Interviewing Anna Smith Spark
Helloooo!
Anna Smith Spark is the author of the amazing Empires of Dust trilogy which I’ve recapped as part of the Happy Endings section in the blog. I found this an immersive and fascinating reading experience and genuinely did not know what expect or how it would all end. It became one of the most powerful reads this year. I’ve been lucky to ask Anna some questions about the books and her writing style. NB Right at the very end there one question which I’ve marked as a spoiler that you should only read if you’ve finished the trilogy
So how does it feel to know the series is finally over?
Very strange. Emptied out. The characters, the world they live in …. every part of the story has with me my whole life, the thing that matter in the series are the things that matter to me, the places they find beautiful are the places I find beautiful. It’s a huge part of my mind that’s … done, and that feels very strange. Like a part of my own life has been finished.
Amazing, as well, that I did it. All I’ve ever wanted is to write a story, and now I have. Life has thrown a lot at me the last few years, but I’ve managed to write this story from beginning to end to the very best of my abilities. That feels special.
Did the series go the way you always envisaged or where there some surprises along the way?
I always knew how the story went – it’s the hero’s journey, the classic hero narrative of a life. As soon as I knew what the story was and what it was about, the end was there, the whole thing emerged as a whole.
But there were a lot of surprises, yes. At the very beginning, as I’ve said before, I had no idea who any of the characters I was meeting were, what they were doing, why. I was well over half way through Broken Knives before I understood what the story was. And the other characters, especially Tobias and Bil, surprised me greatly the more time I spent with them. I grow more and more attached to Bil. Tobias has a whole other story I could tell, in another life, in another place, it breaks my heart thinking about what he could have been. Which was the whole point of the story, of course, the tragedy of war and male violence, of poverty and lack of life-chances, of childhood pain, the injuries these things do that can sometimes never be undone. But it still surprised me, saddened me, the more I wrote about him: what Tobias could have been, could have done, if things had been different.
King Ilyn and Queen Elayne. The more I think about them, the more I feel for them.
One theme I got from the series was that all these flawed people were originally trying to do the best thing for other people then it all goes horribly wrong. Is this something you wanted to explore?
Oh gods, yes. The sheer horror of life … we all trample on other people’s lives, harm others, harm ourselves, but fundamentally most people are trying so hard for those around them, love their families, make decisions that seem right and good. And the cost of this for oneself and for those around one is horrific. I work in government, I’ve studied history, and, believe me, a lot of what’s wrong with the world isn’t scheming and plotting and evil plans come to fruition, it’s sometimes very clever people doing what they think is the right thing or the best thing in the circumstances or the only possible thing because, trying and trying and trying. ‘Mistakes were made’: being aware that one’s judgement is hugely flawed, that mistakes can be and will be made, that a good decision may well with the benefit of hindsight turn out to have been catastrophic … that’s so important.
Power, of course, in the end, is not having someone above you telling you you’re being stupid. Never trust someone who’s fully confident in their judgement. What makes a good person ‘good’ is the ability to question themselves, doubt, think about consequences and possible outcomes, reflect on themselves, reflect on the world around them.
King Illyn and Queen Elayne again. I’m a parent. What would I do in their position? What would you do?
In terms of settings the series seems to mix a number of styles from desert cities to island kingdoms – did you have specific places or cultures in mind for the locations?
The world of Irlast is a map of all the places, real or imaginary, and the time periods I love most. Sorlost is Flecker’s Samarkand and Yeat’s Byzantium, there are obvious hints of Borges’ cities, and the cities of Lovecraft’s Dream Quest. It’s really my description of every fantasy city I ever loved. The White Isles are modelled on the British countryside – the moors and salt marshes Marith and Thalia ride through are my memories of the Peak District around Castleton and the marshes at the mouth of the river Blyth in Suffolk respectively. Then the layers of history and travel writing I’ve read, the Mongolian steppe, the Altai, the Kara Kum desert, the Hindu Kush, Macedon. And random images - there’s a huge beech tree near my house that I walk past every day, in the afternoon if I walk into town the sun is directly behind it, in the morning on my way to work the sunlight hits it, as the season change the whole nature of the tree changes. There are riverside meadows I see every morning from the train, early enough that the mist is rising from the river white above black-silver water just as I’ve tried to describe it, some mornings in winter everything is thick with frost …. Even the white trees that Thalia waits beside – I got worried afterwards that people would think I’d ripped off GRMM, but the white trees are drawn from a group of silver birches in the gardens of Anglesey Abbey, outside Cambridge, where there’s a winter garden of silver birches, very strange and mournful.
I love describing landscapes, basically. I walk a lot and read a lot of local history and natural history about the places I’m walking in, and then want to write that all down, my memories of place and time.
The writing style you use is incredibly powerful and very much gives me of the feelings and sensations of the moment. Was that a deliberate choice for this series or has this been your usual style?
Goodness, thank you!
The Court of Broken Knives was actually the first story I ever wrote as an adult, so I suppose in some ways I have no idea what other styles I might write in. But really it’s just how I write. I biggest piece of advice I think I can ever give is just to write how you write. I see things on forums sometimes where people are asking what works best, what do people like, how do you….? Write what seems right and good to you. First or third person, close POV or omnipotent narrator, very simple language or complex highly-wrought stylistic prose, whatever you find pleasure in writing. All that bizarre crap about not using the passive voice or not using adjectives or whatever … it’s rubbish. There as many ways of telling a story as there are stories in the world. But the only way to write something worth reading is to feel comfortable yourself in writing it.
That immediacy of experience and sensation is hugely important to me. What matters most to me is the effect of the language on the reader’s emotions. Beauty of language and the sensation it evokes in me is the first thing I look for in a book, is for the mark of a great writer. M. John Harrison, Mary Renault, E.R. Eddison, Michael Moorcock … the weird beauty of their prose and the way it shapes a world in my head is why I love fantasy above all other genres, in the end. Fantasy is the language of dreams.
Also myth and folklore – I grew up reading a lot of mythology and listening to a lot of folk songs. The raw strangeness of mythic language, the powerful sensations they evoke – I try to capture a sense of that, of how it feels to read Kevin Crossley Holland’s description of Ragnorok, or hear a perfect voice singing Twa Corbies. And there’s a lot of poetry in my writing because I grew up with poetry and want to capture the magic it can create. The Iliad, Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Wasteland: having read poetry and heard poetry performed, I want to write the feelings inspired in me because, well, obviously I do.
Your series has both shown the huge attraction of violence and its horrific repercussions? What fascinates you about this in your work and do authors need to be responsible and show the uglier side of battle including the victims of it?
Again, I think the stories I grew up hearing and reading had a huge influence on me – Greek and Norse mythology, for example, both have a very complex attitude to war, neither are remotely simply ‘anti-war’, but, as the products of a society immersed in violence, both are very aware of the personal consequences of war. Think of that great, terrible scene in the Iliad when Hector says goodbye to his wife and baby son for the last time – it’s impossible to read that scene without being aware of the horror and pity of war (and remember listeners would have been very aware what will happen to all the characters, Hector’s death isn’t a shock plot twist but a fundamental part of the shared experience of listening to the story), yet Hector’s speech is all about how he wants his own son to grow up to be a great warrior. War isn’t seen as good or bad, but as some terrible inevitable thing, like being ‘pro or anti’ famine or pestilence or flood. It happens, it’s terrible for those who suffer in it, it’s glorious for those who triumph.
We still today hugely fetishize military prowess and violence as something to aspire to, just adding in a woolly-minded coda about ‘but only if it’s to uphold good’. The current cultural obsession with superheroes depresses me, frightens me. Someone makes a quick speech about how violence is a last resort in the face of evil, not something to be celebrated … then immediately trashes half a city in a massive consequence-free CGI explosion. If I watch one more sub-Tolkien ‘no one wants to live in these times …’ speech immediately followed by an uncritically black and white smash the baddy fight scene, I’ll commit violence myself. I think we absolutely need to show deeper consequences, look at what violence ‘for the greater good’ actually means.
And think also very deeply and critically about the way we other the proponents of violence, refuse to concede that these evil inhuman beings are … just trying to look out for each other, following orders, wanting to get on in life, frightened, hopeful, just like us. In the Iliad, it’s important to remember, the Trojans are the ‘enemy’ – but also the human side of the story, the ones who are shown in a domestic context, wanting peace. Achilles is the great central hero in the classical sense of the term, but it’s impossible to see him as morally ‘a hero’. Since the Middles Ages, the hero of the Iliad has always been Hector, the leader of the ‘enemy’, the one who loses and dies. That nuance is totally lost in many modern stories that are so uncritically Manichean. Life generally isn’t Manichean. We need to always question our beliefs, ask why we’re doing something and what it might mean for others. It may be that an act of violence is morally good and necessary, no question. But we still need to recognise that even morally justified violence has consequences for everyone involved. If I kill someone who is in the act of committing mass-murder, that has to be justified, it can’t not be justified. I am a ‘hero’, yes. But that person I’ve killed …. someone loved them, they looked at the world once and something in it made them happy, and I’ve killed them.
The great danger in sff is that we can present the enemy as literally inhuman, and that basic reality is erased. Orcs, robots, zombies … it’s terrifyingly easy to make the enemy in sff so inhuman that killing them becomes a consequence-free game.
So, yes, we all have a huge moral duty to try to make people think more deeply about the world. Absolutely, yes.
If there was one book (not your own) that you love to recommend to other people what would it be?
M John Harrision’s Viriconium cycle. All other works of epic fantasy are but a footnote to Viriconium, as recently I said to Steve Erickson.
[SPOILERS BELOW IF YOU’VE NOW READ THE TRILOGY:]
Mild spoilers - there is a fantastically weird section towards the end where Marith meets his match in battle and I loved the lack of explanation who this foe was. What led to that choice of opponent?
She is who she says she is – the Queen of Turain. She is Life, Mother Earth, the Great Goddess, Mama Nurgle, nature which brings both rich harvests to feed your children and plague and famine and all life’s inevitable decay. And life will always defeat sterility and death.
Or she’s a warleader who defeats Marith because he lets her, because he wants to die, he can’t see an end to it, he’s so afraid of going on, he’s tried to stop it he can’t so the only way left is to destroy himself and the army along with him.
Or she’s a woman with a silly hat who defeats Marith because he’s not actually that great a commander or swordsman and he and his army are faling apart in so many ways by now anyway they’e obviously going to lose, and he’s trying to make excuses afterwards so she must have been more than just a woman.
You choose. I honestly don’t know.
I did very deliberately write her as an earth goddess mother earth image, her skin the colour of good brown earth, her hair the colour of ripe corn, her eyes as blue as the summer sky, crowned with leaves, because … well, hopefully that’s obvious [The blue eyes and dark skin link her with another woman in Marith’s life, also, which was deliberate too]. But she’s not good, necessarily. Just … powerful, like and unlike the way Marith is powerful. How and what and why is never really clear about Marith either – Amrath returned? A gift of his ancestry? Brilliant? Lucky?
