Riding high in Harry Potter’s wake February 18, 2024
Posted by dolorosa12 in interview, review reprint.Tags: children's literature, fantasy novels, garth nix, ya literature
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This post is part of a series of articles that I previously published in various Australian newspapers when I was working as a reviewer between 2001 and 2012. The vast majority of these do not exist in digital format, and I’ve decided to reprint them here for digital preservation. Much of what is said in these republished reviews does not represent my current thinking, but rather my understanding at the time of writing and original publication. The titles of the posts are the titles that were given to the articles by subeditors upon publication.
Readers have Canberra’s Turner Primary School to thank for Garth Nix’s The Keys to the Kingdom series. The phenomenally successful and internationally acclaimed fantasy author reveals how an enforced cross-country run led to the memorable opening sequence of the first book in the series, Mister Monday.
‘I had asthma and bronchitis and I was on this run and I just thought I’d keep running. We were running around the oval at school and I had difficulty breathing … and the next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground looking at the sky. And so I based the beginning of Mister Monday on this real-life experience.’
Now based in Sydney, Nix lived in Canberra until he was 19, and is full of praise for his childhood home.
‘Canberra’s a very good place for a writer to grow up in. You’ve got good education. The Canberra public library service is very important too. Particularly the specialist children’s library they used to have at O’Connor shops, on my way to school. I would get new books almost every day from that little library. The librarians there were enormously helpful at getting books for me, and I owe them a debt of gratitude. It’s a good example of how libraries often sow the seeds for the work that people do later. They’re great sources of inspiration.’
Nix is one of Australia’s most popular children’s authors. His books, which have been translated into 30 languages, have sold more than 3.5 million copies worldwide. Interestingly, he did not become a full-time writer until quite recently, and spent a lot of his adult life working in the publishing industry, as a literary agent, public-relations consultant and editor. He argues that while this experience was helpful to him as an author, it alone cannot explain his success.
‘Having a background in the business has helped me understand how to get the best for my books and to know when something’s going right or not and if somebody’s not doing the boest for the books or they are, but you can’t make things happen … A lot of it’s luck of the draw … You can market books, push them, but ultimately it comes down to the readers’ word of mouth.
‘I’ve been lucky as well, because I’ve always written the kinds of books that I wanted to read, and when I first wrote that was not a very popular area. You know, I’ve got rejection letters for Sabriel which basically say, “Fantasy? Forget it.” This is pre-Harry Potter, pre-Philip Pullman [the Whitbread Award-winning author of the His Dark Materials trilogy], and so I was always just paddling my little canoe, and then this giant tidal wave of Harry Potter just swept past and caught me up in its wake. I’ve been lucky that conditions for selling the stuff that I did changed. It may well change again, but I’ll just keep doing the stuff I want to write.’
At the moment, what Nix wants to write is a seven-part series called The Keys to the Kingdom. These books are set partly in a slightly futuristic indeterminate Western country, and mainly in the fantastical world of the House, an anarchic realm thrown into the chaos by the withdrawal of the Architect (a shadowy figure who created all the ‘Secondary Realms,’ including our own universe) and the division of her Will among seven villainous, Key-wielding Trustees. Into this bizarre world steps Arthur Penhaligon, a twelve-year-old boy who stands out as a particularly unsuitable hero in a genre famous for its ‘unlikely heroes.’ Nix explains that Arthur was perfect for the story he wanted to tell.
‘I like my characters to feel like real people, and sometimes that means that they are more frail than heroes. To be human you have to have weaknesses as well as strengths. But the characters emerge out of the stories, I often know very little about them at the beginning of the story. I don’t sit down and work out their whole lives as some writers do. I’m totally driven by the story. He has asthma because I had asthma as a child, I suppose, and funnily enough, it went away when I was about twelve or thirteen, and I didn’t have asthma again until I started working on The Keys to the Kingdom.
Nix is keen to reinforce the ordinariness of his protagonist, giving him one of the craziest, most blended of blended families, so that, in his world, he doesn’t stand out. ‘Because Arthur was adopted, I didn’t want him to be part of a typical nuclear family where he would be the odd one out.’ Even Arthur’s meaningful-sounding name, with its hint at a link with the medieval Arthurian legend, is for Nix a literary joke.
‘With Arthur Penhaligon, I guess I’m doing a sort of red herring on the reader, because you’re meant to think “Hang on, that sounds significant,” but in actual fact, it’s not. Arthur is chosen at random because he’s about to die, he’s not the Chosen One, so it’s a little ironic joke. He’s not the secret heir who’s been hidden away, he’s just a boy who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
One of the characteristics of Nix’s work is the number of clever ideas he manages to pack into a couple of hundred pages. The most brilliant conceit in The Keys to the Kingdom is that, rather like the television series 24, the action takes place over a relatively short period — one week, with each book devoted to one day. Nix explains that ideas like this come relatively easily to him. He gives an example from another of his books, Sabriel, the first in his Old Kingdom trilogy.
‘One of the central ideas is of two countries separated by a wall where one is magical and the other is technological, and it came from a photo of Hadrian’s Wall. On the southern side of the wall there was a green lawn and on the northern side there were these snow-covered hills and it actually looked as if one side was summer and the other side was winter. There are lots of stories in fairytales and fables with barriers between the fairy world and our world and demarcation points like hedges or walls or doorways, so it’s not a new idea, it’s just what you do with it.’
Nix is a voracious reader, and says that many of his ideas come from other books. Glancing around his bookshelves, he points out children’s stories, classic fantasy novels, short stories, biographies, history books and graphic novels. But one of the richest seams he mines is an old edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.
‘It has so much old, weird stuff in it. You can open Brewer’s at any page and find an idea for a story. It’s quite astonishing how you can just open this book and discover amazing things.’
An element of myth Nix has transformed in The Keys to the Kingdom is the idea of the Seven Deadly Sins. The Seven Trustees of the Will, whom Arthur must defeat, are thoroughly refreshing villains, each embodying a particular kind of modern evil. Thus, the slothful Mister Monday represents bureaucratic ineptitude, while avaricious Grim Tuesday becomes a symbol of corporate greed. In Sir Thursday, Nix is able to place the action in a setting of which he has some experience, the military. (Nix spent some time serving in the Army Reserve.)
‘Certainly I drew upon my Army Reserve experience, but I’ve always been a military history buff — a history buff in fact — and I read a lot of biographies, so I’ve read a lot of personal stories of soldiers, and it draws on that as well.’
And is it also good to correct some common mistakes made in films and books about the military?
‘Annoying things happen in movies sometimes. Some of them are incredibly basic, like little differences between the American and British armies, when Americans make films that have British soldiers in them, they have them saluting without their hats on, which they do in America and they don’t do in Britain. There are tiny details like that which most people couldn’t give a stuff about, but there’s always some who do, and it’s nice to get it right for them. And I do like it when I get emails from serving members of the military who just appreciate some of the military characters in my books.’
But while correcting misconceptions about the military is satisfying, Nix’s primary aim has always been to tell a good story. He views this as the natural purpose of children’s and young-adult fiction.
‘I think good children’s books, and good young-adult books nearly always work on multiple levels, and one of those levels is always a very strong strand of story. [A good children’s book will always have a] strong story, rich characters, usually told in a fairly straightforward prose, so it’s an easy read in the sense that it’s easy to immerse yourself into and be carried along by it, not lots of interruptions in the style which throw you back out of the story … But often the good children’s books have other levels as well, where more sophisticated readers, as well as being immersed in that story, can also pick up on the thematic level where the author is having a lot to say about the nature of the world, or the nature of humanity, or human relations or any of those deeper things, and perhaps because of that very strong weave of story, you often will pick up that subsidiary weave of thematic content without realising you’ve done so or having to pause and think about them, or stop.’
Philip Pullman has often spoken out against the trend in children’s literature to make a good story subsidiary to a moral message. It’s a view Nix shares. ‘I think with children’s books, if you set out to make your “top level” a message, or some sort of didactic theme, it doesn’t work, because there’s nothing to carry it along. A story can carry a theme, but a theme can’t carry a story. A good story can be deep and poignant and so on, but it must be the primary carrier of everything else.
‘Adult books don’t have to be like that, but the best adult books also have a very strong layer of story which carries everything else along, and that’s probably what Pullman was talking about in that he was able to convey a greater depth of meaning on the back of a great story, ostensibly for children, but the best children’s books are for everyone and you can reread them. You can read them at ten and just get the story, and again at 20 or 30 or 50 and get all that other stuff, and you can reread them again and again and again and get more out of them. That’s the characteristic of great books in general, not just children’s books.’
This interview originally appeared in the 25 March, 2006 edition of The Canberra Times.
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