Considered one of the truly gifted epic fantasy writers of our time, Paul Kearney has been captivating readers with his prose from his first book The Way to Babylon (1992) and is already doing the same with his latest offering, The Wolf in the Attic. Find out more about this amazing author below!
Paul Kearney is the critically-acclaimed author of The Monarchies of God and the Sea Beggars series. He has been long-listed for the British Fantasy Award. In the eight years subsequent to the publication of The Way to Babylon, Kearney lived in Copenhagen, New Jersey, and Cambridgeshire, but at present he makes his home a stone’s throw from the sea in County Down, with his wife, two dogs, a beat-up old boat, and far too many books.
Thanks for being here on SFFWorld.com, Paul. To get the ball rolling, you paint a vivid picture of Oxford, England in your new book The Wolf in the Attic, besides going to university there, what’s your relationship with the place?
I lived in Oxford for a couple of years after university while I pondered what to do with my 21 year old self. It was then that I began writing seriously, got an agent, and a publisher – all in the space of a year. To make ends meet I taught English to foreign students and tended bar, and every chance I got I wandered the woods and hills around Oxford, as well as traversing the western half of the Ridgeway. I once spent a whole weekend alone in Wytham Wood with no gear whatsoever, tracking deer, watching a vixen and her cubs, and generally skulking in the trees.
In 1991 with a publishing contract under my belt, I moved back to Ireland- then to Denmark, then America. Twenty years passed before I thought of going back to Oxford, and in that time I found that the place had changed, become smoother and shinier, as it were. I felt like a ghost walking around streets that were both deeply familiar and totally changed. Oxford in the mid-eighties still felt connected to an earlier era – some of my tutors had worked with Tolkien and knew him well – and pubs like the Lamb and Flag, the Trout, and the Eagle and Child had barely changed since the days when they were frequented by the Inklings. But two decades later, and Oxford had definitely moved on, becoming more prosperous, but losing some of its essential character. But I still loved it.
It was a decision to walk the Ridgeway again that brought me back there. My father, whom I loved, had died only two months before, and my brother, cousin and I decided on a walking holiday one bright day in May. It was while walking the Ridgeway and wild-camping in the woods and copses along it that I began to mull over the idea of a story which would engage with that marvellous landscape, and also include as a character the city of Oxford itself, and some of my own affection for it.
As for the time the story is set, what made you choose the 1920s in particular?
I specifically chose the late 20’s because of Anna’s personal history. Her home, Smyrna, was sacked in 1922, and Tolkien and C.S. Lewis first met in 1926. That decade seemed to bring together a lot of the elements of the story that I was juggling in my head. It was the past, but it was not the far distant past, and I felt I could reach back and touch on it in a way I could not if it had been set twenty years earlier, before the First World War.
I am an old fashioned sort of chap; I read real books with footnotes and appendices, I smoke a pipe, I like beer and good fellowship and firelight and talking about books, and I have served in uniform. I have often felt that I would have fitted better in that era than the decade I currently inhabit. It was a real pleasure to explore it, to savour that atmosphere.
What was it like delving into the mind of the book’s protagonist twelve-year-old “Anna”?
After bringing numerous soldiers, kings, and other well-loved adult characters to the page, did you find it challenging writing from the perspective of a young girl?
It was quite frankly daunting. I was not sure if I could pull it off, and I was not quite sure how I was going to do it – the nuts and bolts of the language she would use, for one thing. But one fine day I sat down and wrote the first few pages of this little girl’s thoughts, in the first person, present tense, and the moment I did that, I felt I had a way in. As I went through the book it was as though this child’s voice was travelling through me, and I was merely recording what she had to say – a very vivid experience, and one which had never happened before in 25 years of writing books. I still can’t quite explain it, but I was absolutely confident about what she would say and how she would view her life and those around her.
I have nieces Anna’s age, but I did not draw on them at all. The voice came from within. When I was Anna’s age, I read the same books she did – my literary diet was solely from that era – Wind in the Willows, the Hobbit, E Nesbit, Jules Verne, H G Wells. So I was quite happy with her influences and the way they would flavour her outlook on life. And I had lived where she lived, and could visualise the streets she walked upon and how they related to one another. I too was a bookish sort growing up, most often to be found reading alone in a corner (despite a multitude of cousins and other relations coming and going all the time – ours was a large family). In some ways, Anna is that child. In others, she is, perhaps, the daughter I would like to have had.
Anna originally hailed from Greece, why did you decide to use it as her origin country?
The Destruction of Smyrna, when I read about it, seemed a terrible, astonishing event to me. The Graeco-Turkish war which followed hard on the heels of the Great War was comparable in its carnage to Syria today, but is hardly known. Whole populations were displaced, exchanged, and sometimes destroyed. I had known for a long time that I wanted to tackle these events in a story, and I even briefly considered writing a straight up historical novel about them. But the character of Anna, though partly born out of that research, refused to stay where I had put her. And it was her character which dictated everything, not my own concerns or ideas about the book I would write. So though born of Greece, and marked by it, she would be in some ways quintessentially English also.
She is a young refugee with an intriguing background, is she inspired by a real person? In the same vein, what inspires your stories?
She is not inspired by a real historical person, though her early years could have been the story of a number of children, and the scene at the docks of Smyrna, for instance, is in no way sensationalised. There are numerous accounts, to give an example, of the horse galloping on fire through the crowds. And there were worse atrocities by far, which had I included them would have made Wolf a very different book. In the early years of the twentieth century Europe was broken apart in cordite and blood, and those who survived that convulsion were doomed to lead interesting lives.
As for what inspires my stories, I suppose a lot is to do with history. I love reading about history – everything from Neolithic barrow-delvers via Classical Greece and the American Civil War to the Roaring Twenties. These help me set a context, provide a skeleton upon which I then begin to stretch the muscles and drape the skin. The Monarchies of God were inspired by the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the Wars of Religion. The Macht series was born out of a love for the Hellas of Xenophon and Thucydides and Leonidas.
But it’s not all about history. Character drives the machine too – whether it is the wife-beating prison guard in Riding the Unicorn, half-human privateer Rol Cortishane in The Mark of Ran, or a lonely, friendless little girl in Wolf. These characters sometimes evolve in my mind before I commit them to paper, and sometimes they spring fully fledged out of my head in a flash. It’s a lame way to describe it, but it is sometimes as unquantifiable as that – it just happens.
Your knowledge of a range of mythologies is clear in this book, what originally got you interested in myths and lore?
It’s all down to that unfashionable childhood reading. I remember that Roger Lancellyn Green’s Myths of the Norsemen dazzled me from an early age, so much so that I went on to study Old Norse at university. It was the same with his book on Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and Robert Graves’ Greek Myths. Then there was Rosemary Sutcliff, writing about Cuchullain in The Hound of Ulster. I loved these stories – I didn’t care if they were myth; all I knew was that they were big, and fantastical, and often brutal in their majesty. It is a love I have kept all my life, so much so that it has infused my love of landscape and nature – with which all these stories were intimately connected anyway – and it seems to always be there, that glimpse of the numinous in the everyday. I still look up at the full moon and see, not some crater-pitted satellite, but a deep-graven symbol which links us back to a time when humanity still had things to fear in the dark.
You’re well-known for your epic fantasy prowess, what hooked you on this fantasy subgenre?
I’ve always been interested in military and religious history, and for me, the centuries which were the crucible of our modern world saw incredible conflicts in the name of religion. A battle of ideas and beliefs which nearly destroyed Europe, but which ultimately paved the way for the Enlightenment, and the modern democratic society we lucky few in the West know today. So from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, there was this enormous struggle reaching a climax, with Islam pushing right into the heart of Christian Europe, and that Europe itself torn apart by internal schism. Dramatic stuff. And if you add in the growing importance of gunpowder weapons, plus the beginnings of true global exploration and colonisation, then you have a heady mix of elements which to me, twenty years ago, seemed far more interesting than the usual dark-age sub-Tolkien worlds which made up most fantasy. So The Monarchies of God came about.
I found that I liked writing about large armies and epic battles, and I liked the macro level of storytelling, where whole nations are stirred into the pot. So after Monarchies came The Sea Beggars (unfinished, alas), and after that, the Macht.
The Macht series is actually sword-and-planet science fiction in the tradition of Burroughs or Howard – two heroes of mine – but the Greek flavour of it tends to obscure this. By the time I had finished the last of that trilogy, I felt that I had had enough of epic warfare. In The Ten Thousand I wrote my best battle, and I felt that I had to get away from marching armies and mass slaughter for a while!
Would you ever—or have you—written anything outside of speculative fiction?
I have written four modern-day military thrillers under a pseudonym, plus some TV tie-in stuff, and a couple of Space Marine novels for the Warhammer franchise. If ever I walk away from fantasy entirely, it will be to write straight historical fiction (which the Macht trilogy was very close to being, anyway.) One day I would like to write an epic treatment of the Fall of Constantinople, but the amount of research I still have to do is immense.
In the book Anna briefly befriends C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, was this a nod to these literary greats?
I felt that I couldn’t have 1920’s Oxford without Tolkien and Lewis making an appearance, and in the beginning that was exactly what they were meant to do – just stick their heads around the door for a moment. But with Lewis, especially, I felt that I could do more. I didn’t want them to become major characters, because, quite frankly, it didn’t seem right; but the fact that Wolf is ultimately about God and the Devil, good and evil, meant that Lewis the soon-to-be Christian apologist had more to say than I was expecting. Plus, Jack Lewis was a very engaging character, and I could have happily filled whole chapters with conversations between him and Anna. But that would be to drag the book off its course. Having said that, if I ever get to write the sequel, you can bet that both Jack and Tollers will reappear.
If you could live in any other time in human history, where and when would it be and why?
I can think of worse places to be than Oxford just after the Second World War, so long as I wasn’t a chimney sweep or a boot-black! Ideally, I would be a Fellow at Magdalen College, so I could drop in on the Inklings on Wednesday evenings and listen to Tolkien reading the first chapters of ’The New Hobbit,’ as he called the Lord of the Rings.
There are dozens, hundreds, of events and eras I would like to visit through history, just to see what they were really like. I would love to have a chat with Jane Austen, or share a joke with Abraham Lincoln. But as for living there in those times…. perhaps, if I could be twenty years old again, fit, healthy and full of piss and vinegar. But speaking as a fifty year old man, I am very glad to be living in a time of stem cell research, antibiotics and cappuccinos.
One of the things I noted is that fans would love to find and interact with you online. Is there any particular reason you choose to avoid the social media limelight?
I have mentioned before that I am an old fashioned sort of chap. As the years go by, this tendency seems to have become ever more entrenched. I detest Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and all the other chicanery of our online world. And I just find it all so tedious. I understand how this sounds – this interview after all was conducted electronically and is appearing online! But I just feel that the work should speak for itself. I began writing in a time before e-mail, and I’ve never really made the shift into the digital age. That’s idiotic, for a writer, I won’t argue that, but I like to simply hand the book over to the publisher and let them sort out the publicity and marketing and all those arcane skills. I’m rubbish at them, put simply. And I am far too curmudgeonly and bad tempered to be let loose online unsupervised.
Just being nosey—how often do you get out on that “beat-up old boat”?
The boat is at present sat at the side of my house in a sorry state of disrepair. A couple of years ago my brother and I took her out and were caught by a bad squall. We were being blown onto the rocks and had to leap overboard before the damn thing got us killed. Ironically, the vessel subsequently reappeared on a stony beach a couple of miles away, battered but more or less in one piece. I got her home again, and beached her, and there she lies, in need of some TLC. We have had some wonderful little outings in her though – we once pursued a basking shark up the coast – the thing was twice the length of the boat – and there have been summer days when I’ve moored her in the water in front of the house and we’ve dived off her deck into clear green sea.
What’s next for Paul Kearney? Will we see more of Anna, past worlds, or will we be able to dive into a completely new one?
I hope – I hope – that I will be returning to Oxford to take up Anna’s story once again, but it sort of depends on whether it’s a story people want to read. It’s certainly the only story I want to write.
It’s been wonderful having you, thanks for joining us Paul!
You can find information about Paul and his books here: http://www.solarisbooks.com/post/359
*****
Interview by Jackie Jones – SFFWorld.com © 2016
