The Dreaming

In this printed collection, fifteen papers join talks by authors and publishers, reorganized from their place on the conference schedule into three catch-all sections. The majority of the papers are by writers who have some affiliation with the University of Surrey Roehampton, either as current or past students in the master’s or doctoral program or as faculty members. The informal talks that frame the collection of papers add the insights of authors, publishers, critics, and a lone bookseller…

If the Man on the Moon would take an earthly name, perhaps it would be “Rom Villaseran.”

After dining with dream-weaver Neil Gaiman as a prize for winning first place in the Neil Gaiman Art Contest, Villeseran has somehow taken a piece of the American novelist with him as he launched “Paalam Sa Buwan” - his first solo exhibition displaying nine whimsical murals [at LRI Business Plaza on Nicanor Garcia Street]…

Well, OK, Gaiman didn’t amass that fan-base by writing children’s books but, as it happens, this cult author of the Sandman graphic novels, now working on his fifth children’s book, is proving a modern master at spinning fairy tales. Not since the Brothers Grimm has anybody produced work this deeply chilling - stories filled with walls that spew forth wolves, and replacement mothers who look like the original ones but have buttons instead of eyes. The parents in his books are not cruel - just mentally, physically and emotionally elsewhere.

His “other” parents profess love, but offer anything but safe havens - the stuff of story-book step-parenting. And, in this era awash with breast cancer, his version of the motif of the absent mother is the mother who’s ill for a year or two.

The emotions underlying his fantasies are brilliantly recognisable: sibling aggravations, the urge to leave home, and parents who just don’t get it (whatever “it” is). Yet while there is plenty of realism for children, nothing else being written now conveys the otherworldly fear that Gaiman’s work does. So, for once, that clich� of children’s authors’ interviews has special interest: just exactly what kind of stuff did Gaiman’s parents read to him at bedtime?

As he tells it, there were stories - from grandparents as well as parents. But more revealing is his mention of a toy he played with in his earliest infancy. “My favourite toy when I was two was a set of wooden letters, and I remember my mum painting them with me, so all the consonants were blue and all the vowels were red.”

This is interesting because Gaiman’s writing for children - commandingly good as it is - is lifted into another dimension by Dave McKean’s illustrations. There have been three picture-book collaborations so far, The Wolves in the Walls, The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish, and the newest, Mirrormask; and some editions of Coraline, a novel for older children, also have McKean illustrations.

McKean’s drawings have a woodblock quality to them, like graven images hurled on to very vivid backgrounds. The image of the two-year-old future author, playing with carved wooden blocks, rendered bright with colour, could have been a foretaste of his collaboration with McKean.

English by birth, but a resident of Minneapolis since 1992, Gaiman is in Europe to publicise his adult book, Anansi Boys (Headline, �17.99). The day we meet he has had to wake up early - for him - to fly to London from Dublin for a day of interviews and meetings with movie folk. Bleary, but politely attentive, he looks white beneath his mop of curly hair, and is cloaked in his trademark navy sweater, black jeans and leather jacket.

“I usually get up around tennish,” he says. Wow, I say. With three kids, how does that work? Gaiman is in his late forties now, and his oldest two are at university, but Maddy is 11 and still at home. “Maddy goes to school ridiculously early, because it’s the States,” he says, “but Mary gets up with her. I’m usually still writing at 4.30 in the morning, so I get up late. I’ve never been very good at mornings.”

This is the sort of thing other authors might just throw out in an interview, never to think about again. But Gaiman’s author profile is inextricably intertwined with his very Alpha internet presence - he is a serious blogger, which is one of the reasons his website gets all those hits - so somebody somewhere will shortly ask him, via the web, about his sleeping patterns. It’s another aspect of his writing identity: you’re either a Gaiman fan, in which case you know absolutely everything about him, or you’ve never heard of him. But maybe because he’s tired, or maybe just because nobody’s ever asked him, he talks today about something he’s never covered online or in interviews before.

It was when Gaiman was 12 that he first came across a seam of mythology unlike anything his childhood collections of Greek and Roman tales had yet exposed him to. That was the year he got to be “really Jewish”, as he puts it. For this pre-bar mitzvah year, he was sent each weekend to stay with observant cousins in Wembley. “I had this wonderful bar mitzvah teacher. He was a cantor, Reb Meyer Lev. He was very, very into all of the stories of Jewish mythology. I was the kind of kid who, given the opportunity, would derail the stuff I was meant to be learning and get him on to mythological subjects. And he, bless him, would always go there.

“Which meant that in my mid-twenties, when I was writing myths and writing comics, I suddenly discovered that I knew all this incredibly obscure stuff, I mean way beyond imagining, and it was marvellous. And I’d write stuff, and people’d come up to me, and say, OK, the thing about Adam having three wives - marvellous stuff.” He smiles.

There is a mythic quality to all Gaiman’s work, and it works especially well in his children’s books, counterpointed as it is by his very accurate sense of how children think. The eldest of three - he has two younger sisters - he has exactly reproduced the pattern in his own offspring. And that is exactly: not only does he have a son and two daughters himself, but his son is exactly one year, 11 months and five days older than his daughter - the identical gap between Neil and his sister. It smacks of myth; and the memory of experiencing that gap is brilliantly reproduced in The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish: the older brother’s attempt to stifle the younger sister; her glee at watching him get into trouble. “I watched Mike and Holly,” he chuckles, “and I just remembered it all so well myself.”

As with all tales of children in peril, the parents in Gaiman’s books are deeply detached. “I suspect the parents in Coraline, and all the books, are much more me, parodying me - my nose in a book, my head somewhere else. It’s more me taking all the worst bits of me, than it is my parents,” he says.

His books are suffused with his own childhood - not least the house he grew up in, which is the background of Coraline. “What my mum wanted was a modern two-up, two-down house, but they couldn’t afford that so they wound up getting the servants’ half of an old manor house, with 10 acres of grounds, because in 1965 that was significantly cheaper than a two-up, two-down.

“We got one good room, the drawing room. We weren’t often allowed in there, but through the door leading out of one end was a bricked wall, because that’s where the other family lived. My mother gets a kick out of the fact that I borrowed the bricked wall behind the door for Coraline.”

The ones where, scratch beneath the thin veneer of our normal, mundane lives and you find worlds of magic, witches and gods going about their business right alongside us.

It’s not new. Books, television and film have long delved into these stories, from Harry Potter’s world of magic existing hidden but side-by-side with our muggle mundanity, to Buffy’s vampires and demons hanging out in the seamier side of the city while we punch the clock in the offices uptown.

I love these tales because they fit.

Think about it. Where do all the tales of magic, of ghosts and witchcraft come from? Can they all be false, figments of overactive imaginations, or are they constructed, pearl-like, from a grain of quasi-truth that gets covered over with myth to make it more palatable for our anti-magic mentality?

Take gods, as another example. What happened to them all?

With the rise of the main religions of the world, what happened to the Greek pantheon, to the Odins and Thors or Mithras or Isis, or the old thunder gods, gods of the streams and lakes?

To my mind, if you have it within yourself to believe in God (small or upper case G, as you wish) can you not also save a small portion of your mind to believe - however slightly - that once upon a time other supernatural beings also existed?

Bear that (only slightly blasphemous) idea in mind as we journey into the imagination of Neil Gaiman and his novel Anansi Boys.

I first came across Gaiman as the co-author, with Terry Pratchett, of the cult hit Good Omens. Suffice to say it’s a classic that merits reading, and reading over and over again. Trust me, read it, and the Book of Revelations and writings of the antichrist will never be the same again.

Uncertain beginning

Based on that, I picked up Anansi Boys with a slightly bemused expression, not exactly sure what to expect.

I was pleasantly reassured by the subtitle on the inside cover: God is dead, Meet the kids.

The god in this case is Anansi, the spider-god trickster of the African continent.

Fat Charlie Anansi never knew his father that well, other than the fact he knew his father always embarrassed him. You can forgive him for never knowing his father was, in fact, a god.

So, when news reaches him of his father’s untimely demise - in mid chorus at a karaoke bar surrounded by lovely young ladies - Charlie dutifully returns home to Florida from England to take care of the funeral arrangements.

He never realized his world was about to turn upside down with the discovery that: a) his father was a god, and b) he has a brother he never knew about.

His brother, Spider, did know about their father’s godhood. He knew because Spider had inherited most of Anansi’s powers, not to mention the same penchant for singing, stylish clothing, single women and (above all) mischief.

Add in Charlie’s scheming boss, Charlie’s prudish fiancee, her dragon of a mother, a one-night stand with a policewoman and a vendetta with a former foe of his father’s (who is also a god) and you start to get a feel for Gaiman’s wonderful book.

Anansi Boys is a wonder to read. It is lyrical, unpredictable, unconventional and undeniably funny.

We follow Charlie and Spider as they embark on quests: Charlie’s quest to get his life back from Spider, who has decided to move in and take it over with a view to having more fun at it than Charlie does.

That morphs into a quest to stop the bloodthirsty bird woman and Tiger (Anansi’s old foes), a quest to defeat Charlie’s unscrupulous boss and a quest - naturally - for true love.

Anansi Boys is a complex, tightly woven, no-holds-barred romp of a read.

By this stage in his career, Gaiman is in the enviable position of being a Household Name and legions of fans out there not only buy his books as soon as they hit the shelves but pre-order them in droves in the months prior to that. Contraband pre-publication copies even manage to turn up on Ebay. Gaiman is certainly one of those writers whose work I will buy without so much as having set eyes on it, simply because I know he’ll tell a rollicking good tale.

He does so in Anansi Boys, certainly — this is a book that obviously enjoyed being written. There’s a sense of fun about it that’s infectious. However, it is also more nebulous than any other Gaiman book I’ve read, and seems to want to be a number of different things without quite being any of them. The thread that joins these somewhat disparate parts is the inimitable Gaiman humour and wit — and the book brims with that. If ever they make a movie of this they may have to give that lime of Fat Charlie’s a line in the credits. But the novel fractures a little as a straight narrative voice and is interspersed with chatty storyteller-to-reader asides disguised as “and this too is an Anansi story” moments which look a little like padding to me, especially since much of what the asides convey is already found in the body of the novel, in more subtle and more sophisticated ways. And then there’s the strange glimpses of what the novel apparently really wanted to be, something darker and stranger and much less frothy and giggly as, for instance, the lime incident appears to point to. There are bits of a crime novel in here, a coming-of-age story, a high-jinks comedy, not to mention a contemporary retelling of an ancient set of legends complete with some fairly grisly moments involving Fat Charlie’s brother Spider which I will not divulge here for fear of sowing spoilers where they shouldn’t go.

However, having said all that, it’s still Neil Gaiman, it’s yet another enchanting bit of word-wizardry by one of the premier wordsmiths of our times, and it’s still a damned fine read. It’s just that, for this reader, it feels a little like having walked out of the ocean that was American Gods and somehow finding myself cooling my toes in a paddling pool.

Me, mute?

Well, yep. Here’s a guy who can pop out a thousand words about leading (rhymes with bedding) and yet a simple book can shut me up for months.

Of course, as my son put it, “What, are there spells in there, dad?”

Well yes there are son. Spells and a whole lot more. (Note, he’s not a cute little tyke any more. He’s a 19-year old student in art school.)

I’m talking about the Hill House ultra-limited, lettered editions. Yes, I’ve raved about Hill House in the past, from the moment I first bought one of ‘em. And I frankly thought that you couldn’t improve on their product, you couldn’t find something better, more beautiful than a Hill House Limited edition.

Leave it to Hill House to outdo themselves. Because I am the luckiest guy in the entire universe, I got a gander at a couple of the Hill House ultra-limited (lettered) editions, and I have to say that awe just doesn’t cut it, for a couple of reasons. Now, some of these reasons are on the jaw-dropping drooling side of the equation. You’ve glanced at the piccies here, you can grok that the physical presence of these books is flat-out amazing. I’ll go into some amount of gory, obsessive detail in the fullness of time.

But there are some rather practical matters that are almost as important. Yes, they come in a box that looks like something Pandora might have mail-ordered. But the Hill House super-duper limited editions also pack in a few important bits that will improve the actual mental process of reading the damn books. Yes, those improvements are delivered like jewels in velvet. Literally. But what matters is the pleasure they will add to the reading experience of your oh-so-lucky-as-all-get-out-of-here recipient is indefinable, unrelated to the imposing physical presence. Books are, in the most basic sense, IP. What Hill House delivers knocks you upside the head both physically and intellectually, which is really what you want, right?

Yes it is, trust me.

Let’s open up the door, then, and cast a few spells.

What we’re talking about here are the apexes of desirability. Yes there are two. But let’s start with the main reason to buy, say, Hill House’s ultra-limited edition of American Gods. That would be that owning it will give you insight into his other works that you just won’t find otherwise. In particular, should you wish to get something of an inside line on the utterly sublime Anansi Boys, then you’ll need to pick up this edition of American Gods.

Inside that spectacular box, you’ll find a slim volume of invaluable information. It’s titled Only the Gods Are Real: A Guide to the Gods in Neil Gaiman’s AMERICAN GODS. Author Renata Sancken has gone through the WM Morrow edition of American Gods and pulled out every God that Gaiman mentions (and some only suggested) and described that God. This includes the titular character of Anansi Boys as well as other critters and creators that show up in that volume. She includes page references and extensive references to her sources, which include web pages as well as books. It’s the perfect sidecar for those who want to tuck into the extended edition of American Gods that comes in that honkin’ box. Turn the little book over and you get Neil Gaiman’s bibliography for American Gods, which is a wonderful article written by Gaiman about the books that he consulted when creating this novel.

Between the two there’s an exponential effect when it comes to immersing one’s self in Gaiman’s novels; not just American Gods but Anansi Boys as well. They’re the literary equivalent of a flashlight that you can shine about while reading Gaiman’s work. Not so much light as to spoil the shadows. Just enough in fact to cast the kind of shadows that will make Gaiman’s story sharper, more enjoyable.

About 15 years ago he collaborated with Terry Pratchett on a novel called Good Omens. It did very well and has been translated into many languages.

“But most of the world decided that what must have happened was that I wrote a very serious novel and Terry Pratchett put in all the jokes,” he says with mild indignation.

“I thought that wasn’t the way I remembered it happening. But I did think that maybe it would be fun to do a funny novel that would also have scary bits in it.”

Neil Gaiman is on the promotional circuit again, meeting his disparate groups of fans. They range from the devotees of the cultish Sandman graphic novels, for which he was once best known, to those of a more literary bent who enjoyed his last adult work of fiction, American Gods.

Then there are those keen on his work for the screen, particularly the TV serialisation of his novel Neverwhere, another collaboration, this time with Lenny Henry who became a good friend.

In Newcastle, prior to a signing session at Forbidden Planet, he says a question by Lenny ( “Why aren’t there any black people in horror movies?) also set him on track to his latest novel, Anansi Boys.

“I started thinking: what would be a horror story that I could populate with black people and that would draw on African culture? I sort of got interested but I came to realise that what I had wasn’t a movie or even really horror.”

For much of Neil Gaiman’s work you have to invent new genres and Anansi Boys is one of them. It’s adventure, fantasy and comedy in one, but with a dash of horror, particularly if you hate spiders.

Fat Charlie Nancy’s roguish dad has died and at the funeral he first becomes aware of a shadowy figure who does, indeed, become something of a shadow. Some time later the doorbell rings and there stands a man claiming to be his brother. “You can call me Spider,” he says. “You going to call me in?”

A humdrum life, largely spent working in an accounts department, begins to spin out of control, as it might do if you’ve just discovered your dad was a spider god.

To get rid of the ultra-intrusive Spider, Fat Charlie engages the services of four old ladies with a neat line in voodoo. Typical Gaiman, it will make you laugh and squirm.

Once a journalist, this versatile writer turned his pen to other things when he had interviewed everyone he wanted to meet. He now lives mostly in America with his wife, Mary, and their three children, although he hasn’t picked up the accent.

Recently he has ventured into children’s fiction, with Coraline and The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish, but a big film project has also been occupying much of his time. He was approached by the Jim Henson Company, famous for the Muppets, and asked to write a fantasy along the lines of Labyrinth which graphic illustrator Dave Mckean would direct.

“Most movies begin with a story but this one began with a budget, even if it was only $4m which doesn’t compare too well with the $40m it cost to make Labyrinth in 1986,” notes Gaiman. But he wasn’t complaining. That’s not really his thing.

Nice to have you back on the program, Neil.

Neil Gaiman: It’s nice to be back, Neal.

NC: Is there one thing that makes children’s fantasy work?

NG: I think the thing that really makes children’s fantasy work is the power of belief. Children know when they’re being patronized. They know when someone’s telling them a story that the person telling it doesn’t believe or is telling it to kids for their own good. I think–and talking about [The Chronicles of] Narnia, I think the enduring power of Narnia is that really you had C.S. Lewis following these ideas. He had this idea of a faun in a snowstorm with an umbrella and packages and wanted to write the stories and find out who this faun was and where he came from.

NC: You wrote an interesting addendum to “The Chronicles of Narnia”, a story called The Problem of Susan. Why did you want to do it? Was it homage?

NG: No, The Problem of Susan was a story that eventually sort of came out from something that had been bugging me for many, many years. The Narnia books were the books that hooked me as a reader, hooked me as a–I was maybe six years old. I absolutely adored them, went seriously off them when I was 12, came back to them as an adult, first reading them to my older two children and then to my younger daughter. And each time I’d read them, I would get more and more irritated by the way that C.S. Lewis treated women of, let’s say, reproductive age. Girls are cool and he had some terrific girls and there are some nice elderly women in there, but when it gets to sort of beautiful, nice women of reproductive age, they’re wicked witches, they’re ditsy, they’re strange, they’re evil, they’re not to be relied upon. And Susan, who was the oldest of the children, is dismissed in the last book. All the others sort of go off to this wonderful Narnian heaven and we are told that Susan didn’t qualify because she was too interested in invitations, lipstick and nylons. And whether you want to interpret that as being about vanity or being about sex or whatever, she didn’t qualify. And it always struck me as being deeply problematic, and a few years ago I wrote a short story addressing the problem of Susan and playing around with various Narnian ideas and was quite fascinated by how people took it and how much power that story had.

NC: I wonder, another element of–your contribution was received by some with delight and others as blasphemy, I will say. But anyway, is an element of children’s fantasy that children or childlike creatures have to be at risk and that that risk has to be greater than just risk to themselves?

NG: I think that’s definitely part of it. But I don’t think that you can, with any children’s fantasy, sum it up to a formula because I think at that point you run the risk of making something very cold and very strange. In obviously a lot of great children’s fantasy something bigger than threat to themselves is there, but then again, you know, you’ve got Oz in which, yes, the wicked witch is defeated, but really it’s about Dorothy’s quest to go home. You’ve got–a lot of the great children’s fantasies, I think, they’re about kids figuring out who they are and they’re about kids taking other kids to somewhere bigger and stranger and better than they might have in a…

NC: And also–yeah, but also about returning home, growing up in Peter Pan’s world and leaving that world when in fact one of the enduring lessons, I think, of a lot of these books is even as adults, a lot of us would just prefer to live in these worlds.

NG: Oh, absolutely. And, I mean, when I look back at the things that I got from Narnia, I’m very amused watching the current foofaraw about whether or not Narnia is deeply Christian and whether or not Aslan should be perceived as Jesus and so on and so forth, ’cause I look back at what I took from Narnia as a kid and it had Bacchus in it and, you know, the Greek god of wine and it had these fauns and nymphs and Silenus and werewolves. And I went off and found out who they were. Nobody mentioned Jesus and it never occurred to me that this cool, bouncy lion was Jesus. On the other hand, I went and found out everything I could about Bacchus, the god of wine, ’cause he was in there.

NC: If you’d like to join our conversation about children’s fantasy books, give us a call. What was your favorite? Why was it your favorite? Does it hold up? And we’ll go to Michelle. Michelle’s calling from Phoenix, Arizona.

NC: Neil…

NG: I think…kids literature, one of the things that you bring to it is yourself as a child, which can sometimes make it kind of hard to go back to…I remember as an adult going back to some favorite books as a kid and remembering all this wonderful stuff, you know, the wind whipping the snow, the whickering of the horses, the–and reading the section and the entire section turned out to be something, like, `”I hope it stops snowing soon,” said Jack.’ …And I realized that as a kid you bring yourself, you build these worlds and they’re bigger and better than any movie could be. And sometimes they’re there when you go back and sometimes they aren’t.

NC: I wonder, when you said you went seriously off “Narnia” when you were 12, was that ’cause it was..baby stuff’?

NG: No. No, no. I went off “Narnia” when I was 12 because I was very slow on the whole Christian allegory bit and I’d completely missed the whole death of Aslan and coming back to life as being a Jesus thing, but I was reading, rereading–I was one of these kids who also read the Narnia books over and over again and, you know, read other books because there weren’t an infinite number of Narnia books to read. But at some point I was reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and I realized that Eustace Scrubb’s getting turned into a dragon and undragoning was actually a rewrite of the blindness of St. Paul on the road to Damascus. And I suddenly thought, hang on, there’s this stuff all through here. And I felt like an author who I had actually trusted to play fair with me had been hiding things in the text and had not entirely been playing as fair as I thought he was. These days it doesn’t bother me, but when I was 12, I got very–got up on my high horse and put the books away.

NC: Michelle, thanks very much, and we hope your son continues to enjoy them.

NC: Yeah. Neil Gaiman, would you agree?

NG: Yes, I think I would, although I don’t think that all fantasy is necessarily about growing up. I think some of it is just about taking one more step on the road towards growing up and learning the lessons that life teaches you. And I think taking those life lessons is the big important thing…when I wrote Coraline, it’s about–you know, it’s really a story about a nine-year-old girl learning a lot about bravery. It’s not about growing up, but it’s definitely about taking those first steps towards independence.

NC: There are lessons, there are morals, if you will, maybe not morals, but…

NG: Not necessarily morals, but definitely lessons.

NC:…did you want to add to that, Christopher?

NC: Neil Gaiman, why don’t you start?

NG: I think there are two big things going on there, one of which is if you’ve actually gone off and created a whole world or a whole order of created things for yourself, you normally want to stick, as an author, more than one story in there. So there’s definitely an urge towards series as an author.

I think as a kid it’s very, very simple, which is that if you like something, you want another one just like that…or as close to that as you can get. And that’s the magic of a series there.

…NC: Here’s an e-mail we got from Kathleen in Portland, Oregon. `My favorites were probably more magic than fantasy, but I loved all the Edward Eager books, ordinary children who find a talisman of some sort, in one case a book that wrote what they said and did as it happened, and have fantastic adventures because of it. I think I love them because they made it seem just possible that it might happen to me.’

And I think that’s an element of it, took. And you see Madeleine L’Engle’s book, the “Wrinkle in Time” books–Neil Gaiman, there’s so much to identify, for a kid, with those kids, as in the kids with–in “Narnia.”

NG: Oh, absolutely. I mean, Edward Eager did something very interesting. He was an enormous fan of E. Nesbit’s books, the Victorian author of things like–Edwardian author of Five Children and It and The Story of the Amulet and things like that, and he just wanted to take them and put them in an environment that his kids would recognize. And so he set them in 1950s and 1930s America. And I think it’s a lovely–I was saying earlier there weren’t any formulas, but it is a lovely formula, just the idea of kids just like you stumbling into that one magical thing that will grant their wishes or almost grant their wishes or give them some wonderful magical thing that, A, they will learn from but what you take away from that as a kid reading it is not necessarily the lessons of Half Magic or Magic by the Lake, whatever, but you take away the magic and the idea that maybe if you just touched the right thing, put the right thing in your pocket or said hello to the right frog, it could all happen to you.

NC: Christopher Paolini, your protagonist discovered the right precious stone and, well, things have developed from there. You’ve talked about, you know, liking to live in that world, but as people do age and get older, lessons get more difficult.

NC: Yeah, Neil Gaiman, I’ve talked to science fiction writers who said, look, there was that first generation who spent, you know, a chapter explaining how the faster-than-light drive worked and then there was the next generation who said, `And then we switched on the warp drive and took off.’

NG: Oh, absolutely. And that really is one of the things that makes, I think, fantasy a little different still from science fiction, though, which is that with fantasy you have things that have baggage. A dragon comes on; a dragon has baggage. And it has wonderful dragon baggage and McCaffrey didn’t invent dragons, you know, nor did any of the other writers. We’re just tapping into something that’s been wandering around in human myth and consciousness forever. And I love that. I love the fact that, you know, if you–you can still write wizards without treading on J.K. Rowling’s territory because it’s such an enormous thing. And by bringing on a wizard, you’re doing a specific thing. I tend not to as a writer just because I tend to go off toward places if it’s going to keep me amused. So I mean, my next children’s fantasy novel, the one that I’m writing right now, is set entirely in a graveyard and…

NC: A chucklefest, is it?

NG: It–I hope so. I decided it was time to rewrite The Jungle Book all set…in a graveyard so it’s called The Graveyard Book…about a kid whose parents are killed and who gets brought up by dead people.

…NC: Tamora Pierce joins us now. She’s written five full quartets of fantasy for both children and young adults. Her novels feature young women as the heroines of a fantasy realm with some medieval characteristics. The latest is called “The Will of the Empress,” and she joins us from member station WNYC in New York City. Nice to have you on the program as well.

NC: Neil Gaiman, some people feel that violence–the dark stuff–shouldn’t be part of children’s fantasy stories. It’s certainly part of yours.

NG: Yeah, part–well, part of most of mine…I’ve written some fairly bright stuff. I think that what’s interesting is the–just that weird little gulf, though, between a book and a film. A book can be anything to the person who’s reading it, to the point where they discover it. A film does tend to be one thing. And something of the size of Lord of the Rings, for example, you can go into it because what you love is Tom Bombadil or Fogol Mabaradowns(?) or whatever, and pretty much ignore the battles. That wasn’t the approach that Peter Jackson took; a different filmmaker could have taken a different approach. But it does kind of lock it down in a very strange way.

You know, for the Narnia books or the Narnia stories, right now inside people’s heads they are the book that they wrote, and there’s a hundred thousand million different Lucys and Susans and Peters and Edmunds running around. In a month or two, maybe there’ll only be four left, and they’ll be the ones from the movie, and I think we would lose something from that.

TP: Also, as violence in children’s books is concerned, and this is something that I can speak to because I get spanked for it all the time, children live in a violent world. Children are hazed and bullied at school; they come home to the news. They do not live in a safe, protected little shell, and if you look at children’s books really closely, you’ll see that it is a–they are terribly violent places. Peter Pan and Hook–if you read the J.M. Barrie book, you’ll see that there are very real edged weapons there and that they come perilously close to Peter’s chest. I know I went around for days with prickling in the skin over my sternum feeling a sharp edge press there from those battles with Hook. The idea of a crocodile munching your arm wasn’t a pretty thing. “Treasure Island,” Blind Pew gripping Jim’s hand. Children’s books–the good ones–are not safe. They are not violence-free because children don’t respect when they have taffy sold to them, as Mark Twain would say.

NC: Neil Gaiman, do you want to start with that?

NG: I don’t ever remember a time that I didn’t want to be a writer. At–when I was a little kid…[I didn't] think that I could be a writer by writing books; that hadn’t occurred to me. So I would–by the age of 12 I’d come up with wonderful scenarios in which I would tumble into a parallel universe, which didn’t happen to have a copy of Lord of the Rings in, holding the only copy of Lord of the Rings which could then be published with my name on it so I would get to be author of Lord of the Rings. As I grew up, I realized the only way I was actually going to become a writer was to have to write things and start them and finish them. I started out as a journalist, and was a journalist as long as I needed to be a journalist and then started writing comics and fiction, and now just make things up for a living all the time.

NC: Tamora Pierce?