more in
demand. So I was fortunate in that respect, in that I haven't
jumped on the bandwagon, I was already on it. As I described
it to someone else that I swimming along paddling this little
canoe and suddenly this Potter-Pullman wave caught up with
me and I've been carried along in it's wake. So those circumstances
changed, British publishers started getting much more interested
in the books a while ago. We decided as we've waited a few
years already and picked a time to go with it. I also got
new representaion in the UK, Amanda Harwood, who's done
a fantastic job. So it's publishing history I suppose. Not
only has the attitude of British publishers changed with
them being prepared to publish just the UK rights to a book,
but also the greater environment has changed as well, where
the area in which I'm writing is in vogue.
There's
a wonderful endorsement from Philip Pullman on the back
of your book about the relationship between fantasy and
reality and you mentioned metaphor previously. How much
of your work is metaphor? How much of it is mysticism? What
elements are important to you?
I think realism is very important. The Philip Pullman quote
has been enormously helpful. He actually provided it many
years ago for the American publication as part of a much
longer, very kind E-mail he wrote about the book. I think
he's absolutely right, you need start with the foundation
of realism which you then build upon because it needs to
feel real to the reader. You need to feel that this is a
real story that could be happening somewhere, it's not here,
it's not now, but if you start with a foundation of reality
you can build upon it with layers of mysticism or myth and
so on. So I'm a very keen believer in that bedrock of realism.
That applies to characters who seem like real people, not
stereotypical cardboard cut out constructs who just serve
plot purposes. Also the environment they're in needs to
feel real, people get cold, get frightened and get tired.
The landscape is particularly important in fantasy, it needs
to feel like a real place and the settings need to seem
as if they could exist. I think you also do need to drive
roots into myth and legend. I think in Western culture we
have this big reservoir of myth and legend and fairytales
which is inside us, and we respond to that and there's some
connection in a fantasy novel to that myth and legend. It
actually enhances the realism because it strikes a chord
in the reader.
I never consciously set out to write a metaphorical story
or to communicate any sort of message. At the same time
if I've done my job well there will be more to it, people
will find metaphors and find things that speak to them just
beyond their enjoyment of the story. I think if you consciously
inject those elements you're bound for failure, for me they
need to grow organically out of the story.
You
talked about the characters in your books in the last question
and I think that fantasy allows you to develop quite complex
and extreme characters. Who are some of your own favourite
characters from fiction and in particular fantasy?
That's a tough question. I don't tend to pick out characters
from stories, although they are part of what I love about
great stories. To take Lord of the Rings as an example,
to choose that great fountainhead of fantasy literature
of recent times, It's the totality of it that I respect
and admire but the characters are very real in that and
I certainly have favourites there. In other genres, like
detective stories for example, all my favourite stories
are ones where the details of the crime are irrelevant.
One of my favourite writers in that genre is Dorothy Sayers,
but I'm not interested in the crimes, I'm interested in
the relationship between Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Bain.
That human story always outweighs the story of crime and
punishment that is taking place. So I think in fantasy when
characters seem real that enhances the overall story.
The
UK edition of Sabriel is a very beautiful hardback
with a very simple cover design, one of the most intersting
I have seen for some time. It is very different to the covers
for the American and Australian editions of the same book.
How important is the artwork to you, and how successful
do you think the cover is?
I think it's extremely important. Everyone says to never
judge a book by its cover, but everyone is attracted to
a book by its cover. So a great cover might attract many
more people to pick up the book and then get entranced by
the content. The cover is enormously important and it needs
to communicate the right message to its readership. Many
years ago I was working in a bookstore and a book came in
which had a fantasy sounding title and a fantasy looking
cover but in fact it was an historical novel. That just
communicated the wrong message because the fantasy people
would pick it up and read the back and put it back and the
historical readers, even though it was in that section,
would not pick it up because it didn't look like their sort
of book. I think one of the great achievements with this
cover of Sabriel is that it's quite enigmatic so it immediately
grabs your attention, whilst at the same time sending this
subtle message that it is a fantasy novel. Another thing
I like about it is that it doesn't dictate its age group.
The book has a large adult readership in America as well
as a young adult readership and to my mind it's proved to
be one of those books that can be read by anyone from eleven
or twelve up. Adults read it, teenagers read it and very
precocious kids read it, and with the British cover it will
suit any of those audiences. I think that HarperCollins
have got it right.
A
number of children's authors who I've spoken to have said
that they don't consciously write for children. Fantasy,
though, does seem to be very popular with children. Why
do you think this is?
I think it is a very popular genre across the board and
I think that fantasy appeals to children in the same way
that it appeals to adults as it offers an alternative to
their normal life. It offers an exciting and often adventurous
story which takes them out of the normal surrounds, which
is part of the attraction of reading anyway because all
books do that to some extent. Whether you're going back
to Jane Austen in 1820 or with Tolkien to middle earth,
there's that basic attraction. I think children are authorized
to go there, to enter a fantasy world and people have no
trouble with them using their book plus their imagination
to go somewhere else. I think there is some societal pressure
for adults not to wander off in their heads, although I
think less than there has been. Kids are allowed to dream,
with adults it's frowned upon to some degree. I think it's
a great thing and healthy thing and imagination is not a
dirty word, or it certainly shouldn't be.
What
are you working on at the moment?
Up until 4am Tuesday morning last week I was just completing
the first book of a new 7 book series called the Keys
to the Kingdom which is actually for somewhat younger
readers as a core audience, although I hope it'll have an
appeal across the board. Like CS Lewis, I believe a good
children's book can is for any age, but the main character
there is twelve or thirteen so somewhat younger than Sabriel.
That's another fantasy but it's one that starts in our contemporary
world. It has a boy who becomes the accidental heir to powers
and the heir to the secrets of the Universe. With this comes
many troubles so he is embroiled in a clash of powers that
underlie the whole of reality. Our world is only one of
many worlds, but there is a central reality, the record
keeping repository of the whole Universe that has become
incredibly stuffed up after years of neglect and misuse.
This boy is, by chance, roped in to sort this out. It's
a fantasy adventure and that's what I'm working on at the
moment. We haven't actually sold to a British publisher
yet, that'll have an American release next year. It's quite
an odd situation I'm in where, because my books have been
out elsewhere in the world, they are out of sync with publishing
in Britain.
What
are your hobbies and interests?
I'm a very keen fisherman. I like rock fishing, not trying
to catch rocks, but sea fishing I suppose you'd call it,
fishing from from the rocks rather than beach fishing. I
swim and body surf off the beach, which seems to be a peculiar
Australian thing to do. I'll have to explain it to other
people, but it's basically surfing without a board, using
yourself as the board. I read enormously widely still. I'm
not one of those writers who hasn't got time to read, I'd
die if I couldn't read. I have a new baby son too, Thomas,
who's a new major occupation for myself and my wife , so
that's very exciting, being a father. In terms of interests,
military history is one of my great interests and one of
my main reading areas, history in general. A lot of my interests
are represented in my reading and reading non-fiction is
one of my major passions.
Can
I ask you what book you're reading at the moment?
I just finished reading a book on Field Marshall Montgomerry,
called The Full Monty, which is a very interesting
biography that I read on the plane over. I read a lot of
biographies, I tend to have periods where I'll buy three
of four biographies, or three or four books of non-fiction
and read those or I'll but three or four fantasy novels
or children's novels. I've got a whole stack . I'm hoping
to get the proof of the new Dianne Wynne Jones novel from
HarperCollins, I'm a big fan of Dianne Wynne Jones.
I
know you've already written two sequels to Sabriel.
When can we expect to see those?
Lirael will be out in hard cover this time next year,
with the paperback of Sabriel, and Abhorsen
will be out the following year.
|
>
Buy Sabriel
RELATED LINKS  >
Garth
Nix website
> Sabriel
website
Jubilee
Books is not responsible for the content of external Internet
sites
|
