Scarlett Thomas Meet the Author

We all know what it feels like to get lost in a book. In Scarlett

Thomas's novel Dragon's Green she turns it into a story of magic and

danger. Eight children's quest to make sense of a police turned upside

down by a catastrophic event called worldquake. A writer who has had

great success with what is called literary fiction, she has had an

experience that has changed her as much as any of her characters.

Welcome. So what did you discover about

writing and about your own writing when you brought magic into the

equation? Eight lot is the answer to that. Evelyn in my career I started

writing about maths and then I moved onto physics and then botany and no

magic! Like so many classics of children's fiction you're stepping

into another world, whether through a wardrobe or bony rabbits all and

in this case by going back to a book as the doorway to some different

world, it is obviously something that energises you. And for me, this

is part of the whole concept of magic. I think books are magic. I

think lots of things are magic but books are definitely magic and when

you open the pages and there are a black marks on a white sheet and

they can you, they can really do almost anything, it is astonishing.

You wrote somewhere in the course of describing your meditation with the

categorisation of books and we shouldn't think of literary fiction

and children's fiction as being separate things, you also said every

children's story, every novel I think you said, is a political text.

Can you explain that? How long have you got? When you write children's

fiction you have to make lots of decisions and especially in a

non-realist setting and world building from scratch, so I had to

decide, for example, in the otherworldly characters called to

there are a lovely big houses and groans and everything is a bit PG

Wodehouse, but how do you maintain that without servants and they kind

of feudal situation which I don't believe is right for people to live

in, so I immediately I have to confront these problems. If the

characters brought breakfast only three, who does that and why? Is she

a servant? We discover more about how that world works. So you have

two invent rules and therefore you are saying things about how people

live. When I studied politics years and years ago I discovered that

politics happens in any situation with limited resources and you have

to do decide how to divide things up. It also happens at any fictional

situation in which the author has made fundamental things. How

difficult did you find it to think about the right rules for your

world? It require the same leaps of imagination. It is plotting a world

rather than just a story with any world, so at times it was easy and

other times it took me months to come up with solutions, and some of

them I are still working on! One of the things I am fascinated by years

in the early sections particularly you are talking about life in school

in many passages, and the sort of rules and the way that school works,

and you clearly have an affection for the kind of discipline, almost,

that would get people into learning. There is a very distinct kind of

schoolroom that you described. Can you tell us how that came about

because I am intrigued. I think it is partly a kind of nostalgia. Not

political nostalgia but an anaesthetic nostalgia, not so much

for what my school was like but what books were like when I was at

school. We are going back quite far now. The main teacher who actually

has your best interests at heart, that is an archetype that we find in

a lot of areas. It is a reassuring archetype to you? I think so because

I suppose I believe no one is really that mean. Even the baddies in the

books are all from the world up blushing, by the way. Funny, that.

They are all a bit too clever for their own good. They do have bad

aims in mind. Other than that I try to be compassionate towards my

character, so the mean old teacher wants the children to do well, and

she is hilarious. And the heroine of the book, what is your feeling about

her? Is that a lot of you in higher? Their vows. And the idea of the

General Hugo who sets off on a quest and difficult things happen and she

has to keep going, that was important to me when I was writing

the book, I had been ill and it was a struggle to get better, and I

found reading about other female heroes really inspiring. You have

been quite open about the fact that you had for want of a better word we

will call it a nervous breakdown, and this is a book that followed

that, so it is inevitable that you must feel quite strongly about some

of the ideas about in the video was in some other things that come out

in this book, that it is not just a chance collision of atoms, it is

something that sprang from your own experience? Absolutely. There were

some scenes that I wrote that as I wrote them they kind of made me

better, so when they go through the forest and she confronts her Demons,

something in me sort of settled. A straightforward metaphorical thing.

And I find especially with children's fiction and magical

fiction that you are operating in that more archetypal sort of realm

where you are dealing with these deep things, and I am completely

better now just in case anybody is wondering. In some ways you want it

to deal with them and it strikes me that you have found this form that

came to you quite naturally, although there is a lot of hard work

and problems to be solved, but the idea of doing it, that once you

picked it up you never wanted to let it go, it allowed you that freedom.

Absolutely, and something about the voice that I was able to access for

this book. Different from any of your other novels. Sort of or more a

development of. I think each book is a development of the one that came

before and this definitely develops the voice from The Seed Collectors

which is an omniscient, free direct style. Is it always useful to have

some characters who are always seen from the outside. You don't know

what's going on inside their heads. You can have that rule and when

you're writing, rules and restrictions are good because they

make you work hard and imaginatively to solve problems, but on the other

hand, I think I do go everywhere with this book and it is quite fun.

You're suddenly with a villain minor character or are you zoom out to

this strange narrator who isn't quite bored but is next -- isn't

quite God but is next to God. For me, I have found a voice that I

didn't let myself use for a long time, or I just didn't try it out

and now I have found that it is amazing. I don't think it is

necessarily an easy thing to do, but for me it was kind of coming home to

my true voice. Scarlett Thomas, author of Dragon's Green and many

more to come, thank you. Thank you.