Susanna Clarke is a writer. From talking to her it appears that nobody is more surprised by this fact than she is. Having worked in publishing for twenty years she released her first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell (Bloomsbury) in 2004, and that the rest of the world took for granted she was in fact a writer amazes her. She is a writer and an incredibly good one at that. She was in Dublin in March as the guest of honour at this year’s Phoenix Convention. Fantasy author Juliet McKenna interviewed her and we were there to cover it (i.e. Dave Hendrick recorded and transcribed the interview).
JMCK: You didn’t read (study) English?
SC: My Mother is an English graduate from Oxford and an English teacher and she told me don’t read English, because you can always read what the English tutors have to say in their books, which I suppose is true but that’s true of any degree. Although it’s not like you’re going to, so I don’t really know if that works out. In a way having become a writer I really am rather glad I didn’t read English because I know from Colin’s experience, and from other writers who have studied English at University, that they have to go through this process of unlearning some of it in order to begin writing so as not to begin criticising and analysing what they’re writing the moment they put pen to paper.
JMCK: Yes, I couldn’t read Mansfield Park for ten years after studying it. St Hilda’s College Oxford, has a splendid track record for producing fabulous authors, and Bradford. I gather you had a false start with a crime novel set in Bradford?
SC: I did. I was a big fan at that time, we’re talking sort of the late eighties, of Ruth Rendell and I still think she’s a fabulous writer. I really loved detective novels and I really wanted to write one. I had also for years wanted to set a book in Bradford which is a very interesting town. It’s so up and down the hills and at night the street lamps sort of coil so you see the patterns snaking ‘round the hills. It’s an amazing place, plus when I was there, I suppose, in the late seventies the ruined industrial landscape was still there which was kind of romantic in a very sort of grim way.
JMCK: As we know it’s grim up north.
SC: Yes, it wasn’t grim in so much as there were grim elements and I found it a good place for a detective novel but it just didn’t come. Looking back I could see where fantasy and surrealism kept trying to creep in and you can’t really have that in detective novels.
JMCK: Which brings us to the Arvon Foundation course you went on because, from reading various interviews and articles, plotting is a big element that you got from that course. What directed you to Arvon in the first place?
SC: Having given up this detective novel, I’d given up writing for, I don’t know, maybe a month. I was fairly sure I wouldn’t become a writer, but after about a month I was fairly sure the obvious thing was to try and write a fantasy novel, because I’d just re-read Lord of the Rings, and these magical books (CS Lewis and Ursula Le Guinn), and see what happened, I was at that point in Spain and I came back to England and was looking around for a job. I thought I really ought to go on a course, a fantasy writing course so there were two courses one by a fantasy writer – was it David Gemmell? – and the other one was run by these two guys I’d never heard of, Colin Greenland and Geoff Ryman, and to be honest I don’t know what I got from the course – except possibly Colin (Susanna’s Husband). I remember Geoff Ryman doing this wonderful sort of seminar on how to plot a book and he used a piece of paper about that size (points to a flip chart) and he drew a diagram but he didn’t remember to turn the diagram around and show the audience. And nobody really liked to say anything. But it was a great course just because they made me write a short story which I rather resented, because I wasn’t really interested in short stories so I came up with this idea of writing a story with my two main characters, or rather just one of them Jonathan Strange. I thought that way I’ll get them to read a bit of the novel.
JMCK: The novel was already gestating at this point?
SC: Yes, yes and I’d written bits, but I thought a short story may force them to discuss the novel although they’d want to talk about short stories so I wrote The Ladies Of Grace Adieu and I sent it to them. I think they asked for five thousand words and I think it was eight (thousand) and I hoped they wouldn’t notice.
JMCK: Which brings us to one of the other things that crops up in everything that’s been written about the book so far which was it took ten years to write. The hardback I have is 728 pages long. Presumably your word rate was faster than 72.8 pages a year so how does a book take ten years to write?
SC: At the beginning, although I’d been trying to write all my adult life and had written in the early eighties about a hundred pages of another novel about angels in Liverpool and then bits since then, I’d never actually completed anything but this one short story so for the first two or three years I would write these sophisticated pieces and take them to my writing class and say look this is my novel. I would read them out and they would all sound pretty swish but they didn’t join up and there wasn’t any continuity. It was all sort of fragments, so the first three years I was learning to write. And there was a point where I had to look at what I’d written at the beginning and thought this is just scraps and start again. That was actually quite hard. It took a long time to write the first four chapters as in almost giving up because it was so tough. I still don’t write necessarily in sequence, I write the bit that comes to me and if I have a great idea for chapter which may turn out to be chapter 52 at the beginning then I sit down and write that and it’s a matter of plotting towards these points – I don’t recommend this by the way.
JMCK: You mentioned a writing class. Some of these groups of aspiring writers are very constructed in that they are very rigorous with each other and some are simply mutual self congratulatory societies. I’ve dealt with one where people become fixed in their errors because all their friends tell them it’s wonderful - what was the attraction for you?
SC: The writing group that I went to was run by a flame haired German translator and playwright called Tinch Minter and she’s run it for years in Cambridge and it’s still going. It’s a slightly odd class in that I made a lot of friends there, there are people there of wildly varying levels and interests. The great thing about Tinch was that she could always address whoever it was at whatever level they were doing and say something very constructive and supportive. I know that for a while when I was going there there was actually a girl who couldn’t really speak English and she decided she’d rather go to a creative writing group than a English language class and I didn’t really feel that we were helping her to improve her English, but Tinch still managed to say something helpful and encouraging. I went for about a year and found that it gave me what I needed, the impetus to keep going at that difficult starting point and after a year I felt what I needed to learn was how to write longer prose and so I stopped going because I wasn’t going to get that, but it was a very good group.
JMCK: Did you have to do a lot of reverse engineering because you were writing pieces out of sequence?
SC: Not really, the world grew, the great thing about having ten years is that you have time to think about the world. I guess it took me eight years to write the first half and then the second half probably took me less than two years, but that was because I knew so much about the world at that time. I just have a, I don’t know if you’d call it an intricate mind, but it’s a mind that wants to complicate everything. I go off at diversions at every stage. I wanted to build up the detail because I felt it would make the magic more real, the world more real, and I wanted the reader to feel that they were reading a story not in a fantasy world but in the real world. So I was glad to do the intricate stuff because it comes naturally to me to be writing and think ah the interesting thing about that is but the exception to that is – and the detail comes naturally.
JMCK: Hence the footnotes?
SC: Hence the footnotes. I could have done that several times over footnotes to footnotes but I restrained myself, you should be grateful.
JMCK: One of the things that, didn’t put me off, but about the publicity was Harry Potter for Grown ups to which my knee jerk reaction was “ugh that’s unoriginal it’s a big fantasy book by Bloomsbury”. Then I read the book and actually I could see one way in which that was true in so far as it’s a fantasy book for people who don’t read fantasy. There is an awful lot of your classic sword and sorcery fantasy but you will get the most out of if you haven’t read lots of sword and sorcery and this is also true of Harry Potter. There are many other differences but we won’t go down that road. Did you deliberately set out to write a fantasy novel that would be accessible to people who don’t read fantasy? Why didn’t you opt for swords and sorcery and heroes on big horses?
SC: Largely because I hadn’t read any. I’m a very slow reader, and the fantasy that I have read is the classics, CS Lewis, Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin and beyond that an awful lot of it is comics, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, so I didn’t really have those stereotypes, those genre bits and pieces to draw on plus I was writing very much for myself. I was creating a world that wasn’t just drawing on those, it was drawing on Jane Austen, drawing on a feeling that I wanted to write about Northern England and I wanted to write about my feelings about the North. So there were a lot of ways in which I wasn’t very interested in writing a fantasy novel, but there were a lot of ways in which I was, because the book’s about magic. There was a very limited pool of classics I was also drawing on other writers from my childhood, Joan Aiken, Leon Garfield etc. Some things come from The Name Of The Rose by Umberto Eco because buried in that book, as an important plot point, there’s another story about the Cathar Leader, who was leading a revolution that was put down 20 or 30 years before the action of the book and there was this story of this character, this Cathar leader, who never appears in the book. I don’t even think any speeches of his are reported in the book, but he is a major figure, a very compelling figure and that’s the idea of the hidden character who never appears which I think I got from that one source as being very important. In Strange and Norrell where the Raven King, John Uskglass is a huge influence on the book but is buried quite deep within it but that’s true also in my short fiction as well.
JMCK: You talk of comics, and you described the likes of Bradford coiling upwards. It’s a book full of incredibly vivid images where do you get your images from? Do you think you write in vivid terms.
SC: Yes I think so and I’ve always loved fiction which presents something you haven’t quite seen before or something that you’ve seen many, many times but in a slightly new way. So yes I’ve drawn on fiction like that and I’ve tried to get those rather filmic images into the book. Another important writer to me is GK Chesterton whose Father Brown stories and The Man Who Was Thursday are full of these most extraordinary and very simple almost heraldic images of London landscapes and fields, but just adds acrobats falling from the walls in fanciful costume - very, very vivid images. So I try to get that in.
JMCK: PD James famously starts her books always with a place. Do you get ideas from things you’ve seen? I’m thinking of the magic in York Cathedral or the Gentleman with Thistle Down Hair, can you pinpoint the origins of that?
SC: The Gentleman With Thistle Down Hair may have come from a picture Charles Vess drew for Neil Gaiman’s Books Of Magic series. He drew the third book of four, which was about Fairie, and there was just an image in the graphic novel of a woman with very similar hair, a fairy woman, so I think it came from that. I’m not aware of it usually at the time I don’t do it consciously, but sometimes when I think back or find the book where I got the idea I recognise it. I’m a very magpie writer, I pick up things I like from other peoples work and I nick it.
JMCK: It’s called an homage I believe. Talking of visual aspects one of the striking things about the book is the illustrations. At what point did the illustrations become part of the book?
SC: I met Portia Rosenberg quite early on while I was writing the novel. I went to a Cambridge open studio, there was a picture of hers in the catalogue that she did of Cinderella, and it looked quite extraordinary so we went along, and I think she’d done some illustrations for herself of Oliver Twist and some of Cinderella. Which if you think about it, if you took Oliver Twist and Cinderella and put them together you’d end up with something not dissimilar to Jonathan Strange & Mister Norrell. I didn’t say anything to her at the time as it was her moment and she was having a wonderful day. People were coming up to her and saying they’d seen her illustrations and were just knocked out. So it was not really the time to say actually I’m writing a novel… but when it was time to sell it I think I’d written the first two parts and my agent was thinking of sending it around to publishers he said to me it might be an idea to get some illustrations done, I don’t know why he thought of it.
JMCK: It’s a remarkable thing for an agent to say.
SC: And I said I always thought it would be great with illustrations as it would really intensify the idea that this is a 19th century book. I told him I knew of someone who could do it and he said, and this is like an agent, would she do them for free? And I said she might do. So Portia did five and I said I cannot guarantee it will lead to something, but at least it will get your work in front of several publishers, and when Bloomsbury bought the book I had a conversation with the editor and asked what about the illustrations and she said, the kind of thing that editors always say, which was that the readers will want to imagine the characters for themselves. And I said well it didn’t put people off Dickens and I just talked through why I thought it was important and bear in mind I’d worked in publishing for 20 years. I worked in a small office for a very large company Simon and Schuster and I was a managing editor and used to going to meetings and really putting my point across, hearing people say “that’s fine but we’re not going to do that”. So I put my point across really forcefully to my editor and she said “that’s fine”, and I thought “but we’re not going to do that”. Then I found out later that what she meant by fine was ok and this I found really strange. It was wonderful; I still don’t know why they did it. I mean they had this huge novel from this completely unknown writer. I it was a fantasy novel, and they don’t do fantasy in their adult division so why add Illustrations to make it even more difficult?
JMCK: And footnotes.
SC: And footnotes, what I told them was that adult readers are perfectly able to cope with illustrations and very few people have breathed a word against them.
JMCK: One of the great myths, certainly in my experience, is if you’re going to get on then you have to know somebody in publishing or if you work in publishing there’s an instant entrance. Nothing in my experience has ever indicated that this is true, and in my experience I can’t see a direct line between editing cook books and becoming a published fantasy writer, so was the book finished when Bloomsbury took it on?
SC: No, the first two thirds were finished and I was working on the final volume.
JMCK: Were you left to write it without editors looking over your shoulder?
SC: I was left completely alone. I think they had a synopsis, but I think it was somewhat vague as to what happened in part three. Certainly there was a lot of stuff that went into part three that nobody knew anything about but they (Bloomsbury) were patient and quiet. It was a bit late, it wasn’t dramatically late, I think it was due in July or August and I ended up delivering it in September or October and they were completely cool about it.
JMCK: When did you first get an inkling that it was not so much going to be a book as an event?
SC: I think it grew gradually. It was when I went to meet the people at Bloomsbury, and they introduced me not only to my editor, but to the sales director and the publicity director and the managing director and lots of other people and a lot of them had actually read the manuscript and I knew that this was not normal. And I suppose it was my publishing background that informed me on it because when people walk up to a brand new author and start talking about their book saying “this is what we’re going to do”, I was thinking this doesn’t normally happen. The personal assistant to the MD said to me after the meeting, “I was watching you then and you just looked stunned”.
JMCK: Has it been a two edged sword because presumably Bloomsbury are saying ok can we have another one and please can we have it this decade?
SC: That’s the thing about Bloomsbury, I think they’re remarkably old fashioned in some ways they’re the sort of publisher I’d hoped I’d work for when I first got into publishing but never actually did. They’ve a great understanding of authors and have great patience with authors. I think it helps that they published Donna Tartt’s second book which took ten years and they didn’t seem particularly worried that it took them ten years. But yes I do sort of have a schedule now, but I’ve had some ill health over the past year so I haven’t been able to do any writing for a while and they know that and they seem pretty cool about it.
JMCK: It’s not only been a success in these islands, but also in America and elsewhere, and it’s been published in how many countries?
SC: I think the number of languages it’s been translated into is somewhere over 30, but apparently quite a few countries have two languages; there’s simplified Chinese and complicated Chinese and there’s Spanish and Catalan and then there’s also this thing in France where they sell the paperback rights to one company and the hardback to another so it all gets very complicated, but I know when you add up the number of publishers it comes to 30 plus.
JMCK: It is famously a book on English magic. Neil Gaiman in his writings about it stresses the importance of that. Have you had any feedback as to how that has translated, or how accessible other cultures have found the Englishness of it?
SC: I was amazed when the Koreans started buying it, because what sense is this going to make to people in Korea or Thailand, but 19th century English novels apparently go around the world and people read them so there’s something there. I think the archetype of the snowy Yorkshire moor and the stage coach coming around it is familiar to readers around the world and the book draws on a lot of 19th century literature as well as fantasy.
Audience Member questions: You mention Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore as influences you obviously read a lot of comics is this something you feel you might have a go at yourself? Writing a graphic novel maybe?
SC: I’d love to write a graphic novel. Neil Gaiman who came the other way – he wrote comics and then novels said novels are much easier than comics – which I believe. It seems absolutely obvious, you can’t mess around with footnotes or long descriptions, you’ve got to fit everything into a panel, and there’s got to be at the end of the page a reason to turn the page, so it’s something that I might do but I think there are other things I need to do first.
Audience Member: What came first?
SC: There are sort of two things that came first, although I don’t remember the chronology. I’d had the idea of having a chronology of magicians that I would embed into English history and one of these ideas was that there would be a magician who had no name and who was very powerful and mediaeval quite a long way back and the other idea was that there’d be two magicians who would be 18th /19th century and they would work together and would famously quarrel and thought that they were extraordinarily different from each other, but other people couldn’t really tell them apart and they eventually became Strange and Norrell so it was this idea of the chronology that came first. I hadn’t worked out the implications of making a major character a character without a name. Tolkien does it and Ursula Le Guin does it but they have minor characters who are magicians without a name whilst I have the Raven King who’s really rather important, so he’s ended up with more names than the others, he’s the King of the North, he’s the Raven King, he’s the Black King, he’s John Uskglass, which may not necessarily be his actual name.
JMCK: Were you never tempted to simply write his story?
SC: Sure, in fact my early notes are more about his early history than they are about Strange and Norrell. So the first few notebooks are filled alternately with notes about the Raven King and then about the relationship with Strange and Norrell and I opted for the latter because I’d read fantasies with the mediaeval slant but the 18th century the regency period seemed a bit more unusual.
JMCK: You make some unusual choices throughout the book? You’re quite merciless with your characters. Innocence is of little or no protection. Was that a conscious decision?
SC: It’s quite difficult for me to do. I think you were saying at an earlier panel that a lot of beginner writers write around the big event. If their characters are coming up to something traumatic you sort of deflect it and then avoid it. I knew it was the wrong thing to do so I think I sort of over compensated.
JMCK: One of the other tensions in the book is that it’s a very funny book but there is also some absolute horror in it, were you ever tempted to go much more into the broad comedy or much more into the outright horror?
SC: No I think that is maybe something I got from comics. It’s not something I got from Joss Whedon, but it’s certainly something I admired about Buffy the way they could go from the silliness to the real heartache and the world ending in a heartbeat. I love that juxtaposition of light and dark.
JMCK: Did you have any qualms about writing the line “and on the third day she died” because that for me is a real heartstopper?
SC: It was quite hard to do, but it was necessary. Some of the things that happen, I think particularly to the female characters, are drawn from Scottish, English and Irish folklore. Women and innocents, when they come across Fairie, do have a hard time.
JMCK: Where is it written that life is fair? I say that to my children all the time. So what next, what will we all be reading next? The story of the Raven King?
SC: That’s tempting. I may get to some of it but not immediately. What I’m working on at the moment starts a few years, not many, after Strange and Norrell finishes, but will mainly focus on different characters. It’s the continuation of story of the world rather than the continuation of the story of Strange and Norrell. In the meanwhile there will be a collection of short stories, The Ladies Of Grace Adieu.
JMCK: Do you write your own blurbs?
SC: I rewrite them.
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Dave HendrickHaving misread the Batman origin story he now believes that minimalists are a cowardly and superstitious lot. When he’s not punishing furniture designers and German techno bands he’s busy marketing other media to the world, publishing comics and generally drinking.
He hasn’t called you ‘cos he’s lost your number.