Conn Iggulden Meet the Author

to fantasy writing.

You've decided to cast away historical setting and get rid

of real characters that we might know and gone into fantasy -

if it's a word you're happy with.

Why?

I've always loved historical fiction.

I've always read it and my entire career has been built around it,

but I've also always read fantasy and the big difference,

to some extent, is the freedom.

In historical fiction, you have to check every single fact,

otherwise somebody will e-mail you - a Roman re-enactor,

something along those lines.

But with fantasy it felt like I had a slightly...

The reins were off.

I didn't have to stop in the middle of a scene and think,

"Did they have sidesaddle in this particular...?"

"Hang on, she's a woman on a horse, would she have

"been riding sidesaddle?"

Which is my constant experience in historical fiction.

You make it up.

Well, exactly, you have that freedom.

In historical fiction, you do feel the constraints

because it has to be as accurate as possible, you have to find

a story in the real history.

Of course, you've got an army of readers and they've

enjoyed ancient Rome, the Mongol Empire, the Wars

of the Roses, and so on.

They've trusted me.

They've trusted you.

And they've felt at home, they've enjoyed the setting.

It's risky, you know, taking them into a city that doesn't exist.

It is and it's almost like starting again.

There's no way to sugar that pill.

It is a completely different audience.

Some people won't touch it.

I've always thought that historical fiction and fantasy

are the closest genres.

There are certain elements - the thrill of a battle, for example,

can be very similar.

Of course.

And it depends how you do it.

I don't have any dragons in mind, although George RR Martin has done

very well with them.

Well, there's a bit of magic in this book.

It's not Harry Potter magic in the sense that lives

aren't governed by it, but it's very much there.

There's a kind of superstition that becomes real.

Yes.

The point about it really is I wanted to have as few

constraints as possible.

An awful lot of stories, at their heart, are about characters

making some discovery about themselves and I wanted

to use magic to bring those discoveries about.

I wanted characters to be able to move on and through various

devices and then bring them all together at the end.

We are talking about a city whose great era is passed.

I mean, it's a bit like Venice with the Empire gone.

Yes, they're worn out.

It's all worn out.

Tired.

And there is an unhappy figure on the throne.

This is a very familiar setting, in a way,

for an historical novelist.

A miserable young man and various families all struggling for power.

To some extent, there's always that basis in reality.

You can't simply have, I don't know, walls disappearing

in the middle of a scene.

You have to have it as real as possible and then add that extra

element that I've always fantasised about myself, which is the ability

to do something extraordinary.

That's what makes a good story, I would hope.

There's an interesting comparison between this book,

which I think is the beginning of a trilogy, is that right?

The Empire of Salt.

Well, we'll see if you can control yourself and keep it as a trilogy.

It will be the first trilogy I've ever done.

It might end up being four.

You are very prolific.

Dunstan came out only two, three months ago, and that's

an interesting book, because it's set, as it has been

your wont up to now, in a particular historical period,

in the England of what people misleadingly called the Dark Ages.

It's told in the first person, which you've never done before.

No.

To some extent, I do like to challenge myself,

but I came across Dunstan when I was reading Dickens's

A Child's History Of Britain to my children, as I'm sure you do.

He described Dunstan, who was a saint and Archbishop

of Canterbury, as a complete rogue and involved in the selling

into slavery of a queen.

So...

You thought, "Hang on."

I thought this is a good character here.

I thought if he's both a monster and a saint at the same time,

then I've got another Genghis Khan, if you like, which is too strong.

But I liked Genghis because he was hated by his enemies

and loved by his own family.

I look for that sort of humanising quality.

I want them to be rich and varied and interesting, as he is.

And, of course, it's a very interesting period

in English history.

It is, it's fascinating, because its book ended by Athelstan,

the first King of England, who also was King of Scotland.

Yes.

Yes, Constantine came down.

He had coins made with "Rex totius Britanniae", and a fair claim

to being an actual King of Britain.

But, of course, that only lasted as long as his short

reign, which is 14 years.

It's 910-988, something like that.

400 years after the Romans had been their for half a millennium.

And, of course, you've written about Caesar and Augustus

and the rest of them and this is the beginning,

really, after a gap, of what happened after

the Romans had gone.

Yes, to some extent this is the run-up, of course, to 1066.

These are the kings that people probably don't know,

but they are the only ones with great stories.

And the nice thing about Dunstan is his life crossed seven kings,

so he went from Athelstan at the beginning to Ethelred

the Unready and, through those seven kings, we have the beginning

of the modern world.

And you've told the story through Dunstan's voice.

Yes.

A wonderful opening line, I hope I've got it right -

what is an opening line but a door being opened by an unseen hand?

Something like that, sorry if I've got...

But opening lines are important.

That's a good one.

It is, but that's the beginning of the prologue.

The beginning of the first chapter is "I think I could have hung

there all day if they hadn't broken my hands."

Which I...

You see, for me, I do like that a little more.

The whimsical quality of writing in the first person meant that I had

this old man's voice.

And as I was saying earlier, I had to cut some of that out,

because you couldn't be too rambling.

What's the difficulty of writing in an old man's voice?

You're not an old man.

No, but I've known a few.

My father was 90 when he died and I'm familiar with the way

they tell stories, as I heard them so many times.

The trouble with that is an old man will tell the same

story more than once.

I was playing with the fact could I actually do that in a text?

And the answer is no, honestly, you can't.

If you're writing about a young man, described by the old man,

you have to do the young man's voice, you have to to cut out some

of the querulousness of the old man.

Yes.

Just to keep it tight and fast moving, because I do

like the reader to turn the pages.

Because books aren't a representation of reality,

how an old man would speak.

No, there's always a simplification.

Books are telling you a story about what an old man might do.

Yes, I think someone once said that the simplest real human

being was 1,000 times more complex than the most complex

Shakespearean character.

That is true.

Real people are very, very complex, indeed,

and all you can ever do with a novel is to try and focus a single facet

and try and make them as real as possible.

Talking about storytelling, I'm interested in something

about your mother, who, I think, was of Irish descent

and came from a tradition of the telling of tales,

which is a very powerful bit of the culture.

Her grandfather was a seanchai, an Irish storyteller,

who used to go from fireside to fireside and be rewarded

with a meal and a glass of ale if he tells a story.

It was a community purpose, this business of storytelling.

Oh, yes, it kept history alive.

Before it was written down...

When I went to Mongolia, they talked about the fact

that they knew they were the distant ancestors of the North

American Native American, because they had been

there 15,000 years ago,

and they had an oral tradition which went back much,

much further than anything written down and that's where these

stories come from.

You were a teacher.

If you were trying to explain to children who are a bit

leery about history, or indeed novels, but particularly history,

why it is that it's fascinating by saying, you know,

how do we explain this, what happened, how do we know?

My mother always said that, for her, history was a series of stories

about people, with dates.

To me, that's the absolute heart of it.

People are interested in people.

We are fascinated by extraordinary moments of courage and betrayal

and love and despair, and history is absolutely

chock full of those, because it's the story of millions

of different people.

It's an absolute treasure trove and always has been.

And in this case, whether it's Darien, a fantasy,

or whether it's Dunstan, based on, you know, a real man

and a real historical period, the point about storytelling

and where it takes us is the same.

Yes, I mean, at the end of the day, its characters.

I think Kurt Vonnegut says there's this guy, right,

and he's a pretty decent kind of guy and then something

awful happens to him.

That's the absolute essence of all fiction,

whether its history or heroic fantasy.

Conn Iggulden, now CF Iggulden with Darien,

thank you very much.

Thank you.

Time for a look at the weather.