The Serpent Papers (62 page)

In November 2012 I travelled to Mallorca for four days armed with a book of Ramon Llull’s writing. When I arrived in Palma, I rented a car and drove myself to Valldemossa through pouring sheets of rain. The weather reflected my own turbulence – and it was frightening – but I was determined: I wanted to go and feel the soil beneath my feet in the Serra de Tramuntana – to see with my own eyes the landscape within which the Catalan mystic had worked and lived.

Over the course of that four day trip I circumnavigated the island by car, going to every remote monastery I could find. Eventually I came to the Monastery of La Real. I met a complete stranger who agreed to show me the medieval manuscripts in the library of the Balearics. He took me through a little door and put an old book in my hands – from the early 14
^th
century. It was the first time I had ever held a parchment book between bare fingers. I felt something electric pass through me like a bolt. It was
here. Everything I was looking for.
My story was inside this incredible, seven-hundred
-
year
-
old book. The only problem was: I knew nothing about palaeography or parchment or the historical period within which these books were made.

So when I got back to my desk in London, I attacked the research.

What kind of research did you do for this novel?

I did a great deal of research on the ground in Barcelona and Mallorca between 2012 and 2014. I visited museums, monasteries, ruins and archives. I walked the paths between villages on the Serra de Tramuntana and crisscrossed Mallorca by car. I also participated in two courses through the University of London’s annual Rare Books School and the London International Palaeography Summer School. I’m still learning as I go! I went repeatedly to Paris and spent hours in the Musée de Cluny. In London I took full advantage of the British Museum and the British Library
.

Fortunately, I’m not intimidated by libraries
,
and I love a good index. Anna’s work and Picatrix are obviously very inspired by my exposure to professional academic research at university. I don’t think of Anna as being very much like me at all – but perhaps I would have become something similar if I had gone down the career university path.

My love of Spain is something that developed before university and crystalized while I was a student. I worshipped Miró and Lorca, and was devastated by the history of the Civil War. I’ve lapped up Spanish history and authors – and have a special place in my heart for Catalonia. But I didn’t want to write about those aspects of Spanish history directly. I see what I’ve written as a kind of love letter to a city, rather than a historical homage to a specific time or place.

How much of the mythology in the book is true?

Everything relating to Sibyls and Ramon Llull is as accurate as possible. Philomela and Rex Illuminatus bend the truth a great deal more, but their histories are also rooted in actual folklore and real mystical traditions.

At best I’m a pseudo-historicist. I like fiction because it allows me to reinvent the world around me, to make things up, to experiment and explore.

Where are you taking the series next?

The Serpent Papers
introduces Anna Verco and sets her up as the protagonist of the ongoing saga, taking her into a deepening menace that bleeds across European cities. I’ve started writing the second and have mapped the trajectory – so I know that Anna will be even more peripatetic
,
moving between Barcelona and London – but I won’t give away more than that. The series will explore the convergence of science and magic, and the portrayal of deviant women in European history.

Did you always know you wanted to be an author?

I’ve always expressed myself through stories – but no! There are lots of writers in my family. When I was a teenager I sensibly decided to rebel against being a writer of any kind. So I went to Stanford and majored in International Relations and studied Arabic. Within a year I had got myself onto a nuclear submarine in San Diego, and into a 72
-
hour simulation of a real-time terrorist attack on the US where I enacted the Secretary of Homeland Security – only to have a complete crisis and realize that this was
not
me.

I switched majors to English and decided I would become an academic. In 2008 I won a grant to study Lorca’s
Cante Jondo
in Spain for a month, immediately followed by a place on a research seminar in India, studying the legacy of non-violence in India
.
In combination these experiences were illuminating – life
-
changing. In India I came face to face with sectarian violence and terrorism. In Spain, I disappeared into the flamenco barrios of Granada and Seville and immersed myself in the study of Lorca. I came out of this very shook up
,
very electric
,
and I started writing. I think because I had told myself that novels were outside my remit, I began with angsty spoken
-
word plays, two of which were produced at Stanford in my senior year. After this I decided to go to Drama School – and return to Spain. So I did. I left a half
-
finished MA in Modern Thought and Literature behind me at Stanford, and never returned to complete it.

Who is Anna Verco – and where do you place her as a female lead?

I’m a feminist and I think
The Serpent Papers
is, at its core, a feminist take on the thriller/serial-killer caper, which traditionally has often sensationalized or commercialized femicide. I started writing it in frustration against the profusion of prostitutes found mutilated in European dumpsters. And yes – I have mutilated women in the novel – but I do so in dialogue with a tradition
.
Their bodies are written on – written over – and maybe that’s labouring the point, but I believe I’m confronting the roles of gender in the genre. Women’s bodies are written over all the time in serial killer narratives. This time though – it’s conscious. It has a deeper meaning
.
The Serpent Papers
speaks to an ancient – I mean centuries
-
and centuries
-
old – attack on the female form
,
on the female body.

Anna Verco takes her lead from
The Killing
’s Sarah Lund,
The Bridge
’s
Saga Norén (with whom I am completely obsessed) and Lisbeth Salander – she owes her birth to the queens of Scandi Noir – but she’s also a very different interpretation of the genre’s damaged ‘woman detective’ or female protagonist – she blends the supernatural and the hyper-real, and in that way I think she’s extremely original – and genre-bending – to me she feels fresh and new
.

My favorite thing about Anna – and I think this is quite groundbreaking for a female lead – is that she doesn’t easily give herself to you. I like that in a narrator. She isn’t compelled to spill her own secrets just because she’s telling you a story. That makes her unreliable. Male narrators seem permitted to do that more frequently but when women do this it can feel strange, odd. I think she’s very radical – reacting against this conceit that her gender should compel her to bare her soul more openly. I can say that you will get to know her more as the series develops. Your intimacy with her story will enable her to build that trust – to reveal who she really is.

The Facts Behind the Fiction

Rex Illuminatus

Alchemy

Philomela

The Sibyl

Rex Illuminatus

I started reading the works of Ramon Llull in the fall of 2012 and my study of his work lead to the invention of a character, Rex Illuminatus, the alchemist at the heart of my novel and Anna’s research. I took the lead from the events of Llull’s life and his posthumous legacy. For those who don’t know the name Ramon Llull – and I’m assuming most English speakers won’t – he was:

• Born around 1231 in Palma, the newly conquered Catalan capital of Mallorca

• A Christian philosopher steeped in the Neoplatonic tradition

• An intellectual product of a cosmopolitan and powerful medieval kingdom, whose web of political and economic influence stretched out across the Mediterranean, reaching deep into Europe and North Africa

• A leading European mystic at the vanguard of the radical religious and mystical thinkers who emerged from the Iberian Peninsula in the 13
^th
century

• One of the first Europeans to write prose novels

• One of the first Europeans to pioneer the use of a Romance vernacular in the fields of philosophy
,
theology, and science

• A founding father of literary Catalan

• A Christian apologist, missionary and creator of a school of oriental languages at Miramar outside Valldemossa

• The inventor of the ‘Art’ – the complex system of symbolic notation and combined diagrams that serves as the direct inspiration for the ‘Truth Machine’ attributed in
The Serpent Papers
to Rex Illuminatus

As a young man, Llull was the appointed seneschal (steward) to the son of King James the Conqueror, the future James II
.
Later in life, he described his troubled youth wonderfully dismissively, saying that he had once been wed and with children, financially comfortable, licentious and worldly (he was known to have taken many lovers). But when Llull was thirty he had a series of Christian visions, in which God commanded him to abandon his life of ribald poetry and the Mallorcan court, and devote his life to writing and the development of a universal tool of conversion. He left behind his wealth and his family, embarked on a pilgrimage and took up an ascetic habit. This realization led to prolific output: Llull produced two hundred and sixty-five literary works in his lifetime. He travelled widely, presenting his combinatorial systems and theories to kings and sultans, popes and universities – and wrote to such an extent that he became incredibly famous. He was given the title Doctor Illuminatus, and his fame carried the legacy of that name well beyond his grave, lifting Llull’s work up through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.

When I first started writing, I assumed that I would use Ramon Llull as a historical character in the novel, but I had a problem with doing this – I clashed against Llull’s religious persuasion, his stance on women and emphasis on conversion – and I also wanted to invent something new. I didn’t want to write purely historical fiction. So I decided to investigate the areas of Llull’s life which I found most opaque, most mysterious
,
and zeroed in on the circumstances of his death and what happened posthumously to his written work. Llull’s last work is written in Tunis, dated December 1315, after which point he vanishes from history. And here is where my eyes light up: two fascinating events occurred after Llull’s death, affecting his legacy dramatically. In the late 1300s his work ignited the ire of the Dominican Inquisitor General of Aragon – Nicholas Eymerich
,
who features in the novel as an ally of the Assassin of Words. At the same time, Llull posthumously becomes one of the most famous alchemists in the history of the European tradition.