Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #215 Read online

  "It started when the age of Thatcherism was replaced by a Labour Government that ceased to be socialist, then ceased to be left wing, and then ceased to be anything."

  At that point we share reminiscences of the all too brief sense of elation we felt at the re-election of the Labour Party in 1997.

  "I remember the euphoria of driving to school on the Friday morning after the 1997 election—I was a teacher in those days. We had stayed up as late as we could and I was listening to the last results coming in. It was a case of ‘bliss was it in that dawn to be alive'. It felt like we were all waking up. Then it all went wrong.

  "The Castor stories don't stem directly from that, but my preoccupations do spill over into the books. They are often compared to Hellblazer, which arose directly out of Thatcherism: Thatcher was just getting into her second term when Jamie Delano was writing the first issues. He used Hellblazer as a stalking horse to attack targets of police brutality, politicised use of the police in the 1980s, the decline of the inner cities—it's all in there."

  I suggest part of the reason there was more scope for optimism in the 1980s was a wealth of radical art and writing that vigorously criticised the iniquities of the Thatcher Government. In the intervening decades, I suggest, there's been a tendency for the arts to eschew social and political critique. But Carey reminds me this trend isn't confined to the arts.

  "There has been a tendency for most people to withdraw in that way. The Castor books reflect this post-political world. I don't want to make too much of it because I don't want the books to date by belonging too much to a particular historical era. But there is a lot of social commentary without any particular political conclusion or moral being drawn."

  Carey tells me the fourth Castor book, Thicker Than Water, due for publication in October 2008, is set in London once again, but moves some of the action to Liverpool as it draws heavily on Castor's past.

  "His relationship with his brother Matthew comes to the fore: someone they both knew as children has been horrifically attacked in South London. Castor is drawn into the investigation and it eventually leads him to go to Liverpool and talk to people he knew before he left. We see his mother for the first time. And we get a bit more of a sense of what the Castor boys were like when they were kids and how their relationship soured. The Liverpool bit, like the Alabama sequence in Dead Men's Boots, takes up three or four chapters."

  I remember reading somewhere that Carey intends to write six Castor books, and ask whether Thicker Than Water moved the story towards some sort of inevitable conclusion.

  "Not exactly: there will however be a major revelation in the sixth book. From the third book onwards we're starting to shift the focus. Each book is a self-contained story with a self-contained case for Castor but we're beginning to plant the seeds of the bigger mystery of why the dead are arriving now, after so many millennia of civilisation. Is there a pattern to all of these seemingly diverse and strange events? In the fourth book there will be an earth-shaking revelation, but it won't be until the sixth book that I lay all my cards on the table and show how everything is part of one big picture. That won't necessarily be the last book, but it will open up elements of the story that are quite mysterious at this stage."

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  The Wishing Chair vs vanilla ice cream

  Carey's passion for the fantastic and its possibilities—as entertainment and as a means of conveying emotion and ideas—is apparent in his reflections on his own work and that of his fellow writers and artists. But what was the origin of his enthusiasm for the form?

  "I was crazy about fantasy and science fiction as a kid—addicted to it to the extent that I read nothing else at one time. Then I kind of branched out—I read mainstream literary fiction at school and ended up doing an English degree. But for pleasure I read fantastic literature such as H.P. Lovecraft. Initially I thought horror just meant the Hammer Dracula movies, but I've always had a real love for the whole spectrum of fantastic literature. Crime fiction as well, I used to love the good old fashioned whodunits that have gone out of style now. I love noir and I love Raymond Chandler's work.

  "There was obviously something in me. I can remember when I was six years old and the books I went back to again and again, until they fell apart, were the two big Enid Blyton fantasy series—the Faraway Tree and the Wishing Chair. The pattern was set from that very early age. My father-in-law is fantasy averse—almost fantasy phobic: he says he can't enjoy fiction if he feels it isn't about something that can happen in real life. In the course of one of our arguments I said ‘That's like saying you're only going to eat vanilla ice cream!’ And I stand by that: it's like making a virtue of sticking to an ascetic, joyless baseline. I love fantasy because it's the third dimension of fiction: without it there's flatness, but with it anything and everything is possible."

  So when did he first get the urge to create fantasies of his own?

  "I discovered very early on the pleasure of having an audience. I have a brother, Dave, who is five years younger than me. When we were kids I wrote and drew comic books for him. I should say at this point I'm a really awful artist—just terrible. My knowledge of human anatomy is zero. All the characters in my stories were eggs: I did thousands and thousands of pages of eggs with arms and legs. But that was my introduction to the pleasure of being a narrator and the pleasure of turning somebody else on to my storytelling."

  One of the striking characteristics of the Castor books is Carey's skill with structure: the framework is robust enough to keep the impetus of the narrative going while the author makes the occasional foray into local history, metaphysics and people watching. Does this faculty for sustaining the drive of a story stem from his earliest experience of writing comic strips?

  "Writing comics is very good training for any other kind of writing for exactly that reason. It's a discipline that I was very slow to learn. I wrote a couple of abortive novels, in my late teens and early twenties, before I wrote comics professionally. They were sprawling and shapeless, twice as long as they should have been. In a comic book you become a miser: you make every panel pay its way. If you only have 22 pages in a monthly book or, say, five pages if you're doing a ‘Future Shock’ piece for 2000AD, there's no room for anything extraneous to the story. You have to cut it out. When I came back to writing novels with Felix Castor, I was much more confident and, I think, more skilful in terms of deciding what had to be where and what had to go because it wasn't adding anything to the forward momentum of the story."

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  The percolation of stories

  So was the move from comics back to novels a significant, and perhaps unsettling, departure?

  "I had an almost frightening amount of freedom. To move from the short deadlines and rigorously planned-out structures of comics to a novel is like going from a river into the sea. You live with a novel for eight months and the length is anywhere between 100,000 and 150,000 words. But I think I had to do it that way round. I needed some boundaries. There are scenes in Castor that exist purely to add depth and breadth—particularly in the second book where you begin to see the infrastructure of reality has changed, partly to accommodate the risen dead. I suppose that contradicts my idea about discipline and pacing but the elements I brought from comics enabled me to tread my own path. And I hope I trod that path without losing the reader and ending up expatiating into a void.

  "Actually, I must confess the draft I initially turned in for Dead Men's Boots was huge—it was 155,000 words. My editor reminded me that I needed to watch this tendency to go down the J.K. Rowling path of producing fatter and fatter books. He made the radical suggestion that I leave out the sequence in Alabama, but I really liked the idea of taking Castor and the demon Juliet into a different locale. I wanted to take them way outside their comfort zone and watch the resulting strains on the relationship. But I had to have a long hard look at that manuscript. I took out a couple of incidents that were broadly separable from the rest of the narrative, but it was ha
rd because I was very fond of them."

  Carey's reference to the role of his editor shows that while the novelist's role is solitary for the months in which a story is created, it is, ultimately, collaborative in nature. It is, however, much less intensely interactive than the process of creating and revising comic strips.

  "In comics your story is percolated through lots of other storytellers and other processes before it gets to the page. The penciller brings his or her vision to it; the inker transforms the pencil line; the colours make an enormous difference. What you get back at the end of that process has moved quite a long way from what was in your mind when you started. I've had huge good fortune in that almost all the artists I have worked with have been really talented and really in tune with what I was trying to do. There have been a few occasions where something I was trying to set up got knocked down because the artists didn't get it, or didn't choose to follow the art directions.

  "What emerges is to some extent out of your hands and this is where the editor's role is crucial. Sometimes it depends how far an editor keeps the writer and the art team in communication. A good editor—and I've had some great ones—will send you page roughs as they come in, and pencilled artwork as it comes in. That way you have the chance to give your input at each of those stages. So I might say ‘I like what you're doing but we're moving towards that last panel revelation, which is tiny and which, I think, needs to be blown up'. A bad editor leaves it to the art team and goes off for an early lunch. The next thing you know it's in print. So in that sense, yes, a novelist has far more control over the process."

  And, for Carey, effective collaboration isn't merely a matter of having the right channels of communication in place, but is critically dependent on appreciating your responsibilities to other people trying to earn a crust and understanding the constraints of the process.

  "It's the difference between working to a monthly deadline and living with a story for the better part of a year. In comics, a writer is the first link in a long chain so, if you fart around, there are people further down the chain who are not able to make a living because they are waiting for your work to come in. There are days when you have to force yourself to say ‘I'm sitting at this table and won't get up until the script is done'. You're always chasing a deadline: you're writing a breakdown; you're going from breakdown to script; you're doing a polish on the script; then you're writing the next breakdown. You can't change your mind about a narrative: for Fantastic Four and X-Men, very often I'd be writing six-issue stories. If you get to Issue Three and think Bugger I should have set up this character right at the start, at least had them appear in a cutaway panel, it's too late. If a better idea occurs to you as a narrative unfolds there's nothing you can do. But in a novel you have what I can only call ‘vertical freedom', if something occurs to you in Chapter Twenty you can go back and mess around with Chapter Three."

  * * * *

  A huge intellectual puzzle

  There's another critical difference between Carey's work as a novelist and his role as a writer of comics: in the Castor books he creates his own mythic structures and characters, but in much of his work for comics and graphic novels he is inheriting them. In a couple of instances, he has remixed stories for a new medium. One was a comic book adaptation of a Fantastic Four movie; the other was his adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere from novel to comic book form.

  "Neverwhere was a hugely enjoyable experience—I'd read the novel when it came out and enjoyed it enormously. It was like a huge intellectual puzzle at first: we took apart the novel and looked at how all the bits and pieces fitted together. Then we decided which bits to keep, which bits to change, which bits to keep but with a twist and which bits to leave out of the comic book story. We did this really meticulously, scene-by-scene and line-by-line, until we'd turned the novel into a breakdown for the comic. We then sent that off to Neil to get his thoughts on what we were trying to do. It was a fascinating and creative piece of problem solving."

  But almost impossible, I suggest, unless you had a massive amount of experience of structuring strips.

  "It certainly helped to have written 200 comic books already. We made a couple of big global changes on the basis of that experience. The novel jumps between various points of view but we used the central character, Richard Mayhew, as a first person narrator. We did that very consciously as it allowed us to determine what the audience does and doesn't know at certain points. And, while you can have a third person omniscient point of view in comics, it seems very dated unless there's a reason to do it. It stinks of late 1970s, early 1980s strips and it's almost never used now. People began to realise how clunking and strange it was in a medium where the balance of storytelling was visual, not verbal. Either they told you what you were already seeing or, even worse, used it as a bridge to cover things you weren't seeing but damn well ought to have been. In its heyday it covered failures in communication between editors, writers and artists and produced some weird, elliptical storytelling, leaving the reader puzzled as to whose voice they were listening to."

  This adaptation work is far from typical of Carey's work on comic books, but the bulk of bread-and-butter work on comics involves writing stories for characters created by earlier writers. I ask him how he feels about picking up the creative batons passed on—or dropped—by other writers.

  "There's an interesting essay by Ursula Le Guin, where she compares the Soviet system of state control of the arts, this is before the Wall fell, with the American system of market control. In the USSR there was state censorship—a lot of stories that could never be told because the state wouldn't allow you to tell them. In the United States, on the other hand, there is censorship by the market. The example that springs to mind is Vonda McIntyre, who wrote two terrific early novels and a story collection with some gems in it, then went on to write Star Trek for five or six years—because she had to earn a living. In the USSR, at least people managed to use speculative fiction to write novels that attacked the system through their use of metaphor. I'm thinking, for example, of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

  "Writing other people's characters is a defining feature of the comic books mainstream—I suppose it applies to writing for TV too. Most successful comic book characters have been around for decades. There's an enormous amount of conservatism in the comic book mainstream in America and in Britain. So it's easier to reinvent the X-Men than it is to launch a new book with a completely new set of characters. But, following from Le Guin's point, the pressures of the market mean there's a sense in which we all use other people's characters all the time."

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Debts of continuity

  But, I ask, has his work on stories that have extended or developed someone else's work involved a different kind of thinking and a different kind of creativity?

  "When I came to work on X-Men and Hellblazer I felt I owed an absolute debt to the continuity of previous narratives. Chesterton said something about the difference between material miracles and moral miracles. Your audience will accept any number of material miracles, but as soon as you have a character do something that makes no sense in terms of motivation you've lost the audience. So, if you take over the X-Men and suddenly decide to make Wolverine gay, you're in trouble because it makes no sense in terms of his motivation up to that point. You have to ground psychological changes in things that happen to the character—mess with the psychology of characters at your peril.

  "The X-Men have 30 years of continuity: I would not be exaggerating to say there were four to five thousand issues of X-Men material out there. There's a vast corpus of material—so you have to put in the spade work. I was an X-Men fan and I'd read an awful lot of the material, but it still took me several months to get completely up to speed. But what could be better than immersing yourself in a big pile of comics and saying ‘I'm working'? I was thrilled to do the X-Men because I go back such a long way with those characters."

  But what is it that draw
s Carey to superhero stories, in spite of the reaction against them in recent years? Why is he clearly so passionate about a form in which hand-me-down characters bring debts of psychological continuity and other creative limitations?

  "A lot of serious comic writers won't touch them at any cost but, at their best, they produce marvellous, powerful and extremely enjoyable stories like Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, Alan Moore's Watchmen and Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns. I have a deep affection for the X-Men because they brought me back to comics at a time when I had stopped reading them. That goes back to Chris Claremont's reinvention of the team in the early 1980s. Even further back I went round Fazakerley and Aintree, looking for specific issues in every newsagent. The distribution was shambolic in those days and we had to pick up a copy whenever we could: we'd read episode one of a Fantastic Four or X-Men story and then stand a one-in-four chance of catching the next episode."

  As our conversation unfolds it becomes clear that Carey's work on another inherited character, Lucifer, proved a pivotal point in his career and had an enormously formative impact on his development as a writer.

  "Lucifer was my first gig for Vertigo. It was a tremendous challenge to adapt a world myth and push it in a new direction, but it was a dream job too. If you'd asked me five years earlier what my ultimate ambition was, it would have included writing a spinoff series for Sandman. Neil Gaiman provided a major source of inspiration when he created this huge stage on which all these various world mythologies can coexist—Judaeo-Christian archangels meet Japanese gods meet North American Indian gods. It was wonderful to play on that stage. The challenge was in making Lucifer a protagonist: there are certain things you can't have him do. You can't have him in a traditional fight, you have to put him in a different kind of story and articulate about him in a different way. Through my own distorting lens it became a story about family relationships—as a lot of my stories do. We got away with making Lucifer the son of God and we partly did that by never mentioning Jesus at all. God has three sons—Michael, Gabriel and Lucifer. Gabriel is out of the picture before the story starts, presumably dead, but the relationship with Michael becomes central as the story plays out. And it becomes a story of escaping your father's influence.