{"id":64921,"date":"2014-01-14T14:34:20","date_gmt":"2014-01-14T19:34:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=64921"},"modified":"2014-01-14T15:48:07","modified_gmt":"2014-01-14T20:48:07","slug":"we-all-have-our-magical-thinking-an-interview-with-nicola-griffith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/01\/14\/we-all-have-our-magical-thinking-an-interview-with-nicola-griffith\/","title":{"rendered":"We All Have Our Magical Thinking: An Interview with Nicola Griffith"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"St._Hilda_at_Hartlepool_by_James_Clark_(Oil_Painting)\"<\/a>

James Clark, St. Hilda at Hartlepool<\/i> (detail), 1925, oil on canvas.<\/p><\/div>\n

Late in Nicola Griffith\u2019s 1998 novel <\/i>The Blue Place, her protagonist, Aud Torvingen, speaks rapturously about a spot on the coast of England. \u201cHave I told you about Whitby Abbey, on the Yorkshire coast? There\u2019s a ruin there that dates from the twelfth century, very haunting, very gothic, but the first abbey there was founded in the seventh century by Hilda. There\u2019s a power there.\u201d Fifteen years later, Griffith\u2019s latest novel, <\/i>Hild, explores the early life of the woman who would go on to become Hilda of Whitby.<\/i><\/p>\n

Hild is an intricately plotted historical epic, set in a landscape that seems familiar and a culture that is anything but. Hild, the young protagonist, acts as an adviser to the king, Edwin, and the novel abounds with plotting, misdirection, and the use of mysticism toward decidedly realpolitik ends. Griffith\u2019s ability to evoke a different time and place has manifested itself in very different ways over the years; her first two novels, <\/i>Ammonite and <\/i>Slow River, were both science fiction, though of very different types. <\/i>Ammonite begins as anthropological science fiction and gradually becomes more epic in scale; <\/i>Slow River involves conspiracies, industry, and a marvelously intricate plot. The series of three novels featuring Aud Torvingen\u2014<\/i>The Blue Place, <\/i>Stay, and <\/i>Always\u2014are set in the modern world, with a fiercely analytical (and sometimes critically violent) protagonist. And in 2007, her memoir, <\/i>And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer\u2019s Early Life, was released.<\/i><\/p>\n

Reached via phone at her Seattle home, Griffith\u2019s spoken language is as precise as it is on the page.<\/i><\/p>\n

How long have you known that Hilda of Whitby was a figure you wanted to write about?<\/b><\/p>\n

Since my early twenties. Actually, I didn\u2019t even know that I was going to write about her<\/i>\u2014I discovered the abbey in my early twenties, and I was very struck by it. Hilda grew on me. She grew in the back of my mind. At first, I thought I was going to write an alternate history novel, one in which the Synod of Whitby didn\u2019t go the way that it actually went. But the more I discovered about the world itself, about the seventh century, the more I wanted to write how it actually was. Not make it fantastical, just really go there, really live there for a while. And Hild herself became more and more interesting to me.<\/p>\n

I kept putting off writing about her, because I really didn\u2019t want to write a book about women as chattels, and women as baby-making machines. But as I discovered more about the seventh century, I realized that my preconceptions were wrong, and in fact, Hild could have been a really powerful woman in her own right. A really powerful person<\/i>\u2014not just a powerful woman. And then, one day, I just thought, This is enough. I have to really go there. It\u2019s time to step up. The day before my forty-seventh birthday, I sat down and wrote the first paragraph. So it took more than twenty years. <\/p>\n

Reading the book, I was impressed with how deeply it immersed me in seventh-century Britain. It gives you this wealth of information, and there isn\u2019t a lot of hand-holding.<\/b><\/p>\n

My worry is that readers are going to find the first few pages quite difficult, especially as they\u2019re told from the perspective of a three-year-old. That was the most difficult part, beginning, just trying to figure out how on earth to enter this world. And then I hit on the fact that one should enter it as a child, and discover it as children do. Some things just are<\/i> and make no sense, and some things we have to figure out.<\/p>\n

One of the things that really struck me about Hild<\/i> was the way that literacy is treated as a technology throughout. It\u2019s something that certain characters are able to use to give themselves an advantage.<\/b><\/p>\n

Language is <\/i>one of our primary tools, and as Wittgenstein says, it is the iron cage of consciousness. If you have the language gift, you can use it as a tool. That\u2019s one of the assets I gave Hild. Trying to figure out what kind of style to use for the book nearly took the top of my head off. I didn\u2019t want to start the book until I thought I had a notion.<\/p>\n

I was reading bilingual versions of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and old Welsh poetry. I read a bit of Middle English, but that just wasn\u2019t the same. It\u2019s not where I wanted to go. I wanted to go earlier. Even words like hythe<\/i>\u2014I stuck the word hythe<\/i> in there, it means a sort of sandy harbor. But that\u2019s a Middle English word. I was cheating. I felt very wicked. But I thought, It sounds suitable. It sounds Anglo-Saxon. I ended up thinking of language as a kind of chisel. The sentences are what you might call almost Celtic. They come back along, they\u2019re winding. The words are very short and sharp and blunt. They\u2019re not transparent. These are very solid little words, and I think that\u2019s a very Anglo-Saxon thing.<\/p>\n

The novel treats religion somewhat similarly. Religion is pragmatic here. Characters convert not because they\u2019re dedicated to a particular faith, but more because it will be advantageous to them.<\/b><\/p>\n

Everyone has this notion of the Middle Ages\u2014certainly the early Middle Ages\u2014as being this very superstitious era. I think that all eras are superstitious. We all have our magical thinking. But I wanted to show that the people fourteen hundred years ago had minds just like ours. They thought the same way about things. The pragmatic, political people would have pragmatic, political thoughts about religion. They would have used priests as tools.<\/p>\n

You made reference to a sequel to Hild<\/i> on your Web site recently, and at the end of the book, there are parts of her life that remain unexplained. Is her life something that you\u2019re planning to return to?<\/b><\/p>\n

Oh, yes. I had originally intended to write one big fat novel. I got to about a hundred thousand words and the character of Hild was only twelve, and I thought, You know, this just isn\u2019t going to work. The way I\u2019m seeing it right now is that there are going to be three books. The second book will take us to the point where she rejoins the historical record, when she\u2019s thirty-three. And the third book will be the second half of her life. I know where the second book begins, and I know where it ends. And I know some of the points in the middle. I just don\u2019t have the whole thing yet.<\/p>\n

I find Hild to be a very likable character, and a very admirable character. At the same time, her society is one where people can be bought and sold, and you don\u2019t shy away from that aspect of it.<\/b><\/p>\n

Hild has to be sympathetic in the sense that the reader has to understand what she thinks and how she feels. They don\u2019t necessarily have to like her in the sense of, I wish she was my friend, or my daughter, or my mum. They just have to understand her. Honestly, I wrestled with the whole slavery issue. The way, obviously, we\u2019re all brought up is that it\u2019s just anathema to own a human being in that way. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it\u2019s just a question of degree. We are all beholden, on some level, to some institution, some more than others.<\/p>\n

If you were a slave in Hild\u2019s time, some of them had better lives than some of the free people. That\u2019s a low bar, I know. This is just how it was, and I had to deal with it. Hild had to. I think, in book two, we\u2019re going to see more slavery, and see how that really unfolds. I couldn\u2019t afford to spend too much time on the notion too early, I don\u2019t think. There\u2019s a lot about the seventh century that\u2019s going to be difficult for twenty-first-century readers, without throwing too much at them at once.<\/p>\n

There are parts of Hild\u2019s life that are well documented and parts that aren\u2019t. Where did you draw the line for yourself, as far as which things you could write speculatively about and which you couldn\u2019t?<\/b><\/p>\n

For me, the rule was very simple\u2014if it could have happened, it was fair game. If it was actually written down, I was not going to contravene it. But there was so very little that\u2019s known to be known. I can give you her entire life in one short paragraph.<\/p>\n

Most of what we hear from Bede about Hild is, pretty much, hagiography. If you strip that out\u2014the fantastical dreams about her ascending to heaven, and all that stuff\u2014there\u2019s very little left. We know roughly when she was born, but not exactly. We know she was probably born in Britain. We can guess that she was born in what\u2019s now Yorkshire. I was guided greatly by reading all the secondary scholarship around this time. The material goods and so forth. All the archaeology, the ethnology. How the jewelry looked. And I could extrapolate from that. I started off as a science-fiction writer, so that\u2019s my meat and drink\u2014take three facts and build a world from it. It\u2019s a joy to me.<\/p>\n

Do you have a sense of what your next project might be after the third volume of Hild<\/i> is done?<\/b><\/p>\n

I\u2019d love to write the next phase of my memoir\u2014I wrote that multimedia memoir in 2007. And there are lots of novels I\u2019d write. I would love to write about this country in pre-Columbian times. I would also love to write about the UK and Iceland a little later, like the ninth century. There\u2019s another Aud book bubbling in the back of my head. I sometimes think about Ammonite<\/i>, and what that might be like now. Ideas are cheap. They circle like planes running out of fuel. Whichever looks most important, I will bring that in to land when it\u2019s time.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Late in Nicola Griffith\u2019s 1998 novel The Blue Place, her protagonist, Aud Torvingen, speaks rapturously about a spot on the coast of England. \u201cHave I told you about Whitby Abbey, on the Yorkshire coast? 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