In the book Innocence and Experience there is a chapter that is a transcription of a colloquy with people like Susan Cooper, Natalie Babbitt I think was involved, and Lloyd Alexander, and he commented that he believes that the characters in the realist novel are confronted with much more complex choices than the characters in fantasy novels, because fantasies deal with absolutes.

Yes, they do, but there's no reason why it shouldn't be equally complex, I mean, I think Lloyd Alexander's approach is somewhat simplistic, actually, I've always thought so.

I wondered, because I don't actually see that that applies to your books at all, in fact...

No... I really feel a sort of strenuous struggle when I read Lloyd Alexander, I think, Goddammit man, do you have to be that simple?! And he seems to deliberately exclude all sorts of things which I feel should be in there. And, no, I mean, fantasy does have this quality which isn't simplicity, but appears to be, and I'm at a loss to define it, usually. I tried when I was writing these talks to come here, to try and define it, and I just damn well can't, because in a way, one of the things about it is it's all things to all men...

Which confirms what you've said, that the children's books that last are fantasies.

Yes, yes, I suppose that is why. But I can't get any further than that at the moment, it's very frustrating.

I feel that the absolutes are in your books, but they're very blurred, and whether or not that's deliberate, or whether or not it's just because that's the way things usually actually are, I mean, if you take Gwendolen...

I was just thinking if you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine.

When I read that, I thought specifically of Gwendolen, because... I mean, if you put Gwendolen and her relationship with Cat into a realist novel, all hell would break loose.

Oh, it would indeed!

Because here's the sister that murders her brother not once, but two or three times!

I know, and this is what I was imagining Del Del (by Victor Kelleher) was going to be about, and it most disappointingly wasn't!

Gwendolen is about as horrible as any of your characters get, and about as evil and unpleasant, and yet she's gorgeous! She's funny and she's clever and that scene in the church when she brings the stained-glass windows to life, I mean, it's just wonderful, and I think we all secretly think "gee, I wish I could have done that when I had to sit in church!"

Exactly, I used to sit in church wishing I could do just that, you know, so it was lovely to be able to do it in a book!

And furthermore you let her get away with it. She trips off quite merrily to be queen.

Yes, I think so, I think so. I mean, it's a terribly limited existence, that's the trouble, I mean, O.K., she's happy, but I think this is a temporary state, as soon as she realizes her queendom is purely notional she's going to be so frustrated. I was trying to sort of indicate this is how people build up frustrations in the future, but not sort of lean on it, I mean, the story was about Cat really.

I think, getting back to the absolutes business, in a sense she is the side of the absolutes on the dark or the evil side, and Cat is obviously... and yet there is that blurring, We know that we don't particularly, we don't approve of her choice, we know that it's not ultimately even make her happy, and yet there are things about her that are attractive and entertaining.

That's right.

So the absolutes are there, but they're not set in stone—I've used that phrase more than once! Yes, I wondered what you'd think about that, because it just didn't seem to work for me with what you were doing; Lloyd Alexander's comment...

Yes, I think he's talking nonsense there, I really do. Particularly as he's dealing with all this amazing Celtic stuff, which is about as blurred as you can get, even though it has these wonderful clear dream-like images to it, it's actual significance is around the spectrum. It isn't necessarily the whole way across, but it's a good section of the spectrum each time. Yes, I want to shake the man, I really do!

Fire and Hemlock is not a book that I have been particularly familiar with, but I was very interested in what you wrote about it in "The Heroic Ideal", mainly because you were talking about the very conscious decisions you made there about structure, about forming, I mean about the overall form of the novel as well as the content and the progression of the plot, and I wondered if that was typical.

Absolutely not typical, although not untypical, I mean, the conscious decisions are made in a sort of very swift, white heat kind of way usually, just as the book is arriving at the point where it needs to be written. I was very cast down, actually, when I'd written that and I'd actually had to flee from Boston to New York because I was beleaguered by a terrible fan.

Oh no!

Well, it's all right, I had my revenge, he's Chair Person. Anyway, I fled him to New York, he pursued, alas, and I had to scream abuse at him in a book shop. I arrived, sort of panting and desolate and rather at a loose end, at my publishers in New York to find the second in command lady, who is wonderfully wise, she's a beautiful lady called Libby, just finishing reading that thing, because I'd sent them a copy just in case I lost mine, in case my baggage went astray, and they were terribly worried about that, and she looked up from it rather majestically as I tottered into the office, I mean, it really was timing like nothing, laid her hand on it, and said, "This is very nice, Diana, but writers don't write books this way." She was obviously one of these people who believe that it was all at a very low level of sub-conscious if not unconscious, which is not actually true, and I do think about these things, and what I was doing, and what I think probably deceived her was laying it out very clearly in that one so that everyone could see the process I'd been through, which was probably a process that lasted half an hour. I mean, it sounds as if I'd meditated for half a century on this, and it wasn't.

Yes, that's probably what I was wondering about. Well, leading on from that, your work draws on many sources, in that case the two ballads, and in other books many other things, first of all, do you consciously choose to use them, or do they sort of naturally fall into the text...

No, once you get what you're writing about, which, I mean, I can't at all describe why it is, you get this kind of nucleus, it immediately attracts all the right things, as it were, that it needs, sometimes from outside, sometimes from inside, it comes from both ways. It's a fascinating process, really, over the years I've sat and watched so many books doing this, just waiting. It's like a sort of gelatinous ball, and sucking in all the things that they actually need, and it's very queer, and they're very serendipitous, too, they find things which up till then I've not considered, or haven't even known about, and I'll suddenly find out it's the one thing I need, and that makes it go, or somebody will say something. My very latest book was sitting there, and it's been sitting there for five years as a sort of indigestible gelatinous ball, it's collected no end of stuff to the point where I was really bewildered by it, and I needed the thing that would bring them all together, the thread that went through the whole narrative, and it so happened that I was in America, in Minneapolis, and we had one of those rather curious conversations, you know, the British side versus the American side, and then there was suddenly a point where we all agreed, and we looked at one another in bewilderment, and then, again, this friend that writes horror stories, and for this reason I've dedicated the book to him, suddenly said, "Oh yes, this is what it is." What we were actually talking about was the primordial forest, and one of the queer things which we'd all been talking about was how when you get to England, and you go into just the tiniest piece of left-over woodland where-ever, with main roads on either side, the last little nub of Sherwood Forest, somehow you get lost, even if it's only about half the width of this across, and Neil said "Yes, because it's being the primordial forest when you get into it." and this was just what I needed, it was the one uniting fact.

And does drawing those things together often happen like that, it just clicks, or do you have to work hard at it.

Yes. Well, I work hard at it, I mean I had been working with this one, very hard at it, for about five years, sometimes even writing drafts, on this occasion I had written many drafts, sometimes just simply thinking and agonising. It's like having a tongue in a sore tooth niggling away, and then quite suddenly it will come to me, or somebody, as in this case, will say something, and I think, "That's it, now I can write it."

A relief.

Relief! Oh, it's a wonderful feeling.

Well, if those sources that appear in your work are largely instinctive and so on, do you however, think it's important to pass on some of those traditional tales and mythologies and so on.

Yeah, and the best of British literature, you know, in the English language. I think it's very important, because you always have to bear in mind; this is the responsibility thing again, that when you do it, it's possibly the first time a certain person will have come across this, and so you have to not only present it like dishes in a feast, but present it well, so that it becomes like Japanese food, you know, beautifully presented.

I guess in terms of creating tomorrow's readers, I mean, contributing to the person who is going to continue to be a reader, and therefore a thinker and all the rest of it, then you're rolling things over by drawing on some of those... does that make sense?

I think so, it does make sense, I mean, the "rolling things over" does seem to... there's a tremendous knock-on effect, I suspect, there's nothing actually so important as thought and ideas, when you think about it, because everything new was at some point an idea in somebody's brain.

From a vege peeler to the Concorde!

Yes, exactly. The wheel, for God's sake.

On to characters. Am I correct in thinking that I have read somewhere that Chrestomanci is your favourite character?

He's certainly one of my favourite characters, yes. At the point when I said that, I probably hadn't written Howl's Moving Castle, nor possibly even Archer's Goon. At this point, yes, he was my very favourite character, and then Howl came along.

Yes, he's pretty gorgeous, isn't he!

Yes, and indeed, somebody once, a sweet girl in Yorkshire who writes to me, I call her "Our Cath", because she writes me these long chatty letters she said, "I'm terribly sorry, I've got a message from our Audrey in the office. She's fallen in love with Howl. Is he a real person, because she wants to meet him!"

I can really understand that, he is... yeah! It doesn't surprise me!

She was really passionate about it, poor Audrey, and I had to say, "No, I'm sorry, I did make this one up."

I was interested to hear you say today that Charmed Life began with the scene where Cat meets Janet, and I wondered therefore was Chrestomanci originally a device to help Cat move on, who took off from there, or, how did he begin?

I wish I knew! I know the name "Chrestomanci" began in, I do, not so much now, but I used to write a lot of what I called "Five Finger Exercises", where I knew I had a lot of ideas in my head, but there was no book going at the moment, so I would just write and see where it lead me, and in fact out of this came an awful lot of names, the name Chrestomanci and indeed some characters. That book that I was so amazed to see, the adult book (reference to earlier conversation) one of the main characters in that came out of a five finger exercise, and oddly enough he was called Chrestomanci, that was his family name. Then I thought this is an extremely exciting name...

It's a great name.

It's a name of power. It seemed I needed a very distant, powerful person who slowly came near, in the way these powerful people do, very equivocal and possibly appeared not as powerful as he was. It was all necessary from that central scene, and yes, then he sort of came along. I didn't even say "I need the name", it was that bit where they were all sitting down at the kitchen table and they find the letters with his signature, and what was it signed? Chrestomanci. It was one of those things that came around without my having really thought about it at all. The Dark Stranger himself. He wasn't really a deliberate invention. He was just necessary.

And did he take over, and did you expect him to develop into four books?

No, I didn't, I really didn't, no, I was really rather surprised when in fact he kept recurring.

In fact, I responded to Jonathan's father in A Tale of Time City in very similar ways as I do to Chrestomanci, I find...

Now that's very interesting, because in fact Jonathan's father, as far as I thought about him, is in fact an image of my father, and as you know my father was very far from being like Chrestomanci, or perfect in any way.

Probably the scene that clinches it is that gorgeous scene where he's looking for his slippers and Vivien suddenly realises that he's bunging it all on and falls about laughing, and you suddenly discover that this man isn't as vague and as stern and all the rest of it as perhaps Jonathan has perceived him to be up until now, and possibly that's because Cat perceives Chrestomanci to be all those things.

That's right, I mean, Cat is under a misapprehension, he's in awe the whole time, it's quite difficult to render and the only way I could do it is that bit at the end where Chrestomanci tells his story about his own childhood, which later led of course to The Lives of Christopher Chant. But I suppose he is in some curious way a father figure, and this is where he gets his power from, actually.

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©Judith Ridge 1992