Interview: Gwyneth Jones, September 2001

This interview took place in September 2001, at the monthly British Science Fiction Association night in London. This interview previously appeared in Vector (issue #221, Jan / Feb 2002) the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association.

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TB: Bold as Love is quite a departure from your other books.
GJ: I wrote the story ‘Bold as Love’ first, for Paul McAuley and Kim Newman’s anthology In Dreams. It was not by any means the story of the novel Bold as Love, but it was the germ of the story. A bunch of rock stars - not immensely famous rockstars but just ordinary rockstars - are the leaders of the revolution. The story was about how lightly we would tread upon the earth if everybody lived the way they live at rock festivals: a bit of dodgy vegetable curry and everybody living in tents with diabolical sanitation. When that anthology was reviewed, the reviewers who mentioned my story all said ‘it’s a very strange aberration for Gwyneth Jones’. Which made me think … well, how little do they know? For the last god knows how many years I’ve been writing serious science fiction; but, in my spare time, I’ve been going to gigs and to festivals, and I’ve been buying music, as - no doubt - many other people who read science fiction have been doing. It’s been a part of my life. When I came to writing that story I realised that music has been very important to me, and when I’d done it, I knew I wanted to write about those people, that world, in a novel. This is what I do in my spare time, and now I’ve decided to write about it.
TB: So the novel’s a labour of love?
GJ: Yes. Terrific fun, great. It’s much closer to my life, closer to my own personal feelings, than the serious science fiction that I’ve written before, which has been talking to people about things that were going on in the world, and that I thought were worth talking about. But this is my daily life. Nightly life, maybe.
TB: It’s more light-hearted than your other novels.
GJ: Maybe this is one of the symptoms of middle age. You get to a point in your life when you look around and you think, ‘Hold on. This is all there is. There isn’t going to be any more. Isn’t it great!’ And you start enjoying what there is to be enjoyed. You don’t stop wishing that you could change things for the better, but you make sure you don’t miss any of the fun. Bold as Love is about that feeling: ‘Hey! Not much time left. Don’t want to miss any of the fun’.
TB: It’s a very near future - not today, not tomorrow, not an alternate Now as one reviewer’s posited, but perhaps ten or twenty years away?
GJ: Really, there is no date to Bold as Love. The Locus reviewer decided that it was set in 2007, because that makes 300 years from the Act of Union between England and Scotland. I had said at some point ‘three hundred years’, but I was rounding up, or rounding down… But I think this could be the real future, in some senses. All that has to happen really, to add to the mix we already have, is a huge economic crash, and I think that could be arranged… it could be very close. But of course, things wouldn’t turn out half so benign in England as they do in Bold as Love. A paved-over Police state, is more likely.
TB: Well, the character Ax is named after Axl Rose - but Guns’n’Roses weren’t big in 1985.
GJ: If there is a date, it would be 2013. If you examine the text carefully you’ll find information that supports this. It would mean Sage and Ax were born in January and February 1987, which makes them a Fire Rabbit and a Fire Dragon, according to the Chinese astrological calendar -which is where Dilip places them, when he’s doing the PR publicity poster, I think it’s the start of Chapter Nine. It also makes it possible for Dan Preston to have named Ax after Axl Rose, which is one of the jokes in the first chapters. It’s very embarrassing for Ax, he’s a musico, refined intelligentsia of the Indie Rock world, but his father is a pub-character, a total layabout with shameless heavy metal taste… Whereas Sage’s parents were older, middle-class hippie drop outs, from whom he inherited a huge black vinyl collection, and the Grateful Dead fixation; and Fiorinda’s miserable background is in the unfortunate-children-of-mad-megastar mode; there are plenty of examples. I’m talking ‘bout my generation’s children, fictionally speaking… and I worked it out carefully, in a way. But the dates will not add up. There’ll be anachronisms, and I don’t mind. I like them. There is a crucial mention in one of the last chapters of ‘Near Miss Year’ - apparently ten years before the events of this story there was an asteroid near-miss, and everybody spent a mad summer thinking the world was going to end. I put that in because I was writing Bold as Love in 1999. Remember 1999? Eclipse Summer? That was a little Summer of Love, and I was in Cornwall for it, living on a beach, on the Lizard, and there were rock festivals all over the place. We didn’t get much of an eclipse but it was a great atmosphere, English outdoors community experience. I wanted to put it in the book, so I did, regardless. If there should be a previously unsuspected Near Miss in 2003, then be very afraid… I had never written in a scenario so close to the present before. I had to make a decision. Is it going to be all dovetailed in? Or is it going to be freeform? The moment I thought of that, the obvious answer was ‘freeform’. One of the things I might do on the website is make a little concordance of all the things that just cannot add up.
TB: You quote Marx at the beginning of the book: “All mythology masters and dominates and shapes the forces of nature, in and through the imagination. Hence it disappears as soon as man gains mastery over the forces of nature”. And you’ve added, “But, on the other hand …”
GJ: I’ve got a lot of time for Karl Marx. I really appreciate his writings. But I think he’s wrong there. I think that mythology will always reappear, reintegrate itself, grow again - like fungus or something - and I think one of the things that’s happening in Bold as Love is that the relationship between the technology and the human race has reached a cusp where it’s possible for people - to coin a phrase - to take over the means of production. One of the things that happens - and again, this is one of the things that would belong in the concordance, because as science goes it is, as far as I’m aware, total balderdash - is people becoming their own powerhouses. We get very energy-conserved hardware, so if you want to power a computer, you power it with your fingertips. I can’t bear to tell you the science, but it involves ATP - adenosine triphosphate - the molecule that is used in your cells for energy production. There is a sense in which technology reaches a point where it is loose in the community, and the big corporations - what am I talking about? They can always win - but in my world, in my vision, there comes a point where people can do it for themselves. ‘ATP’ means ‘take the power into your own hands,’ see, very literal. This is one of the things that made rock music a good metaphor, because this is the technology, for the feckless new millionaires of the first generation of big money rock and roll, and then again for the punks … where people, individuals and bands, were able to hijack the machinery, use it their own ways. The more available it becomes, and the more possible it becomes for somebody to say “I don’t need any of you, I’m just gonna bring out a record in my bedroom, and I’m going to press the discs and I’m going to sell them.” Doesn’t mean it’ll be a good record… but it can be done. Home publishing.
TB: Yes, there’s an Internet-based music industry in the novel.
GJ: Don’t ask me how the economics works. I know it does, I know people like Prince make stacks from download sites. But there’s no accountancy strand in Bold as Love…
TB: That’s all very futuristic, but you also have echoes of British - no, English - mythology. Possibly because of the novel having three protagonists - two men and a woman - who are, let’s say, emotionally entangled, people are calling this an Arthurian fantasy.
GJ: It started with the idea of our hero, Ax, being a person who is a principled artist. He’s learnt his craft, he can play the guitar really well. He believes that Western civilisation is worth saving, and he sees it falling apart. He never imagined he would be in Yorkshire with an assault rifle, but he has always thought to himself, “I want to be one of the people that keeps things going. I can see that we’re getting to the point where we might fall off the edge of something. I want to be one of the people who makes the choice for the future rather than the Dark Ages.” Once I’d got that hero set up, because I’m English and because I’ve read a lot of Arthurian myth - and because I’m a science fiction and fantasy fan - I thought ‘Oh really? Well, this sounds like Arthur.’ And we have Fiorinda who is magic. She’s native magic, sovereign magic, that’s not all she is, but it makes her the queen. So I’ve got Guinevere. I invented Sage as Lancelot when I realised what was happening. But this is Arthur in a modern mode, this is not re-enactment fantasy. My Arthurian sense of it, it’s the sense of Ax being one of those people who tries to hold back the tide. I don’t know who Arthur really was; I don’t know if he’s a total invention. But if the Arthur story, fifth century dux bellorum holding back the barbarians, is a story of somebody trying to preserve a civilisation when it’s bound to go, then Bold as Love is an Arthurian story.
TB: Is mythology destiny?
GJ: Ax is not just dux bellorum of the British. Ax has an agenda, and his agenda is about art, friendship and concern for others … I don’t want to say any more than that. The story does go on being Arthurian, but different things can happen with a myth.
TB: Near the beginning of the book, Fiorinda asks someone, ‘Is politics really the new rock’n’roll’?
GJ: I was thinking to what extent music had been my politics. What happened to me was that I read these rock’n’roll biographies looking for rock’n’roll ideas the same way as I’d look for science ideas to put in a book. I realised this actually is the story of my life, because when Bob Dylan - and all those other people whose names we’ve forgotten because Bob Dylan became It - when they were looking for the roots music of America, I was looking for the roots music of England. I, and my sisters, and my friends, were getting into Cecil Sharp: we were playing and singing English folk songs. We were part of that Zeitgeist. Folk music was big when I was thirteen or fourteen, and that’s where I was, and then… the Beatles, and all that followed. What I realised when I started writing Bold as Love is the importance of rock’n’roll - well, not just rock’n’roll, popular music, which becomes ‘folk music’ if it lives. That it goes right back to medieval times in my personal knowledge, which is quite amazing really, a thousand years. ‘Sumer is Icumen in’ was written in Reading, did you know? By a monk. Isn’t that fascinating? Synchronicity, eh? Unluckily, most of our really well known English pop/folk music dates back to the Napoleonic wars (which makes it awkward in Bold as Love because the French are supposed to be our friends). I don’t know if rock’n’roll is politics, but it’s been my cultural history, it’s had a significant part in shaping my life. I hadn’t really realised that when I started writing Bold as Love, but now I do.
TB: I’m not going to ask you how close the politics are to your own.
GJ: Well, there are lots of different politics in the book.
TB: I probably will ask you which bands you had in mind, though.
GJ: There are three main bands in Bold as Love. … I should say, Bold as Love the book has a website. I’ve never done this before. I have a website of my own, which is autobiographical and has essays on it. I decided that if I was going to write a book about rock’n’roll bands, it had to have a website, and I have gone all the way. There’s a quiz, there’s a letters page, there’s everything you would expect to find, and there’s also merchandising - band T-shirts and so on. Ax Preston is the lead guitarist and frontman of a band called the Chosen Few, who come from Taunton. You can get the Deconstruction Tour T-shirt for his band. The Chosen Few are just a virtuous indie guitar band, and I didn’t have a closer model than that. Does the name Reef mean anything to you? West Country guitar band? Almost famous in 1999? Something like that. Held to be good, not famous yet but might be… There are always a few bands like that around. Or you might think of them as Radiohead, though of course they come from Oxford, not far enough west.
TB: Radiohead, only more cheerful?
GJ: More cheerful, and more metal-oriented. Some of you may know Deconstruction in this world is a very over-the-top heavy metal event that’s been happening for the past few years. My Deconstruction’s an eco-warrior deconstruction: theirs is just a chance to make a lot of noise, drink a lot … but I was amused when I found out there was a real ‘Tour’. Many points in common with reality, that’s a good sign, I think. Then there’s DARK, from Teesside, the band Fiorinda plays with. There are several models for Fiorinda’s band. One is that they are Nirvana: Nirvana’s big album is Nevermind. DARK’s big album is No Reason. They’re the raving anarchist kids. Sage and Ax, the men, are the grown ups. Fiorinda is the monster teenage loony.
TB: And she sounds like P J Harvey.
GJ: I thought of Elastica, but for a singer … I looked and listened, and listened and listened: and Polly Harvey, P J Harvey, she has the voice: she’s Fiorinda, near as can be. Cerys Matthew, also, looning around in her party frocks… Then there’s Aoxomoxoa and the Heads. There is an English band called the Heads, they come from Bristol, they’re into psychedelic hard rock: but actually, my Aoxomoxoa and the Heads are, schematically, shall we say, the Grateful Dead. They’re technos, not a guitar band, but they are carrying the futuristic-tech-in-Rock strand; and they have other Dead-like characteristics. But Sage is also a very contemporary figure, I mean 2001 contemporary. In many ways it’s horrifying to me to realise that a lot of the things that Marshall Mathers has to say about himself, and that are said about him, could easily be said about my Sage, who is a very laddish sort of rockstar, who’s made a lot of money out of making himself very popular with a bunch of deranged teenage louts. But he actually has a more responsible side. I don’t know that Eminem does. I think that chap is a conceptual artist, really.
TB: I was thinking more Oasis …
GJ: Oasis?!
TB: Not for the music, but for the attitude.
GJ: Oh yes, yes. “There is this plate-glass window saying ‘Throw a chair at me’”. Sage is a serious large-about, and to some extent there’s some Noel/Liam stuff going on between Ax and Sage. But his bad taste is more calculated, I think, than anything Oasis were capable of. Arbeit Macht Frei is the title of Aoxomoxoa and the Heads’ last album before the book begins. It means ‘Freedom through Work’, and it’s written in wrought iron on the gates to Auschwitz. The Heads say it’s a comment on global capitalism. This is where Sage stands, like Eminem: ‘I’m saying really terrible things: yes. But it’s because the world’s a really terrible place…’ I’ve worn the T-shirt. Occasionally someone will accost me and say ‘Freedom through Work. That’s German, innit?’ Nobody has come up to me and said ‘How can you do that?’ which is rather shocking, really. How close the historical horizon is. How soon we forget.
TB: On to the artwork: the cover of Bold as Love is a pastoral landscape by Anne Sudworth
GJ: It’s beautiful, isn’t it. But it didn’t grab the buyers! I had a dispute with the management about the cover. It was me going for guitars, the management going for unicorns and fairies… er, I mean, “something that shouts ‘Fantasy!’” was the actual words. I said ‘please, no’ because I think if you put spaceships on the front of a book, people will not be happy when they open the book and there are no spaceships in it. They will realise that they have been tricked, and they will not be pleased. If it isn’t a genre fantasy, don’t give it a genre fantasy cover, was my argument. So we got an empty landscape… and I suppose I was wrong. I usually am. Sigh.
TB: Inside the book, by way of contrast, you have a frontispiece by Bryan Talbot, with Sage, Ax and Fiorinda. He’s also done the sketches on the flyers for the book, and the illustration for the excerpt, ‘The Salt Box’, in Interzone.
GJ: I’ve known Bryan for a while, and I really admire his work. When I’d written Bold as Love I wanted people to read it for me to tell me what I was up to: because it was so different from what I’d done before. I sent the book to him, and he read it and liked it. So I said ‘Would you draw them for me, Bryan?’ And he did! The frontispiece of the book is a bit hard on Ax. I think it emphasises the Rock Dictator aspect. But that’s fair enough. It’s a reading. And the portrait sketch - that is Ax! When I saw the sketch of him coming out of the printer, I thought, ‘Yeah! Now I know what Ax Preston looks like.’ I really like the Sage picture as well. Fiorinda - well, she wasn’t entirely Fiorinda for me when I first saw her (though now, I wouldn’t have her any other way). She looks older than sixteen, and colder… But that’s true to what I wrote, to the impression she makes, though not true to what I know, and what people will find out, if they read the book. A passionately loveable heroine, Roz Kaveney said, and that made me very happy, because that’s what I meant her to be… But I’m really thrilled to have these brilliant pictures by Bryan.
TB: The excerpt in Interzone [#169], the first chapter of Bold as Love, was the subject of a complaint, wasn’t it? You’re Public Enemy Number One, accused of publishing material liable to incite paedophiles.
GJ: David [Pringle] was pretty doubtful about publishing this: he said, ‘but there’s no fantasy in it, Gwyneth’. He finally agreed to publish it because he liked the story, although it had no elves, dragons or werewolves in it. Poor chap! In the middle of July he got a crank letter which he naturally ignored. The crank letter said that ‘The Salt Box’, by Gwyneth Jones, was obscene, liable to encourage paedophiles, it was child pornography and he was going to report it to the police. David came back from holiday two weeks later, and the police turned up and took away copies of the magazine: ‘Got to follow up these complaints, sir’. So I got a phone call - I was on holiday in California - to tell me that the first chapter of my book, which was due to be published the next week, had been seized by the police. I was, er, astonished. What happens in this story is that a twelve-year old girl, whose mother is a rock journalist, she has no idea who her father is, has a cold, miserable childhood. Then her mother’s glamorous sister appears and introduces her to the world of celebrities, and the twelve-year old girl knows that her mother doesn’t approve but that just thrills her the more. Her aunt takes her off to a country house weekend. The country house belongs to an ageing megastar. She thinks she’s there because her aunt wants to give her an exciting time. Actually, she’s been groomed and she is being presented to this elderly, fifty-plus rockstar as his treat for the weekend. Of course, he’s paying for it: he’s paying Fiorinda’s aunt. She gets, shall we say, seduced by this rockstar. She is not fazed, she is not a victim, she does not feel herself to have been raped: her attitude is ‘ugh, he’s disgusting; but you never know, it might be a break’. I suppose that was what Disgusted of Wilmslow found so outrageous. I hadn’t thought I was writing child pornography. I’d read and assimilated what happened in the back of the music business, and this was the milieu that I was writing about. And because I also write fairy tales, dark fairy tales, it struck me at once: well, this is what happens. The father goes after his daughter. And although it’s not obvious from the version in Interzone, the rockstar turns out to be Fiorinda’s father. Like the king in the fairy tale. In the modern form fairy tales don’t tell you why the daughter’s getting persecuted: it’s because the father wants her sexually, (and also magically, in this case); and she flees from him. That’s some of what happens in Bold as Love.
TB: There are other sections in Bold as Love which deal with child abuse and paedophilia: I don’t think any of them, unless the reader has a very hyperactive imagination, could be read as any sort of incitement. They are damning of the people involved.
GJ: Well, I was talking about was the counterculture, which has its demons, just as global capitalism has its demons. Hmm. Maybe, freedom from constraint corrupts, just the same as power… Everybody wants to be free. I wanted to show both sides of that, the good and the bad. And the bad’s pretty bad. But thinking of some of the things I’ve written … I never expected to get into trouble with the police for this!
[Audience] What’s the final outcome of the complaint?
GJ: That is a dispute between me and David at the moment. David had a policewoman come round on August 2^nd. (You remember the dates, because you imagine the day in court! That might happen). She took the stuff away, and she told him she’d be back to him in a couple of days. She wasn’t. When I got back to England on 14th August, I rang him and said ‘So what happened with the police?’ He said ‘Well, nobody got back to me, and I’ve mislaid the scrap of paper on which I wrote down the policewoman’s name’. He would have been all right ringing the police station and asking to speak to a particular person, but he’d have had to ring up and say ‘Er, you know about that obscenity charge?’ He didn’t feel like doing that, and I don’t blame him! I said ‘I’d really like to get off the hook: I’m sure they’re not going to prosecute, but I’d like somebody to say that they think the story’s OK.’ But as of now, it seems I’m never going to get that. There’s a lingering dissatisfaction about it, that I’m never going to be able to get somebody to say ‘that was ridiculous’.
TB: There’s a lot of grim stuff in the book, but despite that it’s light-hearted, and almost Utopian. It’s a better future than many.
GJ: It’s a very optimistic version of what’s going to happen in the next few years to this country. It’s about dealing with all the problems that we have, and dealing with a lot of disintegration and collapse in a way that not only avoids major grief for major sections of the population, but has the people feeling that they’ve done a good job. Blitz spirit. It’s total fantasy!
TB: You have that line about helping other people as routine medication: “We’ll give the patients rock’n’roll for heavy medication, voluntary work as routine antidepressants. If we pitch it with enough conviction they’ll buy it.”
GJ: Ax’s theory is that, since we’re social animals, being good to others is a drug with a very pleasant kick. We all know it. It’s the way we’re wired. We’re supposed to look after each other. Ax’s theory that he tries to put into practice is that, in times of crisis, you can get people to go back to their wiring, go back to their original nature, and look out for each other.
TB: The paragraph goes on, “We all know only too well human beings will do any fucking thing, no limit, if it’s seen to be normal and taken for granted.” (p??)
GJ: One way or the other, yes. People will send the Jews to the death camps, or they will go and do voluntary stints in hospitals. You may not remember this - though of course I do because I had invented it the year before - but at the beginning of this year Gordon Brown suggested we should have a Volunteer Initiative. That’s what happens in Bold as Love: people go along and do their two or three hours of hospital cleaning or whatever, as if there was a war on. Of course it’s not going to happen. But Bold as Love’s a pantomime, and I hope it makes people feel better: that’s what it’s meant to do.
[Audience] Given the background of Islamists in the book, is there anything in it you would have rewritten in the light of the events of September 11th?
GJ: No. I had the largely Muslim - or at least politically largely Muslim - state of Yorkshire trying to declare UDI, and I had Ax and the Counterculturals going in and saying, ‘No! We can’t afford to break up any more! You’ve got to join in!’ I don’t want to change that. If you read the book, you’ll find out what the result is.
[Audience] In the excerpt you read out to us, do we ever get an explanation for the ghoul?
GJ: Nope! But one of the things you’ll find out in Bold as Love, which you can disentangle from the rest of the book if you look for it, is that spooky things are happening. It’s very much a realist near-future fiction, but there are things like the ghoul, and Fiorinda’s magic: and there are a couple of other strange things that show the rise of irrationality - no, not irrationality. The simplest way to put it is the way Sage keeps putting it: ‘The world is getting stranger’. Something has happened and the world is getting stranger, and all kinds of things are coming out of the woodwork. It’s not a new idea. No, you don’t get an explanation of the ghoul: but if you read an Ann Halam book called Don’t Open Your Eyes, (which came out in 2000 from Orion children’s books) you’ll find the very same ghoul. Er, sort of.
[Audience] The very last thing in the book says ‘Continued in Castles Made of Sand’. Is it written? When’s it coming out? And how many are there going to be?
GJ: It’s written, it’s with Jo Fletcher now, I’ve talked to her about it, and I’m just about to start the revision. It’ll come out some time in 2002. May 2002 is the date I have at the moment. How many are there going to be? If I have my way, there’ll be quite a few. The world has fallen apart, there’s been a huge economic depression, and there’s trouble in Europe. I can get quite a few years’ mileage out of that, and a lot of strange things can happen before I start writing Bold as Love: The Next Generation.
TB: Are you going to put excerpts on the website?
GJ: I’ve only put the first couple of paragraphs of Castles Made of Sand on the website, because I’m still working on it. But there will be chapters that probably won’t turn out to be chapters, and I’ll post them. Outtakes.
[Audience] Do you see Bold as Love as a complete departure for yourself from your previous material?
GJ: What I’ve got in Bold as Love is the idea that rockstars can be fantasy characters, and the rockstar concept, the music, is a thread through our times; and an idea of what’s going to happen in the near future. I don’t think it’s original, but it’s flexible and good as a framework. There are all kinds of topics to be dealt with, like AI, like … hmm, not to give too much away, anything that’s science-fictional, can be dealt with in the Bold as Love fantasy scenario, with the Bold as Love characters. That’s what I intend to do. I don’t think I’ve changed track, but I’ve come round to the idea of using a certain scenario, and a certain set of people, as the vehicle of what I want to write about. I want to tell these people’s stories, as the story of their world.
TB: How did it feel to be writing two heroic, brave males after all those years of writing ineffectual, flawed men?
GJ: I don’t think I’ve been writing about ineffectual, flawed men! Definitely not! That’s a base calumny on Sid Carton, Atoon of Jagdana, Endang of Gamartha, James and Luci in Kairos and even on Johnny Guglioli… whereas, arguably, Mishy Connelly in Phoenix Café isn’t strictly a man at all. My male characters are no more flawed or ineffectual than anyone else involved in my stories. They’re sometimes heroic, sometimes childish, sometimes wise, sometimes stupid … but they’re complete human beings. I’ve always done that. I’ve never been a woman who makes the men out of cardboard, or just brings them in for sex interest. Male characters that I’ve written before have been off the centre of the book, maybe: and I know to some people that seems like a deliberate insult to the male. But it isn’t. Ax and Sage are not so different from their predecessors: it’s just that they are in the centre of the book, and that was decided by the scenario.
[Audience] Have you ever considered doing a graphic novel with Bryan Talbot?
GJ: I’d love to. Alas, Bryan Talbot doesn’t need anybody to do graphic novels with him. He’s Renaissance Man, he can do it all. He doesn’t need me: I need him to draw the pictures, but he doesn’t need me to tell the stories. In a perfect world, maybe, one day. But how does it go? ‘Time is short, art is long’, and I think Bryan has enough to do with his own ideas.

Shadow -- K J Parker

A man wakes up, half-immersed in a stream that runs through a battlefield, with no recollection of his identity. Overhead, crows circle, waiting. He has a vague memory of arguing with his reflection in the water, but that must have been a dream. Poldarn, taking the name of an obscure - and possibly made-up - god whose priestess he encounters, quickly adapts to a life without a past. His vivid dreams hint at that past, from a bewildering number of viewpoints: which dreams are truly his memories? Against a backdrop of a crumbling empire, beset by Viking-like raiders, Poldarn tries to reconstruct his identity. There are those who recognise him, but none of them live long enough to tell him his name. All that he can be sure of is his superlative skill with the sword and his ability to survive.

With the help of the fake priestess, Copis, he becomes a divine impersonator, a high-risk courier, and a button merchant - each role leading to another teasing encounter with a nameless face from his past. Legends and folk tales seem to link his fate with the story of the god Poldarn: could he, in fact, be a god and not know it?

Meanwhile, the sword-monk Monach (‘just a word for ‘monk’ in the southern dialect’) has been instructed by his Order to find the man who is calling himself Poldarn. The Order’s purposes are unclear, even to Monach, but they’re privy to knowledge about the god Poldarn that might help the mortal version to make sense of everything that’s happening to him.

K J Parker’s first fantasy trilogy, beginning with Colours in the Steel, met with critical acclaim for its straightforward grittiness, dark humour and attention to technological detail. The setting of the Fencer trilogy was a world of minimal magic, with few of the supernatural or mystical elements that have come to typify post-Tolkien fantasies. Shadow is similarly prosaic, focussing on the mundane rather than the magical. Parker conveys an intimate understanding of the mechanics of day-to-day life in a mildly industrialised Renaissance world - button-making machines, sword-fighting technique, the decades-long war against the raiders - without losing the tension of the narrative or glorifying its nastier aspects.

There are other similarities to Parker’s earlier novels. The prophetic dreams: the mirroring of dream and reality, highlighted by identical phrasing: the sheer complexity of plot, which is hinted at rather than revealed. Parker also has a rare gift for characterisation, and the plot is driven by credibly flawed individuals, rather than high-minded archetypes. Poldarn’s quest for his identity takes some improbable turns, working towards a revelation that is genuinely surprising and keeps the reader guessing until the end.


Shadow proclaims itself as ‘Book One of the Scavenger Trilogy’. Does the world really need another weighty fantasy trilogy, at over £10 for the trade paperback editions? Yes, when it’s by a writer as fresh and innovative as K J Parker.

White as Snow -- Tanith Lee

Tor’s Fairy Tale series, edited by Terri Windling, has published a number of elegant literary fantasies since its inception in 1987. Each novel in the series aims to retell a classic fairytale in a new and startling way, restoring elements of sensuality and terror which have been bowdlerised by well-meaning children’s editors over the years. Authors to date have included Pamela Dean, Charles de Lint and Jane Yolen: the latest in the series, White as Snow, is Tanith Lee’s interpretation of the tale of Snow White.

It’s far from the first time that Tanith Lee has used fairy tales as a source. Her 1982 anthology, Red as Blood, retold a number of classic tales in styles ranging from the high-tech science fiction romance of ‘Beauty’ (Beauty and the Beast) to the more familiar surreal horror of the title story - another version of Snow White.
In recent years, Tanith Lee’s adult fiction has seemed ever darker and more decadent: her prose can, at worst, be overblown and humourless. Only her juvenile novels (such as the Wolf Tower and Unicorn sequences) retain the wit and vigour of earlier works.


White as Snow is, in that sense at least, a refreshing departure from form. Lee intertwines the tales of the evil ‘stepmother’ and her affection-starved daughter with elements of classical myth and medieval romance. Arpazia is a spoil of war, raped and impregnated by the conquering king: her disowned daughter Candacis, known as Coira, is no sweet cipher, but a complex personality in her own right. The dwarves, too, are finely-drawn individuals with unexpected depth, rather than the circus troop one might initially take them for.

The tale unfolds against a lightly-drawn backdrop reminiscent of medieval Italy. There’s a dreamlike lack of any sense of place and time. Nothing from the wider world crosses the boundaries of the narrative, although there are vague references to other lands, other wars. Christ and his mother Marusa are worshipped, but the women of the walled town go into the woods at solstice and equinox to pay homage to the forest king, remembering the old myths. Coira’s nickname is given to her by her nurse: it’s the name of the corn-goddess Demetra’s daughter, who was stolen away to a place under the earth by Hadz, the King of Death.

As if acting out a play, the characters in the novel perform various interpretations of the roles suggested by their names, at once blind to the myths and archetypes they embody and desperate to escape them. Unravelling the original texts of the fairy tale, as well as the Disneyfied popular conception, White as Snow marks a return to the clarity and vision of Tanith Lee’s finest fantasies.

Passage -- Connie Willis

… Passage (Connie Willis) had me in floods, and not for what I suspect are the obvious reasons. It was not at all what I expected, and some aspects of the novel crept up on me and announced themselves by reducing me to tears, sometimes halfway through a sentence. I think I'd rather be distressed, alone, by words on a printed page and the images they evoke than by reference to the same images in a public place.

Paul Kincaid has commented on the inappropriate slapstick elements of the novel - the first half of the novel, at least - which delude the reader into thinking that this is just another romantic comedy along the lines of Bellwether or To Say Nothing of the Dog. The same characters, in marginally different guises, form the central trio. Joanna is the sensible academic female, trying not to be romantic or frivolous: Tish is the ditzy, predatory younger woman, academically her inferior, who clearly looks down on her unworldliness: and Richard is the oblivious genius with his mind on higher things, out of touch with his feelings … yes, we're in Mills & Boon territory again. And this is a hospital romance.

Because of that, I didn't expect raw, painful emotions or an unsentimental, un-American discussion of death. Nor did I expect to be so upset over the fictional, gradual decline of a fictional character. Joanna's high school English teacher, Mr Briarley, has Alzheimer's, and is slowly forgetting everything he knew; every quotation, every memory, every word. 'I used to think that a quick death, with no time to say goodbye, was the worst that could happen' says one character (or words to that effect). How I envy anyone who, through a drug-induced experimental state of mind, can experience their loved one 'well and happy, with limbs and faculties restored'. Even if I knew that it was an illusion, it would be a terribly addictive one.

It would have been so easy for Connie Willis to find a kind way out, to give this book some measure of happy ending, real or illusory. It would have been almost as easy to slide into the realms of the fantastic and stop it being a novel about science at all (because that's what it is, considerably more than it's a romance). That she does neither, that she does not cheat but unflinchingly challenges the reader's forlorn hopes, is to her credit. She is honest about death in a way that amply demonstrates how little patience she has with the 'denial' culture of modern America.

There are aspects of the book that I question, even while being powerfully affected by some of the writing. Joanna's clinically-induced experiences seem much clearer than those of the other experimental subjects, but there's no good reason for that. Richard does something very unprofessional and unscientific - I wonder why, because he doesn't seem like a person whose basic principles would be overruled by emotion, even in extremity, to that degree. I'm unsettled by the ending, and wonder about the imagery: but even outside the realms of the book I can make it fit my beliefs and assumptions, and it certainly works with the rest of the novel.

Recommended, unless you are in a vulnerable state of mind. If I'd known, would I have started reading the book? I carried on even after I realised how close to the bone it was getting: but it's immensely readable, and I'd have found it harder to stop reading (and let my imagination take over) at that point than to continue.

(NB: My father was hospitalised last year after a stroke: he's had Parkinson's disease for the last decade, but since May 2001 he's deteriorated very quickly, to the extent that sometimes he doesn't recognise me, and he is convinced that my mother - dead fifteen years - is living in the same nursing home as him). 

Bold as Love -- Gwyneth Jones [subjective]

(See also my more objective review of this book)

…I really just wanted another chance to ramble on about Bold as Love, by Gwyneth Jones. A very fine book, and the proof that I, at least, think so can be found in the state of my copy: less than a month old and showing signs of considerable wear. 

I still haven't decided whether it is a truly 'good' book, but it's one of the best I've read for years. I can't remember the last time that I re-read a novel immediately (not once but twice!): and I can't be sure that my enthusiasm for the book hasn't blinded me to major flaws in plot and structure.

But I don't care. It's like being in love: a temporary madness, perhaps obsessive. I realised long ago that one of the defining qualities of the books that I adore (as opposed to admiring) is that the characters work for me: that I like them. I've also recently begun to think about novelistic portrayals of relationships - whether friendly, romantic or professional - and how a book can be made or broken (for me, at least) by convincing and appealing character interaction or the lack of it.
Perhaps this is why I enjoy the not-necessarily-worthy Harry Potter books, despite their flaws and their relative simplicity. The friendship between Harry, Ron and Hermione, though very different to my own experiences at school, appeals to me emotionally. It also gives the series so far an emotional core, a constant 'safe place': Harry, the outsider, needs that haven: it's where he draws his strength. Considering the news item about the woman whose doctoral thesis argues that Hermione is the real hero(ine) of the books, perhaps there's a place for an academic paper on the role of friendship as magical amulet in recent children's fantasy? Seems to me that many earlier juveniles featured solitary protagonists who were strong because they didn't have that sort of support network: they had to be independent and that prepared them for magical adventures. If they weren't alone, they were often aided and abetted by siblings, which is an entirely different matter.

But back to Bold as Love, which is not a children's book by any stretch of the imagination.

I'm not sure that the future portrayed by Gwyneth Jones can be reached from where we are now. I'm not entirely convinced that any government, even New Labour, would invite a committee of indie rock stars into the policy process. There are elements of characterisation that don't ring entirely true. (There are elements of plot which I find distracting). There's some grim stuff in the novel, as well as plenty of Millaresque festival scenes. But there's also poetry, magic and subtlety. It's a very British future, though perhaps a rather rosier one than we're likely to get. The call of a blackbird in a dark Yorkshire conifer plantation, with a fighter plane 'like tearing silk' overhead … Tube travel after the revolution … the horror of holiday villages. That's Britain: indeed, that's England.

Bold as Love is also, in places, laugh-out-loud funny. That's not through any artificial heartiness on the author's part: we're not talking slapstick scenes or riotous behaviour here. No, the humour resides (almost?) entirely in the dialogue: in people trying to see the funny side, in everyday banter, in the clash of personalities. I don't think I've ever laughed at anything in any of Gwyneth Jones' books before. I've admired them as works of fiction, and as explorations of what might be. She's painted solid, believable, densely-imagined futures which have appealed to me intellectually. But Bold as Love is fun. And it got me listening to rock music (and other popular stuff) again, purely as a spin-off: and of course that taste never really went away, so maybe the appeal is largely in the setting and the (imaginary) soundtrack.

I do wonder if the novel will leave cold those with no experience of, or liking for, the present-day equivalent of the social milieu it portrays. On the other hand … I've had two long letters (as a result of an email to someone else asking for interview questions) from someone who'd been described as Gwyneth Jones' greatest fan. I was pleased to find someone whose obsessive attention to detail was similar to my own. In the first letter, one of the questions concerned the positive portrayal of rock concerts - 'she doesn't mention the pounding beat or the crowds'. Hmm, I thought, a non-rock fan: well, obviously not that important a part of the setup, then!

And the next letter gave it away. The second book, Castles Made of Sand, is due out some time next year. (Can't wait. Must wait.) Remarking on the suspense, my correspondent discloses: "I haven't looked forward to a forthcoming book so much since The Return of the King in 1956. I was 15 …"

I have to say this surprised me: I'd taken him, from tone and comments, as someone of roughly the same generation as myself. But it was heartening as well: as I said above, I'd wondered if Bold as Love was a Yoof book, enjoyable only by people who Do That Sort of Thing. (I'm phrasing this badly but the urge to communicate overrides the desire for eloquence).

Bold as Love -- Gwyneth Jones [objective]

(See also my more subjective review of this book.)

Imagine a near-future England gently ravaged by flood, GM disasters and economic decline. The Home Secretary announces an initiative to get the kids involved in society (not to mention politics) by creating a 'counter-cultural thinktank' of the brighter stars of the indie rock scene. Maybe promoting politics as the new rock'n'roll will rouse England's youth from post-millennial apathy and rejuvenate England just as the Act of Dissolution - splitting the UK back into its component nations - comes into force. The rock stars will probably be too busy taking drugs and having sex to achieve anything significant, but they do seem to have influence ...

Fiorinda, brattishly independent teenaged daughter of a famous rock star, signs up for the think-tank by mistake while following someone who looks like her father. Skull-masked Aoxomoxoa (Sage to his friends) joins up to keep his friend Fio company. And Axl Preston, the political face of rock'n'roll even before this initiative, could hardly be excluded from such a gathering. To the surprise of many, though, it's not Ax whose political agenda provokes a bloody coup one night in December.

Fiorinda, Sage and Ax find themselves unnervingly close to the new centre of power. The England they live in is becoming stranger daily: by the end of this, the first of a series of novels, it's transformed to an almost medieval state.

That central triumvirate has evoked comparisons with the legend of Arthur: but this is no simple recounting, or recasting, of the archetypal British myth. It's a very English romance, though devoid of warm beer, cricket matches and old ladies cycling to church. The romance is not limited to a traditional love story, whether heterosexual or otherwise. Bold as Love is as much a love letter to the festival counterculture as it's an examination of the relationship between any two individuals.

Jones' future England is deftly drawn, with minutiae that are more convincing than any infodump in portraying the demographic and social changes between Now and Then. The climate's growing cooler, not warmer: the Royal Family have fled the country: Wonderwall is still a classic rock anthem.

We see the transformations wreaked upon the post-Dissolution remnants of the United Kingdom through the mildly distorting lens of Fiorinda’s alienation. 'This is not my world' is her refrain, but she could easily be a new Britannia, or an English Marianne, for a newly-independent, forcibly isolated England. Sage and Ax, charismatic but not entirely reliable heroes, struggle to hold things together through a sequence of revelations and catastrophes that emphasises the immutable frailty, cruelty and fallibility of humankind within this altered England.

Jones portrays these interesting times with an unfailing, occasionally grim attention to psychological and social detail. Bold as Love is not the frivolous romp that its subject matter - the Rock'n'Roll Reich - might suggest. That doesn't mean, though, that the bold new world painted here is unremittingly bleak. Welsh technology is quietly evolving solutions to problems that haven't yet begun to bite. The music scene is healthier than ever (and Gwyneth Jones resists the temptation to describe future gigs in tedious detail).

Whether or not you buy into the politics of the revolution - Bold as Love could be read as a Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the counterculture - the focus of the novel is personal rather than political. Sage, Ax and Fiorinda are likeable, flawed individuals who strike sparks off one another as the tangled relationships between them evolve and mutate. There’s an exuberance about these three, even in their darkest moments, that is appealingly infectious. I’m looking forward immensely to encountering them again in the next volume, Castles Made of Sand.

The Martians are Coming

This article originally appeared in Banana Wings #16, 2000 (eds Brialey and Plummer)

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The Martians are Coming
Here's something you'll catch several glimpses of if you search for 'Shoebury' on the Web:

Some of the passengers were of the opinion that this firing came from Shoeburyness, until it was noticed that it was growing louder. At the same time, far away in the southeast, the masts and upperworks of three ironclads rose one after the other out of the sea ... a Martian appeared ... then yet another, still farther off, wading deeply through a shiny mudflat that seemed to hang halfway up between sea and sky.

H G Wells had been to Shoebury, all right, or at least to that part of the Essex coast: he knew about the surreal light and the drifting horizon, and the mudflats stretching out like leaden mirrors towards (I imagine) Holland.

It's easy to imagine a Martian out there, between the shallow sea and the narrow sandy beach, striding along at low tide with a tripod gait that couldn't be mistaken from any distance for any of the water birds that flock to this part of the coast. Foulness Island, now mainly owned by the Ministry of Defence, takes its name from the olden spelling of 'fowl', rather than any inherent Donaldsonian miasma.

Incidentally, Wells’ Martians started a trend for interplanetary vacations: in Green Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson has Nirgal visit a drowned Southend, and dive off Shoebury: from a boat moored, quite literally, above the beach, he watches the Cutty Sark go racing past, liberated from dry dock at Greenwich. But there’s no true sense of place; surely no writer so enthralled by light and colour could resist the temptation to rhapsodise, at length, about the light.

... an acre of land
Between the salt water and the sea sand

Stuff gets left here for the tide to cover, discover, rust and rot. Part of a prototype for the aborted fourth London airport, Maplin, still hulks impenetrably out on the sands, just beyond the remains of the kilometre-long defensive boom. Further out, and not often visible, there’s a line of sea forts stretching north, including the Independent Republic of Sealand, once home to Radio Caroline. Around to the west, part of the Mulberry Harbour - a vast array of concrete barges destined for Normandy - lies broken-backed where it grounded. You can walk most of the way out to it at low tide, wading like a Martian half a mile from the shore, as long as you don’t mind the risk of drowning. My father says that if you follow the tide out, it will have turned before you reach the edge of deep water. Don't flee for the shore, he says, don’t run: the mud sucks at your feet if you run, or trips you suddenly, knee-deep in a hidden hole.

The mud is thick and black. My father told me of a man he knew back in the 1960s, who shovelled mud into crates and loaded them onto the ‘up’ train for collection by some London beauty salon. Since then, most of the cockle beds have been closed, the shellfish too poisoned for human consumption.

Life below the mud oozes merrily along, though. Ankles lapped by little cats-paw waves, I bend to watch shrimps and baby flatfish dart and hide. Once the mud is exposed, periwinkles make Odyssean voyages from one patch of weed to another, leaving a single broad track behind them. Sudden knee-high jets of water mark the presence of hidden subterranean creatures. Subterranean? This doesn’t feel like land (too liquid), and isn’t – between tides – the sea. Imagine a planet with no moon. This shifting, liminal zone wouldn’t exist.

Let Slip the Dogs of War

Beyond the boom, out of mere mortals' ken, there's a DERA (Defence Evaluation and Research Agency) site, which tests all sorts of armaments - including, allegedly, parts of obsolete Polaris missiles - out on the sands where Wells' Martians stalked. There's been a military presence there for centuries, possibly for millennia: the Saxons weren't the first to build a fort on this peninsula of grass-knotted sand, far out at the mouth of England's greatest river. The Nore lightship is moored four miles out: the anchorage around it was the site of the great naval mutiny of 1797.

In the first world war, Shoebury was home to the War Dog Training School, which trained sentry, patrol and message dogs and sent them out to Flanders. There was more of a military presence than that, though. When I mention Shoebury to my father, and show him my photographs of the unforgettable light, he rouses briefly to say 'Your grandfather was there in 1915. He used to exercise the officers' horses out on the sands every morning.'

My grandfather was a French national, though he may also have had British nationality from his Scottish grandfather (hence 'Brown'). He'd have been 30 years old by then, with a child due to be born in November to his wife back in France. What was he doing at a British army camp in 1915? Was it an army camp? Was it British?

I try to ask all this: but I have to sit back and swallow my frustration as my father fights to recapture his train of thought, but loses it anyway. He mutters something, but lack of teeth, and the slurring left by four separate strokes, conspire to make him unintelligible. It is all locked inside, behind misaligned teeth that a dentist should fix (if any dentist in the area was taking on NHS patients). And if he will not rage against the dying of the light, I shall do it on his behalf.

If you ever have to go to Shoeburyness
Take the A road, the OK road, that's the best

This assemblage of Shoebury-lore was seeded by a short story, 'Settling the World', in Mike Harrison's anthology The Ice Monkey. He mentions the Shoebury Road, which runs east from Southend to the faded grandeur of what the Sunday papers (being alarmist about the use of old Polaris missiles at the DERA range) are pleased to call a 'popular seaside resort'. (Popular with Martians, at any rate). In need of a venture beyond the M25, and reminded of the existence of a place I'd visited as a child, I took the train to Shoebury: at least, that was my intention, but on a whim I got out at Thorpe Bay instead.

My family were creatures of habit, and we visited the same section of beach almost every summer weekend for over a decade. The beach at Thorpe Bay is pebble, with patches of sand. Driftglass emeralds and sapphires sparkle exotically as the waves break over them. Because estuarine tides are strong, a series of wooden breakwaters was constructed to prevent the sand washing away. Some of the wood is new, and not yet weathered grey. I’ve read that the sea level on this part of the coast is rising by 10 centimetres a year: am I imagining that the high-water mark is further up the beach?

At the back of the beach there's a row of beach huts, some of them Edwardian, painted in faded weather-proof paint. We used to sit in front of a particularly pink one, 'Clif's Own': in windy weather, or when it was raining, we sheltered (or scrambled out of wet costumes) in its porch. It terrifies me that I remember the names of the ten or so huts on either side. If you'd asked me a week ago to describe ‘Cygnets’ I would have stared at you blankly. Now I can say: narrower than the huts on either side; white weathered to grey; a steeply-pitched tar-papered roof; an open porch at the front, with three steps leading in, and a shiny new padlock – this year’s – on the door.

This particular spot on the beach is probably the place where I have been happiest in my life. The sound of these gentle waves, on this mixture of shingle and sand, is like coming home: the silhouette of the broken Mulberry Harbour barge, uncovered minute by minute as the tide goes out, is too familiar for me to wonder even for a moment what it is. The chimney on Sheerness rises out of the haze, almost in line with the pole that marks the end of the breakwater. As the tide recedes, there is a distinct line of still water marking the submerged part of the breakwater. I haven't been here for at least fifteen years, yet it is all instantly eternal; as though I have never been anywhere else. This (with apologies to Douglas Adams) is the furniture of my mind.

Dawn in the Afternoon

The light here is unlike anywhere else. It's difficult to photograph the exact effect, but sea and sky - while quite distinct - seem far more closely allied than usual. To the east of here lies the shallow, relatively calm North Sea, like a huge mirror. The land is pancake-flat and marshy, and goes on for miles, held in by a sea wall which is constantly being raised. (The Dutch came to this bit of Essex in the seventeenth century, felt right at home, and drained some of it, though malaria was rife until the nineteenth century.)

There's a definite glow on the eastern horizon in the late afternoon: a cool, pale blue light that seems to have nothing in common with the warm, hazy, smog-pinkened sunshine (refracted in London air) to the west. I grew up not ten miles north of here. That light, more than anything else, is a Proustian madeleine for me.

I remember asking my parents, one summer Sunday afternoon at home, if the light in the east was the dawn. Naturally, they found this incredibly amusing, and it's to their credit that they took the time to explain to me that 'dawn' meant the sun rising, and how could the sun be rising in the east if it was still in the sky to the west? I remember finding this rather confusing for a while: I must have been very young.

But it's the light, I tell you: it promises vast celestial things to the east. It brings back memories. (What is blue and is like amber?) I walked from Thorpe Bay eastwards along the empty promenade, past retired couples packing up their Thermos flasks and tartan blankets (we had one, with tar marks on it). My eyes were fixed on the east: I wanted to be able to drink up the light like water. A limitless blue, reflected in water a shade darker and on silvery mud flats strewn with grounded pleasure-boats, with the horizon a simple, distinct line of light.

In Memoriam for the Living

Sitting on that beach, I felt at first as though I was creating a memorial weekend to my parents: gradually, that feeling mellowed into a sense of visiting instead. My mother's long dead: my father is still alive, though now he lives far from that beach and will never visit it again. I 'phoned him, sitting there on the breakwater, and told him that the light was just the same and there were trains again along the pier. He was having a good day: he remembered enough to remind me to look out for the masts of the Richard Montgomery, a bomb-laden wreck over in the mouth of the Medway. I couldn't see it. My eyes aren't as good as they were.

My father walks slowly these days, with difficulty, as though he is walking in the mud out past the breakwaters. It takes him fifteen minutes to walk from my sister's house to her car. He tells me it is safer if he doesn't hurry.

I could wax poetic – or pathetic - and say that the metaphoric tide is coming in, ready to lap at his ankles. I don't say anything. I have to remind myself that the golden afternoons I remember are a quarter of a century away. He looks back, on lucid days, so much further: to a sand dune he ran up one summer's afternoon, outpacing the steam train that carried the rest of his family. Where was that? He can't say.

It's too late now for me to write down everything he has done, the tales told over, and I curse myself for not concentrating. The light at Shoebury brings tears to my eyes, too: but it remains, and is always there when I visit it, and will be there when I am dead.