Fantastic friends

Bestselling writers Neil Gaiman and Susanna Clarke talk with Salon about fairies, folk tales and fighting the tyranny of realism.

By Laura Miller

Oct 8, 2005 | Writers are legendarily competitive, and frequently petty about it, as countless romans à clef have shown. That makes the sunny collegiality in the friendship between Neil Gaiman and Susanna Clarke most remarkable. Gaiman -- who somehow manages to qualify as a cult writer despite regularly landing books on the bestseller lists and drawing crowds at his public appearances -- first read Clarke's work over a decade ago, when an old friend, Colin Greenland, sent him a sample. Clarke, who loved Gaiman's "Sandman" graphic novel series, had signed up for a writing course largely on strength of the fact that Greenland, who taught it, knew Gaiman. Gaiman was so taken with the scrap of fiction Greenland sent him that he demanded to see more. He kept sending Clarke's work to publishers and was eventually rewarded, along with all the rest of us, with "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell," Clarke's doorstop novel about two rival magicians, published to great success last year. Gaiman says that for him the best thing about Clarke getting famous is that when people ask him who his favorite contemporary writers are, he no longer has to explain that one of them hasn't published a book yet.

Gaiman and Clarke write in an imaginative tradition that, as they see it, goes back centuries, although the "fantasy" label now affixed to it is a recent development. It's not always a comfortable fit when so many readers associate the genre with pallid Tolkien derivatives. Gaiman, for example, chooses mostly contemporary settings for his novels, often scruffy urban ones like the London Underground ("Neverwhere") or the ramshackle roadside tourist attractions that inspired "American Gods." His latest novel, "Anansi Boys," is like a cross between Nick Hornby and Zora Neale Hurston, based on West African and Caribbean folklore but set in today's London, and he is the screenwriter for "Mirrormask," a new animated film about mother-daughter friction by Dave McKean that wanders in and out of a decrepit public housing complex. Clarke won over many elf-averse readers with her uncanny ability to re-create the prose cadences and ironic wit of classic 19th century novelists like Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope; her novel is as much about manners and politics as it is about spells. The two authors, in New York to do an onstage interview, met with Salon beforehand to talk about their shared enthusiasm for British folklore, the tyranny of realism and the cat flaps of Isaac Newton.

Do you two feel a particularly strong kinship with each other's work?

S.C.: Especially between "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" and a book Neil wrote called "Stardust."

N.G.: I think it's because they're English.

How so?

N.G.: Both of us like primary sources.

Such as?

N.G.: Well you read folk tales, you browse your way through Katharine Briggs. And Shakespeare. You get the sense of a peculiarly English fairy that's amoral and huge and at the same time incredibly small. There's a weird change of size and shape. It's a peculiarly English thing.

I should interject, for those who don't know this, that in English folklore, a fairy is not a tiny adorable girl with wings, but often a full-size person, and usually very capricious, powerful and dangerous -- someone you don't want to get mixed up with. England certainly has a modern tradition of fantastic literature that overshadows the rest of the world.

S.C.: Other European cultures have more developed myths and legends. You can get this feeling of the English or Scottish or Irish or Welsh fairy, but it is by nature very elusive. It would be possible to pin down a German fairy, but the English one just vanishes, becomes the shadow under the trees.

N.G.:There's a glorious short story that Susanna did. Was it Mrs. Mab? The one where she keeps going into houses which turn into the insides of flowers and nuts.

S.C.: The character keeps looking for Mrs. Mab. When she sees something and it's small, it looks big, and when she sees it and it's big, it looks small. It exists, but exactly where or what size it is is not clear.

Do you make this material up or do you go back to the folklore?

S.C.: I do go back to the folklore and to Katharine Briggs. That's the only bit of the magic in "Strange & Norrell" that I really researched. English folk tales and fairy beliefs are very fragmentary. Scottish, Irish and Welsh are a bit more developed. They have more remnants to pick at. Obviously, though, you also pick out stories from books you've read as a child. So I can't say I've been absolutely strict about it. It's just what's useful at the moment.

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