1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:09,210 Today, I'm talking to Elizabeth Knox, the New Zealand fantasy author, perhaps best known in the U.K. for her book, 2 00:00:09,210 --> 00:00:15,930 The Absolute Book, which she wrote in 2019 but which was published in the U.K. in 2021. 3 00:00:15,930 --> 00:00:26,130 And before that, her best-known book was probably The Vintner's Luck from 1998 and its sequel, The Angel's Cut in 2009. 4 00:00:26,130 --> 00:00:30,060 And so we're delighted to be talking to Elizabeth here this morning. 5 00:00:30,060 --> 00:00:35,820 So, Elizabeth, why did you choose the fantasy genre for this particular book? 6 00:00:35,820 --> 00:00:47,890 I well, I had. I had always wanted to try to write a book like one of THE books of my life. 7 00:00:47,890 --> 00:00:55,490 I read it when I was 16, Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita. 8 00:00:55,490 --> 00:01:02,930 Which is a fantasy book and also a political satire and a number of other things. 9 00:01:02,930 --> 00:01:07,730 And a book set in Moscow in the late 1920s, 10 00:01:07,730 --> 00:01:16,250 and it was written in the 1930s but wasn't published until the 1960s and the first time it was published was published outside Russia, 11 00:01:16,250 --> 00:01:20,930 of course, because it was one of those more ... he had displaced Stalin. 12 00:01:20,930 --> 00:01:25,910 So but the thing is about this book is that it? 13 00:01:25,910 --> 00:01:35,390 That it kind of swaps between telling the story of Pontius Pilate and telling the story of some unhappy people in Moscow, 14 00:01:35,390 --> 00:01:41,360 and it has witches in it and it's the devil, and ithas a demon who's a large black cat. 15 00:01:41,360 --> 00:01:50,670 And it's kind of it's just a wild book, but it's wild and it's grand and it's funny and it's silly and it's. 16 00:01:50,670 --> 00:02:01,140 meaningful and pertinent, and I always thought I wanted to try to write a book that had this sort of sense of mixed tone and wildness to it, 17 00:02:01,140 --> 00:02:07,770 and I didn't have a way to get into it, though I knew I wanted to put Fairyland in it. 18 00:02:07,770 --> 00:02:20,470 My idea of Fairyland. And I knew I wanted to end up being kind of a book with a hidden intention, but I didn't have a way in, 19 00:02:20,470 --> 00:02:29,110 and then I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about a gene of books that we were calling arcane thrillers, 20 00:02:29,110 --> 00:02:34,120 things like Dan Brown, the book with the scholarly hero. 21 00:02:34,120 --> 00:02:40,480 And I suddenly thought, aha, that's my way in. And that's how I got to that book. 22 00:02:40,480 --> 00:02:50,530 I'd always wanted to write a book that did the kind of things that it did in terms of going out wide and then it seems to proliferate, 23 00:02:50,530 --> 00:02:59,620 but everything comes back again. So a kind of a mystery where it's an inclusive mystery. 24 00:02:59,620 --> 00:03:04,420 But the way into it had to be like an arcane thriller. That's wonderful. 25 00:03:04,420 --> 00:03:09,370 Like describing the different tones and we are keen to avoid too many spoilers here. 26 00:03:09,370 --> 00:03:16,010 So I wouldn't ask you to to rehearse the plot, but I think that explains quite a lot. 27 00:03:16,010 --> 00:03:20,860 Your reference toBulgakov there, because the moment you said that, I thought, 28 00:03:20,860 --> 00:03:25,960 yeah, that's absolutely the kind of thing that Master and Margarita is all about, isn't it? 29 00:03:25,960 --> 00:03:32,200 So was that beyond Bulgakov? What were your fantasy influences when you were growing up? 30 00:03:32,200 --> 00:03:36,160 What did you read? Everything, really. 31 00:03:36,160 --> 00:03:45,820 But well, because I'm the age I am the fantasy that I was first getting was a young adult fantasy writers, 32 00:03:45,820 --> 00:03:47,830 writers of fantasy and science fiction. 33 00:03:47,830 --> 00:04:01,780 And I can remember that I loved Ray Bradbury, who my father introduced me to, but on the less classy but but all very exciting for a young person. 34 00:04:01,780 --> 00:04:14,860 Andre Norton. The American writer who the prize is now named after the young adult fantasy writers prize, so I loved Andre Norton and then, 35 00:04:14,860 --> 00:04:22,550 of course, like everybody else around about that time, I discovered Ursula Le Guin, firstly, The Earthsea Chronicles. 36 00:04:22,550 --> 00:04:28,600 like lots of young people and The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed and so on. 37 00:04:28,600 --> 00:04:36,700 And I wasn't distinguishing between fantasy and science fiction because I knew I loved both. 38 00:04:36,700 --> 00:04:44,980 So if I was reading Ursula Le Guin's science fiction, 39 00:04:44,980 --> 00:04:53,620 the thing that I was loving about it and the fantasy without distinguishing, was how involved with the real natural world they were, 40 00:04:53,620 --> 00:04:58,750 I mean, how deeply physical and embodied her fiction is. 41 00:04:58,750 --> 00:05:04,030 So I just think those were the things that formed my tastes pretty much. 42 00:05:04,030 --> 00:05:10,090 And then, of course, you know, there was Samuel Delany and so on. 43 00:05:10,090 --> 00:05:13,120 So the interest in science fiction stayed with you then? 44 00:05:13,120 --> 00:05:18,790 Because I know speaking from my own experience and it's something I think quite a lot of young women say, 45 00:05:18,790 --> 00:05:25,090 is that they sort of enjoy science fiction quite a lot up until they become adolescent. 46 00:05:25,090 --> 00:05:29,800 And then maybe it's the kind of science fiction that's really all about space craft 47 00:05:29,800 --> 00:05:36,130 and the kind of highly technical and has really sort of a simple adventure plot. 48 00:05:36,130 --> 00:05:43,690 And everything depends on rules around time-bending and so on, that they lose that kind of taste for science fiction. 49 00:05:43,690 --> 00:05:53,830 And I must say that I love Le Guin's Earthsea chronicles, but I never got around to reading any of her science fiction until the last year or so. 50 00:05:53,830 --> 00:05:59,350 And I've been guzzling it down, I think. it's absolutely fantastic. Because its, some of these things? 51 00:05:59,350 --> 00:06:01,210 You don't know where they are? 52 00:06:01,210 --> 00:06:10,360 I think that's partly the problem is, is you need to kind of you need good readers to point to not just in the general direction of science fiction, 53 00:06:10,360 --> 00:06:19,270 but on the more specific directions, like the science fiction that has an interest in sort of anthropological things. 54 00:06:19,270 --> 00:06:28,450 Like Orson Scott Card's not very popular at the moment, but those Ender stories, 55 00:06:28,450 --> 00:06:35,950 Speaker for the Dead and so on, are incredibly good at creating different beings. 56 00:06:35,950 --> 00:06:39,220 And it's not about, it is partly about the technology. 57 00:06:39,220 --> 00:06:49,990 But but even even the AI, it's about the soul of the AI that they end up, the stories, about people and about different ways of looking at the world. 58 00:06:49,990 --> 00:06:51,660 So I think. 59 00:06:51,660 --> 00:07:03,440 I think I don't know whether it's girl readers or just readers who want the science fiction to be really about people, even if the people are trees. 60 00:07:03,440 --> 00:07:11,590 Yeah, yeah, that's right. I think the the anthropological training that Le Guin had, I think both her parents were anthropologists as well, 61 00:07:11,590 --> 00:07:20,480 which allows her to create all those different kinds of people in really quite densely imagined worlds. 62 00:07:20,480 --> 00:07:26,730 So so was Le Guin someone you felt you were speaking back to, in some ways in this book, 63 00:07:26,730 --> 00:07:34,850 or are the influences that you were kind of pushing against too many to count? 64 00:07:34,850 --> 00:07:44,990 Well, there are no, there are always specific people that I feel like I'm talking to one way or another, and it isn't that they are like me, 65 00:07:44,990 --> 00:07:58,730 it's just that, um, I think I approve of the ambition when it comes to thinking about what genre can do like Ursula Le Guin 66 00:07:58,730 --> 00:08:03,970 determinedly understands thatgenre. 67 00:08:03,970 --> 00:08:08,460 That literature appears in all genres and that literary fiction is only a genre. 68 00:08:08,460 --> 00:08:13,930 So if you get that kind of healthy frame of mind, you can. 69 00:08:13,930 --> 00:08:24,700 Be ambitious for know the things like beauty and depth and so on in your genre work. 70 00:08:24,700 --> 00:08:33,040 So I think I'm always thinking of people like her and Philip K. Dick, but specifically with that book, I was thinking of two things. 71 00:08:33,040 --> 00:08:41,440 The first was Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, and the other one was Buffy the Vampire Slayer because of the mixed tone in that, because 72 00:08:41,440 --> 00:08:48,850 it can be so incredibly grand and beautiful and moving and silly and funny and, 73 00:08:48,850 --> 00:08:52,750 you know, full of action and full of character. 74 00:08:52,750 --> 00:09:01,150 And it was the kind of the scope of not just taking one tone and going all right, this is a drama. 75 00:09:01,150 --> 00:09:11,550 So it will be dramatic. It's like I understand why people like the Scandi Noir, for instance, television series, 76 00:09:11,550 --> 00:09:18,990 but I don't really like them myself because they they just they don't make you laugh. 77 00:09:18,990 --> 00:09:21,690 And it's not that I require things to make me laugh. 78 00:09:21,690 --> 00:09:36,980 But I kind of think that you can make people worry and and feel horror and and be moved and make them laugh all in the same thing. 79 00:09:36,980 --> 00:09:41,900 That's really important, I think, to to get that sort of variety of tone. 80 00:09:41,900 --> 00:09:48,800 I know exactly what you mean about Scandi Noir in which I have to confess I'm quite addicted to, 81 00:09:48,800 --> 00:09:57,680 but tell us a bit aboutt the secondary worlds that you created for The Absolute Book, 82 00:09:57,680 --> 00:10:00,710 because it's a really capacious sort of universe, isn't it? 83 00:10:00,710 --> 00:10:07,430 I know that you've you've taught a course on worldbuilding at Victoria University in the past, 84 00:10:07,430 --> 00:10:11,480 so you must have thought quite a lot about the Secondary World. 85 00:10:11,480 --> 00:10:18,050 Can you tell us a bit about what your thinking was when you were creating that version of Fairyland? 86 00:10:18,050 --> 00:10:25,700 Well, I wanted it. I mean, Fairyland as I was thinking, you know, where the fairies are like elves, you know, 87 00:10:25,700 --> 00:10:31,850 that they are beautiful and forbidding and very, very pleased with themselves and heartless. 88 00:10:31,850 --> 00:10:40,250 And so they got all that going on. But they live in the most beautiful world where they care for their world and they care for each other 89 00:10:40,250 --> 00:10:47,210 and they care for the human beings who are living with them and in they're sort of hunter gatherers. 90 00:10:47,210 --> 00:10:51,350 And they're at one with nature. So they are admirable in very many ways. 91 00:10:51,350 --> 00:11:00,110 But then they have this business with the Tithe where they tithe, they had these these Taken people with these wonderful lives, 92 00:11:00,110 --> 00:11:10,310 they lead and then every hundred years, they have to give souls to Hell, and so they give their people more than one hundred years, 93 00:11:10,310 --> 00:11:19,280 but they do eventually just funnel them on to Hell in order to pay for the rent basically, on the land that they have. 94 00:11:19,280 --> 00:11:25,280 But I sort of wanted to make it a plot like they had that problem with Hell 95 00:11:25,280 --> 00:11:30,980 because Hell could take the land back, because they took the land originally. 96 00:11:30,980 --> 00:11:39,380 So it's you know, it's kind of a colonial thing thatthe demons of Hell, are dispossessed from the land that the fairies are now occupying. 97 00:11:39,380 --> 00:11:50,240 So it's complicated like that. And that's the insoluble problem that that's in the book. 98 00:11:50,240 --> 00:11:58,400 There are a number of insoluble problems and one of them is the problem that we have, the real problem of the fact that we are destroying the planet, 99 00:11:58,400 --> 00:12:03,770 but they have this problem of being stuck in this treaty that makes them into brutes. 100 00:12:03,770 --> 00:12:10,010 So they're very pleased with themselves. They live wonderful, civilised lives and they're brutes. 101 00:12:10,010 --> 00:12:15,050 And they look away all the time and they look away in order to survive. 102 00:12:15,050 --> 00:12:19,760 They have to not think too hard about what it is they have to do. 103 00:12:19,760 --> 00:12:27,350 And yeah, I wanted to make it as difficult as possible for them to get out of that situation and for it to be not entirely resolved, 104 00:12:27,350 --> 00:12:33,410 though the resolution to all of that is sort of built into the book. 105 00:12:33,410 --> 00:12:40,350 But I left all the closing there so that certain readers will be able to if they started thinking about various things, 106 00:12:40,350 --> 00:12:48,410 they would go, oh, you could do that. You could do this. You could do, because I quite like doing that, leaving a few clues, breadcrumbs. 107 00:12:48,410 --> 00:12:53,930 And the idea of the Tithe, I guess you took from traditional stories about Fairyland, 108 00:12:53,930 --> 00:13:01,490 like Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin? Yes, which are less folkloric traditional. 109 00:13:01,490 --> 00:13:07,790 than literary traditional, like the folkloric ones tend to be slightly more peculiar. 110 00:13:07,790 --> 00:13:20,540 So I read the Katharine Briggs book about fairies, you know, the big compendium, it's a fantastic book and then promptly discarded. 111 00:13:20,540 --> 00:13:31,820 as most of it was not useful for my purposes that I realised quite soon that mine were those literary fairies of Thomas the Rhymer and Shakespeare and so on. 112 00:13:31,820 --> 00:13:41,300 So, yeah, I though a very medieval kind of fairy in a way, not the sort of Victorian flower fairy type tiny creatures, 113 00:13:41,300 --> 00:13:50,270 but something that's much stronger and more powerful and on the same par as humans in terms of size. 114 00:13:50,270 --> 00:13:59,030 But with that kind of ruthlessness, I think that you always get with medieval fairies that they know what they want and they are going to get it. 115 00:13:59,030 --> 00:14:02,630 Yes. In the end, that they they're resolutely contractual, 116 00:14:02,630 --> 00:14:09,020 which is kind of interesting to have people that are that they are, it's not just the sense of honour. 117 00:14:09,020 --> 00:14:16,280 It's their kind of addiction to reality that they you know, that there's a contract involved. 118 00:14:16,280 --> 00:14:21,680 They have to follow it like it's like instinct. Yeah. 119 00:14:21,680 --> 00:14:26,930 That's what I always sort of admire about them, because in a way, nine times out of ten, 120 00:14:26,930 --> 00:14:32,870 the fairies can rely on the humans doing something that makes their contract void 121 00:14:32,870 --> 00:14:37,610 because they're stupid or foolish or greedy and the fairies can just destroy them or 122 00:14:37,610 --> 00:14:45,530 take what they want. But that 10th time, the the human says, no, you promised this and this is what you have to give me. 123 00:14:45,530 --> 00:14:51,980 And then I'm thinking about Sir Orfeo, the fairy king says, yeah, OK, I promised. 124 00:14:51,980 --> 00:14:56,180 So you can take your wife back. Yeah, that's it. You got me. 125 00:14:56,180 --> 00:15:01,400 But you've got to understand their rules in order to kind of figure out how to live by it. 126 00:15:01,400 --> 00:15:12,920 Yeah, it was fun doing that and it was fun. Like the whole business of not throwing away the fairy magic, like if you mention glamours. 127 00:15:12,920 --> 00:15:18,530 You've got to say, well, this is how this works. So I got that. I've got a whole chapter towards the end, 128 00:15:18,530 --> 00:15:25,220 makes and makes the ordinary business of the plot that has to play out in that chapter more interesting that it completely 129 00:15:25,220 --> 00:15:35,570 eliminates one of the main characters because of a glamour, like they actually are literally invisible throughout the whole chapter. 130 00:15:35,570 --> 00:15:38,810 And that was that was that was great fun. 131 00:15:38,810 --> 00:15:46,450 But yeah, I've thought, well, you can't go around mentioning glamours without saying and this is what this looks like. 132 00:15:46,450 --> 00:15:51,830 I thought the way in which you built various kinds of, I guess, 133 00:15:51,830 --> 00:16:02,480 magic technology into the Secondary World was really interesting, that you had problems that the Hunter-Gatherer society have to deal with. 134 00:16:02,480 --> 00:16:12,080 I guess within that that wonderful natural environment in which they're living and they have sort of different classes of magic that that they employ. 135 00:16:12,080 --> 00:16:22,370 And it's not just a question of they wave their hands and this thing happens, but they have quite dedicated sort of magical devices. 136 00:16:22,370 --> 00:16:28,490 Yes. And and they've got a class of people who know how to operate the force beasts. 137 00:16:28,490 --> 00:16:32,570 Yeah. Sort of the builders who go off and, you know, 138 00:16:32,570 --> 00:16:42,540 repair the road through the swamp or shift the boulders that have fallen down into the mountain paths or yes like I, I like. 139 00:16:42,540 --> 00:16:46,440 fantasy that looks like science fiction, so towards the end of that, 140 00:16:46,440 --> 00:16:56,550 you get the idea that actually the fairies come from somewhere else, originally, they've stolen the territory and made it. 141 00:16:56,550 --> 00:17:02,430 very different than what it was before by basically terraforming. 142 00:17:02,430 --> 00:17:11,250 I mean, just you realise that that's what they must have done. So there's a kind of a science fiction underneath the fantasy. 143 00:17:11,250 --> 00:17:18,370 I quite like that sort of mixing genres. What would you say? 144 00:17:18,370 --> 00:17:24,880 Oh, no, actually, the next question I wanted to ask was alongside that Secondary World of the fairies, 145 00:17:24,880 --> 00:17:31,120 there's really a very strong theological debate going on as well in some ways, 146 00:17:31,120 --> 00:17:41,620 and kind of, I guess not a million miles away from Philip Pullman's rethinking of the Fall and its implications. 147 00:17:41,620 --> 00:17:49,540 And obviously in The Vintner's Cut, The Vintner's Luck, sorry, you have an angel protagonist as well. 148 00:17:49,540 --> 00:17:54,070 Is is theology something you've always been particularly interested in? 149 00:17:54,070 --> 00:18:03,800 Well, I was raised by a evangelising atheist who was a lapsed Catholic, so my dad was an evangelising atheist. 150 00:18:03,800 --> 00:18:06,570 I don't think there's anything more. 151 00:18:06,570 --> 00:18:17,400 stimulating for your interests in religion as a child than having an evangelising atheist parent, and and at the same time, 152 00:18:17,400 --> 00:18:22,320 my mother was probably she was herself a second generation atheist. 153 00:18:22,320 --> 00:18:26,130 Her father was an atheist. Possibly, possibly. 154 00:18:26,130 --> 00:18:32,070 His parents were too. And she, so for her it was all a settled matter 155 00:18:32,070 --> 00:18:41,610 You know, there was no argument to be had. So there was a sort of calm atheism going on in the household and this kind of raucous atheism going on. 156 00:18:41,610 --> 00:18:46,340 And he just made religion very interesting. So, of course. 157 00:18:46,340 --> 00:18:53,720 You know, I was always reading things and with The Vintner's Luck, 158 00:18:53,720 --> 00:19:04,700 it's very definitely coming out of the Christian imagination and you have a heaven and a Hell, but you don't have anything else noticeable. 159 00:19:04,700 --> 00:19:11,030 But The Absolute Book sort of decides the gods are a class of being and that their 160 00:19:11,030 --> 00:19:17,270 well-being is dependent on human beings and the ways in which they're worshipped, 161 00:19:17,270 --> 00:19:25,980 which is kind of a parallel to the the sort of badly managed stewardship of human beings of the planet. 162 00:19:25,980 --> 00:19:32,270 That's kind of like you can you can make your gods ill and also I was interested and I thought, 163 00:19:32,270 --> 00:19:38,690 well, I'm going to write a pagan book, you know, a pagan book, you know what, like I was thinking that? 164 00:19:38,690 --> 00:19:43,430 But then I just decided in the end that it was a book in which all the gods were true. 165 00:19:43,430 --> 00:19:45,950 So and they were all more or less equivalent, 166 00:19:45,950 --> 00:19:53,840 but rising and falling throughout history according to the kind of energy they were getting from their worshippers. 167 00:19:53,840 --> 00:19:59,690 And that you you come to understand that that's the way the world's working throughout the book. 168 00:19:59,690 --> 00:20:09,950 And then you get to see more or less the beginning of a God, like somebody becomes a god in the course of the book, a little god. 169 00:20:09,950 --> 00:20:20,630 But it's a trajectory, a little god of a particular place, isn't it, where the Christian God is is, I guess, quite a big God. 170 00:20:20,630 --> 00:20:25,790 Yeah, the Great God of the Desert. 171 00:20:25,790 --> 00:20:26,840 Yeah. 172 00:20:26,840 --> 00:20:40,430 And I was quite interested because I had not expected this at all, to suddenly find my my own favourite god Odin popping up along with his two fantastic ravens'. 173 00:20:40,430 --> 00:20:48,590 I love the stories. I love the comedy that the ravens produce and and the sort of the origin story that you have for them. 174 00:20:48,590 --> 00:20:52,220 Why Odin in particular though. Oh well OK. 175 00:20:52,220 --> 00:20:59,420 So this is my, I've always know I was never interested in Odin, particularly any more than any other Norse gods. 176 00:20:59,420 --> 00:21:06,230 And when I was a child reading mythology all the time, I loved the Greek gods and the and the Norse gods. 177 00:21:06,230 --> 00:21:12,260 I was like, hmm I cou,ld take them or leave them, but, um. 178 00:21:12,260 --> 00:21:15,540 Well, it would have been the year two thousand or two thousand one, 179 00:21:15,540 --> 00:21:24,150 I was off at a writers festival and sleeping very badly because of the different time zones and all the excitement. 180 00:21:24,150 --> 00:21:33,420 And I had a dream in which I was in this vast, cavernous space and I was about to be shown the God who was in charge of my life. 181 00:21:33,420 --> 00:21:41,670 And I came up to this God who was standing in front of a throne facing away from me. 182 00:21:41,670 --> 00:21:52,140 And they turned around and I saw a sort of a division or difference at first, I glimpsed a division or difference in the face. 183 00:21:52,140 --> 00:21:57,030 And I had a bit of a sensation of enormous disappointment that I was about to be shown 184 00:21:57,030 --> 00:22:02,070 Janus, the two-faced god, and that for some reason this was something to do with me. 185 00:22:02,070 --> 00:22:08,200 And then I realised I was looking at a god with one eye and that it was Odin. 186 00:22:08,200 --> 00:22:16,540 And I can remember I went down to breakfast and I told the poets at the table, Matthew Sweeney, 187 00:22:16,540 --> 00:22:22,180 the Irish one, being one of them, about this dream, and he said, well, why don't I have dreams like that? 188 00:22:22,180 --> 00:22:26,660 That's a poet's dream. Exactly, well, he is the god of poetry. 189 00:22:26,660 --> 00:22:31,560 And I've always had a sort of a. 190 00:22:31,560 --> 00:22:40,280 I've thought about the dream a lot, I thought about the whole thing of sacrificing an eye for wisdom and end sacrificing 191 00:22:40,280 --> 00:22:47,350 a kind of a depth perception for something else, you know, 192 00:22:47,350 --> 00:22:57,190 for ravens and I just I just thought about it and and then so when I came to the book, I thought, well, I'll probably better put Odin in it. 193 00:22:57,190 --> 00:23:02,860 And then but then I was much more interested in the ravens than Odin. Yes. 194 00:23:02,860 --> 00:23:09,520 In the end, he doesn't turn up as much as you might have expected once once he makes his first appearance. 195 00:23:09,520 --> 00:23:13,060 I thought we would see a bit more of him. But his agents are there, aren't they? 196 00:23:13,060 --> 00:23:20,170 All the time? Yeah. His agents are there, you know, they're they're about to, you know, abandon him. 197 00:23:20,170 --> 00:23:28,900 I mean, yeah, Odin's a god in the process of being corrupted by worshippers. 198 00:23:28,900 --> 00:23:37,270 I had some fun with that. And I think Odin seems like someone who is quite well suited to the modern world in a way, 199 00:23:37,270 --> 00:23:46,900 because he's ready to do any kind of deals to maintain his power. Yeah, Odin's a terribly interesting God and often turns up in modern stories. 200 00:23:46,900 --> 00:23:50,070 But of course, there is the unfortunate. 201 00:23:50,070 --> 00:23:58,280 You know, revival of of the sort of lovable Norse gods and people tattooing valknuts on them, and the white supremacists. 202 00:23:58,280 --> 00:24:01,990 So, you know, I was aware of that, which is why I kind of commented on it in the book. 203 00:24:01,990 --> 00:24:05,540 I thought, well, what would this mean for Odin if 204 00:24:05,540 --> 00:24:11,870 he had unfortunately managed to attract all these white supremacy, attract these white supremacists. 205 00:24:11,870 --> 00:24:19,800 I bookmarked that paragraph because I'm writing a book about the reception of Old Norse myth myself. 206 00:24:19,800 --> 00:24:20,960 And I thought, yes, 207 00:24:20,960 --> 00:24:31,050 that this is what I want about these kind of right rightwing lunatics who adopted Odinism without having a real sense of what it's all about. 208 00:24:31,050 --> 00:24:37,100 So before we move on to the kind of really large question about the major themes of the novel, 209 00:24:37,100 --> 00:24:44,050 this wants to come back to the question of your being a New Zealand writer and. 210 00:24:44,050 --> 00:24:47,290 The kind of in a way, I was asking myself, 211 00:24:47,290 --> 00:24:58,420 why an English and European imaginary, and not something that's set in New Zealand, or drawing upon New Zealand myths. Oh, I can't suddenly appropriate, 212 00:24:58,420 --> 00:25:03,160 appropriate Polynesian mythology? Mm. 213 00:25:03,160 -- So there's that said is that I mean, I could be a consumer of those stories, but I don't think I necessarily get to dabble my feet, 214 00:25:11,770 --> 00:25:18,310 but I sort of end up with these non New Zealand books becoming highly visible, 215 00:25:18,310 --> 00:25:22,150 whereas my last book, Wake, like the sort of horror science fiction, 216 00:25:22,150 --> 00:25:29,800 which was published by Corsair and did reasonably well in the U.K., is completely New Zealand. 217 00:25:29,800 --> 00:25:34,450 It's set in New Zealand and all but one of its characters is a New Zealander. 218 00:25:34,450 --> 00:25:42,700 And yeah, the the joy of being able to do a contemporary New Zealand book. 219 00:25:42,700 --> 00:25:48,490 But then, I just have much of a book and it has to come out the way I want it to. 220 00:25:48,490 --> 00:25:52,570 And obviously I just wanted to do a book that had Fairyland. 221 00:25:52,570 --> 00:25:59,050 And if you going to do Fairyland, you really have got to get yourself over to the British Isles. 222 00:25:59,050 --> 00:26:04,360 My grandmother .. I think in a way your fairyland, I was asking myself, where is New Zealand? 223 00:26:04,360 --> 00:26:14,680 Because in the kind of real world, your heroine goes over there briefly and her father is knocking around in the southern hemisphere, 224 00:26:14,680 --> 00:26:20,770 appearing in this kind of Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones mash up, I guess. 225 00:26:20,770 --> 00:26:26,320 But then it struck me that actually Fairyland seemed to me very much like New 226 00:26:26,320 --> 00:26:34,860 Zealand must have been before people were there, with their huge range of different habitats. 227 00:26:34,860 --> 00:26:43,510 Yeah. Yes. My fairyland, you know, I, I wasn't going to not use the landscapes I love. 228 00:26:43,510 --> 00:26:49,030 So my fairyland's New Zealand yeah, definitely different bits of New Zealand, 229 00:26:49,030 --> 00:26:56,410 a little bit of some lagoons and {Inaudible}, it's boiling mud pools, the hot pools. 230 00:26:56,410 --> 00:27:03,580 I mean, that alerted me so that's where New Zealand is. , 231 00:27:03,580 --> 00:27:08,350 So you talked a bit about your interest in what we're doing to the planet. 232 00:27:08,350 --> 00:27:13,870 The kind of huge environmental theme is, is one of the things that the book is about. 233 00:27:13,870 --> 00:27:19,450 Are there other things that you felt that you were kind of unpacking? 234 00:27:19,450 --> 00:27:30,490 Well, that writing a book with a hidden intention, which is about a hidden object and has a person on it with a spell that hides them, 235 00:27:30,490 --> 00:27:39,100 having had the sort of hidden things built into the plot, I realised quite soon that I was going to have a hidden theme. 236 00:27:39,100 --> 00:27:49,130 And the hidden thing was the sort of ecological theme and how I wanted that to play out for the reader. 237 00:27:49,130 --> 00:27:58,570 And it's risky because some people sort of rebel against it because they go, oh, well, nothing like that can ever happen. 238 00:27:58,570 --> 00:28:05,440 That's just wish fulfillment. I wanted it to be wish fulfillment, I wanted it to look like wish fulfillment, 239 00:28:05,440 --> 00:28:10,710 because I wanted people to think about what they were saying and instead of thinking. 240 00:28:10,710 --> 00:28:17,110 Well, what say, the fairies and a god and some ravens and so on can save us? 241 00:28:17,110 --> 00:28:25,620 To think who is there, who can save us, because, of course, we can be saved, our governments could save us. 242 00:28:25,620 --> 00:28:31,030 That's if they acted like ?? like, instead they act like 243 00:28:31,030 --> 00:28:35,930 Idiots. Well, your government, I think I'd have more faith in than ours - Idiots thinking of the share-holders. 244 00:28:35,930 --> 00:28:46,000 I was struck by the theme of loss, not just planetary loss, 245 00:28:46,000 --> 00:28:49,950 but kind of personal loss as well as there's a lot of mourning going on in the book, isn't there? 246 00:28:49,950 --> 00:28:55,680 Well, I mean, the protagonist, my scholarly hero, Taryn, who we haven't even talked about. 247 00:28:55,680 --> 00:29:08,380 She's she made the book possible and that she plot wise because she ends up being possessed and it looks like she's being possessed. 248 00:29:08,380 --> 00:29:15,400 I mean, for for people who think that oh that means it's because she's sinful enough to do that as her sin is big enough. 249 00:29:15,400 --> 00:29:19,470 But actually no it's just the demons of trying to find out something she knows. 250 00:29:19,470 --> 00:29:23,830 So they're being opportunistic. She's just bad enough to get a demon in there. 251 00:29:23,830 --> 00:29:35,490 Yeah. So but, yeah, she's she's taken revenge for the death of her sister, for the murder of her sister because she didn't think that the. 252 00:29:35,490 --> 00:29:39,090 The man concerned was punished enough, and that's bad, 253 00:29:39,090 --> 00:29:49,560 but she never repents from killing the man she repents from using someone else to kill the man, which is which is this her sin. 254 00:29:49,560 --> 00:29:57,180 So she spends the whole book facing the consequences of their actions, 255 00:29:57,180 --> 00:30:08,100 taking revenge and never getting properly reconciled to the loss of her sister until the very end when she more or less. 256 00:30:08,100 --> 00:30:16,380 Fills the hole in her heart with other people, which is probably the way that grief like that works. 257 00:30:16,380 --> 00:30:22,380 That's a lovely way of putting it I must say as filling it with other people, 258 00:30:22,380 --> 00:30:34,530 because I guess there is no, the narrative offers possibilities of a much more kind of, you know, Christian reconciliation. 259 00:30:34,530 --> 00:30:41,550 I can see why, as an atheist, you might leave that aside. 260 00:30:41,550 --> 00:30:48,270 I'm not really an atheist. I was just raised as on, a questioning. 261 00:30:48,270 --> 00:30:58,620 Well, at least somebody who's not completely steeped in the mechanisms of Catholic theology as providing all the answers to this kind of thing. 262 00:30:58,620 --> 00:31:08,390 But, yeah, I think that that's that's very striking in the way that what might be a kind of feel-good. 263 00:31:08,390 --> 00:31:19,070 moment that could have been the feel-good climax there comes up against the kind of reality about what's possible with the afterlife, let's say yes. 264 00:31:19,070 --> 00:31:27,020 Yes. And you get, when you're get an afterlife, you get you get purgatory, which is. 265 00:31:27,020 --> 00:31:32,090 Yeah, I was very proud of my version of purgatory. 266 00:31:32,090 --> 00:31:38,200 It's a really recognisable place in a way, isn't it? 267 00:31:38,200 --> 00:31:46,270 And it's kind of antithesis of of Fairyland, 268 00:31:46,270 --> 00:31:57,970 it's got hospitals and railways and the kind of darkness and... but not souls burning in agony or trying to be purged of their sins. 269 00:31:57,970 --> 00:32:03,400 There's just that kind of almost Kafkaesque notion of what's purgatorial. 270 00:32:03,400 --> 00:32:09,410 Yeah, unwieldy bureaucracy and invisible bureaucrats. 271 00:32:09,410 --> 00:32:13,400 And nobody helps anyone else. 272 00:32:13,400 --> 00:32:18,370 They're are always just trying to work out their own problems. This is sort of a 273 00:32:18,370 --> 00:32:28,370 solitary, solipsistic, chasing of something to solve their problems which is purgatorial, It really is recognisable. 274 00:32:28,370 --> 00:32:37,960 Or people seeking the information that they think they need. 275 00:32:37,960 --> 00:32:44,460 I had a lot of fun with Purgatory. Yeah. It's a really big book, 276 00:32:44,460 --> 00:32:49,590 The Absolute Book, isn't it? Carrying it around while I was reading it 277 00:32:49,590 --> 00:32:56,940 was kind of arm-stretching. Did it. Did you know always how it was going to end up or did your ideas change while 278 00:32:56,940 --> 00:33:00,340 you were writing it. 279 00:33:00,340 --> 00:33:13,420 I knew where it wanted to, where I wanted to take it in terms of the the sort of things that had to say about the world needing saving, 280 00:33:13,420 --> 00:33:19,810 but, you know, you always think of better ways of solving the book's problems as you go along. 281 00:33:19,810 --> 00:33:32,140 I mean, I'm not a I'm not a person who plots things out. Ah you don't have a big whiteboard? I have anidea and then I and then I kind of follow my nose and I usually have a good, 282 00:33:32,140 --> 00:33:40,180 satisfactory, a satisfactory ending, a satisfactory course for the plot at a certain point. 283 00:33:40,180 --> 00:33:46,660 And then as I go, I deviate when I think of something better. , 284 00:33:46,660 --> 00:33:52,740 Yeah. Uh huh. So I just do, I knew most of my decisions were aesthetic ones like that 285 00:33:52,740 --> 00:33:58,590 people will keep turning up, so that the the man who set fire to Taryn's 286 00:33:58,590 --> 00:34:03,540 grandfather's library turns up completely unexpectedly towards the end of the book. 287 00:34:03,540 --> 00:34:12,890 And the Mule-Skinner, who kind of threatens to turn up at the beginning, and doesn't turn up and doesn't turn up and doesn't turn up, 288 00:34:12,890 --> 00:34:17,040 and then suddenly turns up extremely alarmingly. 289 00:34:17,040 --> 00:34:27,180 And then is eventually comprehensively got rid of, turns up again, like a horror movie like Carrie leaping out of her grave more or less. 290 00:34:27,180 --> 00:34:33,510 So I wanted to do those things. I wanted things to come around. Yeah, I really like that. 291 00:34:33,510 --> 00:34:46,230 Particularly when when Jacob, not Jacob, the fire-starter in the grandfather's library came back, again in the book I was delighted. Battle, Battle. 292 00:34:46,230 --> 00:34:56,400 Yeah, that was him and the Mule-Skinner himself I find absolutely terrifying character. 293 00:34:56,400 --> 00:35:02,880 And I think when I was reading that kind of central sequence where Taryn is, let's say, 294 00:35:02,880 --> 00:35:14,430 placed in considerable danger by the Mule Skinner, I, I didn't at that point know that you also wrote in the horror genre. 295 00:35:14,430 --> 00:35:17,790 And I was really taken, by the way, 296 00:35:17,790 --> 00:35:25,680 in which the kind of mechanics of the the horrible fate had been thought out by the Mule- Skinner, but obviously by you as well. 297 00:35:25,680 --> 00:35:31,710 Yeah, that was that was sort of my ... the whole chapter is kind of a mini thriller. 298 00:35:31,710 --> 00:35:39,390 And inside the thing was like, and here this is Elizabeth doing a thriller, you know, so I was channelling Lee Child at that point. 299 00:35:39,390 --> 00:35:45,330 I think, you know, there are mechanics to the horrible fight. 300 00:35:45,330 --> 00:35:48,780 Someone has a plan and this is the awful thing they're going to do. 301 00:35:48,780 --> 00:35:56,970 And it doesn't look like he can get out of it. And honestly, I didn't know how I was going to get Taryn out of the problem there. 302 00:35:56,970 --> 00:36:04,380 And then I realised I was writing a fantasy book ... 303 00:36:04,380 --> 00:36:10,630 So, yes, you have a kind of well, deus ex machina, might be one way of putting it, 304 00:36:10,630 --> 00:36:17,640 but I thought that was a remarkable way of resolving that particular situation. 305 00:36:17,640 --> 00:36:22,530 Very unexpected, extremely unexpected. 306 00:36:22,530 --> 00:36:31,500 And I suddenly thought, well, wait a minute. Is is this actually, is Peter Pan in here somewhere? 307 00:36:31,500 --> 00:36:40,980 Oh wait a moment, no it's the shapeshifter, it took me quite a while to figure out the shapeshifter's role in the whole thing. 308 00:36:40,980 --> 00:36:47,100 And then I was going: hm, how unlikely is that? I see. 309 00:36:47,100 --> 00:36:56,220 So what are you working on at the moment? What's coming next? I'm finishing a young adult book, and I say this advisedly because. 310 00:36:56,220 --> 00:37:00,720 I've written young adult books, like the Dream Hunter and Dream Quake, the Dream Hunter duet 311 00:37:00,720 --> 00:37:12,960 and then Mortal Fire over a number of years with other books interspersed. And during that time, young adult fantasies changed a great deal. 312 00:37:12,960 --> 00:37:25,110 So, um, so I've written this, the school-story thriller, science fictiony thing, which I'm quite pleased with, 313 00:37:25,110 --> 00:37:36,760 but that's probably very much a borderline like older teenagers, not because of its content, but probably because of its world view. 314 00:37:36,760 --> 00:37:42,510 Yeah, and do you think there's a really strong I mean, I guess when you and I were growing up, 315 00:37:42,510 --> 00:37:48,400 young adult wasn't even a recognisable sub-branch of literature, was it? 316 00:37:48,400 --> 00:37:55,600 You you read children's books and then you discover what kind of books you could read as a teenager that made sense to you, 317 00:37:55,600 --> 00:38:00,730 which is when I read The Master and Margarita, and got very confused by it. 318 00:38:00,730 --> 00:38:10,210 But I have gone back to it many times since then. Is there a huge difference writing young adult fantasy, do you think, from writing more adult fantasy? 319 00:38:10,210 --> 00:38:16,420 I mean, not just in terms of less swearing and less explicit sex possibly. 320 00:38:16,420 --> 00:38:25,750 Yes. I mean. Well, yes, but the two things that I always think of is that, it has a young adult at the centre of the story. 321 00:38:25,750 --> 00:38:29,540 You've got to have the protagonist should be a young adult in a young adult book. 322 00:38:29,540 --> 00:38:36,380 And my rule is not to deprive the reader of hope. 323 00:38:36,380 --> 00:38:43,240 This is the one thing you can't do in a book for young people. I just I just regard that as wrong. 324 00:38:43,240 --> 00:38:49,690 I'm not doing that. Yeah. So even when I go, I could end this really badly. 325 00:38:49,690 --> 00:38:55,180 I'm like, kind of just hold that thought for a moment. 326 00:38:55,180 --> 00:38:59,150 Yeah, I think that must be a good rule. 327 00:38:59,150 --> 00:39:08,860 I think I suppose young adult fantasy is more at heart about maturing and growing into yourself. 328 00:39:08,860 --> 00:39:15,250 And there must be hope for your young adult protagonists if they don't meet some horrible fate, 329 00:39:15,250 --> 00:39:21,430 that they're going to end up somewhere in a better place than where they started. 330 00:39:21,430 --> 00:39:29,770 Yeah, I think I've kind of had a thing about people meeting horrible fates for some time where the, 331 00:39:29,770 --> 00:39:37,600 Even if the bad things are happening, if people don't disgrace themselves and managed to look after others around 332 00:39:37,600 --> 00:39:44,800 them and remain pretty much true to their own hopes for themselves, 333 00:39:44,800 --> 00:39:45,940 then that works out. 334 00:39:45,940 --> 00:39:58,350 So you can actually throw a lot of things at your young adult characters and just they muddle their way through and in ways that aren't deeply shaming to them. 335 00:39:58,350 --> 00:40:04,690 Yeah. So that's pretty much the way it's playing out, not depriving them of hope in this book. 336 00:40:04,690 --> 00:40:10,840 I'm not depriving them of hope because they can still respect themselves when they come out the other side. 337 00:40:10,840 --> 00:40:21,940 Yeah. And as a school story, is it a day school where there's a kind of playoff between home environment or is it a boarding school story? It's a boarding school story 338 00:40:21,940 --> 00:40:30,190 Because, of course, you know, I never got near such a place in my life, you know, and that's I don't come from that class. 339 00:40:30,190 --> 00:40:39,910 So I was like, ooh, I could do a boarding school. And it is sort of a school with special children, they hope that they all are. 340 00:40:39,910 --> 00:40:50,800 So, yeah, so it plays with that. And then it and then it kind of turns into a thriller pretty much in school, but. 341 00:40:50,800 --> 00:41:01,060 Yeah. I'm always really interested in school stories. Kings of this world is its title, Kings of this World. 342 00:41:01,060 --> 00:41:04,380 And when is it, you're still in the process of finishing it? 343 00:41:04,380 --> 00:41:10,140 So I'm finishing it. So yeah, then I'll send it off to my agent and we'll see where we go from here. 344 00:41:10,140 --> 00:41:13,260 I never know. How that sounds, really. That sounds like. 345 00:41:13,260 --> 00:41:22,410 one to add to my collection of fantasy boarding school stories because I'm always really interested in them. 346 00:41:22,410 --> 00:41:28,530 So I picked up the first copy, indeed the first edition of Harry Potter for a young friend of mine. 347 00:41:28,530 --> 00:41:34,080 So I just thought boarding-school story. Ha, What's not to like about that? 348 00:41:34,080 --> 00:41:42,960 And I'm really interested in the way that those schools affect or are built in a way, what the rules are within those schools. 349 00:41:42,960 --> 00:41:47,310 Yeah, there's some very good anime based on school stories. 350 00:41:47,310 --> 00:41:51,180 And then there was always Diana Wynne Jones's. Witch Week. 351 00:41:51,180 --> 00:41:58,080 Hmm. Yeah. A fantastic magical school story. 352 00:41:58,080 --> 00:42:06,600 Yeah, very of that one. And I guess the boarding school takes the the young person away from the parents and puts them with the peers. 353 00:42:06,600 --> 00:42:16,000 But then you got surrogate parents in, in the teachers. These guys, their parents are so famous there's no getting away from. 354 00:42:16,000 --> 00:42:25,750 Having fun with it, too. Yeah, OK, so they're all busy in Lord of the Rings type movies and yeah, 355 00:42:25,750 --> 00:42:37,480 your technocrats or being responsible for a large percentage of the GDP of theirs small countries, those kinds of things. 356 00:42:37,480 --> 00:42:39,370 You know, it's quite fun. 357 00:42:39,370 --> 00:42:47,980 And of course, that's exactly the kind of kids who does get sent off to boarding school because the parents are busy doing all kinds of other things. 358 00:42:47,980 --> 00:42:49,691 That's right.