Interviewing Oliver K Langmead

Helloo!! This week sees the publication of Birds of Paradise by Oliver K Langmead – a tale of heists immortals and change that I really loved for it’s beautiful writing, strangeness and imagination. Who doesn’t love immortals in a heist? Oliver very kindly answered some questions for me about the book and future projects.

 How do you like to booktempt Birds of Paradise?

There are two ways I like to tempt people into looking at Birds of Paradise.

The first is a pitch:

What if the first man was still alive today? What if, after he was expelled from the garden, the rest of immortal Eden was deconstructed and scattered across the world? What if some of those pieces of paradise ended up in the hands of a group of wealthy pastoral fetishists? How far would Adam be willing to go to regather the remaining fragments of his lost home, and who among Eden’s undying exiles might help him along the way?

The second is a riddle:

For Birds of Paradise, I wrote a handful of heists. The trickiest was a cherry tree heist. If you only had one very strong man, and one very clever bird, how would you go about stealing a full-size cherry tree from the middle of a central London art gallery?

Bringing Adam of Eden fame into the modern world – what led to that choice of main character?

Eden came first. It was always going to be a book about pieces of Eden being scattered across the world, and the clever bird gathering them all together again. Adam showed up later, as a sort of logical extension of that idea, but as soon as he did, it was clear that he was perfect for the kind of story I was trying to tell. Then, it was just a question of managing to make him feel ancient enough – a trick that took a lot of trying!

Those who want the world for themselves versus those who want to share it with everyone seems to be a key theme? Was that deliberate via your choice of adversaries for Adam?

Birds of Paradise is written, at least in part, to express how I've been feeling about climate catastrophe. It's essential that we begin to take climate catastrophe seriously if we're going to mitigate the damage that's going to be caused by it, and to do that we need to start re-evaluating our place in the world. Right now, we are still acting as if the world was made for us – as if it is our right to plunder it, instead of our duty to care for it. The Sinclairs, though bold in their assertion of it, absolutely embody that ideal – they believe in their divine right to possess the world, and their dominion over everything non-human. Adam is an antidote to that: the first gardener, whose duty it was, and continues to be, to care for his non-human friends instead of exploiting them.

Which of the ‘Birds’ was your favourite to write?

Right from the start, Magpie was there. When I came up with the idea of pieces of Eden being scattered across the world, I knew that I needed someone to collect them all together again, and who better than Eden's own playful bird? I'm lucky enough that I live in a place surrounded by magpies – they perch on my windowsill, and fly from tree to tree, and fill the air with their coarse voices, and they're so much fun to watch. An inspiring chorus.

Mixing mythology and modern life seems to be a theme in this book and also Metronome - what is the attraction of blurring the worlds like this?

I think that drawing worlds together is a key function of fantasy.  Take Mendelsohn's categories, for instance. In portal quests, characters hop from one world to another. In immersive fantasy (secondary world fantasy), characters often travel from one culture to another. And in intrusive and liminal fantasies, at least two worlds occupy the same space together. Myths are literalised, and mixed in with the things we know. But through this, we can observe one of the ways that a good fantasy works as well as it does: because it takes the time to ground itself in the familiar before taking us somewhere unfamiliar. Portal quests so often begin in our own world, immersive fantasies so often open in a community that feels familiar, and in intrusive and liminal fantasies, we are usually introduced to the everyday lives of people we might recognise. Without the familiar to contrast itself against, and without the interpretive lens of a familiar protagonist, the unfamiliar (and the downright alien) can be tricky to confront.

What can we look forward next from you and where can we find out more?

I'm just editing my next book for Titan now, which is called Glitterati. Glitterati is a dystopian satire of the billionaire class, and it marries my love of drag culture with how I've been feeling about capitalism lately. It's a lot of fun, and I can't wait to see the cover. If you'd like to keep up with my work, the best thing to do is follow me on twitter at @oliverklangmead

I'm also just about to launch a brand new journal for peer-reviewed research into fantasy and the fantastic, which I'm so excited about. If you'd like to take a look at that, we are over at https://fantasy-research.gla.ac.uk/

If there was one book (not your own) that you wish you could get everyone to read what would it be?

This is a question where I think I would give you a different answer every time you asked it. Today, though, I'd recommend looking at Brian Catling's The Vorrh. If I've addressed anthropocentrism and Edenic themes through anthropomorphism – deliberately making non-humans more human – then Brian Catling does the opposite with The Vorrh. He, too, thinks about Eden, but he does so in a way that rejects the recognisable functions of anthropomorphism: his non-humans are increasingly weird and unfamiliar, though they might seem as if they possess human traits. In that way, he shows us just how strange non-humans really are: removing layers of anthropocentric anthropomorphism to reveal the weird reality underneath. After all: we're not alone on our planet, and the creatures we share it with are stranger than we might imagine.