Author interview with Catherine Webb / Claire NorthAuthor bio:
Catherine Webb is a Carnegie Medal-nominated British author.
Her debut, Mirror Dreams, was completed when Catherine was just 14
years old. The book was published under her own name in 2002 by Atom Books. The
novel garnered comparisons with Terry Pratchett and Philip Pullman.
Catherine went on to publish a further seven young adult novels under
her own name, earning extensive critical acclaim and two Carnegie nominations
for her novels Timekeepers and The Extraordinary and
Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle.
Under the open pseudonym Kate Griffin, Webb has published a further six
fantasy novels for adults. Dubbed the Matthew Swift and Magicals Anonymous novels,
these books are set in an alternate modern-day London saturated with magic.
A lifelong Londoner, Webb describes herself as a fan of big cities,
urban magic, Thai food and graffiti-spotting, and she is endlessly fascinated
by such questions as who leaves copies of the yellow pages on top of bus
shelters, how the hidden tunnels beneath the sorting office were built, and why
anyone would ever dispose of perfectly good pairs of shoes by throwing them
over the nearest telephone line.
Catherine read History at the London School of Economics, and studied
at RADA. In addition to penning novels, Catherine also currently works as a
theatre lighting designer.
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BP: First off can you tell us a
bit more about who Catherine Webb is? What are you hobbies, what do you like to
do in your spare time?
CW:
I’m a theatre lighting designer when I’m not writing books. My cunning plan is that two equally
unreliable career paths – theatre and writing – create one perfectly stable
life. So far, its working out
alright! When I’m not writing books, I’m
lighting shows, and visa versa, and the combination gets me out of the house,
pays my gas bill and, so far, keeps me vaguely sane. I also learn a martial art – escrima – with a
club in London Fields, which makes me endlessly happy. I’ve been trying for years to learn Mandarin,
which I’m pretty poor at, and I still spend an inordinate amount of
time at my library.
BP: You have written many books
over the last few years, do you still know when and where you decided that you
wanted to become an author?
CW: Hum… my parents both begged me not to become
a writer, and their reasons for avoiding the career were good. (Low pay, unreliable prospects, not enough
social life etc..) I don’t think,
therefore, I ever decided to be a writer – in fact, I think I decided not to be a writer, and only wrote books
to keep myself entertained. To a degree,
that still holds – I write books for fun, and if someone buys them, that’s a
fantastic perk. My first publishable novel
was written on a school summer holiday to keep me entertained, and no one was
more astonished than I was when first my parents, then an agent, then a
publisher, all thought it worth a look at.
By the time I realised that I might actually be becoming an author, it
was a little late….
BP: You are well known for you
children’s stories, A Madness of Angels was your first adult fantasy book, did
you encounter any difficulties in the transition from writing for children to
adults?
CW: Thankfully I was blessed by one easily
acquirable condition – I was getting old.
My children’s books I wrote when still fairly young. By the time I was looking at A Madness of Angels I was the sagely age
of 20 years old, and though it may not seem like much, the years 16-21 are
utterly redefining for a person and their life.
People change all the time, but those years when you transition out of
childhood are probably the fastest, most dramatic years of change, and with
that going on I suspect transitioning my writing style was a only small part of
what was happening in my life at the time.
BP: Your urban fantasy books were
published under a different penname, same as your latest book The First Fifteen
Lives of Harry August, why did you decide to do this?
CW:
I became Kate Griffin when I transitioned to adult fantasy, simply so younger
readers of my Catherine Webb books could tell the difference between two very
different styles of writing in two very different areas. The transition to Claire North happened in a
similar-yet-different way. The writing
styles and the content of Claire North books are very different from Kate
Griffin books, and while I’m massively fond of them all, it’s good to have a
clear marker to indicate a different voice and style between each series. Hence: Claire North!
BP: You have managed to keep your
pseudonym secret for quite a while. Why did you decide to reveal who you were?
CW: One of the joys of a pseudonym is that people
can read a book without the author’s history affecting how they see it. No one reading Harry August can exclaim,
‘wow, this is interesting, but where’s the urban wizardry?’ unless they also
know that I’m also Kate Griffin and are deliberately looking for flavours of
that style. However, one of the dangers,
it turns out, is that people then start seeing everyone else and there’s a risk that the question of ‘who’s Claire
North and can we tell from her prose?’ becomes almost as much of a question as
‘is it really Catherine Webb?’ Quite
what the ideal solution is between these states, I have no idea! Should every book be a genderless, nameless
thing upon which we cannot impose any perceptions of the text based on a
writer’s past or gender? Or do
consistent names, and indeed the boundaries of genre and the definition a book
is given by its cover, allow us to always find things we love, and thus promote
reading? I dunno. (Discuss.)
BP: The First Fifteen Lives of
Harry August is something different from your UF and children’s books. Did you
encounter any specific problem when you were writing The First Fifteen Lives of
Harry August?
CW: Keeping track of how old Harry August
was. I had to keep a spreadsheet. However, other than that… Harry August was
written as my book-between-books. I was
mid-contract for a series of Kate Griffin novels, but I didn’t want to write three
Kate Griffin books back-to-back without some sort of break, so wrote Harry
August on the side to allow my brain to re-adjust. In an odd way, it was hugely
therapeutic. The Matthew Swift/Magicals
Anonymous series had reached a point where so much of the story was tangled up
with the events and the universe of the books which went before, that having
something entirely separate on the side was, in many ways… simpler. I know, given the nature of the book, ‘simple’
may not be the word that springs to mind, but honestly, it did feel… rather
relaxing!
BP: What was the most difficult
part when you were writing The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August?
CW: … the most difficult part of the book, or the
most difficult part of the process…? (Oddly different things, though I feel
like a bit of a loon for asking!)
I’d say that probably one of the hardest parts of the
book was actually one of the less narratively significant ones – when Harry
August goes to China. I’ve never been to
China, and though I’m learning Chinese and studied Chinese history, the madness
of the Great Leap Forward and, even more, the Cultural Revolution, is something
I still struggle to comprehend. How do
you write a country that is changing so much, and an ideology that was in so
much flux? Worse: how do you write
something like that convincingly, when so much evidence is contradictory or
obscure? The scenes in China were
tricky, to say the least.
However! In a
more process-orientated way, I’d say that finding an overall narrative framework
that provided momentum was initially difficult.
Once it was solved, it was fine, but pinning down what it is that drives
Harry for hundreds of years, what motivates him and makes him change, was an
adventure in itself, not least as it’d be incredibly easy for a character in
his position to lapse into idle nothingness.
Since the greatest question of his existence – why does he exist? – is one of the few things he can’t answer, it
made sense to pursue this, but fairly quickly you find yourself as the writer
asking another question: is quantum physics as narratively thrilling as love
and betrayal?
Thankfully, it turned out that quantum physics can at
the very least, be a driving factor for
love and betrayal, and things got easier after that.
BP: Besides the hardest part of
the book, which part did you enjoy writing about the most?
CW:
If I had to boil it down to a single thing that made me smile… Fidel Gussman
made me happy. The book is replete with
adventures and recollections, flawed characters and betrayals. Fidel Gussman was an honest bit of simple,
gun-toting joy in the middle of a life that lacked for punch-lines.
BP: The First Fifteen Lives of
Harry August has some pretty cool idea’s. For example the kalachakra, how did
you come up with this idea?
CW:
I was standing on the high street in Stratford Upon Avon during my secondment
with the Royal Shakespeare Company. It
was the very end of a two-year Technical Theatre and Stage Management course at
RADA, and I was having to face up to What Happened Next, whatever that turned
out to be. It was a very hot day, I was
in my steel-capped boots which were beginning to hurt from too much abuse. I was in town as a student lighting
technician working in the Courtyard Theatre, we’d just finished putting in the
show for the matinee and I had four hours off until we turned around the
theatre again for the evening show. This
was a ritual we repeated every single day for three weeks. I didn’t know anyone, I’d seen the swans, I
didn’t really have anywhere to go, and the town was full of tourists and
strangers. Right there, that moment there… that’d be the moment when the
idea popped into my head with an absolute certainty and a compulsion to get
typing as soon as possible. Make of that
what you will….
BP: Now that The First Fifteen
Lives of Harry August is published and your second book from Claire North,
Touch, has been announced do you have still any other projects that you wish to
pursue? A new Matthew Swift book or Magicals Anonymous? Or again something
completely new?
CW: Hum… a few months ago I finished a book that
is still, alas, catagorised as topsecretproject4
until it’s officially bought by someone.
Topsecretproject4 is
completely different from anything I’ve ever written before, and like most things
I do which are complete departures, I wrote it on the side to keep my brain
ticking over and entertained. Even as I
write that sentence, I realise just how patient my agent must be with me… ah
well…
There is, as you say, another Claire North book due
out next year, and I’m also writing some novellas and another Claire North book to go after that. All of this will probably take me into 2015
without breaking a sweat, and by then… who knows? I love writing the Matthew Swift and Magicals
Anonymous books, but, as I often exclaim to anxious theatre directors, for me
to say anything definitive right now would probably be reckless speculation,
rather than absolute fact. I wrote Harry
August on the side, for my own delight between theatre work, and it has massively
changed what I write and how I write in ways I couldn’t have imagined two years
ago. At the moment there are no definite
plans to write more Kate Griffin books.
Neither is there any reason why I can’t.
Whatever happens, I intend to keep writing! I guess the answer is… ask me in twelve
months time… one year at a time….
BP: Everyone enjoys fantasy and
science fiction in their own way. What do you like most about it?
CW: It does more.
I am very tempted to leave those three words as a glib (yet true)
summary of my feelings, but in the interest of full disclosure let me
elaborate!
It does more.
It pushes its characters further, harder, than other genres can. It clones people, redefines memories, bodies,
minds, prods and tears with machines and magics at society and souls. It destroys the world and asks ‘what next’,
challenges characters and readers both to think beyond their understanding of
where they live and who they are – who they might be. It creates futures, extrapolates the ‘now’
into a ‘then’, plays with ‘what if’ and ‘what might be’, challenges the ethics
of the internet age and explores time, space and history with delight. It makes humanity tiny, a piddling little
species in a sea of stars, and that’s okay.
It makes people gods, builds empires of technology and magic, faith and
power. Science fiction and fantasy are
not restrictive terms. These books are not not crime, or romance, or thriller, and they do not not contain within them stories and
feelings every bit as passionate and true as any of the greatest novels of
mainstream literature. Science fiction
and fantasy are all of these things,
can contain all of these things, and then be something more as well.
It does more.
BP: and just lastly, if you would
have to name your top five favourite books, which would they be?
CW:
I’m struggling with this to a degree, because my entire book collection is on
the floor of the nook known as the-mystery-corner-of-unclear-yet-probably-structurally-vital-purpose
in my flat, waiting for shelves to be built.
Without being able to walk along it and inspect its works, it can be
tricky to pin down… but let’s see…
1.
The Chronicles of Amber, by Roger Zelazny. (I know that’s ten books, but stick with me…)
2.
The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler. (Or: anything by Chandler ever.)
3.
Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett. (I nearly put ‘all the Vimes books’ but you
might have hurt me.)
4.
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell.
5.
A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula le Guin.
Not going to lie, I love everything by George Orwell,
and it was a toss-up in place 5 for anything by le Guin or Neil Gaiman, or
indeed for the Complete Garfield Classics
which are my go-to books during stress, or the adventures of Asterix the Gaul,
or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or the
works of H.G.Wells or the Adventures of
Sherlock Holmes or anything by Iain M. Banks or Tale for Time Being by Ruth Ozeki or… just so much… soooo much….
Also, I know it’s not ‘books’ strictly speaking, but as a lighting designer can
I take this moment to say that I love lighting Shakespeare plays? If anyone needs an LD for a production of the
Tempest – magic, storms, redemption, revenge etc. - or any of the history plays
or anything, give me a call….
BP: Thank you for your time
Catherine, I will be looking forward to reading your next book!
CW: Thank you!!
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