OnyxDrake

Australian fantasy author Fiona McIntosh now has her third fantasy trilogy, Percheron, released in bookshops around the world and available here in South Africa. I chatted with her a while back when the first was released. The next, the Valisar Trilogy, is due to be released soon.

ND: What idea sparked off your current trilogy, Percheron?

FM: As always, ideas for stories arrive at the strangest moments. However, I was inspired to write Percheron because I read a dusty old tome from my husband’s library that was simply entitled The Harem. It was written at the turn of the century and was a travel writer’s account of visiting the extraordinary Topkapi Palace in Istanbul and sneaking into the forbidden corridors of the famed Ottoman harem. It overflowed with information that sparked all sorts of questions that I then went hunting to answer. This took me to Istanbul for a few days, into Rhodes, to Dubai and Tunis, among other exotic ports. In the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul I fell feverishly on old books that gave me information on everything from traditional Turkish baths to life in the Ottoman era. It was a fabulous visit and all you have to do is scratch the surface of Istanbul today and Byzantine Constantinople quietly emerges. The visit brought a swirl of ideas to life and I found it relatively easy to conjure a story.

ND: If you had to sum up Percheron briefly for your potential readers, how would you describe it to them?

FM: It’s a tale of forbidden love, of cruelty, revenge and secrets, set against a backdrop of warring realms and a cyclical battle between gods for the faith of the exotic realm of Percheron.

ND: What themes do you enjoy working with the most?

FM: I use recurring themes of love, betrayal and revenge. These are all utterly human, very compelling emotions that can drive people to do remarkable things. And, because my books are always about human struggles, these themes suit me.

ND: Which authors inspire you and why?

FM: Robin Hobb, Guy Gavriel Kay and George RR Martin have inspired me from the
outset of my career. But, for fantasy this is my “big three”. Robin Hobb is unique. Her writing is extremely special and she gave me Fitz and the Fool for a decade of my life. For those characters alone I treasure her books. Meanwhile, Guy Gavriel Kay gave me Tigana. He’s a maestro for beautiful phrasing, fabulous ideas, a twist at the end and Tigana is one of the most stunning fantasy stories that I’ve ever read. It’s easily my favourite and that’s probably because it’s about human struggle rather than loads of magic abounding at every turn. George RR Martin is how all fantasy should be – huge, adventurous, amazing characters, a large cast, epic, fast moving, lots of shocks and twists and turns.

ND: What advice do you have for aspiring fantasy writers?

FM: Know the genre. Don’t be too analytical. Take some risks. Always write from the heart. Don’t spend too much time planning – allow yourself to be swept away by the story, by larger-than-life characters. Anything’s possible in fantasy but remember, story is king, not the world, not the magic, not the amazing concepts. Make sure the characters drive the plot and everything else will fall into place.

Some good news to report. My story that I entered into The Write Co’s “Dream Holiday” competition was highlighted as a finalist and appeared in The Citizen this past week.

I had a byline for the newspaper article but by the time it appeared online, my name fell off somewhere. I do have a copy of the original that I’ll be pasting into my portfolio but, for your enjoyment, I’ve pasted the URL to the story as it appears on The Citizen’s website:
http://www.citizen.co.za/index/article.aspx?pDesc=78324,1,22

Title: The Sheltering Sky
Author: Paul Bowles
Publisher: Penguin Books, 2006 (first published in 1949)
Rating: five out of five

It’s vital, in my opinion, for genre writers to strike out and read literary fiction from time to time. I had various reasons for selecting Paul Bowles’s offering, including the fact that my husband said, “Read this book”; the fact that the late Brandon Lee (I have a soft spot for the guy, all right?) quoted a passage from it in the last interview he gave; and that I’d seen the filmed version of The Sheltering Sky. Granted, perhaps these weren’t the best reasons in the world to go on to read the novel but I’m a firm believer in synchronicity.

My initial response to turning the last page was that Bowles excels at creating tension and highlighting the essential depressing futility of the human condition. This I’ll illustrate in the following two extracts from the novel:

“Humanity?” cried Port. “What’s that? Who is humanity? I’ll tell you. Humanity is everyone but one’s self. So of what interest can it possibly be to anybody?”

And…

Port was annoyed. “What rot!” he snapped. “You’re never humanity; you’re only your own hopelessly isolated self.”

The tale outlines the experiences of three Americans who embark on an expedition in to the north-African wastes in the aftermath of World War II. They face not only an increasingly alien and hostile desert environment but also a completely alien culture, where their Western concepts are hopelessly lost.

Port and Kit Moresby travel with their friend Tunner and their relationships with each other grow more and more complicated. It’s quite evident that Port and Kit are experiencing difficulties in their marriage, characterised by Port’s increasing need to distance himself from everything familiar, and Kit’s increasing withdrawal from interacting with her world.

Both lose touch with each other and their past. This is compounded by Kit’s increasing guilt when she has an affair with Tunner. There is nothing uplifting about this story and it is unclear if any of the main characters gain anything from their time in the desert.

For Port it’s his battle to make sense of existence and his place in the world, which delivers some real gems that border on existentialism.

“I don’t have to justify my existence by any such primitive means. The fact that I breathe is my justification. If humanity doesn’t consider that a justification, it can do what it likes to me. I’m not going to carry a passport to existence around with me, to prove I have the right to be here! I’m here! I’m in the world! But my world is not humanity’s world. It’s the world as I see it.”

He loses his passport while on his journey and, once that occurs, the event becomes a theme that highlights the man’s stripping away of his identity. He goes about reducing his life in a quest to make sense of it.

“If I watch the end of a day – any day – I always feel it’s the end of a whole epoch. And the autumn! It might as well be the end of everything,” he said. “That’s why I hate cold countries, and love the warm ones, where there’s no winter, and when night comes you feel an opening up of the life there, instead of a closing down. Don’t you feel that?

Another passage that jumped out to me, that conveyed some of the most important aspects of this novel is this one:

And it occurred to him that a walk through the countryside was a sort of epitome of the passage through life itself. One never took the time to savour the details; one said: another day, but always with the hidden knowledge that each day was unique and final, that there never would be a return, another time.

The end of the novel was hardly happy, for while Kit continues her journey, she, too, strips away her reservations, embracing the essentially brutal way of life in the Sahara. All human morality is, essentially, meaningless. Joy and goodness are to be found in enjoying each sweet moment for what it is and not taking anything for granted.

And Port had said: “Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems so limitless.”

This passage is engraved on Brandon Lee’s tombstone. He died in the prime of his life, a half-bit movie star glorified for a role in an overly sentimental gothic romance yet even he brought across an inkling of Bowles’s vision during that interview.

Bowles paints a stark, cheerless picture. When you put down this book, you may feel a profound sense of emptiness, of futility, yet this only serves to counterpoint that we do not value our lives.

Often when we start writing, we gain the seeds of an idea. These may be sparked by something that someone says, or something that you see or even a memory that assails you out of the blue.

The trick is to take the idea and weave it into the kind of story that you, the writer, would enjoy reading. Chances are good that if you enjoy writing the story, if you find ways to spread the word, there will be others who will enjoy it as much as you do.

Write from the heart, see your characters, live their world, experience their emotions and the things that they see, smell, hear and feel and you’ll be well on your way to becoming a master storyteller.