A Slip of the Keyboard (17 page)

What can I remember? I can remember the vision of beech woods in the Shire; I was a country boy, and the hobbits were walking through a landscape which, give or take the odd housing development, was pretty much the one I’d grown up in. I remember it like a movie. There I was, sitting on this rather chilly sixties-style couch in this rather bare room; but at the edges of the carpet, the forest
began. I remember the light as green, coming through trees. I have never since then so truly had the experience of being inside the story.

I can remember the click of the central heating going off and the room growing colder, but these things were happening on the horizon of my senses and weren’t relevant. I can’t remember going home with my parents, but I do remember sitting up in bed until three a.m., still reading. I don’t recall going to sleep. I do remember waking up with the book open on my chest, and finding my place, and going on reading. It took me, oh, about twenty-three hours to get to the end.

Then I picked up the first book and started again. I spent a long time looking at the runes.

Already, as I admit this, I can feel the circle of new, anxious but friendly faces around me: “My name is Terry and I used to draw dwarf runes in my school notebooks. It started with, you know, the straight ones, everyone can do them, but then I got in deeper and before I knew it I was doing the curly elf ones with the dots. Wait … there’s worse. Before I’d even heard the word
fandom I
was writing weird fan fiction. I wrote a crossover story setting Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
in Middle-earth; the rest of the kids loved it, because a class of thirteen-year-old boys with volcanic acne and groinal longings is not best placed to appreciate Miss Austen’s fine prose. It was a really good bit when the orcs attacked the rectory.…” But around about then, I suspect, the support group would have thrown me out.

Enthralled I was. To the library I went back, and spake thusly: “Have you got any more books like these? Maybe with maps in? And runes?”

The librarian gave me a mildly disapproving look, but I ended up with
Beowulf
and a volume of Norse sagas. He meant well, but it wasn’t the same. It took someone several stanzas just to say who they were.

But that drew me to the Mythology shelves. The Mythology shelves were next to the Ancient History shelves. What the hell … it was all guys with helmets, wasn’t it? On, on … maybe there’s a magical ring! Or runes!

The desperate search for the Tolkien effect opened up a new world for me, and it was this one.

History as it was then taught in British schools was big on kings and acts of Parliament, and was full of dead people. It had a certain strange, mechanistic structure to it. What happened in 1066? The Battle of Hastings. Full marks. And what else happened in 1066? What do you mean, what else happened? The Battle of Hastings was what 1066 was for. We’d “done” the Romans (they came, they saw, they had some baths, they built some roads, and left), but my private reading coloured in the picture. We hadn’t “done” the Greeks. As for the empires of Africa and Asia, did anyone “do” them at all? But, hey, look here in this book; these guys don’t use runes, it’s all pictures of birds and snakes; but, look, they know how to pull a dead king’s brains out through his nose.…

And on I went, getting the best kind of education possible, which is the one that happens while you think you’re having fun. Would it have happened anyway? Possibly. We never know where the triggers are. But
The Lord of the Rings
was a step-change in my reading. I was already enjoying it, but
The Lord of the Rings
opened me up to the rest of the library.

I used to read it once a year, in the spring.

I’ve realized that I don’t anymore, and I wonder why. It’s not the dense and sometimes ponderous language. It’s not because the scenery has more character than the characters, or the lack of parts for women, or the other perceived or real offences against the current social codes.

It’s simply because I have the movie in my head, and it’s been there for forty years. I can still remember the luminous green of
the beech woods, the freezing air of the mountains, the terrifying darkness of the dwarf mines, the greenery on the slopes of Ithilien, west of Mordor, still holding out against the encroaching shadow. The protagonists don’t figure much in the movie, because they were never more to me than figures in a landscape that was, itself, the hero. I remember it at least as clearly as—no, come to think of it, more clearly than—I do many of the places I’ve visited in what we like to call the real world. In fact, it is strange to write this and realize that I can remember stretches of the Middle-earth landscape as real places. The characters are faceless, mere points in space from which their dialogue originated. But Middle-earth is a place I went to.

I suppose the journey was a form of escapism. That was a terrible crime at my school. It’s a terrible crime in a prison; at least, it’s a terrible crime to a jailer. In the early sixties, the word had no positive meanings. But you can escape to as well as from. In my case, the escape was a truly Tolkien experience, as recorded in his
Tree and Leaf
. I started with a book, and that led me to a library, and that led me everywhere.

Do I still think, as I did then, that Tolkien was the greatest writer in the world? In the strict sense, no. You can think that at thirteen. If you still think it at fifty-three, something has gone wrong with your life. But sometimes things all come together at the right time in the right place—book, author, style, subject, and reader. The moment was magic.

And I went on reading; and, since if you read enough books you overflow, I eventually became a writer.

One day I was doing a signing in a London bookshop and next in the queue was a lady in what, back in the eighties, was called a “power suit” despite its laughable lack of titanium armour and proton guns. She handed over a book for signature. I asked her what her name was. She mumbled something. I asked again … after
all, it was a noisy bookshop. There was another mumble, which I could not quite decipher. As I opened my mouth for the third attempt, she said, “It’s Galadriel, okay?”

I said: “Were you by any chance born in a cannabis plantation in Wales?” She smiled, grimly. “It was a camper van in Cornwall,” she said, “but you’ve got the right idea.”

It wasn’t Tolkien’s fault, but let us remember in fellowship and sympathy all the Bilboes out there.

Boskone 39 Programme Book, February 2002

What can I say about Neil Gaiman that has not already been said in
The Morbid Imagination: Five Case Studies
?

Well, he’s no genius. He’s better than that.

He’s not a wizard, in other words, but a conjuror.

Wizards don’t have to work. They wave their hands, and the magic happens. But conjurors, now … conjurors work very hard. They spend a lot of time in their youth watching, very carefully, the best conjurors of their day. They seek out old books of trickery and, being natural conjurors, read everything else as well, because history itself is just a magic show. They observe the way people think, and the many ways in which they don’t. They learn the subtle use of springs, and how to open mighty temple doors at a touch, and how to make the trumpets sound.

And they take centre stage and amaze you with flags of all nations and smoke and mirrors, and you cry: “Amazing! How does he do it? What happened to the elephant? Where’s the rabbit? Did he really smash my watch?”

And in the back row we, the other conjurors, say quietly, “Well done. Isn’t that a variant of the Prague Levitating Sock? Wasn’t that Pasqual’s Spirit Mirror, where the girl isn’t really there? But where the hell did that flaming sword come from?”

And we wonder if there may be such a thing as wizardry, after all …

I met Neil in 1985, when
The Colour of Magic
had just come out. It was my first ever interview as an author. Neil was making a living as a freelance journalist and had the pale features of someone who had sat through the review showings of altogether too many bad movies in order to live off the freebie cold chicken legs they served at the receptions afterwards (and to build up his contacts book, which is now the size of the Bible and contains rather more interesting people). He was doing journalism in order to eat, which is a very good way of learning journalism. Probably the only real way, come to think of it.

He also had a very bad hat. It was a grey homburg. He was not a hat person. There was no natural unity between hat and man. That was the first and last time I saw the hat. As if subconsciously aware of the bad hatitude, he used to forget it and leave it behind in
restaurants. One day, he never went back for it. I put this in for the serious fans out there: if you search really, really hard, you may find a small restaurant somewhere in London with a dusty grey homburg at the back of a shelf. Who knows what will happen if you try it on?

Anyway, we got on fine. Hard to say why, but at bottom was a shared delight and amazement at the sheer strangeness of the universe, in stories, in obscure details, in strange old books in unregarded bookshops. We stayed in contact.

[SFX: pages being ripped off a calendar. You know, you just don’t get that in movies anymore.…]

And one thing led to another, and he became big in graphic novels, and Discworld took off, and one day he sent me about six pages of a short story and said he didn’t know how it continued, and I didn’t either, and about a year later I took it out of the drawer and did see what happened next, even if I couldn’t see how it all ended yet, and we wrote it together and that was
Good Omens
. It was done by two guys who didn’t have anything to lose by having fun. We didn’t do it for the money. But, as it turned out, we got a lot of money.

… hey, let me tell you about the weirdness, like when he was staying with us for the editing and we heard a noise and went into his room and two of our white doves had got in and couldn’t get out; they were panicking around the room and Neil was waking up in a storm of snowy white feathers saying, “Wstfgl?” which is his normal antemeridian vocabulary. Or the time when we were in a bar and he met the Spider Women. Or the time on tour when we checked into our hotel and in the morning it turned out that his TV had been showing him strange late-night seminaked bondage bisexual chat shows, and mine had picked up nothing but reruns
of
Mr. Ed
. And the moment, live on air, when we realized that an underinformed New York radio interviewer with ten minutes of chat still to go thought
Good Omens
was not a work of fiction …

[Cut to a train, pounding along the tracks. That’s another scene they never show in movies these days.…]

And there we were, ten years on, travelling across Sweden and talking about the plot of
American Gods
(him) and
The Amazing Maurice
(me). Probably both of us at the same time. It was just like the old days. One of us says, “I don’t know how to deal with this tricky bit of plot”; the other one listens and says, “The solution, Grasshopper, is in the way you state the problem. Fancy a coffee?”

A lot had happened in those ten years. He’d left the comics world shaken, and it’ll never be quite the same. The effect was akin to that of Tolkien on the fantasy novel—everything afterwards is in some way influenced. I remember on one U.S.
Good Omens
tour walking round a comics shop. We’d been signing for a lot of comics fans, some of whom were clearly puzzled at the concept of “dis story wid no pitchers in it,” and I wandered around the shelves, looking at the opposition. That’s when I realized he was good. There’s a delicacy of touch, a subtle scalpel, which is the hallmark of his work.

And when I heard the premise of
American Gods
I wanted to write it so much I could taste it.…

When I read
Coraline
, I saw it as an exquisitely drawn animation; if I close my eyes I can see how the house looks, or the special dolls’ picnic. No wonder he writes scripts now; soon, I hope someone will be intelligent enough to let him direct. When I read the book, I remembered that children’s stories are, indeed, where true horror lives. My childhood nightmares would have been quite featureless without the imaginings of Walt Disney, and there’s a few
little details concerning black button eyes in that book that makes a small part of the adult brain want to go and hide behind the sofa. But the purpose of the book is not the horror, it is horror’s defeat.