Neil Gaiman interview: One foot in the graveyard

Published on Friday 7 November 2008 21:06

"YOU SET OUT AND YOU HAVE THIS idea in your head of the Platonic ideal of the book you want to write, and it is a perfect thing, without flaw – not only the best thing you have ever written, it is the best thing anybody will ever have written – and it glitters like a huge diamond …"

Cursed, blessed – or maybe just branded – as the rock star of fantasy literature, Neil Gaiman sits at the end of a long table in his Edinburgh hotel, talking confidently about insecurity.

Three cold teapots already scattered along the table confirm the suspicion that this has been a long afternoon of interviews, but he's still on a riff. He's only paused to change down as the bathos kicks in: "... and then you write your book. And it doesn't actually matter what awards it wins … because you know that you had this perfect golden thing in your head, and you know the sad, shambling, drooling, squalid dusty little thing that you produced and how badly it stacks up against the Platonic ideal."

So far, so disarming. Except this is Gaiman, at minimum the triple-threat master of his various games as a graphic novelist (The Sandman), novelist (Coraline, American Gods, Stardust etc) and screenwriter (Neverwhere, Mirrormask, Beowulf) and he and I both know that there is nothing sad about his new novel, The Graveyard Book; certainly nothing that he does not mean to be sad, and no sadness unmatched by equal optimism and generosity of spirit. And the only shambling and drooling is done – deliciously squalidly, but we'll get to that – by the ghouls, who, after all, have these things written into their very job description.

If you are one of the few people who haven't knowingly come across Gaiman's work as a fantasy writer before, this may be down to what the American writer Michael Chabon describes as the tyranny of marketing departments who like to neatly section off writers into the "genre slums at the local Barnes and Noble (bookstore]", and to certain critics who have a high-flown mistrust of any writer who is unashamed about being "entertaining", a count on which Gaiman is definitively guilty.

The idea for his latest book came to him half a lifetime ago: he was 24, in Sussex, with his first son, a two-year-old who loved his tricycle, and he didn't have a garden, just a house that was all stairs.

"So I would take him across the lane and I'd sit in the churchyard and he would pedal his tricycle for hours up and down the path and in and out the gravestones. And a small boy just looks amazingly at home among the gravestones… And I had this … idea."

The idea was to re-imagine Kipling's Jungle Book – in which a toddler goes into the jungle and is raised by wild animals who teach him the things wild animals know – as The Graveyard Book, "about a boy who goes into a graveyard and is raised by dead people and taught all the things dead people know".

In a way he now wouldn't necessarily recommend to other writers, Gaiman left it alone and waited "until I was good enough for it". By the time he wrote his first children's book, Coraline, he realised he wasn't improving his writing game at the same rate as earlier in his career, "not like the quantum leaps in Sandman, where I could look back ten issues and notice I was ten issues better". He says what started as an idea for his oldest child marinated so long that he had to hurry and get it done for his youngest before she grew too old for it.

It's a good line, but it's not true.

It's not the sort of story you can get too old for. The Graveyard Book, like the Kipling that partly inspired it, does what all classic children's books do, which is to appeal both to the child who reads it as a child, and to the child who remains inside the adult who reads it as a parent. It's a book for all ages because it's a book about growing up, a process we all get to observe from both ends of the spectrum. It's also a robust, big-hearted fantasy, tinged with darkness and lit with humour and surprise, and deeper than its genre surface might hint at.

Gaiman's stories for children work so well because he looks them straight in the eye as he writes, with no trace of writing down to them. In this he has the same directness, combined with breathtaking invention, that characterises the work of, say, Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching series, Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials, J K Rowling's Harry Potter, Garth Nix's Abhorsen books and Sally Gardner's I, Coriander – the other leaders in this Golden Age of children's fiction that we are currently enjoying.

Changing gear from his adult fiction voice is less a matter of altering perspective than considered subtraction: "Kids aren't terribly interested in reading about sex, in the same way that kids aren't terribly comfortable when they see a drunk over the road … and there's stuff that adults do that's just boring. I think of The Graveyard Book as being an adult book that leaves out the boring bits and doesn't have the sex in… (but still] goes down a long way." The novel certainly has depth, along with its wide-ranging playfulness, and it has a sureness of tone in terms of precisely what aspects of the dark and macabre to omit, and what to leave in. He grins: "I do remember in the ghouls story actually stopping and going 'Am I really going to talk about, you know, the lovely taste of the black ichor of a corpse from a leaden coffin…and then I thought, damn right I am!'" It's a good call, because it's dark and delicious and creepily funny.

The ghouls' chapter of the book is a particular highlight, where a mischievous band of ghouls (whose names and the reason for them are the first among equals in the book's joyous flights of fancy) steal Bod and try to carry him off to the Lovecraftian city of Ghulheim, "this abandoned city of wrong angles that they've invaded and you know that if they actually get him there, he's lost".

The ghouls are essentially the apes in The Jungle Book, but there are other sources of inspiration that became apparent in the writing: "I got halfway before I realised that what I was writing owed as much, if not more, to PL Travers (author of Mary Poppins) as it did to Kipling … in the Mary Poppins books there's always one of the short stories with a title like "Bad Thursday" where grumpy kid goes off into dark place through a mirror with people who seem friendly and now it's getting nasty, and they call for… (the real, non-Disneyfied] … Mary Poppins at the point where you're about to get your hand cut off, and you get saved in the end."

Perhaps it's the genesis of the idea in a Sussex landscape that Kipling also knew well, but I tell him I sensed other ghosts in the book than the ones haunting the graveyard; in particular, the Puck tales Kipling told in Puck of Pooks Hill and Rewards and Fairies, in which the sprite Puck would take the children and show them stories from the past. He pauses and eyes the cold dead teapots for a moment: "… the idea that things will come out of the past and inform the present, the idea that where you're living is a place in which history is strata, is one that has been in pretty much everything I have written, and I think that it probably starts there".

The pause is because he found them " incredibly frustrating books. As a kid, I'd read them and re-read them and … I'm going, apart from the Wayland Smith story, there is no magic in any of them! But you've got Puck and you've got faery… and you're using him to do history stories! Why the hell are you doing this?" It's clearly an affectionate frustration, because Gaiman takes pleasure in the fact that people are starting to get context which allows Kipling to be read again. There was a bad time when it was almost embarrassing to be reading him, "definitely in my early twenties I would have to justify to people that I read him, and what I love now is that he's being picked up by the Indians as an Indian writer, which I think is a really good thing. They're not saying he was one of the invaders, they're saying he's one of the great Indian writers."

I think in time to come history will do the same thing for Gaiman. He'll no longer merely be seen as one of the brightest lights of the fantasy section in the increasingly ghettoised bookstores of the world. People will be saying he's one of the great British writers. Period.

&#149 The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman is published by Bloomsbury, priced 12.99. Charlie Fletcher's latest novel, Silvertongue, is published by Hodder Children's Books, priced 10.99.