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Running in the night
Afraid of what might be
Hiding in the dark
Hiding in the street
And of what was following me’.
Very often when I’m writing I’ll get a tune of some sort come into my head that stays with me until I’ve finished the book. At the time I was writing Fenrir it was Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLZJQ2a1MnY. It particularly attached itself to the character of Aelis – the Frankish noblewoman whose pursuit by dark forces is the main focus of the novel.
I often find that the song I have in my head has a big influence on what I’m writing. For instance, in Wolfsangel it was Psychic TV’s Thee Full Pack, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K89TsKAoKDk with its simmering, creepy guitar, spooky timpani and chilling dog attack sound effects. Hence Wolfsangel – particularly the witches – has (I hope) a sort of creeping horror to it, a feeling of people trapped in a terrible destiny. This is what the song evokes to me and I found I was using it as a sort of mental reference point – particularly when writing about the witches of the Troll Wall.
The difference with Fenrir was that I consciously used Hounds of Love as the inspiration for the character of Aelis and the pace of the novel. This was primarily because I love the song and wanted to achieve its sense of someone still pursued by childhood fears it contains.
First up I wanted to emulate the breathless pace of the song. After a couple of strong beats at the start it’s off at a tumble. Likewise Fenrir is basically one long chase that begins after chapter 2 and doesn’t really stop until…. Well, can’t give too many spoilers. There’s really the sense of stuff happening in the song and I wanted that for the novel – a huge forward momentum, no meandering about or wondering where the threat is coming from next. As in Hounds of Love, the threat is right on your heels.
More than that, though, there is a sort of vertiginous feeling Hounds of Love evokes that I get myself when I contemplate time passing, the speed at which the present falls away into the past, the glimpses of your former self that sometimes intrude on your day to day life. I sometimes feel my younger self almost as a tangible presence watching me in my everyday life and this is a very unsettling experience. I’m aware I sound battier than Bruce Wayne here and that I haven’t expressed myself very well. However, this pleases me. Because what I found myself doing when writing Fenrir was expressing something that I simply couldn’t say in any other way. That, to me, is one of the key reasons to write and that’s what Hounds of Love does for me – it expresses passionately a feeling that is deep within me but that I couldn’t possibly nail down by explaining it.
There’s also a certain spookiness to Kate Bush’s music and it’s one of the things I like most in fantasy literature – from Alan Garner’s Owl Service to Tolkien’s dead marshes and Lovecraft’s mad gods.
So this is one of things I was trying to get to in Fenrir.
It’s maybe summed up by this passage in which Aelis remembers her youth at Loches on the river Indre near Tours in Francia. She is running from magical forces and has stopped for the night, accompanied – among others - by some fishermen whose boat she has hired. This was my stab at getting the Kate Bush feeling down on paper.:
‘She huddled into the fire and touched her neck. It was very sore from where she had pressed in the tip of the sword. She looked at the faces of the fishermen in the firelight. They seemed like spirits of the underworld to her. It was as if there was something else behind the day to day.
At Loches there had been a little chapel. Her uncle the Marquis had commissioned a man to paint some biblical scenes for it. She had sat and watched as he mixed his pigment and egg and made the faces of the apostles appear on sheets of wood.
Every day Aelis watched him and, eventually, he asked her if she would like to be the model for a picture of the child saint Agnes of Rome. He had painted her outside in the clear summer light, on a panel he had used before, for an unsuccessful attempt at a depiction of St Catherine. She’d been fascinated to watch herself appear from the mess of colours he kept in his little pots and to hear the story of how St Agnes had refused to marry the prefect’s son, so the prefect had her put to death. Roman law didn’t allow him to kill a virgin, so he had her dragged naked through the streets to a brothel to have her raped. But she prayed and hair grew all over her body to cover her nakedness and each man who tried to rape her was struck blind. A pyre was set for her but the wood would not burn so a soldier stabbed her through the throat.
When the picture was done Aelis went with the artist to the kitchen to eat and to flirt with him. When they returned, a shower of rain had blown into the clear blue day, washing part of his painting away. From beneath the face of the child, the eyes of the woman Catherine peered out. The image came to her because that was what was happening to her now.
Memory, or something like memory, was becoming so powerful that the world she walked through seemed no more than an impression, a shimmering of sun on water, a shadow on fog.’
The other thing I took from Hounds of Love is that there’s nothing arch or restrained about it. There’s no sense that the writer is anything other than utterly consumed by the emotions she’s conjuring. It’s a passionate song that evokes something mythic and unsayable – something about childish fears and the fragility of human existence – there’s no cynicism to it.
I really admire that - something that may surprise people who’ve read my mainstream work, which is so cynical even I sometimes want to slap me.
Kate Bush’s music – Hounds of Love in particular – is overbrimming with feeling, with a bubbling witch’s brew of emotion and a weird sort of spirituality, a real mythic sense. It’s also a bit mad. I hoped to take some of that when writing Fenrir.
Fenrir is out July 21. See the book trailer here!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eSYlvuFpCU
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