James Treadwell: “Teenagers are basically fantastical beings”

My conversation with James Treadwell about his new novel, Advent, wraps up with a question about the book’s young protagonists.

Advent’s main character is Gavin, a teen-aged boy. Horace and Marina, two other important characters, are younger adolescents. Did you conceive of the book as for readers of that age or a little younger, or is adolescence just a good period of life for a transformative fantasy?

This is another great question, and I don’t think there’s much hope of responding briefly, but I’ll do my best.

To take the second part of the question first: yes. Yes it is.

Which is brief, but not very helpful …

I think it’s because teenagers are basically fantastical beings. They don’t quite live in the real world. They’re intensely aware of the inadequacy of things as they are, they’re intensely resistant to the idea that the world has to be the way adults say it is. They also have a strange and wonderful mix of freedom and unfreedom. They can’t choose their own course in the world, they don’t have their own houses and incomes and they can’t decide what to do with their time; but at the same time they’re not caught up in the web of obligations and necessities which makes adults unfree. Someone else deals with bank accounts and dentists and bills and wills and the possibility of being fired or going hungry or having to move to Peoria.

(Of course there are all sorts of social and economic and ideological determinants that affect children massively; but their relationship with those forces is much more oblique than it is for adults. Anyway, if we’re going to have even slightly brief answers I’m going to have to generalise …) I suppose what I mean is that teenagers are unplaced, as it were. Their lives haven’t dried hard yet. They’re closer to being seven-year-olds than we (or they) think. So where an adult might just dismiss fantasy as a distraction or a delusion or a nice-idea-but-we-all-know-things-don’t-work-like-that, a teenager might hear it speaking to them directly, honestly, intriguingly.

As for the first part of the question: I have a distant memory of wanting to write specifically for YA readers, just because my own reading experiences between about twelve and eighteen don’t seem to be going away no matter how much older I get or how much other (and, sometimes, better) stuff I read.

The difficulty, for me, is that “writing for an age group” actually means “writing the way books for a certain age group are supposed to be written, according to current commercial requirements.” Publishers’ ideas of what a book for (say) fourteen year-olds ought to look like were very different in the 1970s from the way they are now, and very different again in the 1920s, and the 1870s, and so on. It’s a marketing issue, essentially. For all their differences, if you think about what Harry Potter and Percy Jackson and the Hunger Games have in common — imagine a sort of stylistic Venn diagram — then I’d say you’d have a good idea of the minimum current requirements for something to count as YA fiction.

Alas, whether I’d like it to or not, my pen just won’t write that way.

The simple answer is that I didn’t write Advent for any age group. Of course, I didn’t write it against any age group either; I very much hope readers of Gavin’s age (fifteen) will enjoy it. But all I could do was tell the story the way I felt it wanted to be told.


Thanks, James! This photo by Arthur Ka Wai Jenkins shows me with Godson, Godson’s Brother, and their dad (James) during a hike a few years ago. In just two more years, we’ll see exactly how fantastical teenagers are!

Differing Points of View and James Treadwell’s Advent

I’ve spoken at writing conferences about what I call the Parameters of Narrative Voice, one of the most important being Point of View. Does a story follow one character closely, or take a wider view? Is the narrator omniscient or limited? What signals (if any) a shift in narration?

I think that an author is best served by establishing the parameters of narrative voice early so that any later changes don’t throw off readers. That said, some novels I like a lot—Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer—shift points of view midstream, to greater or lesser effect.

I brought up that aspect of storytelling in my ongoing Q&A with James Treadwell, author of Advent.

Most of the first part of Advent sticks closely to Gavin’s point of view as he travels from London to Cornwall and meets people. Then we start to follow some other characters as well: Horace, the Chinese-British boy; the minister; and so on. Meanwhile, there are interstitial chapters tracing the story of Dr. John Fiste backwards through time. How did you develop that narrative strategy? What challenges did it bring?

“Strategy”?

Sorry.

But seriously … As far as I can remember, I had the idea of a double narrative in mind from the start. At one stage I think I conceived of it fairly schematically: shorter, more lyrical, more ornate chapters would relate to the more explicitly fantastical material, while longer, plainer sections would tell the story of the present-day characters. It wouldn’t stay as neatly organised as that, but once it was underway it felt roughly right: two apparently very different strands of plot converging on a kind of hinge moment.

Some of the shifts in perspective and narrative voice just arrived out of nowhere, though. It’s that odd experience of ventriloquism which a lot of writers must experience: suddenly it feels like another voice’s moment to start speaking.

The challenges. Mainly, I suppose, it’s trying to get the pace right: the flow from one kind of narrative or point of view to another, the rhythm of suspense, the proportions of the plot. I wish I could say I get this right all the time but I know very well I don’t. It’s one of the aspects where I depend most on my (marvellously helpful) agent and editors to tell me when things aren’t working.

The other big challenge of this rather non-linear and intricate way of fitting a story together is, if I’m honest, the challenge to the reader. In the absence of a single consistent more-or-less omniscient narrator who goes through the plot from beginning to middle to end, there’s no doubt that it’s harder for the reader to be certain of what’s going on.

I’m all right with that, though.

MONDAY: Teenagers as fantastical beings.

Advent Under the Influence—of Magic?

In formulating my questions for James Treadwell, author of a new fantasy trilogy that begins with Advent, I worked from my own perspective on storytelling. I tend to plan out plots, though there are plenty of surprises in the composition process.

James’s answers make clear how he takes a different approach to storytelling, with less planning and thus more surprises. Or is that just British modesty? In any case, the conversation continues…

Advent draws on three enduring legends of western civilization: ancient Troy, King Arthur’s court, and Dr. Faust. (Plus mermaids.) Marlowe already linked numbers 1 and 3, but you take that combination in a different direction. How did you decide to braid those threads together?

You know what I’m going to say about the word “decide,” don’t you?

In all honesty, though, this is a difficult question to answer. (I’m sure that makes it a particularly good question.) Advent grew out of a few seeds — scenes, moments, glimpses of a character or two, an idea. The idea, very roughly speaking, was: magic. I think the notion of magic occurred to me in two ways. Firstly: what would it be like if something impossible happened? (This was very much tied up with my initial impressions of the character of Gavin.)

Secondly — and in one form or another this has informed a lot of fantasy writing, Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell or Neil Gaiman’s American Gods or the John Crowley sequence that begins with Aegypt — what’s the difference between a world with magic and a world from which it’s absent, and how do you get from one to another?

So I began to think about a time when there was magic. And once I was doing that, I was probably always going to end up in the territory of legends. It’s murky in there, though, and I didn’t have a map. I didn’t know — for example — that the character associated with the Faust legend was who he is until after he’d made his first appearance.

Who and what have been your biggest storytelling influences?

I don’t think anyone can say who their influences are. I used to be an academic literary critic, and academic literary critics will tell you that influence is something writers suffer unwillingly and/or unwitttingly. (The critic Harold Bloom puns on “influenza,” which seems about right.)

Observant readers may gather some hints from the answers above, though...

SATURDAY: Wrestling with points of view.

Cooper, Coleridge, and More in James Treadwell’s Advent

In its starred review for James Treadwell’s Advent, Publishers Weekly concluded, “Readers of Susan Cooper and Alan Garner will rejoice to find the first of a new trilogy worthy of sharing their shelf.” I know that’s especially gratifying for James since Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising was a touchstone for both of us growing up.

Our Q&A continues with an unseasonal discussion of the weather.

We’ve talked about winter scenes in English fantasy fiction before: Narnia under the White Queen, the blizzard that shuts down Buckinghamshire in The Dark Is Rising. Are you drawing on that tradition?

It would probably be more accurate to say that it’s drawing on me, if that doesn’t sound too affected … The instances you mention are certainly two of the most powerful fixed points in the imaginative geography I grew up with. (A third would be the snowbound planet called Winter in Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.) I didn’t deliberately set out to echo them, but then that’s not how influence works, is it?

If my landscape made anyone think of The White Witch or Will Stanton and the Dark Rider, I’d be very happy indeed.

Advent starts with an epigraph from Coleridge:

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke—Aye! and what then?

How did you pick that quotation, and what does Coleridge mean to you?

When I was at university, studying literature, I had a small notebook in which I scribbled down some phrases or lines that particularly struck me. I only know this because I found it a few years ago; I’d completely forgotten about it. I must only have kept it up for a few months at most. It strikes me now as a rather sophomoric thing to have done. Nevertheless, that quotation was in there, and the moment I saw it I knew it belonged to Advent.

In my former life I spent a fairly long time thinking quite intensively about Coleridge, though I don’t think that’s relevant to my book. The significance of the epigraph in relation to Advent is the unanswered — unanswerable — question into which the little visionary story collapses. Coleridge’s work has a genius for that. He’s the patron saint of tellingly failed endings.

TOMORROW: Questions of influence, and polite tussling about our different approaches to storytelling.

[The photograph above shows one of James’s sons in London back in the surprising winter of 2009.]

Visiting Cornwall with James Treadwell and Advent

This week Atria releases the US edition of Advent, first volume of new British fantasy series by James Treadwell. I had the pleasure of reading an advance copy last year, and James graciously answered my questions about it. I’ll be running our Q&A over most of this week.

Almost all of Advent takes place in Cornwall. For American readers, could you describe that region of England, its place in British culture, and what it means for you personally?

For American readers, I’d suggest you take clichés about England (villages with old stone churches and cosy pubs, small wet green fields, stiles in hedges, briskly reserved people) and then mix them with clichés about Scotland (moors, heather, granite, fishing boats, craggy beards, vaguely Celtic romantic mysticism, grouchy locals). Once you’ve got those thoroughly blended, set about the whole lot with a hammer, to roughen it up and wear it down and break it into small pieces; then chuck the pieces together more or less at random and dump buckets of water all over them. Voilà. Cornwall.

[View from St. Michael’s Mount, Cornwall, by Bob Kingsley, via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.]

Culturally, Cornwall’s always been remote from metropolitan, prosperous, urbanised England. The old Cornish language’s closest relative is Breton, from the northwestern extreme of France, and there are towns everywhere named after saints no one else has ever heard of. When I used to go there on holiday from London as a child, to stay with my grandparents, it was (by British standards) a fairly serious car journey. The roads got smaller and hiller and twister the further southwest you went, and by the time you arrived you felt a very long way indeed from the capital. The infrastructure’s improved since then, of course, but you still catch something of the same feeling when you’re down there.

My grandparents moved somewhere less inconvenient many years ago, but I kept going to Cornwall anyway. I suppose that shows what it means to me personally. It gets in the blood.

I understand Cornwall is a great place to go in summer, but Advent is set there in the winter. How did you make that choice?

It didn’t feel like a choice … The story as it presented itself to me was always going to be wintry. If I tried to analyse why, I suppose I’d point to the fact that virtually all my childhood holidays in Cornwall happened outside the summers. More importantly, it’s a place that fills up in the summer, as you suggest, and Advent is in part a story about leaving the busy everyday world behind.

One of the characters in the book, who’s partly a native Cornishwoman and partly a holidaymaker from up-country, suggests that winter actually suits Cornwall better than summer. I’d be inclined to agree with her.

[View of Cornwall under a blanket of snow by Samuel Rich, via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.]

The final chapter of Advent takes us to another part of the globe. Are you choosing other settings that have special meaning for you?

It’s a setting I have some personal knowledge of and affection for, yes. I’m afraid I’ll have to take issue (again) with the suggestion that I chose it, though. The reason that part of the world becomes relevant to the story of Advent is to do with what my protagonist Gavin sees when he first goes into his new friend Hester’s house; and I didn’t really have any idea what he was going to see there until he walked in the door.

WEDNESDAY: When fantasy turns cold.

Defining a Sequel, for Marketing Purposes

Godson’s Father James Treadwell’s fantasy novel Advent has been published in Britain, and is getting some fine reviews.

He’s still working out the marketing process, though:

I was invited last week to appear on the BBC News 24 channel “Meet the Author” slot. Sadly, I didn’t get to meet any authors, but I did have a pleasant chat with BBC’s effortlessly genial and knowledgeable Nick Higham.

James was just on an Olympus (Eastercon) panel on the topic “Sequel-itis,” but says on his home page that he’s finishing the “second novel,” not the sequel:

I don’t think [“sequel”] quite describes the relation between Advent and the story that’s falling into its final shape now. Sequels are really the same thing again, aren’t they? — the timescale and events may be subsequent to the first book/film/whatever, but basically they exist to repeat what’s already been achieved. The case of Advent won’t work like that. Presumably you can’t have advents twice, anyway. There has to be an arrival after a coming.

But aren’t sequelae simply things that follow? Advent is an open-ended story, and its last pages set up a story in quite a different place. The result may be as different as The Dark Is Rising from Over Sea, Under Stone, or Witch Week from Charmed Life. But for marketing and saga-construction purposes, those are surely sequels.

“Mine is full of slightly antiquated, pre-contemporary language”

The British publishing magazine The Bookseller has run an interview with debut fantasy novelist James Treadwell (also Godson’s Dad). Although his book Advent features teens as central characters, Treadwell agrees that it’s not typical YA:

The central theme of magic in the real world is reminiscent of the classic fantasy series The Dark is Rising (a sequence of seven [sic] books first published in the late 1960s and 1970s), and it’s no surprise to hear Treadwell describe those books as “a huge part of my mental geography growing up—I loved them”.

Advent is for a slightly more sophisticated readership though, and Hodder is pitching at both the adult and older YA market. With the rise in the appeal of fantasy for a mainstream audience, Hodder is hoping for a Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell-style crossover. . . .

Treadwell doesn’t think his former academic career—he was a Romanticist specialising in 18th and 19th-century writers—has had a direct influence on Advent, but he does acknowledge that spending so much of his adult life reading will have an effect on his own writing: “Any writer has an internal echo chamber, full of bits of phrases and words and language. Mine is full of slightly antiquated, pre-contemporary language, because that’s what I read for a long time.”

Treadwell says while he loved the idea of writing for teenagers when he started the novel, “I realised that these are not young adult sentences. My hand wouldn’t do it. I’m quite prolix. I write long sentences, I don’t write straightforward fast-moving plots . . . but I would love teenagers to read it, and I hope that they will.”

The great thing about the teen years, of course, is that book-lovers can read both well above and below their stated age range.

One to Watch For

I’m looking forward to Advent, by James Treadwell, the first in a new fantasy trilogy to be published in the UK by Hodder in 2012. The agent’s website explains:

1537. A man hurries through city streets in a gathering snowstorm, clutching a box in one hand, breath rapid, casting frightened glances over his shoulder. He is Johann Faust, the greatest magician of his age. The box he holds contains something unimaginably terrible. After the storm abates, Faust will never be seen again, and in time men begin to tell stories about him – that he made a pact with the devil, and that the devil claimed his due.

London, the present day. Fifteen-year old Gavin Stokes is boarding a train to remote Pendurra in Cornwall, to stay with his aunt. His parents need a break from him. Gavin has just been kicked out of school; he’s always in trouble, not because he’s naturally disruptive, but because, as his parents tell him, he makes mistakes about things. He sees strange-looking people, when really there’s no-one there at all. He wakes up at night because he can hear things fluttering around in his bedroom. And then there’s Miss Grey, the silent old woman who has been Gavin’s companion for as long as he can remember.

Okay, James Treadwell is Godson’s Father. He’s also a great fellow with a keen love of literary fantasy and science fiction. The photo on his website makes him look Lilliputian, but he’s really more Brobdingnagian.