This all began with my father. I suppose that's true for so many of us, whatever the values which define you. In my case, a love of reading and language has always been my touchstone. All my father's fault.
He was self-made academically, one of those post-war Grammar school boys from a working class background in Lancashire, steeped in Beethoven and Shakespeare, who drove themselves to excel in exams. He had received the offer of a place to read English at Oxford when my grandfather was made redundant by the mill. My father had to set his own plans aside and become a teacher at a prep school in Yorkshire to make sure that there was at least one wage coming into the house. The place at Oxford became a memory, and though he went on to earn a good degree from London University, he had the better fortune that he had already found his calling — to become a gifted teacher of English and Art History with a particular flair for bringing stories to life for the youngest boys. Eventually, he crowned his long career by becoming Headmaster, though even then he continued to teach as often as his other duties allowed.
He always taught English to Form 1Q in the first year of the boys' grammar school where I also attended. I was not in his first form class, but already knew by heart most of the stories which he had conjured over the years to keep the eleven-year olds entertained. Indeed, I was not alone, for there were other boys in my year whose older siblings had been transported and entertained by my father's imaginings and had regaled their younger brothers with his stories and characters. The stories themselves changed from year to year, but the characters that populated them had become such favourites that even the other teachers knew their names.
The most beloved of these was Michelangelo, the dragon that lived at the bottom of our garden. Michelangelo de Saint-Exupéry-Antoine, to give him his full, splendid name. Quite how my father discovered him in his imagination I will now never know, for he died many years ago and I had never got round to asking. I know that our imaginings are very similar — he made me read The Hobbit when I was barely seven years old — so I've always instinctively known enough about Michelangelo and all his other characters that I didn't really need to ask.
Sunday mornings.
Non-negotiable.
But Michelangelo was not alone. There were the two hellhounds, Balthasar and Akitafelt, one black and one white, a silently watchful yin and yang. They always made an appearance with Michelangelo, so it was a given that they should appear in my story, even if their role is somewhat ambiguous. And on Sunday mornings, when my sister and I would crawl into my parents' bed in that particular way that small children have of making themselves entirely unavoidable, there was Timmy the Mini, whose adventures around the roads of our village my father improvised with the ease of a man who had been telling stories all week and saw no particular reason to stop at the weekend. These were not the dragons and dwarves of high fantasy — they were Lancashire creatures, domestic and specific and entirely believable in the way that only a child's imagination, properly fed, can make them.
I still own my father's copy of The Hobbit — a rather battered Allen & Unwin paperback, held together with sellotape. Before his idiosyncratic career at Oxford, J.R.R. Tolkien taught at Stonyhurst College in the Ribble Valley — ten miles from where I went to school in Blackburn, in the same county, in the same landscape of millstone grit and long moorland horizons. The Brandywine River in the Shire is the River Ribble. The Shire itself is not some imagined version of Middle England, as many readers have surmised. It is Lancashire, softened and greened and made permanent by a man who understood that the most convincing mythologies are rooted in real ground.
You cannot grow up in that landscape, reading those books, without understanding something about the relationship between place and imagination. Tolkien asked: what if this landscape contained mythological creatures? My father answered, in a grammar school classroom and a Sunday morning bed, with dragons and characters whose names I still know by heart. I, eventually, asked a different question: what if those creatures never left? What are they doing now?
The answer, when it came, felt obvious. Tolkien's dwarves are still dwarves — stubborn, technically brilliant, possessed of opinions they will defend past the point of reason, loyal to a fault, magnificent at anything that requires sustained effort in dark and difficult conditions. Then, mirabile dictu, the Industrial Revolution. Practically, a dwarf's wet dream (now there's a thought…). The mines are server farms now. The mithril is data. Stan Mortensen runs underground infrastructure that keeps Anglezarke's financial networks alive. He still has a forked beard with silver rings threaded through it, but now his battleaxe is coding in an Iron Maiden tour shirt, an egg and bacon sandwich on his desk. He is recognisably Tolkien's dwarf. He is also entirely himself. And I guarantee that if you saw him in a Shoreditch pub, all you'd notice would be a stocky metalhead in patched denim and leather.
The elves are still elves — ancient, precise, slightly detached from the urgency that afflicts short-lived creatures, possessed of an institutional memory that spans millennia. Nai'En has been embedded in Chinese government since before politics even had a name, let alone an ideology. The bureaucracy has changed its name several times. Nai'En has not changed at all. Where else would an elf end up, given three thousand years and a talent for patience?
Five elements
The dragons, though, required more thought. Each one needed to be both ancient and contemporary — an elemental force that had found its modern form without losing its essential nature.
I thought of them in terms of what they might embody, what they have always represented in the cultures that imagined them. Gold. Coal. Jade. Silicon. Oil. Five elements, five natures, five ways of being in the modern world. Lots of room to expand too, if you think about it.
Michelangelo is gold — not merely in colour but in character. Precise, accumulated, patient. He has been watching the moor change around him for millennia, and he finds most human urgency faintly comic. Kartika is coal, but she's also the mountain itself, ancient and volcanic and amused by the idea that anyone might presume to own the land she inhabits. Nai'En is jade — cool, institutional, the permanence of things that outlast the dynasties that commission them. Riz is silicon — everywhere simultaneously, moving at the speed of information, the most contemporary of the five and in some ways the most ancient, because intelligence has always been everywhere if you knew where to look. And Jacinto is brought into existence by oil — the great transformation, the force that powered a century and poisoned it simultaneously, the dragon who became a thunderbird and carries the weight of that change in every wingbeat.
What would these creatures be doing in the modern world? The same things they have always done. The world changed around them. They did not need to change. They simply adapted their methods.
I began to write bits and pieces of this tale when my daughter was born. We were living in Central Java in Indonesia at the time, and the proximity of Gunung Merapi — active, imperial, entirely indifferent to the opinions of the millions who live in its shadow — had already begun to insist on its own presence in whatever I was writing. Kartika arrived with the mountain. She did not require invitation.
The writing went slowly at first, then faster as the characters insisted on being heard. Ten notebooks over three and a half years. Written longhand, in Maruman A4 spiral notebooks, from back to front — the left page for the story, the right page for the research, the annotations, the flight routes, the things that needed checking and the things that needed cutting. The hill provided the silence. The dragons provided the rest.
The Indonesian connection proved deeper than geography. Javanese culture carries its own ancient tradition of the naga — the dragon is not borrowed here from European or Chinese mythology, it is indigenous and authoritative and understood in the bones. Kartika does not need to be explained to Indonesian readers. She is already there, in the mountain, in the mythology, in the particular quality of attention that Javanese people pay to the landscape they inhabit. She needed only to be introduced.
The novel was translated into Indonesian before its English publication. I have thought about what that means and I'm not entirely sure I've resolved it. Perhaps it means that the story found its proper home before it found its audience. Perhaps it means that Kartika was always the real protagonist, and Merapi the real setting, and everything else — Lancashire, London, Paris, Beijing, the trading floors and the haute couture and the biker girl from Norton Magna — was the journey that led here.
Allow me to clear up one matter for those readers who have made it this far. Anglezarke is not a collection of my father's first form stories. I couldn't remember any of them if I tried. The characters are his — Michelangelo above all, Balthasar, Akitafelt, the whole improbable cast — but the story is mine, assembled from forty years of reading and travelling and living in places that turned out to matter more than I understood at the time.
My father would have had opinions about it. He always did. I find, more often than I expected, that I know what those opinions would have been. This is the particular consolation of growing up inside a storyteller's imagination: you carry the stories forward, and sometimes, in the right conditions, you can still hear the voice that first told them.