Interview with James Barclay

- Again without giving anything away, can you give us a taste of your latest series, The Ascendants of Estorea?

Totally different to The Raven. These are two books that deal the birth of magic in a crumbling empire. That empire is Romanesque, tatty at its outer reaches and beginning to rot at its centre. The magic manifests itself in four children who are the product of many generations of genetic selection to produce the first humans able to manipulate the elements around them.

The first novel, Cry of the Newborn, charts their development through a war that threatens the entire empire. They have to survive prejudice, religious intolerance, fear, hatred… you name it. And to a large extent, no one can teach them how to use what they have been given. Theirs is a true voyage of discovery. But the book isn’t just about them. It is about those who seek to save their empire, people who you can admire without necessarily agreeing that they should succeed, by the way. But there is room for love, humour and joy too. No day is perpetually dark.

The second novel Shout for the Dead is set a decade after the end of the first and deals with the consequences of war, the emergence of the Ascendants as a group defended by the empire machine but hated by the empire’s dominant religion. And it deals with the descent of one man into madness, delusion and his succumbing to the poison of overwhelming power. Now in this novel there are a few perpetually dark days. That’s probably because of the armies of the marching dead doing their master’s bidding.

Both books keep faith with my desire for dramatic action but I deliberately paced them slower than The Raven because I felt there was more to tell. More detail to be drawn, more character depth to be teased out. Great battles to fight and scenes to illustrate. They have scope and energy, these novels. Or they do to me. I loved writing them for the challenges they presented.

Progress is excellent. The novel is called Ravensoul. It’s with my editor now and he is enjoying it. So far. I think he’ll do so to the end. I’ll know in a few days. The release date was going to be August 2008 but I understand that’s been put back a little now. October seems more likely.

I mentioned earlier that The Raven came from a role playing game. But the spark wasn’t the quests and scenarios we undertook. I still remember sitting round the table, looking at these men and women, my friends, completely rapt by entirely fictitious events being played out on paper, decided on the roll of a dice and of given flesh by our imaginations. The desire to survive, the bond of the characters and the sheer energy we generated when playing, these are what provided the spark for The Raven. Because the group dynamic was so real. Bloody hell, the arguments we used to have, the joy at a victory and the sadness we all felt when one of our number died. Amazing. I wanted them to live on and so I wrote about them.

As for the Ascendants, well, I first had the germ of the idea way back in 1986 when I was still at college. For whatever reason, I knew then that it was too big for me to do justice to at the time. So it lay and festered away for a good long time. In essence, it’s so simple. The premise is: what happens to a world if on one day, there is no magic, and on the next, there is? The consequences on so many levels, personal, religious, societal, cultural, economic.. are enormous. Of course I needed to find the characters to make it work but at its heart, it is just one question.

I’d have to say its the action sequences. Battles, skirmishes, chases, hand to hand, one on ones, whatever. I do love writing that stuff. For me it’s all about making it credible. Well, credible enough. You have to give the reader the feeling of being right there in the middle of the blood and the fear, the noise and the stench. No battle runs true. Even chaos is too ordered a term, I sometimes think. I tend to write my fight scenes straight off the top of my head. No going back until the editing process, no choreography. I visualise it and I write what I see.

Mind you, I think my plotting is pretty good too. That isn’t chaotic. A sound plot stops the reader drifting off so I keep everything relevant. Everything moves the story along. I think some authors forget plot when their ideas get too grand. Readers can get lost in the expounding of theory upon theory. Then it doesn’t matter how cool your characters are. Got to maintain focussss.