The birds are an homage to Yeats, in fact. The bison figure I adapted and made use of after reading Simon Schama’s wonderful Landscape and Memory. It seemed to me that what little people (including me!) knew, or thought they knew, about Byzantine history incorporated a strong element of the mystical or spiritual (along with violence, Imperial mothers blinding sons, and so forth). Certainly the ‘pagan’ fertility rituals are drawn from readings and not invented wholesale … though, equally certainly, every author’s responsible for the use he or she makes of these things. I did want to create a tension between what we are taught, what we are told to ‘think’ and intuitive, instinctive truths - and how art can sometimes emerge from this tension, or great suffering. I took this even further in the next book, Last Light of the Sun.
6) One of the elements I've always been particularly fond of when it comes to your work, has been the almost opulence of your language. It lends a splendour to events, but it also seems to elevate everything above the mundane. Even in contemporary times you have a way of making the words splendid. Was this style inspired by anyone in particular, is it even something you're aware of doing?
Tricky question. Certainly not a linguistic attempt to echo anyone else. In Fionavar I did (as I said before) think in terms of operatic rhythms, the tale rising to and moving away from major arias, duets … and I used mythic, Biblical cadences to try to achieve that (lacking, obviously, music!) in such scenes. The language in the later books has varied as I try to fit it to the setting. The language in Last Light, for example, is harder, terser, less lyric than the books before (and some reviewers and scholars have commented on this).
7) This was my not so subtle way of trying to lead into your latest release - Ysabel which is just out in Canada and due out for release in the U.S. in Feb, right?
As I type, some stores have jumped the gun and it is already on sale in Canada. It’ll be in the US by early February, in the UK by March. There are a plethora of early reviews online already, off the advance review copies … the book business has changed greatly in this regard, influenced by the Internet, shifting more towards a model like the film world, with teasers and trailers and rumours going on for months and months before actual release.
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!