INTENSE ORNATE

An interview with Elizabeth Hand.

Elizabeth Hand's gloomy novels of the uncanny have been critically acclaimed ever since her first novel, the post-apocalyptic Winterlong. She talks to Roz Kaveney about films, dead end jobs and the roots of the fantastic.

Amazon.co.uk: Your novels, and particularly Black Light find magic in some unusual places--artists' colonies and the Andy Warhol Factory and in archaeology. Let's talk about the uncanny and where you find it.

Elizabeth Hand: What tilled the field was being brought up Irish Catholic. Even though I stopped believing at about 15 or 16, it programmes you to think about religion and the supernatural all the time as a reflex, even after you have stopped believing.

Amazon.co.uk: Is there a particular Catholic strain in fantasy?

Hand: There certainly is in English fantasy in the Twentieth Century and the critic John Clute has referred to a New England school of ethical romance consisting of me, John Crowley, James Patrick Kelly, Alexander Jablokov, Michael Swanwick and Richard Grant--and all of us have Catholic backgrounds except for Richard, whose background is Episcopalian. You grow up with a sense of imminent transcendence and the element of the divine in everything. And in my case, and probably a lot of others, there was the influence of Hope Mirrlees, who was a convert--and her novel Lud-in-the-Mist with its big theme of the reconciliation of faerie and the mundane ... My friends and I used to use the oath from it: "By the sun, the moon and the stars And the Golden Apples of the West.

Amazon.co.uk: And being Irish?

Hand: My father's father was a professional Irishman and storyteller who made a great impression on me with his stories of Tir Na Nog and the land of Faerie. He always played up the spooky melancholic aspects of the stories. As I grew up, my friends and I talked all the time of an existence beyond the fields we knew. It was the early 70s, and in the 60s there had been this overwhelming expectation of the sort of breakthrough you find in the stories of Arthur Machen--M. John Harrison writes really well about all of this in The Course of the Heart--and we were all young enough really to believe. My friend Katy Kiernan called it "The Door"--this feeling that there was a way to get somewhere else. As I grew older and started writing, I focused on evoking that feeling--the sense of what you get in children's books like the Narnia stories, only involving adult wish-fulfilment like sex and art instead of talking animals. I wanted to find things beyond the wardrobe but I wanted them to be the elements of the uncanny in the everyday, the things that ought to have happened.

Amazon.co.uk: In both Black Light and your short story collection Last Summer at Mars Hill, you write a lot about artists' colonies ...

Hand: I grew up in Pound Ridge, which is now an appalling affluent place where Hollywood stars own second homes that cost them two million. But back then, it was where New York theatre people lived and artists--it was only ten minutes away from a quick train to New York. The cachet of all this made it trendy and spoiled it, eventually. It is a pre-Revolutionary War town, up in the Hudson valley, with all the supernatural connotations you find attached to that area by Washington Irving. It is a physically beautiful place; I grew up surrounded by actors and writers and they were always there so I took it for granted that one would go down to the cafeteria and see Hume Cronin and Jessica Tandy doing Becket one-acters as a benefit for the school library. Part of "The Door" is a matter of trying to go back to a childhood and adolescence that were genuinely happy, because I expected life to be like that.

Amazon.co.uk: Black Light is a sort of skewed prequel to Waking the Moon. Have you finished with this material?

Hand: I plan to write another book about it all in a few years.

Amazon.co.uk: Waking the Moon is a book that people either love or hate.

Hand: A [US] book chain that organises readers' groups suggested it to them and found that it created extraordinary rows in the groups.

Amazon.co.uk: It is full of stuff from your reading--the feminist archaeologist Gimbautas, the Italian scholar Ginzburg--stuff that does not usually crop up in ordinary fantastic fiction.

Hand: So much fantasy relies on the author's having read Fraser's The Golden Bough or Robert Graves' The White Goddess and nothing else. The White Goddess is a crank book, a crank book of genius of course, but all the same ... Mind you, I found Waking the Moon cited in an article in a pagan magazine as an authority for the idea that there was a patriarchal brotherhood, the Benandanti, that have been running things since antiquity, with no mention of the fact that it is a novel, and a fantasy at that. People want to believe something, and so they swallow anything.

Amazon.co.uk: One of the X-Files slogans is "I want to believe". You are very good on the element in cults and so on of the Will to Power--bad experiences in your past or just a sense of human nature?

Hand: I tend to base my characters on real people; the source for Angelica in Waking the Moon was a woman in my past with whom I had lost touch--and when I contacted her later, she had become a Wiccan High Priestess and did have a son called Dylan. I don't take this too seriously--writing is after all partly about making educated guesses about people and then dazzling the reader with fancy footwork. My family and friends are amused when they recognise bits of themselves--but there have been no lawsuits.

Amazon.co.uk: Glimmering is your gloomiest book, in which there is redemption of a sort, but not survival.

Hand: That, after all, is all we can hope for as individuals--moments of transcendence--because we are all going to die. It is the book closest to my world view--the other books are more like wish fulfilment; I suppose it is also a matter of my mood at the time--I have cheered up a bit. Partly because of protease inhibitors--I had lost a lot of friends to AIDS.

Amazon.co.uk: It is your AIDS book; it is also your environmentalist book.

Hand: When people ask me why I don't write about global warming, I point out that I already did.

Amazon.co.uk: You first made your name with a sequence of novels Winterlong, Aestival Tide and Icarus Descending. Unlike Glimmering, they are books about survival--Winterlong quotes Tennyson: "Though much is taken, much remains." They are also books which use Tarot quite a lot ...

Hand: That's because it is a handy shorthand for a lot of mythic material ... Winterlong was the book with which I taught myself to write from the age of 18 onwards and Aestival Tide was my attempt to cram in all the best SF riffs I had found in movies and comic books--it wasn't a book I took entirely seriously. Looking back at them, they have their own loony poetry--my brother likes the stuff in Aestival Tide about the Church of Christ Cadillac, and people wearing hubcaps on their heads ... The reason there is so much dance and masks in them is that I was stage struck in my teens--with all the theatre around me in Pound Ridge and the Shakespeare Festival nearby--and I went to college to study drama where I discovered I had no talent and after a period of dropping out majored in cultural anthropology which of course meant more masks and dancing ... I studied what interested me and so I had to become a writer because my education had left me unsuited for a decent well-paying job.

Amazon.co.uk: Waking the Moon is in large part your campus novel ...

Hand: The Catholic University in Washington is a magical place in the NE quadrant of the city, full of seminaries and monasteries and parks and fields all owned by the church--it's a huge Byzantine edifice, appallingly tasteless, but wonderful. I only exaggerated it a bit.

Amazon.co.uk: You have done quite a lot of work for hire ...

Hand: I loved novelising Twelve Monkeys--a wonderful elegant melancholy screenplay not all of which makes it onto the screen because Terry Gilliam got involved in the macho struggle of making Bruce Willis suffer so he would act ... Work on the Millennium novelisations and the X-Files movie was less fun--they wanted to retain creative control and so they exercised it by taking out all my adjectives.

Amazon.co.uk: What is your work in progress?

Hand: It is called The Master Stroke after the Richard Dadd painting--"The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke". It is about his work and a family of American painters. It is set partly in Victorian London and partly on an island off the coast of Maine, and that is all I am going to say about it...