Serious Fantastication: acclaimed novelist China Miéville in interview with Steve Haynes: Part Two

Let’s turn to Perdido Street Station. Iron Council has been cited as your breakout novel – but surely this is exactly what Perdido Street Station is. As an example of a difficult second novel, it is hugely ambitious. (A huge leap from King Rat.) Was it part of a marketing strategy? Did you receive any pressure from publishers to produce something similar to your first?

No to both. I’ve become much more aware of that stuff as I get older, but no, my publishers at the time were very open-minded to whatever I was doing and there was never any pressure put on me, at that stage, to write certain things. Partly because King Rat, although it was decently received, was not a massive thing.

I have to say I don’t know anyone who thinks Iron Council was my breakout book. I think a lot of people think that Iron Council was a book that …

… You challenge your readership with it

… Iron Council alienated a lot of readers. I think Perdido Street Station was the book that was my breakout and it is very different from King Rat.

It was something I’d been working on for years. I’d been building up that setting for a decade so it didn’t come out of nowhere. I’d written a version of a short story – that many moons later became Perdido Street Station – almost a decade before and been building up that city and world over the time. I wasn’t, on any conscious level, sticking my feet in the water with King Rat, trying it out and then gaining confidence to write Perdido Street Station. There was nothing conscious like that, but I think that might have been going on somewhere.

Apart from the political themes running through the novel, it shows up elements that characterise all your books: ‘human’ politics, trust, betrayal, sex, power relationships, complexity. There is also experimentation – the scrap-yard artificial intelligence, the wide canvas, and a particular (evolving) writing style. Is this you setting out your stall as a writer? Are you saying, this is who I am?

Probably, but I wasn’t aware of that. What I was aware of was – I’d always conceived of New Crobuzon as a rag-bag – I’d always conceived of a fantasy world where I could put anything I wanted, and it was always conceived of as a teeming busy smorgasbord of everything; I could just shove anything in. So anytime I came across a mythical figure, I would introduce it. Self organising A.I.s – shove it in! It was self-conceived as an extremely disorganised chaotic full-brimming environment. What strengths the book has are functions of that, what weakness the book has are also functions of that. So, it wasn’t me saying this is who I am, but it was me having an extremely good time, splurging all this stuff and constructing this world that I’d been working on for a long time, and trying to do so in ways that took politics and social beings seriously within a fantasy world.

The Scar is the second novel set in the world of Bas-Lag. This is closer to an adventure / epic quest – but it creates an immense sense of empathy with the main players. The protagonist is trying to put a brake on the adventure and get out of there. The main drivers of the adventure have complex and amoral motivations. The line between right and wrong has never been more blurred. How much does your experience of social anthropology inform the creation of such a world?

I would say it’s more a question of social anthropology being one element. I’m interested in social theory in general, and social philosophy and so on. So yes, social anthropology gives you a certain interest in very distinct cultures, and for me it was to do with the contingency of culture.

One of the things anthropology was interesting for was non-essentialising cultures. And that in some ways works against a lot of fantasy, whereby people are defined by their race and or their tribe: if you’re an Orc you know what kind of person you are; if you’re an Elf you know what kind of person you are. I think one of the things anthropology does is it can be useful at breaking that quite essentialist identification. For me, anthropology at its best is immensely emancipatorily anti-essentialising. I was always interested in having essential characters, but then having stereotypes, which is a very different thing. So essentialism says stereotypes are true, and to be anti-essentialist doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as stereotypes. I was interested in having very strong stereotypes – but which may, or may not, be true of individual characters.

It would be nice to think that a background in anthropology gives this incredible insight into the world and is politically progressive, but I don’t think that’s true. Anthropology was one way I was thinking about these issues which later on went into different directions about international relations and so on.

These days, when I think about anthropology, my first thought is these embedded anthropologists in Iraq; the American government anthropologists who use their know-how to further the American invasion of Iraq – this is cutting edge – anthropologists in fatigues in Falluja – weaponised anthropology! So when people get dewy-eyed about anthropology, I do tend to think of that.

Iron Council is again set in the world of Bas-Lag, and again you change your structure and writing style. This novel could be said to be a fantasy western. It reminds me of A Fistful of Dynamite and Once upon a time in the West. Was this a deliberate choice for you?

Yeah. The main reference point for me was Zane Grey’s The U.P.Trail which was heavily ripped-off all the way through. But it was westerns in general. I read a lot of westerns, I liked western films as a kid. The Leone films were influential, but The U.P. Trail is a kind of western high point – it’s a terrific book. There’s also a book called Whispering Smith by Frank H. Spearman. I like both of those. The Grey I liked a lot. One has an argumentative relationship with these books. I mean Zane Grey is kind of the embedded weltanschauung, is highly problematic, and the Frank H. Spearman books are nasty proto-libertarian stuff, but none-the-less very engaging and interesting, and in Zane Gray’s case really quite beautifully written in a lush, almost Lovecraftian, way

It is an overtly political book in terms of character motivation, apart from the ‘love’ triangle relationship at its heart. The novel is more experimental in terms of structure. Your prose style is evolving too. Is this a subconscious or deliberate process on your part? Is it a direction you are going to continue with in later books, or is it a particular strategy that served Iron Council?

I don’t know what it would mean for it to continue. I don’t know how something would become more like Iron Council than Iron Council, but in terms of the fact of change, you’re right to say it’s not just a question of politics; it’s a question of the kind of prose. It felt very different as I was writing it and the stuff I’ve been writing recently feels very different again. To me, that’s all good, that’s all interesting.

Iron Council was a very important book for me and I was aware of it being quite different, of it being more overtly political, and I was definitely aware of it being somewhat more demanding of the reader in terms of prose style. It was deliberate, but that doesn’t mean I would like my prose to get more knotty and arcane. But it’s an expression of changing. Maybe the next one would be much more clear and then you might go very purply again, I don’t know, but for Iron Council I wanted something more mediating between the reader and the writing, and asking a bit of an effort. That whole flashback section is written in a very particular style.

I think it is an exciting thing for writers to change, to experiment, to not do the same thing. That said, I also think that we have no right to expect readers to go with us. If you have a certain readership which have come to your books because of a certain type of writing and then you start to write very differently it’s no surprise that some of them won’t like it, and I don’t think it’s very appropriate to get one’s knickers in a twist about that and to act like people don’t understand you. What you’re asking is an indulgence. You’re asking people to come with you. And I think that it’s absolutely right that you should ask them to come with you, but I don’t think you should expect the answer – ‘Yes.’

I want to say to readers – if you loved Perdido Street Station, Iron Council is asking something a bit different, and you might not find that as immediately engaging – I hope that I can persuade you. But if people say, ‘This isn’t for me and I like the other stuff and I don’t like the way you’re going now,’ I have to respect that as a legitimate opinion. Of course, as a writer, I want everyone to love everything I ever write!

People return to books. I’ve found books by some writers to be unreadable and then come back, sometimes fifteen years later, and thought, ‘Yeah I really get that – why didn’t I see that before?’

I think that once you have more books out, books change dependent on the other books around them and on the other books in that writer’s oeuvre. Because Iron Council was the most controversial, the least loved of those books, people often think its contrarianism of me to say that it’s my favourite, but from where I stand Iron Council is unquestionably the best of those books. I’m not saying Iron Council is flawless, but I stand by the decisions I made in that, including the decisions that made it harder to read in places and was asking stuff of people.

As you say, maybe in a few years people will come back to it and say something else. And if not, well okay, fair enough. I’d like everyone to love everything, but it’s never going to happen. You have to write what you’re going to write. Your job as a writer is not to write what the readers want. I think your job is to make the readers want what you write. You may, or may not, succeed at that immediately, but that’s what I think it should be.

Iron Council – a western. Perdido Street Station – a bit of film noir in there. The Scar – an adventure road movie. Is it your desire to write a fantasy novel in every genre?

Yeah. It is.

A kind of Kubrick – ‘I’m going to make a film in every genre’?

It is, it is, it is!

Your most recent novel, Un Lun Dun is a Children’s novel. I found this very playful and it had me laughing out loud as you subverted reader expectations. You’ve said you were freed up by the intended audience and could use fairy tale logic, but previously you’ve been very suspicious of fairy tale narrative. What sort of fairy tales?

I love fairy stories. I grew up on fairy stories. But what I don’t like is a certain moralism that is vastly exaggerated in the Victorian bowdlerisations and that original fairy stories are often much more amoral. My issue is with a certain type of fabulism, and a whimsicality in adult fiction, whereby there’s a fantastic that doesn’t believe in itself. I like fantasy fiction that believes in its own impossibilities. When you talk about adult fiction that has a certain kind of whimsicality and replicates fairy tales (in the sense that the logic it’s about is a fabulor logic), you are aware of being told a story as opposed to inhabiting that story. Which means you’re always distanced from the specificities of the story because it always exists in a kind of meta-level. It’s pre-meta, and that irritates me as a reader. The exceptions for me are, one – fairy tales pure and simple, and two – when you’re dealing with children’s fiction.

I know there’s all these weird arcane subdivisions such as ‘Y.A.’ [Young Adult] and ‘Children’s’, and to me there’s quite a distinction. When I think of quite high children’s fiction, such as the Alice books, stuff like The Phantom Tollbooth, stuff that is written for slightly younger than what is thought of ‘Y.A.’, there’s a certain logic there. It has what feels like a fairy tale logic, but I think for some reason, for the reader, it doesn’t get up my nose in the same way. Because I think that readership has a direct relationship with the fantastic embedded in language, so that it doesn’t feel distancing in the same way that fabulor logic does in an adult readership. To me … I mean, this is a personal response.

So, for instance, one of the things you can do is literalise a pun, and in an adult book that would be unbearably whimsical. For me, the issue is not so much fabulism, it’s the issue of the way it works in much literary adult fiction. The only writer I can think of who’s done it successfully in recent years is Steph Swainston; her Fibre Toothed Tigers from The Year of Our War were really funny! I really like Angela Carter, but I’m less able to enjoy her books the more self-consciously fairy tale they become. The reason I like Nights At the Circus is because, although it is still clearly a fairy tale on one level, it actually takes itself very seriously. It reads like some big Dickensian fantasy novel. Whereas when you get to something like The Infernal Desire Machine, I feel like I’m being told a story, and that I find alienating.

What I meant by being freed up by the younger readership is that there’s none of that pre-emptive alienation of the fabulor logic. So although it doesn’t follow a straight fairy tale narrative structure, a lot of the figures, and a lot of the kind of punning and the game play and the language play, are less fairy tale than classically children’s fiction. It feels like it’s a homage to Lewis Carroll. For me the examples are puns and a certain type of fantastic that would be very difficult to get away with in an adult fiction. That would feel like something mannered, something that would immediately pull the reader out of the book and make them feel they were being told a story. I don’t like that. I like that sense of immersion.

Lastly, would you ever write for TV, a film script, or a graphic novel?

I don’t know whether I could write for TV or film. It’s a very specific skill and I don’t know whether I have it. I’m not naturally a screen-writer. I think I’m a prose-writer. I’ve done a little bit of comic writing. Looking for Jake had a short story in graphic form in it, and I loved collaborating with Liam the artist, and I’d love to do more comic stuff. People say if you can do comics you can do film. Maybe that’s true, I don’t know. In principle I’d be interested in it, but….

People who write for the screen have an admirably unegocentric relationship to what they write. If you’re reasonably successful, you get paid a pit-load of money, but no one reads your thing! If it happens to get made into a film, terrific, but eighty percent of what you write won’t get made into a film and it will sit on an executive’s shelf, and you have to be at peace that no one will ever read it.

I know that it’s very well paid but in terms of the relationship with the writing, I think I would find that extremely difficult. I write to be read, not for myself.

Thank you.

China Miéville’s next novel will be out around April 2009.