Three-time winner of the British Fantasy Award (for Dark Sister, Requiem and The Tooth Fairy), Graham Joyce has garnered a lot of respect in the genre since his first novel, Dreamside was published in 1991. Not only has he received glowing praise from the likes of Ramsey Campbell and Michael Moorcock, but The Tooth Fairy was even nominated for a Booker Prize. His new novel, The Stormwatcher is the first to be marketed as mainstream, an event which surprises the author. 'It's all happened by complete accident really,' he explains. 'When I went to Penguin it was because they were starting a horror list. Then they closed the horror list down but still wanted to continue to publish me. Penguin aren't publishing genre fiction anymore under genre labels; they're publishing genre fiction under their mainstream labels. Publishing events have happened around me rather than me having any influence over the way the books are published. Having said that, this is probably the least obvious genre I've done so far.'
The Stormwatcher chronicles several weeks in the lives of a group of friends as they holiday in The Dordogne in France. As the title suggests, the oncoming storm mirrors the internal conflicts within the group itself -- in both cases, bad weather is imminent. Jessie, daughter of middle-class couple James and Sabine, is being corrupted by an unknown member of the group. On top of this, each of the friends has a varied past which, in combination, can be explosive. However, unlike many writers, Joyce is quite content to let his story unfold through the eyes of more than one character. 'I was actually breaking a rule in The Stormwatcher because generally one should, in a conventional narrative, follow the central protagonist. I've always done that, I like doing that, I understand why it must be done. But I also try to do something different each time rather than repeating the same novel. With The Stormwatcher I wanted to write an ensemble novel. I don't know whether that's a weakness -- that it's difficult to locate a central character -- but it's what I wanted to do. Because I was talking about the weather as a metaphor, I wanted to make the density of the relationships the issue so that one got the feeling that a group of people can make a "weather". Just like the meteorological conditions make a weather around them, they generate their own psychological weather.'
Meteorological metaphors abound in The Stormwatcher. Sabine,
for instance, wishes her troubles and frustrations could be washed away
by a rain storm, a theme which Joyce developed throughout the book.
'Because I was trying to say this thing about the weather -- that people
are subject to group-dynamic forces -- I couldn't isolate one particular
character. I was actually trying to relegate the significance of the
individuals; trying to subordinate it to the group mind. That's why
I was interested in doing an ensemble novel. I wanted this feeling that
there was this nine miles high turbulence going on above the heads of
the characters; that they were almost washing about on a kind of ocean
somewhere. They had their unique qualities. But there was something
much larger than themselves that was making them behave in different
ways.'
Sexual conflict is a theme which runs through all of Joyce's books. He writes about real people whose affairs are fraught with suppressed passions; not to mention down-to-earth lust! Sex, in his books, seems tied into breaking rules; living dangerously. For example, there's an illicit affair between a teacher and a pupil in Requiem; adultery on a Greek island in House Of Lost Dreams; a past affair between James and Rachel, two members of the group in The Stormwatcher. 'I had this idea that there's a relationship between vulnerability and the imagination,' says Joyce. 'So you have to expose your characters' vulnerabilities in social situations to explore the imaginative side of their characters; the extreme dimensions of people's nature. I think that everybody's got extreme dimensions to their own nature, and those extremities are often manifested through either sexual repression or sexual maladjustment. Not everybody lives it, but I've got a feeling it's there. It just so happens that in my books I make my characters live it. In real life people don't tend to push themselves to such extremes. But since those extremes are metaphors of what I'm trying to say I always make them jump through hoops in the books!' (laughs)
Another theme running through his writing is the ability to make the
reader uncomfortable with his or herself; the psychological insights
into our deepest, darkest, guiltiest secrets, are incisive and often
embarrassingly illuminating. 'One of the weaknesses of the genre is
that it puts people in extreme circumstances and then fails to actually
ask the human questions about the way that we are frail. That's when
our weaknesses of character actually emerge. A lot of genre material
fails to serve the narrative by addressing those questions. But having
put people in such difficult situations I'm more interested in how they're
going to react and behave than in how the story's going to work out.
I like to have those two things going on at the same time so that, hopefully,
the novel is operating on two different dimensions. One in terms of
which way the narrative is going to pay off, and the other in actually
saying, "This is what we're like as human beings. This is how we live
our lives; how sometimes we fail or serve each other."'
When writing a novel, Joyce is just as likely to let the characters dictate how the story will develop as plan it meticulously in advance. 'I always have a rough notion of how it's going to evolve. But I always see it as a kind of excavation too. Like with mining, you never actually sink a shaft unless you know there's some good coal there. But neither do you don't know what you're going to get out till you get down there and start digging. It might be of surprisingly good quality or it might be poor. I like to know roughly where I'm going with the thing; then I'll leave a good margin for development of different characters. Some become more interesting to me than others. I don't always know which way that's going to be, but that's only because I might have a pretty shrewd idea of where the narrative is going but haven't thought enough about how human beings might react in a given situation. So it always seems like there's room for one or more characters to behave in a way which is then interesting to analyse and explore.'
Several of Joyce's novels are set in exotic settings -- the Dordogne in The Stormwatcher; Jerusalem in Requiem; a Greek island in House Of Lost Dreams: warm climes of dust, heat and sweat. This allows the author to mirror internal conflicts in the characters, especially as tempers fray more rapidly in the continuous heat. 'I'm very interested in sense of place and this idea of landscape shaping the way that people behave. I've lived on a Greek island and I've lived in the Middle East. I respond very much to the weather and to the climate. I was always both impressed and appalled by the fact that in Greece a man could kill his wife and plea that the sirocco was blowing; that he could get off with a lesser sentence if he could convince the jury. I was always impressed by that because, having endured a sirocco myself for a few nights, I know it can drive you to absolute distraction. I've always felt that I'm somebody who's rather sensitive to the weather and it affects my moods in a very strong way. Because Britain is such temperate place I find that I'm pitched into different moods when I'm in more exotic locations myself. Once, in a particularly hot climate, my wife emptied a bottle of water over me because I was behaving so badly. It was such a relief! I like my characters to be responding in a similar way.'
I read Graham a passage from The Stormwatcher: 'Words had a life of their own…….(words) were like currents of air, streaming hither and thither, trying to find an aggregate form. They were like weather fronts.' One wonders whether this sums up the essence of the book. 'Yes I think it does. I'm interested that you've pulled that out because I feel that people haven't got as much control over as they like to think over the things they say. Sometimes a person uses words to just express a mood rather their words being carefully thought out and delivered analytically. In the same way, I'm interested in what's not said. That's another thing I talk about in The Stormwatcher -- words speak for the hidden side of people. Sometimes sciences do that just as eloquently. What I was interested in was the idea of words themselves acting like weather fronts.'
Jessie, the book's troubled youth, has her secret instructor, who, like
the tooth fairy (in the novel of the same name), is there to plant adult
concerns in the mind of a child. 'I've always been interested in the
idea of people having shadow tuition,' explains Graham, 'whether that
be from a fantasy figure or a figure that turns out to be one of the
people in the company. In some of the previous books, the shadow-tutor,
if you like, has turned out, like in The Tooth Fairy or in Requiem,
to be of supernatural origins. So I was interested in taking the same
idea and actually leading the reader down that path of thinking that
it would emerge as a supernatural character, but in the end they get
a human figure. Also, I was interested in the idea of haunting the little
girl, only with someone who was alive instead of dead. The Stormwatcher
still has exactly the same Graham Joyce concerns running through it.
It's just that this time the shadow tutor is not supernatural. But I
hope that I kept tricking the reader into thinking that it might damn
well prove to be supernatural at some point. It was a kind of literary
game I was playing.'
The character of Rachel in The Stormwatcher, herself from a working-class background, makes an interesting comment about the class system when she says that she wants to take Jessie away from '(her parents') banal taboos and shitty middle-class preoccupations…' Given the author's working-class background (his father was a miner), might this be construed as a personal observation? 'I admit to being a very class-conscience person,' says Joyce. 'The subject can be boring to some people but not to me; the hierarchical arrangement of class in this country is endlessly fascinating. Its subdivisions are magnificent in the way that they operate, and I've always been into the nuances of social class, mainly because British people spend such a lot of time denying that it even exists. What I was doing in The Stormwatcher was deliberately trying to bring in a character who was from a working-class background. Who was trying to settle into a middle-class milieu and who felt unspoken hostility. The book isn't a whodunit but a who's-doing-it. I wanted to play on the fact that Sabine, being a middle-class mother, would be making guesses about who's whispering to her daughter. Her natural instincts would make her think that the woman from the working-class background is responsible because she feels threatened by this person. So it was actually a way of me exploring some of those anxieties and insecurities from both sides of that social class divide.'
Joyce's previous jobs have included teaching and working as a European
development officer for youth work. Understandably, he feels his background
has influenced his portrayal of children in his stories. 'I don't think
that adolescence has to be a time of crisis but it often is. When you
look at the statistics for youth violence, the high levels of teenage
suicide, you realise that a lot of people are, psychologically, quite
up against it -- trying to make this leap from childhood to adulthood.
That period seems to have been artificially extended by this incredibly
long period of adolescence that you now have to serve in modern western
society. In a different society this would all be over and done with
in some very quick rite of passage. One day you're a child and you go
and, I don't know, jump off a 200 foot pylon with a vine creeper attached
to your ankle and then you're a man! Now it seems that you change schools
when you're eleven years old, and then you reach seventeen or eighteen
and you still haven't proved to everybody's satisfaction that you're
an adult.
'I think there are huge consequences for the fact that we keep people in a suspended state of childhood. And these tend to be expressed in terms of anxieties for that person, who is physically an adult and should be doing adult things and accepted on adult terms, but is kept artificially in this state of childhood or adolescence. I mean, adolescence is an invention, a concept really -- there was no such thing as "adolescence" before this century. So the psychological anxieties that accrue around this thing that we've done to prevent people growing up, I think, demands a form of pay-back. I saw a lot of this stuff when I was involved with youth work. That's why it works itself out in characters like Sam in The Tooth Fairy, or Jessie in The Stormwatcher.'
Horror novels in particular have long played on the notion that, since the personality of the youngster is unformed, he or she is much more easily swayed by the opinions of others. 'Because the youth hasn't assumed his role in society as an adult, he or she is so incredibly open to influence -- good or bad -- which is why a lot of adolescents picks on role models like pop stars, political and religious ideologies that they think will solve everything. There's almost a desperation to crystallise the nature of life. People are drawn to these crytillisations, and sometimes it makes them open to really bad influence. I've always been interested in that. For example, I had to do a lot of work on why young people were drawn to religious cults and political extremities, and I always felt that it was because this hole had been created and they were just dying for something strong to fill it.'
The
next novel, Indigo, sees a return to exotic climes. 'It's set
in both Chicago and Rome. When I did The Tooth Fairy, that was
where I grew up (in a Warwickshire colliery village). I figured I owed
it to my locality to see if I could do a book without relying on exotic
settings. So I've done that; I'm back on exotic settings now (laughs).
Chicago's a really futuristic city for architecture; and Rome, of course,
is located in the past. So you have this kind of past-future thing.
Again I'm exploring this issue of bad influence.
'Indigo will steer a little bit back towards the genre. I've always been writing the kind of books which interest me. I'm a fan of both genre material and mainstream books. I read both, and I think my own books reflect that. I'm quite happy to be in the position of asking questions about genre in each book. I always feel like I'm doing something right if somebody can't quite place the genre of one of my novels.
'I think I got shoehorned into genre publication. I was never unhappy with that because I was a fan of it myself. It's just that sometimes, when you start out as a writer, your book gets chosen by this or that editor because they've got a space on this or that list. If they like what you're doing and can shoehorn it into that list then they'll do so. And I figure that's what happened with mine and why there's always been a difficulty every time I've turned in a new book to a publisher.'
