Hugh Cook (Canadian novelist)

Transcription

[applause] Speaker 1: Thank you. Guy Kay: Thank you. Am I mic-ed? Yes. I'm mic-ed. A quick housekeeping note, I have no problem with people checking their cellphones for the Blue Jay score. My preference, as an extreme courtesy, is that no one shout, or yell, or moan, or do anything dramatic when they find whatever happens there, because if I'm reading the scene when the mothership comes down and transports everyone to 16th century Florence, you are going to kill my buzz. So, that's first housekeeping note. Second of all, some quick "thank yous" to the library for hosting this, to Tina for that generous introduction, to Lori for agreeing to try to make me sound wittier than I'm likely to be. And we can write our books. I write my books myself at an alarmingly slow pace as a number of people have been opined to tell me. [laughter] GK: But I don't produce them myself. And I've had the extraordinary support, commitment, creativity, energy of a great many people among my publishers around the world. But tonight, I don't think that any of them would be so curmudgeonly, to use a word that is occasionally for some reason applied to me, as to object if I single out Penguin Canada, Nicole Winstanley, Beth Lockley, the team that Penguin have been so extraordinarily engaged and committed to supporting my work for many books and many years now, and exceptionally so with River of Stars. So, I would like to express my real thanks to them. GK: My last thank you, which is anything but pro forma, this is as real as I get, is to you, to my readers. The most salient and telling gift an author can have is the luxury of time to make any given book as good as that writer can be, can become, can aspire to be. And my readers around the world have... There are enough of them, and they seem to like the books enough to give me that luxury to do my thing which is to write, rewrite, write, rewrite, swear, rewrite, thing, over and over. We live in a sped up world with some expectations of a book a year or better. And If I have escaped that mandate, that reality, it's the gift, the grace extended to me by my readers. So, if I say thank you, I mean it. GK: Now, River of Stars. Those of you... And I'm sure there will be a few who have heard me riff on this before. I'd like to read from early in the books because otherwise you end up doing very extensive backfill, which tends to be very extensively boring and often leads to people in the audience falling asleep. [laughter] And over the years, I have decided that that's counter-productive to my purposes. [laughter] So, I'd like to read from early in the novels requiring as little back story as possible. I want to read to you briefly because I want to make sure I don't keep Lori waiting because then she'll get irritable [laughter] and I can suffer the consequences of that. So, we're about to be introduced to one of the two protagonists. So, it's a young woman named Lin Shan. We are in 12th dynasty Kitai which is modelled on, inspired by the Song Dynasty of the early 1100s, 12th century. GK: Shan is about 16 years old. This is, by the way, a recurring theme of mine. People grew up faster for a myriad of reasons today, not least of which is the fact we tend to live longer. We grow up more slowly in many respects. People grew up faster in earlier times. Shan is 16. She has been betrothed by her father. She is getting married next year. She is profoundly distinctive in a culture that is extremely repressive with respect to women. She has been educated by her father, an extremely minor, diffident, shy, edge of the court figure whose one subversive action in his whole life was to educate his daughter as if she was the brother who died when he was young. So, Shan has received the education that a young man preparing to study for and take the examinations that lead to a lofty existence. She has been educated that way. GK: She and her father have spent the day in the second city of the empire. They travel to a flower festival in spring time, based on reality, and they are in the home of a retired prime minister. They are visiting him, because the father, the gentle, minor court figure father has written a tiny book on gardens, including the garden of this retired prime minister, and he has presented it to him. Unbeknownst to them, on the same day, the prime minister knew it, one of his most beloved protégées, in fact, one of the most beloved figures in Kitai is a poet named Lu Chen, a poet and a politician, who has just been exiled by the faction currently in power. GK: One of the themes of the book is the way political conflict played out through horrific exile that was usually meant, as I said once in the words of Goldfinger to James Bond, "I expect you to die, Mr. Bond." Exile was in fact in some instances expected to kill you. And this poet figure surprised Shan and her father by being there that day. They've all had dinner in the older prime minister's house, and Shan has retired to her room to go to bed. GK: It is dark outside the silk paper windows. No moon tonight. The crickets continuing, wind, the birds quiet now. She glances at the bed, she isn't sleeping anymore. She is gazing at the books on the desk when she hears a footfall in the corridor. She is not afraid. She has time to wonder at herself that she seems to have not closed her door after all, when he steps inside. "I saw the light," he says quietly. Half a truth. His chamber is at the front other side of the dining chamber. He had to have come this way in order to see her light. Her mind works like this. Her heart is racing. She is truly not fearful though. Words are important, you don't think or write afraid when it is the wrong word. She is still wearing the blue jacket with gold buttons from dinner, there are phoenixes on it. Her hair is still pinned, though without the flower now. She bows to him. You can start with a bow. He says not smiling, "I shouldn't be here." GK: "Of course, he shouldn't," Shan thinks. It is an offence against courtesy to her, to her father, to their host. She does not say that. She says, "I should not have left the door open." He looks at her, his eyes are grey above a long nose and the neat grey and black chin beard. His own hair is also pinned, no hat, the men have removed their hats at dinner, a gesture meant to indicate freedom from restraint. There are lines at the corners of his eyes. She wonders how much he's had to drink, how it affects him. The stories, widely shared, say it doesn't very much. He says, "I'd have seen a light under the door, I could have knocked." "I would have opened it for you," she says. She hears herself say that, and is amazed, not afraid. GK: He is still beside the door, has not come farther in. 'Why?" he asks, still quietly. He has been cheerful all day, for the three of them. Not now. "Why would you have opened it? Because I am being sent away?" She finds herself nodding, "That is also the reason you are here, isn't it?" She watches him consider it, is pleased he hasn't offered the too quick easy denial flattering her. "One reason," he murmurs. "One reason for me, then, too," she says from where she stands by the desk by the bed, near the lamp and two flowers. Something shrieks from the garden, sudden and loud. Shan startles, catches herself. She is too much on edge, not that that's surprising. GK: Something has just died outside. "A cat hunting," he says, "perhaps a fox. Even amid beauty and order, that happens." "And when there is no beauty, no order?" She regrets that even as she says it, she is pushing again. But he smiles. He says, "I'm not going to the island intending to die, Miss Lin." She can't think of what to say to that. "Say nothing, for once," she tells herself. He is looking at her from across the room. She can't read that gaze. He says,"People live on Lingzhou Isle, you know that, I just said the same thing to Wengao." People who have grown up there, she thinks, who grow accustomed to the diseases and the endless steaming rainfall and the heat. She says,"There are... There are spiders." He grins at that. She has meant for him to do so. Wonders if he knows. "Enormous spiders, yes," he says. "The size of houses, they tell me." "And they eat men?" "Poets, I'm told." [laughter] GK: "Twice a year a number of spiders come from the forest into the squares of the one town, and they must be fed a poet, or they will not leave." [laughter] GK: "There is a ceremony." She allows herself a brief smile. "A reason not to write poetry? I'm told they make prisoners compose a verse in order to receive their meals." "How cruel. And that qualifies them as poets?" "The spiders are not critical, I understand." [laughter] GK: He will be another kind of prisoner there. Not in a jail, but watched, forbidden to leave. This folly is not amusing as he wants it to be, Shan thinks. He seems to come to the same conclusion. "I asked if you would offer me one or two of your songs, if you remember?" Men can say the strangest things. But she shakes her head. "Not now. Not like this." "Poetry suits a bedchamber." Stubbornly she shakes her head again, looking down. "Why?" He asks gently. She hasn't expected gentleness. She meets his gaze across the room. "Because that's not why you came," she says. GK: His turn to fall silent. Mostly silence outside now, as well, after that death in the garden. Wind in the plum trees. Spring night. And now, Shan realizes, she is afraid after all. It is not easy, she thinks, to make your way in the world while insisting on a new path. She has never been touched by a man. She is to be married next year. This man is past her father's age, has a son older than her, a first wife dead, a second living with his brother's family, for Lu Chen will not bring her to the island with him, whatever he might say about not going south to die. His son will be coming, to be a companion. Perhaps bury his father one day, or bring the body back for burial, if that's allowed. GK: He says, "I'm not so vain, or unmannerly, to have imagined anything beyond talking tonight." She draws a breath and with it, with his words, her fear seems to have gone, as quickly as it had flowered within. She can even smile, carefully, looking down. "Not even imagined?" she asks. Hears him laugh, her reward. "I deserve that," the poet says. "But Miss Lin, we may imagine much, but not always allow these visions to enter the world. We all live this way." "Must we?" she asks. "I think so. The world falls apart, otherwise. There are men I have imagined killing, for example." GK: She can guess who one or two of those might be. "I think you meant to honour me, coming here. I know how wide the space is between us, because of my sex, my age, my inexperience. I want only to tell you that I'm not... That you need not... " She is short of breath. Shakes her head impatiently. Pushes forwards. Says, "You need not assume I would be offended if you came into the room now, Master Chen." There. Said it. And the world has not broken asunder. No other animal has screamed outside. Burning suns are not falling, shot down by arrows of legend. And she will not, she will not live defined or controlled by what others think or say. ' GK: Because this is the life, the path, hard and lonely, her father has put her on -- never realizing it would be so, never intending this when he began to teach her. And they discovered, together, that Shan was quicker and brighter and perhaps even deeper than almost any man they knew. GK: Thank you, thank you. Thank you. [applause] GK: And now I go over to meet my fate. [laughter] S1: I'm not that scary, I don't think. [chuckle] I hope not. GK: I know. But it's a good setup. [laughter] S1: Where to? Got yourself a little drink. GK: It's the sound effects technician, rattling the ice cubes. [laughter] S1: I have to start off by asking something that I think is in a lot of people's minds. When you were working on Under Heaven, did you know that you would be revisiting China as a setting? GK: No. No. I never know. And I don't just say that. I never know what the next book would be. And if I had been asked to sort of lay odds as I was finishing Under Heaven, I would have said I would not. I would move on. A couple of things happened. One of them was that I made an extraordinary number of acquaintance of a number of remarkably intelligent, inspiring scholars, working in Chinese history. And the connection, the communication back and forth, continued when Under Heaven was finished. Another dear friend of mine, who is here tonight, was working on his doctoral thesis on Song Dynasty calligraphy. And he is very good at strong-arming. [laughter] I'm very good at resisting strong-arming. So, it was force, the irresistible force and immovable object. But that was of interest. GK: And then, I have... Some of you will know this, I have a long-standing interest, it's a recurring theme in my work, which has to do with the way the past does not go away. "The past isn't even past," as Faulkner put it. And the Song Dynasty, the inspiration for this book, was particularly obsessed with not repeating the errors that they understood to have been made in the past. You know, how we use that term where we say, "We're always fighting the last war" and that that's a common problem? They shaped their dynasty, they shaped their culture, in a conscious effort not to repeat the errors that they assumed, they weren't necessarily right, but they assumed were the errors of the past. And the more I thought about that, the more it seemed like a perfect opportunity to really sharply explore one of my own life-long themes, in a particular setting. S1: So, would you say that, that's of obvious interest to you, but would you say that location works almost as a character for you? GK: Yeah. S1: Yeah. GK: Yeah. That's almost exactly how I put it. That's how I would like... If I do it right, that's how I would like the reader to be drawn into the book. People use the word "immersive," or "immersion," and I like the word. It's not so much the idea of putting frogs in the pot and turning up the temperature slowly so that I kill you without your knowing. And I'm not that sadistic. [laughter] But there is an element where I think that the immersive quality of a novel comes, in part, from the reader, gradually becoming more and more aware of how the setting works, how the framework for what the characters do is built up. And I work on that. I work on that in the opening chapters of this a lot. S1: And I know that you don't consider this a sequel, but that's why I would consider this, to a certain extent, a sequel, and why I think that this will greatly appeal to people, and draw them in. If they loved Under Heaven, I think that this is something that will appeal to them. What do you think about that, because I know that you have said that this is not a sequel? GK: Four hundred years precludes the notion of a true sequel. S1: No, but the setting is what the setting is. And I realize that it is somewhat different, but in many ways, it is the same place. GK: Let me ask you this. If I'd written a novel about Michelangelo... S1: Wait, the boxing gloves are coming out now! [laughter] GK: Yeah, you're setting me up. You're making it too easy for me. If I'd written a novel about Michelangelo in Italy, and then my next novel was about Garibaldi. It's still Italy. There will be the same cities. They've changed. GK: No. GK: Florence in the 15th, 16th century has evolved into Florence of the 19th. And 19th century Italians would have been... I'm not putting this randomly, they would have been hugely aware of the glory of the Renaissance in Italy. They would have felt smaller and diminished, looking back at the sculptures and the buildings that had been erected in their space under the Romans and then in the Renaissance. And they would have felt that they were the small, shrunken kingdom. They weren't even a kingdom at that point, there were many kingdoms. So, for me, when I say it's not a sequel, I'm not posturing. It draws upon an awareness of previous events. But I think that would be true about many parts of the world where we're conscious of what's happened before. GK: In... I wrote about this in Ysabel. In Apollyon, in the Middle Ages, in a post-plague time, there was a hovel, there was a ghetto, it was a slum, inside the Roman Colosseum, that had been built in Avenue. And, it was a magnificent Colosseum that was still standing, these spectacular walls. And inside, people lived in ramshackle shanties and hovels, jammed together. And I remember seeing that building. We lived there when I was writing Ysabel, and thinking what must it had been like to live inside a space where the people of the past were so obviously superior to you? That interested me in that book. That interests me in all my books because we don't have that mindset very much. 0:23:29 GK: We don't tend to think that people in the 13th century, or the 17th, or the 8th, knew more than we do. We tend to think in terms of progress, with caveats about pollution, or despoiling the earth, and worries about that. But we tend to have a mindset that we are 'better than'. And in Ysabel, now in River of Stars, I'm interested in looking at a culture that doesn't think that it's better than its ancestors. S1: Did you go to China this time? You didn't go for Under Heaven. GK: I was there in between. Actually, that's another... I could have answered your first question in part by the visit to China in between the two books and one of the... It wasn't so much a research trip. It was a lecturing and speaking trip, but one of the things that happened in Beijing was that my wife and I were invited to, what we thought, would be... I'm not making this up, but we thought it would be a tea party. A publisher there said that we were going to meet some critics at the University and have an encounter. Encounter is a very complex and ambiguous word but I assumed there were language difficulties at play here. I didn't make much of it. And we got out to the University and we were met by someone and we were being hustled through Beijing Normal University and I'm thinking, "Why are we hustling? Is the tea on the boil or something like that? I mean what part of the ritual are we about to miss?" [laughter] GK: And we're being basically force-marched through corridor after corridor and we end up in the largest boardroom I have ever been inside, with communist era portraits, big portraits, all around the walls of, I gather, previous heads of Beijing Normal University and around this titanic boardroom table, there were probably about 80 fully-fledged academics from Beijing Normal and around the walls of the room, there were probably another 120 or 40, what I assume were students. So, there were about 200, 250 people ringing in the room for what I thought would be a tea party. [laughter] GK: And the gentleman on my left turned out to be the Head of International Literature at the University and he explained, sort of, I had a translator on my right, very quietly, he explained that each of the six papers would take approximately 20 to 30 minutes and your response is expected to take about 30 minutes. Is that acceptable? [laughter] S1: Not quite a tea party. [laughter] GK: And you're not really, if you think about it, you're not really in a position to say "Not acceptable." [chuckle] But that won't work. So, the point of the story though, aside from getting a laugh, which I wanted, is that they were wonderful. They were wonderful. The responses to the existing box imprint in Chinese with the translator whispering to me, were wonderfully generous and then the last paper was about Under Heaven, which the academic had read in English and delivered a paper in Chinese to that symposium. It was a symposium, not a tea party. And what happened to me, it's a roundabout way of answering your question, is I felt validated and reassured by their response to the way I work. GK: Now, those of you who've read me before will know that the phrase I've been using, which I stole from Rob Wiersema’s review years ago of one of my earlier books, but I do as much research as I can 'In A Period Of History' than I do 'A Quarter Turn To The Fantastic'. I do it for more reasons than we have time to go through here. But that "Quarter Turn To The Fantastic", it's underpinned by respect for the actual periods and the actual people that I'm using as the inspiration for my novels. And it was so rewarding to listen to a Chinese scholar talking about exactly that. In his first read of one of my books, as to why the books take place in Kitai and not in China. But I think, looking back, I think that there was a boost of confidence and belief that the method was understood there as well as here. S1: I want to talk to you about that. That quarter turn or spin that you give history, how exactly do you set about blurring those boundaries between fiction and non-fiction in your books, the history and giving it that spin? GK: I can't give you a "how" exactly. One of us wouldn't be able to leave the stage alive. [laughter] S1: It will get violent at some point. GK: But the audience gets to vote. [laughter] GK: It's not so much a "how" that I suppose obsesses me. It's the why, which is to say the "why"... And I'm asked this all the time, why I'm not writing about Provence or Byzantium instead of Sarantium, why it's Kitai and not China. S1: You notice I didn't ask that. [laughter] I did try to give it a... [laughter] GK: You tried to dodge it. [laughter] You were skating around the edges of it. "How" starts with... It starts with not wanting to assume that I know what Justinian and Theodora were like in bed together. That's my usual, sort of flippant way of putting it, but there is a point I'm making there. Not wanting to project my imagination on to the real lives of real people. So, if I'm going to use that as my starting point that I want to be inspired by figures of history, for some of my characters, not all, but I also want to have a little space or distance so that the reader and I share, it's important, we share an awareness that this is not the real thing. Now, you may say, "Well, anytime it's a novel. It's not the real thing." But it's not quite true, because so many people assume that they are learning what happened by seeing the movie Argo. GK: So many people think that Zero Dark Thirty is telling them the events that led to the killing of Bin Laden. We don't so automatically separate our response to a work of art from our "Well, they're probably making it up." We end up with a blurring of that border, and I want to make clear at the beginning of the book that we are making up a story inspired by a real setting. So that beginning with the characters not being the actual people, if you think about it, steers me into the quarter turn away from the geography, because I'm not going to actually use Renaissance Florence, but make up someone who sounds like Michelangelo, but isn't quite. If I'm going to do a "sounds like Michelangelo", I'm going to move it into a "sounds like Florence". That's I suppose the starting point for that quarter turn. S1: 'Cause I was gonna say very early in the book, Daiyan says "He was determined to be one of the great manhood of his day, restoring glory with his virtue to a diminished world." And other individuals in the book think about how their actions might be interpreted or misinterpreted in history. And I think you have a fascination with the construction of history. And even in the real world, history you could argue is constructed. It's not real. It's reported by people. It's constructed. It's a story in essence. GK: She is very good. [laughter] GK: That's just about exactly it. There's a line in Under Heaven where I say, I write, "Time runs both ways. We make stories of our lives. How we remember shapes how we lived." And what I mean by that is that nations, empires, cultures and individual people are always constructing what our memories are, what made you into what you are today. There will be certain stories you would tell, if you had a couple of drinks maybe. [laughter] GK: That led to Lori Glassie being what she is today. There would be stories you've told yourself as touchstone moments in your life. And we work with the past that way, personally and on a larger scale in that we look back, and we point to moments, scenes, figures that were pivotal. And somebody else will, A, remember it differently. We all know that. Anyone's got a family knows that you can have an argument at the drop of anything about what happened at Christmas in 1997, who spilled the turkey on grandma that day? Something like that. There are four culprits. The way in which we remember differently does in fact, I don't want to use the word 'obsessed', other people can use it, it fascinates me. And the treatment of history and fiction for me plays through that. GK: Under Heaven and River of Stars both, this one more than anything else I've ever written works in the present tense, the story is unfolding. The people in the book are remembering previous events, both in the Empire and in their own lives, and history is looking back at the events that we are watching unfold as the novel plays out. It's playing out, if I do it right, I'm moving the reader through all three scapes of time, if you will, if I do it right. S1: Yeah, I think you're very successful in that. To me, it almost had the effect of time lapse photography, all those timelines playing out and looking back at Under Heaven. And really, you don't have to have read Under Heaven. But if you do, it adds a whole other dimension to the book. I'd like to return to Shan who you introduced in your reading. You've said before that one of the things you struggle with is finding plausible roles for women in historical periods. How would you say that Shan fits into that in the context of this book? GK: That's a good question. First of all, to address the "struggling to find plausible roles", I hate historical fiction that panders completely to our modern sensibility and mindset. I don't much want 21st century men and women in 12th or 6th or 9th century settings. We cannot escape our own time and framework. As readers, as writers, we can't escape the way we see the world, but we can be conscious of not trying to wholesale export ourselves into the past. So for me, when I'm working with periods of history on an issue like the role and the status of women, I try not to cheat. I try not to give you, if you will, the cliché of the woman wielding a broad sword or something like that. GK: At the same time -- and Shan is a perfect example of that -- I am really alert in my research and my reading, for women in history who were in fact memorable and remarkable exceptions to what might be the norm. And Shan is inspired by the most beloved poet, song-writer woman in Chinese history, a woman named Lie Ching-Chow who did live during the Song Dynasty and who was educated by her father in ways that no women in that dynasty, or from any before, had ever been educated. She was a protégé and it didn't make for necessarily a triumphant, powerful knight, but it made for a recorded life because she wrote events that she lived through. She was a perfect example of what I look for when I'm reading history, which is that word you use, was "plausible". She's obviously plausible because she really lived, and so I don't feel that I'm cheating if I let that kind of figure inspire one of my characters. S1: And yet what's interesting about both her and Daiyan is that, in a sense, they're both characters out of time in this book. GK: They're both... Ren Daiyan is the male protagonist. Shan, the Lin Shan is the female one surrounded by my usual terrifyingly large cluster of secondary characters. S1: Big book. [chuckle] S1: I had to throw that in there. [chuckle] GK: They're both prisoners... Prisoner's the wrong word. They're both constrained by the nature of their society as we all are, if you think about it. None of us are particularly free to avoid or escape whatever the norms of our society are. But they both chase at those constraints. Daiyan is the son of a very minor clerk, at the outermost borders of the empire, who wants to be a military figure at a time when no respectable family ever allowed a son to be in the army. The army had caused all the problems in the past. It was clearly and completely a consequence of powerful generals, too powerful soldiers loving their general more than the emperor. The empire's problems were all based on the army. GK: And so, by the time you get to my 12th Dynasty in Kitai, it is a disgrace for any young man to even think in terms of a military career. The only people went into the army were conscripted sons of peasants who didn't have a choice. So, Daiyan is chasing against the shape and nature of his culture. And Shan, educated far beyond the norms of women, is doing the same thing. It leads you if you think about it... If you think about it from the point of view of a woman, she's in an extraordinarily difficult circumstance because a by-product of that education is going to be that almost all women detest her. It's done... S1: And a lot of the men too. GK: That's right. The men will not accept you. You're a curiosity. You're a freak or you're a threat. And for the women, she'd manifest a threat. The phrase used at the time where the women was supposed to remain in what was called the inner quarters. There was an aphorism that nothing but disaster would ensue if a woman overheard the men talking about significant events. They weren't even supposed to hear it. So, if you have a woman educated in a fashion to understand better than many men, the shape and arc of events, she is not going go sit easily in any world. S1: It's a fascinating character. And in fact this is the point in time, and you touch on it, when women start having their feet bound. GK: The best theory I read about this, I use it in the book. And it's a theory. It's not conclusive, but it makes the most sense. A woman named Patricia Avery, who teach in California, one of the major scholars, her theory is that as a result of what we were just talking about, the detest that was felt for the military life, educated civilized men made it obvious to their peers and to the emperor that they wouldn't dream of pulling the bow string, wielding the sword, riding a horse. They grew plump, lazy. They were carried in the sedan chair to go to the end of the hallway. It's a long way back, but I mean, really! [laughter] GK: That's when they started growing the little finger on the left hand long. S1: The fingernail? GK: "I could never hold a sword. I could never do anything in a physical way. I mean look at the two-inch fingernail I've got." And so Avery's theory about bound feet was that in order to preserve the "proper", and I'm putting that in scare quotes, the "proper" distance between the capacity of men and the capacity of women, women had to be even more limited in their mobility than the men had made themselves, by choice. And so bound feet became a measure of attractiveness because they reflected that further limitation on mobility. S1: And of course, Shan is properly horrified by the idea of this. It seems to me that some of the themes of your work, and in particular, in this book are the extinction of ways of being the inevitably... Inevitability of time and the hopelessness of individual human endeavour, and yet, the honour and importance of such endeavour, would you agree? GK: Yes. S1: Quite wistful and sad. GK: Well, one of the ways into that point, and I didn't know this, the themes aren't laid out. I've said forever that I hate books where the author rears up with one of those hammers you see in a midway side show, trying to ring the bell, and bangs you on the head. S1: Yeah, there isn't an authorial voice in this that pops up. Most definitely. GK: Yeah. I hate the books that hammer you with the author's thesis or theme. I'd like to... And I've said this before, I'd like to slip a stiletto into your ribs. [laughter] GK: So, you don't even know it's in there. S1: You don't even notice it. [laughter] GK: Yes, yes, you notice you're sitting a fair distance away. S1: Yeah, that's right, I am. [laughter] GK: You shifted over to the far side. If you want to talk about body language, just look the other way! [laughter] The theme that surprised me in this book, because it kept sneaking in and sneaking back, was about parents and children. And when you talked about honour and behaviour in a certain way, and I don't want to go into a long riff on grittiness and fiction and the notion of human beings as "all being", nasty, brutish and short. I don't want to go there. But in River of Stars, one of the things that my reading and then the process of writing and exploring the book brought forward, was how role modelling from parents, it's a parent talking, that role modelling plays such a role in how children will conduct their lives. GK: If they've respected, Shan and Daiyan are both the children of immensely respectful men, and the story shapes itself around the fact that both of them respond to that. And then, there's sibling relationships, and again that wasn't planned when I began the book. There's a sibling relationship that's central in the end to the emotional response of the book. These aren't themes that I sit down and sort of lay out a checklist. Some people do, but I can't write that way. I don't outline. So, I don't know all of the things that will find their way into the book. S1: You talk about how your treatment of books and the fantasy component gives them a universality. I'm gonna turn that around a little. Do you think that this book and the themes of the book, even though you don't outline and have check marks, do you think that this, in essence, means that this book could have been set anywhere and at any time? GK: Ask me that again? S1: Your treatment of the books and the fantasy component, you said in the past that that fantasy component gives your books a universality. GK: Yeah. S1: Do you think that that means that this book could've been set anywhere and at any time? GK: No. No, but it's a great question, and I think the only context for this particular story would be a culture or a society as focused on right behaviour as this one was. And also, as driven by its desire to escape its own past. I think the particular template of River of Stars requires a culture like that. But a larger point fascinates me, because some aspects of my writing would lend themselves to what you're talking about but they are not settings specific in the overarching motifs. I just put up an essay today on the web on exile, on the implications of exile, that a publicist I work with asked me about two months ago, pretty much in this voice, she says, "What's with exile in all your books?" And I said, in my suave way, "Say what?" [laughter] GK: And then I started looking back and, damn it, she was right. That I've been dealing with... And in the essay, I run through, and I've been dealing with that as a motif for 12 novels. Without ever having sat down and said, "Okay, who's gonna be the exiled figure in this one?" Or something like that. I've never done that. Norman Mailer once said that every author has only two or three books in him and he just writes variants. Ann Patchett said that. And you and I both love Bel Canto. Ann Patchett said, "I only have one book!" S1: Well, it's interesting because I interviewed Helen Humphreys recently and she had said once that all of her books are about loss. And I asked her in the interview... I said, "That's what they're about, and you said you wanted to get away from that." And she said, "I know, and I can't seem to escape myself." It seems to me that your books are also about heroic endeavour. What do you think that that says about you? [laughter] GK: I never got over Bill Mazeroski homered to beat the Yankees in the seventh game, first World Series I ever watched. [laughter] GK: History put its stamp on me at five years of age. I do believe that we are one of the most ahistorical cultures that's ever been. I think that we are presented with such a staggering and fascinating amount of contemporary "of-the-moment" information that it obliterates our capacity and to some degree, our interest, in stopping and looking back. You know, every once in a while somebody runs another survey, about 50% of Canadians don't know who Pierre Trudeau was or something like that, or what caused World War II, and that's not quite what I'm talking about, because that's a function of how history is taught today in schools. GK: But in a larger sense, I think what might be said about me through all my books is that I find an urgency to looking at causes as to how we are where we are. And I mean that in the broadest sense, which is to say it's not that the books are about us here and now. I'm not being that precise. I'm writing about cultures and trying to show the reader how that culture got to where it is through its own past, and then the extrapolation is more general that readers today will think about what is it in our own past that has led to our evolving to where we are now. I think that is a core fascination that runs through most of what I write. S1: It's interesting because I know that you have been... I was reading something the other day and you have been... And this person called you a historian and that your books are sometimes taught in history classes. I find that kind of ironic given the fact that you really strive to stay away from presenting real history. You don't want to write about real history, and in fact you have a problem with people who write about real history. GK: I want... S1: And not people who write about real history but people who present... GK: Real people in history, real people in history. S1: Yeah. GK: There's a really interesting thing that happens to us when we are consumed by a novel which is to say that we... Some of us can be so absorbed, and I know you're like this, we talked about this. We can be so absorbed by the story, storytelling, that we are being given that it takes on an intensity and an urgency that sometimes leads us to, and I suspect some of you will nod as I say this, that you look up from the book and you're surprised at where you are, the setting and the framework, the chair you're in, the couch you're on, feel a little bit odd because you've been so deeply engaged by a narrative, and I think that angles into what you're talking about. It's the nature of the experience of a story, of a fiction that can nonetheless feel compellingly real to us. Sometimes it's worrisome. Sometimes it's worrisome on the Team Edward novel in something... [laughter] GK: And we won't go there, but it's not safe for our purpose. S1: Shades of Gray. Shades of Kay? [laughter] GK: But more often, I find it really, really reassuring. I find it reassuring when people talk about... The reviewer in The Globe talked about being changed by reading River of Stars. That's an extraordinarily wonderful thing for a writer to hear from a reader, that a story can... To an adult person... When we are 12 and 14, a lot of what we read can change us, can help define us. We were talking before about looking back. If you read To Kill A Mockingbird at 12, maybe that put its stamp on you in a certain way. But as an adult to be changed by a story? That's about as good as it gets for a novelist from an educated reader. S1: What books would you say have changed your life in the past? Can you think of any? GK: Well, the biography of Bill Mazeroski after he hit that home run. [laughter] S1: I sense you're fixated. [laughter] GK: Yes, yes. We can go with that. We can go with that one. Do you know that I cried when he hit that home run? [laughter] My mother and I... True story, my mother and I were in the Hudson's Bay Company in Winnipeg. On the mezzanine floor... There was a television on the mezzanine floor, tiny black and white TV. That's all that was back then, and my mother took me up to where a crowd of men were chain smoking and watching the end of the World Series and I was already a Yankee fan, without a cigarette, and Mazeroski homered. Like, he waited till I got there. He homered about 30 seconds after I got in front of the television, and everyone is cheering and yelling, and this five-year old kid starts crying. And a courtly dignified gentleman knelt down in front of me as I'm sitting there crying, and he said, "Son, if you're going to be a sports fan in your life, you're going to have to learn to take losses with wins." And I kicked him in the shin. [laughter] GK: And I don't regret it. [laughter] GK: There are so many books. There are so many books that have one way or another changed me. I was a precocious reader. So, I was reading some things really early and really strongly. A lot of them were historical fiction. Mary Renault, Greek settings for historical fiction. Dorothy Dunnett writing about 16th century Europe. Tolkien later. But that didn't changed me. See, I want to be careful because I'm naming books that affected me, not necessarily, that changed me. They did make me want to write. S1: So, what I was going to say, they must have... Those books must have influenced your writing. What about non-fiction, things other than books that have influenced your writing, would you say? GK: Well, I'll give you a couple of books that did change the way I looked at the world which would be Robert Graves, and Joseph Campbell and James Frazer, the great writings about Myth and Legend. 'Cause Myth and Legend really did intensely infused my sense of the larger world. That did change me, reading those. Sports. S1: No! [laughter] GK: Absolutely. I could have been, and there are people in the room who will testify to this, stand up and say, Hosanna! , that I could so easily have been a bookworm. But I love sports too much. And we had ferociously competitive Winnipeg-Y chromosome sporting events going on all the time. And I think that influenced me because it put me in some degree of balance, which I might otherwise have been an overly cerebral young kid, that the young kid was also out there swearing and kicking people. [laughter] S1: Just to close off, I have to ask you. I think a lot of people ask writers what advice they have for aspiring writers. But I want to ask you, given that we're in a library, what advice do you have for readers? GK: That's a great question. Move out of your comfort zone. One of the things that I increasingly notice talking to readers is that we tend to find what we like and stay with it, look for it again, and there's nothing wrong with that. We know which Rye bread we like best. We don't need to try a different one. But if reading is going to do some of the things we've been talking about, not just distract and divert you, but also stretch you, then moving out of your usual haunts, the usual section of the library or the bookstore where you go, that would be a piece of advice because that gives the act of reading a chance to contribute to you, extending your definition of yourself. So, I would say move out of your comfort zone. S1: Alright. It's always wonderful talking to you, Guy. Thank you. A character in the Fionavar Tapestry who we never meet, because she was killed in a car crash, I think her name was Rachel or Sarah. Was her character background based on a real person? GK: No. No. Okay. Short. GK: I've almost never done that. I've almost never done that. My middle brother once asked me with my first book, and he was being funny and he said somewhat preeningly, "Which of the heroes is based on me?" [laughter] GK: And I said, "The third peasant to the right in line." It was too good a setup. I mean I wasn't going to miss that one. S1: Are any of them composites of real people? GK: No. But you know what is? You know what does come? Characters don't come, but gestures do. Expressions. When I'm in writing mode, I'm kind of omnivorous in terms of conversations when I'm looking at people, the way someone crosses their legs... S1: Oh, great. [laughter] GK: The way they... No. No. I'm not in writing mode, I'm just saying. The small things of how people act whether they are prone to nod their head to encourage a conversation, or whether they are po-faced, that sort of thing enters and I make notes about that. I make notes about letting characters in the book pick up traits like that. S1: What about... I know a lot of writers make notes when they are in cafes and things like that. Do you... Of conversations. Do you... I mean your stuff is historical too... GK: Well, no. But you you can do that. I certainly did that with my very first novel, the one that was never published. My first book was a picaresque about Canadians backpacking through Europe and I was on the South Coast of Crete writing there and every damn day I would go into the cafe... S1: Drink Ouzo? GK: Yes, exactly, and end up with a life-long dislike of Ouzo but that's another thing. And listen to people saying things like the Youth Hostel in Paris was the worst hell-hole that I have ever stayed in, and the next scene in the book would have someone talking about the Youth Hostel in Paris being the worst hell-hole they ever stayed in. S1: Okay, this one. Let's see if we can read this. In discovering a new story, which manifests first, a character with his or her history or the world in which they will live and act? GK: I usually go setting, theme, character, narrative. That's not set in stone. But the usual pattern is that I need to know where I am, and then I need to know why I'm about to spend three years there. And then I need to know who I'm dealing with. And only when those are in place do I start thinking carefully through what happens to them. That's my usual sequence for that. S1: I have a question that occurred to me, just because the books are so big, [laughter] in terms of your process and the actual mechanics of the process, how do you work in... You work on a computer, I presume, and in terms of insane back ups and in terms of the process of the files you don't... GK: Do I practise safe typing? S1: Well yeah, do you actually work in Word or what process do you use in terms of the files? Because this is massive. This is like, what, a couple of hundred thousand words. GK: I'll give you a couple of them. S1: And notebooks. And... GK: It's all on the computer now. And it's all backed up. S1: Notes on all the characters... Okay. GK: It's all backed up. My first three books were written long hand with a fountain pen. Retyped, writing in the morning, and the second draft... When you talk about how I work, I am... I could never tell you how many drafts a book is. I'm always amused when a writer says this one took six drafts or three drafts or nine drafts. I have no bloody idea. Because at the end of every day, I am rewriting that day's work. And at the beginning of every morning, I'm rewriting the previous day's work again. And about every three or four chapters, I stop, and I rewrite everything up to that point. So, I'm going back to one to four, then one to eight, then one to twenty. I'm an idiot. [laughter] I'm an idiot. It's really not smart. So, that is part of the work ethic that I could not do if I didn't write on a computer. S1: So, hence, a book every three years. GK: Yeah. S1: Okay. [laughter] GK: And then I'll rewrite all of them. S1: So another question, when making your turn toward the fantastic, does the setting drive the magical elements or do you use them to drive the needs of the plot? GK: That's a terrific question. Somebody feel good out there. [laughter] GK: It's a terrific question because one of the things I dislike in most historical fiction is an underpinning of smugness or superiority about how much more we know than people in the past knew. Can you believe that in 6th century Byzantium, they actually thought that if you carved a curse on a wax tablet and baked the tablet so it was hard, and threw it in an open grave before it was closed up, the curse would come true. Isn't that quaint? Isn't that remarkable that they believed that in the past? And when we read most historical fiction, writers are presenting this in a framework where we are meant to be a little amused or bemused about the way people behaved. GK: I want to give value. It's important to me. I want give value to the way people in the past understood the world. So, if they believed that improperly buried family members might become ghosts to haunt their descendants until they were properly, respectfully laid to rest, which happens in River of Stars, I want that to be true in the world of the story. I want the reader of the novel to see the world playing out the way the characters understood it. And if I do it properly, that takes away some of the smugness we feel in a lot of historical fiction when we look at the quaint beliefs of the past. So, the supernatural elements, certainly in the last five or six books, the supernatural element grow out of what I learn about the societies that I'm using as the inspiration for the book. S1: That was good. What music, if any, have you listened to while writing, especially works with musician characters for example, A Song for Arbonne, Tigana and Under Heaven. GK: Once more. I didn't quite follow you. S1: Oh, sorry, what music, if any, have you listened to while writing, especially works with musician characters? GK: No pattern, no absolute pattern. The best example of something shooting into my consciousness is that, Laura and I have been living in Aix-en-Provence when I was researching A Song for Arbonne and beginning to write it. It's based on medieval Provence and by complete, staggering coincidence one night, we saw an announcement of a concert by a French chanteuse named Esther Namantier. And, by God, she was singing Provencal songs from the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th century. She was singing the music of the period that I was there to research and write about. And that ended up on the CD player for the duration of the next period of time. With regards to exile, if longing for home is such a strong, subconscious theme in your work, where is it that you are exiled to? [laughter] Wow! I'm gonna give a probably too serious answer. It's always... Let me be more cautious. It's usually a mistake to draw too close a parallel between the work and the artist. We tend to do that. We read a tragic novel. And we think, "God, you must have been depressed in the year you wrote that." Or we see a comedian on stage killing us with his routine, and we're shocked to discover that this is a depressive, anguished human being. The art and the person don't have anything like that one-to-one correspondence of experience. So, I don't particularly feel exiled to or from anything. I'm fascinated by the way exile plays itself out in human lives, but it's not a personal sense that I'm aware of. S1: We have time for one more question. I've noticed that you referred to Fionavar often in other books, the first world war stories come from. Do you think you might return to Fionavar again? Did something inspire the first world idea? And that's from Christie. The references in later books are meant as absolutely no more than what a musician would call a grace note. It's a tiny nod back to where I started. It has never been meant as something building towards a device I hate when I see it in other writers, and it comes late in life to many people, and I'm hoping I dodge it, which is the desire to create the grand, unified field theory of your fictional universe, and tie everything together in some way. I don't want to do that. I haven't actually sought to do that. The notion of the first world itself, the other part of the question, was that when I wrote the Fionavar Tapestry long way back now, I was playing with the notion of... I suppose even back then, that quarter turn was playing itself out. I wanted to use a kitchen sink's work of our myths and legends from various cultures in our world, and place them in the Fionavar setting and twist them just a little bit. GK: So, if I was going to do that, it struck me as consistent in world building to imagine that our world legends are the distorted version of Fionavar's actual, true story that we've got it seen through a smoky mirror. That's where the notion of the first world, and what it might imply going down the road into our world. I haven't thought about this question, that maybe even back then, with my very first books, I was thinking about spinning the dial just a little bit that way. Thank you. GK: Lori, thank you. Thank you, all. S1: Thank you, everyone. [applause]