The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy

This is an interesting collection of interviews with thirteen fantasy writers – Lloyd Alexander, Franny Billingsley, Susan Cooper, Nancy Farmer, Brian Jacques, Diana Wynne Jones, Ursula K Le Guin, Madeleine L’Engle, Garth Nix, Tamora Pierce, Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman, and Jane Yolen.

Leonard S Marcus, who writes on children’s books for the New York Times, writes in his introduction that some of the interviews were done in person, some by phone, and two by e-mail, but to be honest the simple Q&A format means they all read as if they could be the e-mail ones. One doesn’t expect in a book like this the kind of devastating revelation of a writer found in, say, Lynn Barber’s profile of Richard Adams (collected in Mostly Men), but the book would flow more naturally if there were more of a sense of a true encounter between the author and his interviewees. Previous books in this vein, such as Justin Wintle’s The Pied Pipers and Jonathan Cott’s Pipers at the Gates of Dawn, have managed this.

This one gripe aside, Marcus has done well in asking the kind of questions children might want to ask of their favourite authors, and in giving the authors space to answer them. There are no huge revelations here, but each author gives revealing details of their childhood, their approach to storytelling, and their work routine. A few crosscurrents arise naturally (several writers mention Masefield’s The Box of Delights as an early inspiration, for instance) and others are solicited. All the writers are asked about their response to Tolkien (though interestingly none, not even Diana Wynne Jones, is asked about J K Rowling). Philip Pullman speaks for several when he records his initial delight in The Lord of the Rings and his current distaste for it: ‘There’s nothing truthful in it about human nature, or society, or men and women. Nothing true in it at all.’

This concern with truth turns out to be a consistent preoccupation of fantasy writers. As Madeleine L’Engle puts it, ‘Something has to be true to be real, but it doesn’t have to be real to be true.’