A Slip of the Keyboard (18 page)

It might come as a surprise to many to learn that Neil is either a very nice, approachable guy or an incredible actor. He sometimes takes those shades off. The leather jacket I’m not sure about; I think I once saw him in a tux, or it may have been someone else.

He takes the view that mornings happen to other people. I think I once saw him at breakfast, although possibly it was just someone who looked a bit like him who was lying with their head in the plate of baked beans. He likes good sushi and quite likes people, too, although not raw; he is kind to fans who are not total jerks, and enjoys talking to people who know how to talk. He doesn’t look as though he’s forty; that may have happened to someone else, too. Or perhaps there’s a special picture locked in his attic.

Have fun. You’re in the hands of a master conjuror. Or, quite possibly, a wizard.

P.S.: He really, really likes it if you ask him to sign your battered, treasured copy of
Good Omens
that has been dropped in the tub at least once and is now held together with very old, yellowing transparent tape. You know the one.

2002

I’m pretty sure that the publicists from this award would be quite happy if I said something controversial, but it seems to me that
giving me the Carnegie Medal is controversial enough. This is my third attempt. Well, I say my third attempt, but in fact I just sat there in ignorance and someone else attempted it on my behalf, somewhat to my initial dismay.

The Amazing Maurice
is a fantasy book. Of course, everyone knows that fantasy is “all about” wizards, but by now, I hope, everyone with any intelligence knows that, er, whatever everyone knows … is wrong.

Fantasy is more than wizards. For instance, this book is about rats that are intelligent. But it is also about the even more fantastic idea that humans are capable of intelligence as well. Far more beguiling than the idea that evil can be destroyed by throwing a piece of expensive jewellery into a volcano is the possibility that evil can be defused by talking. The fantasy of justice is more interesting than the fantasy of fairies, and more truly fantastic. In the book the rats go to war, which is, I hope, gripping. But then they make peace, which is astonishing.

In any case, genre is just a flavouring. It’s not the whole meal. Don’t get confused by the scenery.

A novel set in Tombstone, Arizona, on October 26, 1881, is what—a Western? The scenery says so, the clothes say so, but the story does not automatically become a Western. Why let a few cactuses tell you what to think? It might be a counterfactual, or a historical novel, or a searing literary indictment of something or other, or a horror novel, or even, perhaps, a romance—although the young lovers would have to speak up a bit and possibly even hide under the table, because the gunfight at the O.K. Corral was going on at the time.

We categorize too much on the basis of unreliable assumption. A literary novel written by Brian Aldiss must be science fiction, because he is a known science fiction writer; a science fiction novel by Margaret Atwood is literature because she is a literary novelist.
Recent Discworld books have spun on such concerns as the nature of belief, politics and even of journalistic freedom, but put in one lousy dragon and they call you a fantasy writer.

This is not, on the whole, a complaint. But as I have said, it seems to me that dragons are not really the pure quill of fantasy, when properly done. Real fantasy is that a man with a printing press might defy an entire government because of some half-formed belief that there may be such a thing as the truth. Anyway, fantasy needs no defence now. As a genre it has become quite respectable in recent years. At least, it can demonstrably make lots and lots and lots of money, which passes for respectable these days. When you can buy a plastic Gandalf with kung-fu grip and rocket launcher, you know fantasy has broken through.

But I’m a humorous writer too, and humour is a
real
problem.

It was interesting to see how
Maurice
was reviewed here and in the United States. Over there, where I’ve only recently made much of an impression, the reviews tended to be quite serious and detailed with, as Maurice himself would have put it, “long words, like
corrugated iron
.” Over here, while being very nice, they tended towards the “another wacky, zany book by comic author Terry Pratchett.” In fact,
Maurice
has no whack and very little zane. It’s quite a serious book. Only the scenery is funny.

The problem is that we think the opposite of funny is serious. It is not. In fact, as G. K. Chesterton pointed out, the opposite of funny is not funny, and the opposite of serious is not serious. Benny Hill was funny and not serious; Rory Bremner is funny and serious; most politicians are serious but, unfortunately, not funny. Humour has its uses. Laughter can get through the keyhole while seriousness is still hammering on the door. New ideas can ride in on the back of a joke; old ideas can be given an added edge.

Which reminds me … Chesterton is not read much these days, and his style and approach belong to another time and, now, can
irritate. You have to read in a slightly different language. And then, just when the “ho, good landlord, a pint of your finest English ale!” style gets you down, you run across a gem, cogently expressed. He famously defended fairy stories against those who said they told children that there were monsters; children already know that there are monsters, he said, and fairy stories teach them that monsters can be killed. We now know that the monsters may not simply have scales and sleep under a mountain. They may be in our own heads.

In
Maurice
, the rats have to confront them all: real monsters, some of whom have many legs, some merely have two; but some, perhaps the worst, are the ones they invent. The rats are intelligent. They’re the first rats in the world to be afraid of the dark, and they people the shadows with imaginary monsters. An act of extreme significance to them is the lighting of a flame.

People have already asked me if I had the current international situation in mind when I wrote the book. The answer is no. I wouldn’t insult even rats by turning them into handy metaphors. It’s just unfortunate that the current international situation is pretty much the same old dull, stupid international situation, in a world obsessed by the monsters it has made up, dragons that are hard to kill. We look around and see foreign policies that are little more than the taking of revenge for the revenge that was taken in revenge for the revenge last time. It’s a path that leads only downwards, and still the world flocks along it. It makes you want to spit. The dinosaurs were thick as concrete, but they survived for 150 million years and it took a damn great asteroid to knock them out. I find myself wondering now if intelligence comes with its own built-in asteroid.

Of course, as the aforesaid writer of humorous fantasy I’m obsessed by wacky, zany ideas. One is that rats might talk. But sometimes I’m even capable of weirder, more ridiculous ideas, such as
the possibility of a happy ending. Sometimes, when I’m really, really wacky and on a fresh dose of zany, I’m just capable of entertaining the fantastic idea that, in certain circumstances,
Homo sapiens
might actually be capable of thinking. It must be worth a go, since we’ve tried everything else.

Writing for children is harder than writing for adults, if you’re doing it right. What I thought was going to be a funny story about a cat organizing a swindle based on the Pied Piper legend turned out to be a major project, in which I was aided and encouraged and given hope by Philippa Dickinson and Sue Coates at Doubleday or whatever they’re calling themselves this week, and Anne Hoppe of HarperCollins in New York, who waylaid me in an alley in Manhattan and insisted on publishing the book and even promised to protect me from that most feared of creatures, the American copy editor.

And I must thank you, the judges, in the hope that your sanity and critical faculties may speedily be returned to you. And finally, my thanks to the rest of you, the loose agglomeration of editors and teachers and librarians that I usually refer to, mostly with a smile, as the dirndl mafia. You keep the flame alive.

Speech read by Anne Hoppe, 2 October 2009

I am sure that there are writers out there who are capable of telling the world, clearly and succinctly, why and how they wrote the books on which their names and likenesses now twinkle.

They would be real writers, who keep things in filing cabinets rather than in piles. They will have desks, quite probably glass topped, which, unlike mine, are not infested with mice.

Yes, I know, this should not be possible, but it is an old Victorian desk with secret compartments in it; secret that is to me but not, alas, to the mice. Patch, the office cat, occasionally unleashes a pogrom, but what we have now is a stalemate at best. I cannot bring myself to poison them in situ, because of the thought of the little bodies mouldering in there somewhere among the mislaid wills and long-lost maps to hidden treasure.

I have met real writers. They make lists. They plan out their books on file cards. They do proper research, with notebooks, and unlike me, they don’t get totally sidetracked by a wonderful book about the frozen-water trade on the U.S. seaboard in the late eighteenth century.

It would be hard to describe my usual way of working, but I suspect it would look to a bystander, at least in the early stages of a novel, like the activity of a man who does not know what he is doing. That would be reasonable to surmise; generally I do not, and the purpose of writing the novel is to find out. Fortunately, this usually happens about halfway through the first draft. I tinker with ideas, invent characters, try out lines of dialogue, and generally play around with it until I have found a way to let myself know what I am thinking; often, one of the characters says something that tells me what the story is about.

Nation
was not like that. It arrived like a tsunami; it took me over, more or less.

This happened about six months before the dreadful Asian tsunami of 2004, and when I saw the terrible news I told my editors that there was no way I could write the book at that time. It would simply be wrong.

But the story banged away at me nevertheless, to the point where I had to give in. It was that or go mad. And the first thing I did was to write the song.