Right. You've read the book. Or you've read enough of it to be curious about what's underneath. Either way, you've earned this.
Every novel hides things. Some authors do it deliberately — a private joke, a chapeau to someone who matters, a lyric threaded into the dialogue because it belongs there and always did. Some things find their way in because the writer's life and the book's life have been running parallel long enough that the membrane between them gets thin. Anglezarke has both kinds.
I'm going to show you where they are. Not all of them — a magician keeps something back — but enough to reward the attentive reader and mildly embarrass the inattentive one.
Let's start with the biggest one, since it reframes everything else.
Anglezarke is not an invented place. The village — the mill, the church, the moors above, and the Fairview chip shop — is Higher Walton in Lancashire. It is the village where I grew up. The landscape of the novel is the landscape of my childhood and adolescence, renamed and given just enough fictional distance to allow the dragons to inhabit it without anyone filing a planning objection.
The mill is real. The church is real. The Fairview is real. Michelangelo does not live beneath an imaginary Lancashire hill. He lives beneath a very specific one, and if you know Higher Walton, and you think about where I might have lived, you will recognise it immediately. If you don't, you will simply read it as a convincingly rendered fantasy setting, which is precisely the intended effect.
The Dwarves credit at the bottom of this website — "Forged by the Dwarves at Anglezarke Mill" — refers to an actual building. Stan Mortensen runs his server infrastructure inside the engine building of a real (former) cotton mill in a real village in Lancashire. The dwarves are very much at home there.
The Grouse & Hare, where several of the novel's early key conversations take place and where EJ first begins to understand what she has stumbled into, is based loosely on the Cock & Rabbit in the village of The Lee in Buckinghamshire.
The Cock & Rabbit remains a very fine pub. It has that particular quality of certain English village pubs — the low ceilings, the sense that the building has been having opinions about the people inside it for several centuries, the specific quality of quiet that suggests the walls have heard everything and will not be sharing it. So you may also surmise that Norton Magna is The Lee. A fascinating place because, despite the protestations of its splendid residents, it is almost entirely fake: the Liberty Stuart family, they of the eponymous store off Regent Street, created most of it in the late nineteenth century. That has always made me smile.
There is a lunch in the novel. The location is given simply as Gavroche. Not Le Gavroche. Just Gavroche.
This is not an error and it is not casual. The people who ate there regularly — and there was a particular kind of person who ate there regularly — never said Le Gavroche. They said Gavroche, the same way you say Claridge's rather than Claridge's Hotel. The definite article is for tourists.
Albert Roux opened Le Gavroche in 1967 with his brother Michel. It became the first restaurant in Britain to win one Michelin star, then two, then three. The kitchen that Albert built became the most important culinary education in the country. If you wanted to cook, and to be taken seriously by the people who mattered, the term at Gavroche was sine qua non. The modern British restaurant scene is, in large part, an extended footnote to what happened in that kitchen.
Steven Doherty is a close and valued family friend. He joined Albert's kitchen as a commis chef in 1978, worked his way up, and became the first Briton in history to hold and run a three-starred restaurant. He was Albert's man, Albert's standard-bearer, and the person from whom a generation of chefs learned what real cooking actually required.
"Lunch at Gavroche" is for Steven. And for Albert, who died in January 2021, and who deserved more chapeau than a single unadorned mention in a fantasy novel. Though perceptive readers might have taken note of the position of EJ's table. Not a coincidence. I hazard that Albert would have found it perfectly sufficient.
In the chapter before Jacinto's first appearance, there is a description of the sky over Venezuela. The phrase used is "bruised and sullen stormclouds."
This is a lyric from Jacob's Ladder by Rush, from the album Permanent Waves, 1980. It is also the first track on Jacinto's playlist, for reasons that will become apparent to anyone who listens to it before reading the chapter again.
Better yet, try reading it again with Jacob's Ladder playing. You'll get a sense of how it felt to write it.
Riz's first words to EJ, upon materialising in the conference room on the third floor of the Anglezarke office in a manner that suggests he has been waiting there for some time and finds her surprise faintly amusing, are a paraphrase of the opening line of Sympathy for the Devil by The Rolling Stones.
Riz is silicon. He is everywhere simultaneously. He has been observing the human experiment with detached fascination since before most human civilisations learned to write. He has, one suspects, had occasion to use this line before.
The song opens Riz's playlist. This was always the plan. It's also a respectful nod to Mikhail Bulgakov. Think about it.
Selwyn — EJ's handler, her reluctant mentor, the man responsible for keeping her alive long enough to become what she's going to become — has a particular phrase he uses when she asks if he thinks there will be more communication from her grandfather.
"Not yet. Not until Joe tells you the time is right."
Spit It Out. If you know it, and you know what it means in a Slipknot concert, then I need not explain further. If not, listen to the track. Even better, watch the video of Slipknot at Donington in 1999 that made the rest of the metal world quietly reconsider everything it thought it knew about crowd response. There is something fascinating, almost hypnotic, about the psychological hold that Corey Taylor builds and then releases. It is the second track on Stan's playlist. Stan has opinions about music and they are not negotiable.
There is a scene — brief, specific, apparently incidental — in which EJ rings the front bell at Huntsman on Savile Row.
The tailor is Charlie Watts. I know, when I tell you, it's kind of obvious. I wrote him into the scene as an elegy, three days after his death.
Charlie Watts wore Savile Row for most of his adult life. He was the best-dressed man in rock and roll — which requires a certain kind of effort to achieve when your bandmates include Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. He was also the greatest rock and roll drummer who ever lived. He held the Stones together for sixty years with the same unhurried precision with which he pinned a lapel.
Eight. Rush — A Confession
This requires more than a paragraph.
I bought the Archives triple album when I was twelve years old. This was the gateway drug, as it remains for a disproportionate number of people of a certain age and temperament. Three albums, one purchase, an entire reorientation of what I understood music to be capable of doing.
What Rush gave the nerdy, rather self-conscious kid I was — and I was emphatically that kid, the one who wasn't popular, who read too much, who had strong opinions about things that other people found uninteresting — was a lyrical and musical compass. Neil Peart wrote about ideas. He wrote about the individual against the collective, about the relationship between discipline and freedom, about what it costs to pay attention in a world that rewards the appearance of paying attention over the thing itself. He wrote about these things in the context of enormous, technically demanding, frankly slightly ridiculous progressive rock, and he made it feel urgent.
Here is something I have noticed about Rush fans of my generation: we tend, disproportionately, to have gone on to do out-of-the-ordinary things. We went to Oxbridge or the Ivy League. We built things and ran things. We developed, along the way, strong opinions about food and wine and watches and the correct way to make a Martini, because once you start paying attention it turns out there is no convenient place to stop. We also, it must be said, ended up with rather better-looking partners than our teenage selves had any right to expect. The popular kids peaked early. We were in it for the long game.
Jacob's Ladder opens Jacinto's playlist. Xanadu — live, of course — is in Stan's. Tom Sawyer closes Riz's. These are not random choices. They form a triangle across three characters — a connective tissue that the attentive reader will notice and the Rush fan will fully understand. If you are both, I hope it lands the way it was intended.
Albrecht the dwarf is a homage to Mr. Kilmister. The hair. The muttonchop whiskers. The cryptography skills that nobody questions because nobody wants to be the person who questions Albrecht about anything. A friend who read an early draft chided me for a lack of respect. Lemmy still, God love him, can be the cause of strong opinions.
The nicknames, if you think about them, are obvious. Albrecht is Lemmy. Ragnar is Stan — as in Stan Mortensen, Bolton Wanderers and England centre-forward, hat-trick in the 1953 FA Cup Final, the Matthews Final. Lancashire, naturally. These things are hiding in plain sight, which is precisely where Easter eggs belong.
Lemmy Kilmister died in December 2015, four days after his seventieth birthday, two days after being diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. He had spent those four days in his apartment playing videogames. This seems, on reflection, entirely correct.
And then there are the playlists. We Are The Road Crew on Stan's. Silver Machine — the live Hawkwind recording from before Lemmy was asked to leave the band — on Riz's. Rush appear three times across three different playlists. But Lemmy is the only composer whose work finds its way onto two different character playlists without anyone in the novel remarking on it. He would have considered this entirely appropriate.
The trading floor scene in the early chapters required music. The music that trading floors of a particular era actually played — the years when everything felt possible and nothing had yet gone wrong — was not the music that serious people admitted to liking.
Bonkers by Dizzee Rascal was one of those tracks. So Cool Britannia they played it at the London Olympics. It's a proper banger, but it did not survive the final edit.
It is on Michelangelo's playlist, annotated as an Easter egg, because the golden dragon who has been watching the human experiment for several thousand years and finds most of it faintly comic has a more honest relationship with Dizzee Rascal than he would ever publicly admit.
He was there for the trading floor years. He had opinions about the music. Those opinions were complicated.