An Evening with Neil Gaiman: Memory, Magic and Survival

The magnificent Neil Gaiman has been doing that thing again recently where he flies all around the world in a remarkably short space of time, like a novelist Father Christmas, visiting all the good bookshops and literary societies to give them the gift of his latest book: The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

I was fortunate enough to catch Gaiman on his whistle-stop tour of the UK for a Q&A at the Royal Society of Literature (and a couple of nights previously in the Apple store on Regent Street), where he discussed his first adult novel in over eight years and how it came to be. Chairing the Q&A was the Guardian's literary editor, Claire Armistead.

Tell us about The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the first novel I've ever written completely, one-hundred percent entirely accidentally. Any other time I've written a novel, I've known I was going to be writing a novel, I knew what kind of a novel it was going to be, I knew the shape of the book, and then I went off and wrote it. I knew that Stardust was going to be a thin book that would feel like a fairy tale; I knew that American Gods was going to be something the size and shape of a brick, and that it would be a big, rambling thing; I knew that Anansi Boys was going to be a funny book about the length of a P.G. Wodehouse novel, because that was the kind of thing I wanted to make.

But The Ocean at the End of the Lane... It was last year and my wife, the inestimable Amanda Palmer [there's a whistle from the audience] – thank you, she is very whistle-worthy – she had gone off to Melbourne, Australia. She had gone to Melbourne to make an album, which eventually she finished, it's called Theatre is Evil, and I didn't expect really to have a problem with this. I thought, 'I'll go off and write.' And then I discovered that when your wife goes off to make an album, she winds up in another relationship with the album that she's making, that kind of excludes you. I actually understood this, because I'm pretty much like that when I'm writing a novel; I batten down the hatches and everybody else in my life just shrugs and waits for me to come back out again. But in this case I was really missing Amanda, and she was gone, she was sending me happy texts, telling me how her album was going, and that was about it... And I thought, 'I miss her. I'll write her a short story, that's what I'll do...'

Some years ago, about 2003, I bought a mini. And I really liked the mini; I loved things about it, like the fact that I was in proportion to the new minis out there, roughly the same size that I as a small boy had been to our little mini. There was a very nice consistency to that. I remember just talking with my dad – he'd come out to America – we were talking about minis. And I said: “You know, you used to have that lovely, little white mini. I loved that car. Why did you get rid of it?”
He went, “Ah. I've never told you that story, have I?”
And I said, “No. You have never told me that story.”
“Well, we had a lodger. He was South African. He'd come over from South Africa, and he'd smuggled out lots of money with him from his friends that he'd promise he'd bank for them. He had lots of money with him. He came to England, and he discovered the casino in Brighton. Initially, he lost all his money, and he only planned to dip into his friends money until he'd made all of his money back, but then he didn't have anything. He came home, stole our car, drove it down the lane and he killed himself in it.”
And I said, “What?!”
“Yep. I sold the car that afternoon. I knew your mum would never get back in it, ever again, and that was the end of that car.”

My reaction to this anecdote was not sorrow for somebody who had died, it was instead this weird seven-year-old resentment that something interesting had happened that I hadn't known about! I was the kind of kid who thought interesting things happened in books, but never happened in real life, and something had happened and I hadn't known... So that sort of sat there at the back of my head, and I kept thinking 'wouldn't it be interesting if I had known' or 'if that were a story, where would that story have gone?'

Then Amanda goes away, and I missed her, and I thought, 'you know, do a story. I'll do Amanda a story.' She doesn't really like fantasy very much, but she likes me, and I tried taking her to places I had lived before, just to show her what they look like. I kept having to go, “but this isn't actually what it was like when I lived here, because now they've built houses all over it.” So I thought, 'I'll take – not the family, but the landscape – of the world I grew up in and I will have a character who is a lot like a seven-year-old me, who lives in books a lot, and I'll set it in that landscape, and it will be a short story. Then I'll send it to Amanda, and then she'll be happy that I've done this thing for her. Then I'll get on with the real work that I'm meant to be doing while here in Florida, like writing an episode of Doctor Who that makes the Cybermen scary, and the other stuff that I'm meant to be doing.'

So that was my plan. It was a really good plan. After several weeks, I looked around and thought, 'you know, this isn't a short story. It's a novelette. They're about 10,000 words, it'll be one of those.' And somewhere in the middle of the following week I thought, 'well, it's obviously a novella.' Then I kept writing it. A few weeks later, I sent an email to my lovely editor Jane Morpeth over here, and my editor Jennifer Brehl in America saying, “I just need to warn you: I appear to be writing a novella. I have no idea what we'll do with it once it's done, but just so you know there's this thing that I'm working on.”

And then I kept writing it... Amanda finished her album... She came to Dallas to mix her album, and I flew in and spent the first couple of days sitting in coffee shops just finishing the book, and then I started typing it. Every night, I would read her what I'd written before bed, and then she'd fall asleep. I have told people that story and they go, “weren't you upset?!” I say “No!” I loved it. She'd wake up the next morning, and I'd ask her where she'd remember up to, she'd tell me and I'd start from there.

When I'd finished the end of that week, I'd finished typing my second draft, and I did a word count. I sent a very surprised email to Jane and Jennifer saying, “I appear to have accidentally written a novel.”

So that was the book. Not necessarily what was going on inside my head as things were being written, but those were the circumstances in which the book was written. It was, from my perspective, a very small, personal book, and I wasn't expecting the reactions I started to get.

I did a signing the other day in Bath, that started about nine-thirty (pm) and finished at one (am), and there were actually people coming up on stage at one o'clock in the morning saying “it's really good.”

[He reads an excerpt of the book – I won't transcribe it, you'll just have to read the book, which you should anyway, it's really bloody good.]

It's interesting that these monstrous creatures make their entry by giving away money. Is this a sort of anti-capitalist statement?!

Not really. It's much more to do with how peculiarly important money can be when you're a kid, because you don't actually have an income source. I, as a kid, was fascinated with money, because I couldn't really understand it; you got it from your parents. Sometimes you'd be really lucky and somebody would come to stay, a friend of your dad's, and they'd actually give you half a crown. Power! I could go into a sweet shop and buy everything I wanted! I could go into a bookshop and buy two books!

So I loved the idea, because we have the suicide and the suicide is driven by money, and I liked the idea of a creature who was by its own rights not evil, trying to do good by people – trying to give people what they wanted at least – giving people money in ways that possibly were not entirely the best form. So that was really where that began, and then of course as the story carried on I had to find out what it was that was giving them money, and once I had created a big – I don't want to give away too much, you've got to read the book – but you encounter relatively soon Ursula Monkton. Ursula Monkton was enormously fun to write. And she always comes with both names; occasionally she's referred to as the thing that calls itself Ursula Monkton, but I liked the idea that she was like Mary Poppins.

Mary Poppins from Hell.

Absolutely! But Mary Poppins is always Mary Poppins. She's never Miss Poppins or Mary, she's Mary Poppins. I thought, let's do one of those, but much darker. Mary Poppins is basically a sort of beneficent God that comes into the Banks children's lives. And I thought, 'what happens if the thing that comes into their life is nowhere near as beneficent?' That was the starting point for Ursula Monkton, who is a monster.

Can you tell us something about the different ways you start work on stories for children and stories for adults, and if there's ever a fork in the road where you have to decide which of the two to follow?

What a great question, and it's absolutely relevant to this one... When I started it, I had no idea. I wasn't actually categorising it as children's fiction or adult fiction, I just went “I'm writing a book, this is fun.” Actually, I didn't, I went “I'm writing a short story, this is fun.” I didn't have to worry.

As it went on, I started to have to actually think about things I'd never thought of before in terms of what makes adult fiction and what makes children's fiction. Occasionally in the margins of the notebook I was writing in, I'd leave little notes to myself. I remember writing... I don't actually remember writing it, but I do remember noticing in my handwriting the words “in adult fiction, you're allowed to leave in the boring bits.”

I think one of the things that decided me on the idea that this was adult fiction that I was writing, even more than the material because you are seeing everything from a child's eyes anyway, was the idea that in children's fiction I am perfectly happy to make villains as dark as I like, to make things as dark as I like, but I always feel that a book needs to be about hope. It has to be about ways you can cope with the darkness, ways you can deal with it. The quote from G. K. Chesterton that I made up that begins Coraline, where I say that “fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” That is the important thing about Coraline.

This is not a book necessarily about defeating dragons. Definitely not a book about telling kids they can be powerful. It's actually a book for adults who have forgotten about the powerlessness of childhood. You have your own wonderful things you can do, but you're also living in a world inhabited by giants. You've turned up in this place where you didn't even speak the language; you were definitely not issued an instruction manual or anything when you turned up. You're just here, and there's this occupying power, and they're enormous. You can't even argue with them, because they can always pick you up and move you. So I wanted to try and put that into my story as well.

One of the things that people keep saying to me about The Ocean at the End of the Lane when they've read it, is they tell me about things that they had forgotten about being a child. That made me ridiculously happy. The stuff that you forget just because you don't go there, and then you can read a book where you are taken there, and suddenly bits of your childhood that you'd completely forgotten can come back.

Let's talk a little about the farm and Lettie's family, the Hempstocks. You get an idea from that extract that she's older than she might be for an eleven year old. Where did they come from? Are they witches?

The Hempstocks began for me when I was about 8 or 9, when somebody – probably my mum – told me that there was a farm down our lane that was mentioned in the Domesday Book. So it was almost a thousand years old. As a kid it didn't occur to me that a thousand years ago the farm would have looked very different, I just assumed that this nice red-brick farm had been standing there for about a thousand years. And then I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if the people who lived there had lived there for a thousand years. And that thought never quite went away.

They were called the Hempstock family, and they had lived on the farm down the lane for about a thousand years, and they were sort of very old, very magical, and nobody ever noticed them. I liked that. As I became an adult, I kept expecting to write a story about them, but a story never turned up with them in. So every now and again, when I was writing something else, I would put one of the Hempstocks in: Daisy Hempstock turns up in Stardust; and then when I was writing The Graveyard Book, I put Lisa Hempstock – who's witchy – I thought, 'good, she's witchy, she'll be in there.'

I think, looking back on it, what I failed to notice about the Hempstocks and the reason I never wrote a story with them in, is I had never written a story set in my lane before. So suddenly, I had this idea: I'll do a story set in my lane, and my father's mini – obviously, there will be bad stuff.

What are they, are they witches? No, they're not witches. Somebody asked me last night - the screenwriter of the film of this, or the person who will be writing the script, I won't say who it is because I don't think it's been announced yet – but his first question was, “is there anything that I should be researching to understand the Hempstock family? Is there any myth you can point me to?” and I said “no.”
“Are they Pagan? Are they magical, Pagan...?”
“No. They pre-date all that. That's new-fangled stuff to them.”

I like the idea that, Old Mrs Hempstock – the oldest of them – remembers the Big Bang. Lettie claims that her duck pond is the ocean, and she says they came across it when they came from the old country, and her mother says that Lettie can't really remember properly because the really old country sank beneath the waves. And Old Mrs Hempstock says that the really old country blew up. So I loved the idea that they were just very earthy, very practical ladies, who dragged their farm half-way across the Universe from the dawn of time, ripping weird stuff up and bringing it with them, and plonked it down at the end of the lane. That's what the Hempstocks are. And they're looking after things. Quite how much they're looking after you never really know...

Certainly keeping bad things out.

Definitely keeping bad things out. They obviously have a job, and part of their job involves just making sure that bad things that come in get dealt with.

Leading on from that... In much of your work, the mythical and the modern merge and conflict. Do you feel that myths are still important in modern culture, and why? Are you creating them, are you tapping into something, or...?

I love myths. I'm a huge myth-junkie. I've loved myths since I was six years old, I may have loved them before. I remember being given a copy of Roger Lancelyn Green's Tales of the Norsemen and just going “This... is brilliant. This is so much cooler than anything else.” Then I got to the story where Loki and Thor and a kid named Thialfi take refuge for the night in a very peculiar house: it's got five branching passages and a big branching passage, they can't really make sense of the geography of it, and it turns out it's a giant's glove.

I saved up my own money, and bought a copy of Roger Lancelyn Green's Myths and Tales of Ancient Egypt...

Which appears in the book.

Which appears in the book! And I have that book still. I just loved that, I loved these animal-headed Gods, loved those stories. So I have always been fascinated by myths; I've always loved letting them drip and trickle into my fiction. There's a moment in The Ocean at the End of the Lane where our narrator is reading some myths, and he says what he likes best about myths is that they aren't for adults, and they aren't for children, they just are. That is still how I feel about them. I can go back and read old myths, I can go back to – these days I don't go back to the Roger Lancelyn Green ones, I go back to the Prose Edda or the Poetic Edda – but I can still get the same joy and thrill as I did as a kid.

There's a thing that comes out very strongly in the way that you talk about children's books in this, that they have huge, violent back-stories. The character says that he loves books about Egypt, because it's about animal-headed Gods that cut each other up and then restored each other to life.

Definitely part of the fun of myths is that nobody is particularly sugar-coating anything for anyone, and kids love terrible things happening. There's that terrifying satisfaction on the face of a kid when something really awful happens to a bad person, it's like “yes,” and you'll read like Grimm's Fairy Tales: “And the Queen was forced to wear iron shoes, and they heated until they were red hot, and they clamped them on her foot and then they made her dance until she died.” It's only when you become an adult that you start going, “oooh, that's not really very nice.”

I love that children's books run all the way through this book, and my publishers actually got in touch with me at one point because they wanted to make sure that any permissions had been gotten for the quotes from classic children's books that I had in the book, and I had to admit that I made them up.

When I was a kid, I read everything; absolutely anything I could find lying around, I would read it. But we had all of my mother's books, that my mother and my aunt read. We had books about girls who could not leave their ponies when the Nazis came. I got to make up some of those in this book, when he goes off to read them, so that was enormously fun. There's a point when you get Sandie, who has been sent off by an administrative error because she's Sandie -ie rather than Sandy with a Y, and has gone off to the wrong school, but it's all worked out very well because she's discovered that her geography teacher is a Bolshevik spy.

But there's a difference between your main character in this and those main characters, in that your main character is powerless. He doesn't fight the good fight and win, whereas the classic trope thing is that they do.

Absolutely. I'm very proud of my main character. It's true, though. He screws up a lot. Several of the things he does actually cause more bad things to happen. At one point he gets himself into deeper trouble – he does escape, a brief escape – he climbs down a drainpipe. He's learnt to climb down drainpipes because kids in books climb down drainpipes, and he feels he has an obligation.

And you've made that point, that it's not a plastic drainpipe like we have today, it's a good old solid drainpipe. There's another point you make, like you say, it's the oddest thing that we used to have gas fires in rooms. It's much odder than a witch or a ghost turning up in your room.

I think it's because I was writing the book, sitting there writing it, and I'm going “well, okay, if this thing had happened to him he would now be drying off... He'd be in the bedroom...” I kept the geography, very much, of the house and the grounds – I played with it a little bit, it's fiction, I moved things around – but basically it's pretty factual. I got to thinking that he would have done what I would have done. I would have gone into the bedroom, I would have lit a match, lit that gas fire and dried off in front of that– you know, that's really weird, the idea that you'd have a five year old and a seven year old with their own gas fire. That's kind of dangerous. In fact, looking back on it, I had a pair of red pyjamas that had a huge hole in the sleeve, and somehow managed not to drip burning plastic from nylon pyjamas that caught fire from that fireplace onto anything, except me...

And I thought, that actually seems more unlikely than anything else that I have written so far, and there's some really weird stuff in this book. So I put that in. It's just something you wouldn't do today. Wouldn't happen. I'm sure Health and Safety people would turn up at your house... With clipboards.

So you can write about horrific things as long as they're in the realm of the imagination, but as soon as it involves reality...

It was fine. I do not want anyone to think that my parents were in any way not looking after us, because this was just how it was! It was just a house that had a gas fire in the children's bedroom... So yes, I'm very good at fiction, but when it's real then that's very weird...

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It was an absolute pleasure to listen to the writer whose work I have admired for some time discuss his latest book at length, and I found myself feeling considerably more inspired with my own writing afterwards. Gaiman's fantastic new book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is now available from all good bookshops and online, and is absolutely well worth reading. My review of the book can be read here.