But even back then I had a dismal sense that too much of the market (writers and readers, both) had reduced Tolkien and high fantasy to lowest-common-denominator elements. D&D had played a role in this, so did the emergence of commercial viability in the field. It is worse today, but 20 years ago the signal to noise ratio was already badly skewed. I wanted to consciously use as many of the tropes and elements of the field, as it was being defined then, but see if I could preserve a measure of complexity in character motivation and themes. I wanted to ‘play’ with the implications of a first, mythic world, to nod towards Freud and Jung, both, if I was going to cast as wide a net as I did in myth and legend (as you note in the question). I wanted to let sexuality and less-than-heroic reasons for actions play their parts. And to give rather more scope to women than tended to be the case. My inward metaphor was opera, in fact.
2) Why the switch to a more historical fiction/fantasy approach in the next three novels? Tigana is loosely based on early Renaissance Italy while The Lions Of Al-Rassan is the reconquista of Spain, and A Song For Arbonne the troubadours and the Albigensian Crusade in southern France. Were those periods of time or places that had a particular fascination for you, or was it the subject matters they provided more important?
Intelligently or otherwise, I’ve always had some fear of cloning myself. Fionavar achieved a measure of success and there was some pressure to ‘consolidate’ that and keep going. My sound bite at the time was, ‘I don’t believe in four-volume trilogies.’ We were living in Tuscany when I began to research and think about Tigana, and that was the year the Berlin Wall fell… leading me to a variety of reflections on the ‘tools’ of tyranny. These dovetailed with an idea I’d had for a while that fantasy was being limited (in the English-language world) in terms of what it was being allowed to do or be. Tigana came alive around the metaphor of magic as a way of erasing the memory of a people or culture. I was anxious again, being aware from the outset that it was not prudent to be departing so greatly, both from I’d done before, and from what genre expectations had become.
But Tigana did extremely well worldwide, and gave me more confidence to continue using the fantastic as a way of examining different periods of the past and different themes and styles arising from those periods. Some of these were indeed periods I’d had a longstanding interest in, others were discoveries, revelations.
Article comments
1 - Imani
That was a great interview: I really appreciated your focus on his work rather than the typical "how do you like promoting? What's your favourite colour?" questions with which so many authors are plagued.
Canadian stores do indeed have his books out in force and I'll be getting it ASAP.
2 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!
I'd say this is possibly the best interview I've every read on BC Magazine!