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This month The Edge of the Forest sat down for a visit with
Charles Butler to talk books, writing, and reading. Charles Butler was educated at London University, and later at the
University of York, where he combined English Literature with a postgraduate degree in computer science. His interests
range from Renaissance literature to the history of science in the seventeenth century. His recent research has
concentrated on children's literature, and he is the author of a handful of YA novels, as well as scholarly books.
The Edge of the Forest: You're an academic who studies and teaches children's and Young Adult literature to
university students. What prompted you to begin writing Young Adult fiction?
Charles Butler: I started writing fiction long before I was a teacher. I wrote my first full-length book when I was
eighteen, the summer before I went to university. It was dreadful: a horrible example of Tolkien-Lite, complete with a
faux-mediaeval secondary world, obscure prophecies, epic journeys across The Map, and many other fatty lumps from the
fantasyland stew pot. That story remains deservedly unpublished, as does its successor. By the time my third book was
accepted for publication, in 1995, I had been working at a university for several years, teaching Renaissance literature.
In fact it was only around the turn of the millennium that it dawned on me I could bring these two sides of my life
together, and teach children’s literature too. I’m a bit slow on the uptake, really.
The Edge of the Forest: In your first published book, The Darkling, there are hints that Petra is a
reincarnation of Mr Century's fiancée, Eurydice: do you believe in reincarnation?
Charles Butler: No, I find the whole idea of reincarnation a bit baffling. To say that someone has come back in a
new body, without any memory of their former life, makes little sense to me. Without memories, without self-knowledge,
without perhaps even belonging to the same species, what has come back? What can it mean to say it’s the same person?
My mind draws a blank. Ghosts, on the other hand, are something I can work with—as is possession, whether by a spirit
or a ghost or a god. Almost all my books involve possession in one form or another, actually.
The Edge of the Forest: In Timon's Tide, Daniel's brother Timon seems an ambiguous character, wanting both
to hurt and frighten Daniel and to help him. Does Timon genuinely want Daniel to be happier?
Charles Butler: Readers will have to make their own minds up about that; but I can at least assure you that the
ambiguity was intentional. Timon fears that his existence has been pointless, that he made no difference to the world.
He comes back into Daniel’s life wanting many things: to save himself, to take revenge, but also to change the lives of
those close to him, for good or ill. And he enjoys the power that comes from being enigmatic and not giving away all the
answers—including whether he’s alive or dead. I named him after a famous misanthrope, Timon of Athens, and some lines
from Shakespeare’s play stood (in my head at least) as a ghostly epigraph to the book. I think they convey something of
Timon’s ingrained orneriness:
Come not to me again: but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood;
Who once a day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover: thither come,
And let my grave-stone be your oracle.
I like the sheer unhelpfulness of that.
The Edge of the Forest: In Calypso Dreaming, Calypso's uncle Dominic is a member of the order of
Asklepius and has the gift of healing: who is Asklepius?
Charles Butler: Asklepius is the Greek god of healing. In the slightly alternative/future world of Calypso
Dreaming I imagine the Order of Asklepius as a somewhat more mystical version of Médecins Sans Frontières, in
which certain people are born with the gift of healing. Dominic is one of these. He accepts the moral obligations that go
with his gift, but he also resents not being able to choose his own path—a resentment that ultimately makes him
dangerous to those around him.
In the version of reality where most of us spend our waking hours Dominic would be a doctor or a priest (or both), but in
Calypso Dreaming I tried to draw the world through a distorting glass. That’s why I set the book on an island,
and involved a quasi-religious community with its own rather skewed view of events. Strange things happen on islands—look
at The Odyssey, The Tempest, Lord of the Flies, or The Wicker Man, to make an eclectic
selection! I’d always wanted to make my own addition to that list. Besides which, I fell in love with Steep Holm, the
island in the Bristol Channel which is the partial model for Sweetholm in the book. It really is that creepy!
The Edge of the Forest: In The Fetch of Mardy Watt, what gave you the idea for the Reverberant Chord, the magical
musical means for the Mayor of Uraniborg to ensnare Mardy and enable the Fetch to take her place ?
Charles Butler: As Professor Kirke used to say in the Narnia books, ‘It’s all in Plato!’ In this case it’s in the
Phaedo, a dialogue in which one character champions a theory I’ve always rather liked (better than reincarnation, anyway…),
that the soul is related to the body in the same way that music is related to an instrument—a kind of attunement.
According to this theory, the soul is neither material (music is not a physical part of the instrument that plays it) nor
immaterial in the sense of being independent of the body (you can’t play music once the instrument is broken). That was
somewhere in my mind, I believe, although you certainly don’t need to have read the Phaedo to understand the book! So was
the idea of a resonant frequency—the thing that allows a soprano to shatter a wine glass with a high note (at least
in cartoons). I wondered what would happen if you could pull off the same trick with a human being. Not with a single note,
but with a vastly complex chord, that would act as a kind of musical fingerprint.
The Edge of the Forest: I have noticed that all your teenage protagonists seem to come from fractured families where
absent, dead or feuding parents are the norm, and siblings often don’t get on well with each other. Do you feel this is an
accurate reflection of modern family life?
Charles Butler: It’s an accurate reflection of some family lives, at any rate, including several families
I’ve known well. I haven’t been actively avoiding happy nuclear families, though, either in art or life! In fact there’s
one in my new book, The Lurkers. I don’t care for stories in which a slab of gritty social realism is stuck on for
effect, as a kind of morbid mood music, without having any real connection to the main business of the plot. In my own case
I’ve been quite careful to ensure that the deaths, feuds, fractures and sibling rivalries are part of a situation—often
a family mystery—which the events of the book help to resolve or explain. Not that the resolution is always a happy
one.
The Edge of the Forest: You have said that your own writing has been influenced by the work of four British
fantasists: Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones and Penelope Lively—and for those readers who are familiar
with the works of these four authors, the marks of their influence are visible, particularly their treatment of time as
non-linear; have any other authors, particularly authors of supernatural fiction, influenced your work?
Charles Butler: I was indeed influenced by these four, or at any rate by the first three (Lively I admire greatly,
but I don’t see her as having had a major effect on my own writing). I doubt I could have written Death of a Ghost
as it is now without having read Red Shift first, for example, particularly the way Garner dispenses with the
usual fantasy mechanisms for handling the relationship between different historical periods; and the conclusion of
The Fetch of Mardy Watt has the kind of multiple revelations and changes of identity I like in Jones titles such
as Archer’s Goon—to pick two examples that lie fairly near the surface of consciousness. When I wrote my critical book
on the quartet you mention, Four British Fantasists, I was of course writing in as scholarly way as I could; but
inevitably the insights I gained fed back into my own practice as a novelist. What doesn’t?
To that list of influential writers I would certainly add Margaret Mahy, and particularly The Changeover, which was
a revelatory book for me when I read it first on a long train journey from Aberdeen to Bristol in about 1991. Her
exuberance taught me to be a more generous writer, to use ideas and words instead of hoarding them for fear they might run
out. Mahy also has a very distinctive way of combining the supernatural and the mundane, which is an abiding interest of
mine as both reader and writer. (The Big Red Book of Segues is one of my as-yet-unwritten books.) My own taste is
for stories in which the ordinary and the fantastic are overlaid, or blurred, or turn out to be the same thing seen from a
different angle, rather than for a sharp division. Mahy’s very good on that.
The Edge of the Forest: In each of your books there seems to be a key event which acts as a trigger for the events
described in the books—do you believe we're all at the mercy of our weaknesses and mistakes, or can we hope to gain and
maintain control of our lives?
Charles Butler: Boringly I suppose I have to say a bit of both—and neither! Quite a lot of what happens to us is
beyond our control altogether, because it comes from outside, from the forces that push the world in its course without
reference to our wishes. But I’m all in favour of people trying to affect events where they can, and a lot of my
protagonists reach a point where they realise they must take action rather than passively watch events unfold. It doesn’t
often come easily to them.
As to the ‘key event,’ it’s to some extent a narrative convention—the decisive crossing of the threshold from the
familiar into the world of adventure. But I try to make the event something that causes my characters to look back as well
as forward, and to reassess the apparent normality that preceded it. In retrospect, even the most mundane things stand
revealed as extraordinary, and that threshold as something of a mirage.
The Edge of the Forest: Have you ever read a book and wished you had written it?
Charles Butler: Many times! Of the writers I’ve mentioned here, I’d single out Garner’s The Owl Service,
Jones’s Fire and Hemlock, Mahy’s The Changeover, and Cooper’s The Dark is Rising. Beyond that,
well—The Faerie Queene, which I wrote about for my PhD, is one I’d love to have on my backlist.
The Edge of the Forest: Can you give us an idea of what your latest book, The Lurkers, is about?
Charles Butler: It’s a children’s (rather than YA) book, about a boy who is foolish enough to make a
Faustian bargain, and in doing so inadvertently threatens the future of humanity. The story is told from the perspective of
his long-suffering elder sister, who has to deal with the disaster he unleashes. Amongst its other attractions, writing
The Lurkers gave me the chance to let my local soccer team, Bristol Rovers, win the FA Cup. That’s how you can be
quite sure it’s a fantasy.
The Edge of the Forest: Were you a big reader as a child/teenager and did you have a lot of books at home or were
you a regular library visitor?
Charles Butler: The first ‘proper’ book I finished as a young child was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
I remember my pride in having got all the way through it, and I think it remained my favourite for a long while just on
that account (I like it for other reasons now). Otherwise I was a fairly scattershot reader—but not a consistently big
reader, I think. I had fierce enthusiasms: for a short while I would read everything I could get hold of about King Arthur, or
string figures, or ghosts, or Greek myths, or codes, or whatever happened to fire me at the time. Then there would be
fallow periods when I didn’t read much beyond my weekly comic, Sparky. I don’t think I read very much children’s
fiction at all! Although I remember a period of about a year when nothing would do but Alfred Hitchcock and the
Three Investigators. (What can I have been thinking?)
The books in the house were mostly my mother’s—a mixture of English classics and detective fiction, and I dipped into
them over the years, picking things up piecemeal. I read a lot of Jane Austen, G.K. Chesterton, Keats, Charles Lamb,
Philip Larkin, and Bernard Shaw. And C.S. Lewis, of course. My mother had worked for Geoffrey Bles when they were
publishing Lewis in the 1950s, so she had copies not just of the Narnia stories but of most of his theological books as
well (including some fairly obscure pamphlets), and I went through them all pretty much without distinction.
The Edge of the Forest: When you were a child, did you want to be a writer when you grew up?
Charles Butler: I wanted to be a poet at one point, but I don’t remember fiction—let alone children’s fiction—figuring
on the my radar. Then again, I also wanted to be a farmer and a professional footballer. I certainly wasn’t any kind of
writing prodigy, though a friend of the family recalls coming across me one day when I was about five, sitting on the
stairs and looking from one hand to the other and saying methodically: ‘Charles Butler...Charles Dickens...Charles Butler...Charles
Dickens.’ Naturally I deny having done any such thing.
The Edge of the Forest: Have you started work on your next novel yet, and if so, can you give us a clue about it?
Charles Butler: I have a short book coming out with Barrington Stoke next year, called Kiss of Death. Other
than that, I’m trying to get to grips with a book that’s been goading me for about four years, but which keeps getting
shunted out of the way by other, more insistent projects with deadlines and contracts attached to them. It’s about the
childhood of Medea, and I’ve a feeling I’ll still be writing it in another four years—but we’ll see!
The Edge of the Forest: Do you have a favourite spot in which to write?
Charles Butler: Cafés are generally good, I find. A small amount of background noise (not too much) helps me
concentrate. But I’m fairly portable, especially as I write my first drafts in longhand. It definitely helps, not being
able to check your email!
Bonus: Read Michele's reviews of Charles
Butler's Four British Fantasists and
The Lurkers in this issue of
The Edge of the Forest.
Charles Butler's Books for Young Readers
Calypso Dreaming. CollinsVoyager, 2002. ISBN: 0-0071-2856-8.
The Darkling. Margaret K. McElderry, 1998. ISBN: 0-6898-1796-7.
(Paperback Edition: Orion Children's Books, 1997. ISBN: 1-8588-1383-2.)
Death of a Ghost. HarperCollins Children's Books, 2006. ISBN: 0-0071-2858-4.
(Paperback edition: HarperCollins Children's Books, 2006.)
The Fetch of Mardy Watt. CollinsVoyager, 2004. ISBN: 0-0071-2857-6.
(Paperback edition: HarperCollins Publishers Limited, 2005.)
The Lurkers. Usborne, 2006. ISBN: 0-7460-7065-9.
Timon's Ghost. Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2000. ISBN: 0-6898-2593-5.
(Paperback edition: Orion Children's Books, 1998. ISBN: 1-8588-1646-7.)
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