[Will Wiles is the London-based author of The Care of Wooden Floors (2012), The Way Inn (2014) and Plume (2019) and now, as ‘W. P. Wiles’, the first volume in a marvellous Fantasy series, The Last Blade Priest. I first got to know him after reading The Way Inn, his expertly written, coolly brilliant topographical fantasia set in the fictitious chain hotel of its title (‘Terence Conran meets HP Lovecraft, Bulgakov staged in the Tate, Kafka as a new Ikea furniture range’ is how the Guardian described the book). When I needed a chain hotel location for my novel The Thing Itself I asked Will’s permission to reuse the brand, and he kindly agreed. Plume, a barbed and vivid journey through contemporary London, and a superb consideration of addiction, writing and place, confirmed his status as a major contemporary writer.
I knew about his love for classic Fantasy, and was able to read The Last Blade Priest in draft, so I wasn’t as surprised as some commentators were by what might look, on the surface, like a change in writerly direction. In fact the things that animate Will’s other books are manifest in this tale too: his superb prose, his fertile, slyly wrongfooting imagination, his engagement and range and potency. There is a kind of architectural solidity to this work (Will also writes, expertly, about contemporary architecture), but his distinctive skill is in the twist he gives to the realities he shares with us. Last Blade Priest is, in short, a great Fantasy novel, and I can’t wait for the next volume in the series. Because I rate the novel so highly, and as I’m working on a critical history of Fantasy, I wanted to ask him a few questions: about the book, and about Fantasy more broadly. In sum: buy his book !— links are at the bottom of the post.]
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AR: Let’s start with Fantasy. I’m curious what your perspective on the mode is, and how you see Last Blade Priest fitting into that tradition. It’s not — it seems to me — a particularly trope-y novel, where Fantasy is concerned: you don’t simply deploy those Tolkien/Dungeons and Dragons fixtures and fittings, heroic men, noble elves, stalwart dwarfs, evil orcs, mysterious wizards. Your elves are rather alarming, for one thing. And you have the Scary Big Birds. And a giant mountain that is also an actual god. Did you set out to thwart the expectations of genre cliché when you wrote this novel?
WW: I started writing The Last Blade Priest as a palate-cleansing kind of exercise, hoping to reinvigorate my writing in general by doing something that was purely for my amusement. I deliberately set out to do something which was very much in the fantasy tradition — an homage really. And one thing I was very certain that I didn’t want to do, this time anyway, was subvert anything — I didn’t want to do “a literary take on” fantasy, I didn’t want to play with irony or allegory, I didn’t want to timeslip or worldslip, and so on.
It annoys me when literary authors venture into SF&F and have to go through all these distancing rituals to explain that their stuff isn’t like that other stuff — which often has more to do with marketing and the way space is organised in bookshops than “snobbery”, although snobbery often does play a part. I wanted something that was “pure” fantasy, and shelved that way. I love novels that genre-bend and play games with readers’ boundary expectations — I’ve written at least one [2014’s The Way Inn] — but that was not what I wanted to do here.
However I did want to avoid cliches and anything that’s tired, so I did have a list of things I wasn’t going to do: no dragons. None of the “traditional” fantasy “races” — chiefly Elves, Dwarves, Orcs. (My Elves are Elves in name only). No “chosen one”*, no prophecies**, no secret/unsuspecting royal birth. I would try to find a “middle way” with my magic: it would have serious limitations and rules and not be soft do-anything magic, but it wouldn’t have pedantic, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying type rules with entirely predictable inputs and outputs. Do-anything magic can be a narrative problem in all sorts of ways, and nerdy rules-based “hard” magic can be interesting but I feel on an emotional level that magic should be wild and paradoxical and mysterious and have unintended consequences.
[* Arguably Anton breaks this rule but he’s not the messiah, just someone who’s passed vetting.]
[** Arguably I break this rule as well in a very small way but the important thing is there aren’t widely known & believed, legendary prophecies in the world and the magic users do not have the gift of foresight. (Sometimes insight.) It’s not that I dislike prophecy as a form of magic — on the contrary, I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on prophecy in the middle ages! — but I find it’s over-used as a way of adding because-I-said-so authority to a plot. That’s what I didn’t want to do]
For my races, besides the Elves, I tried to think of “fantasy” creatures that weren’t much used. Knomes are abominable snowmen, but of course you can’t call them that without making people smile, so I didn’t. (They were called yetis, or a similar word identifiable as yeti, in the earliest sketches, but that had the same issue.) Bindlings started as mummies but have evolved. I am worried I am sandblasting away layers of mystique here and leaving behind Abbott & Costello so maybe I should stop. And of course there’s the Custodians: obviously I like it when their originality is praised but honestly I’m not sure how original they are. They came out of a simple worldbuilding question — what creatures would get to a magic mountain first? — and I also owe a fairly obvious debt to Dark Crystal.
As for “heroic men” — I think flawed heroes, reluctant heroes and antiheroes, and unlikeable dudes just trying to get on in the world, and deliberately hero-less narratives, are almost as tired as “pure” heroes now. Heroism is an incredibly difficult concept to approach originally. The best recent take has been Abercrombie’s in the First Law books, where he has a pretty useless schmuck manipulated by a scheming wizard into looking like Aragorn in the eyes of the world, but only for said wizard’s own ends. Anton has noble qualities that are consistent with “heroism”, and is moreover increasingly aware that he has to be a hero. But a hero is ultimate a man or woman of action, and that’s what he finds difficult.
I digress, sorry. I think calling my antagonists “Elves”, and then settin g up the book so you think “pointy eared immortal snobs” and only see what they really are quite late on, was the only real bit of intentional thwarting of expectations I did. (There was one other way, I suppose: I wanted to start at the end, or rather start in the world’s most important and secret and well-defended location and then work outwards. A more “typical” fantasy narrative would have the Brink and the Mountain — as it might be, Mount Doom, or the Eye of the World — as the destination and narrative climax — which I do, but I also have another narrative that heads out from there. This is not hugely original but it was a governing part of my thinking.) In general my intentions towards the median fantasy reader were less confrontational, I wanted to interest and amuse and avoid the obvious.
In terms of what I wanted to do, the way that I wanted my book (and, I hope, its sequels, if I’m allowed to write them) to fit in with the broader tradition of fantasy: I didn’t really think in terms of a shopping list of tropes, but rather in terms of atmosphere, and how a book makes you feel. Atmosphere and feeling were what I took from my formative reading in the genre, and those are the qualities I wanted to think about in particular and to develop in the prose.
AR: What Fantasy did you read, growing up (and by ‘read’ I mean: read, watch, play). Do you still read Fantasy?
WW: Very mainstream, I think, and typical for a SFF-loving boy of the 1980s. Tolkien at the foundation: My mother read The Hobbit to me and my sister when we were very young indeed. She later loaned me her copies of Lord of the Rings and I read those. In between those I read all of the Narnia books and the Earthsea books. (As an aside, I think it was the seven Narnia books that gave me a taste for the rewards of “the epic” in the conventional blurby sense — the sense of achievement at getting through to The Last Battle.) My father recommended Peake’s Gormenghast novels and I loved the first two of those, hated the third. I read Pratchett and Fighting Fantasy choose-your-own adventures. Richard Adams was also very important: I read Watership Down and Plague Dogs, but also Shardik (my father had a copy), which was strange and thrilling and had a real sense of contact with an unfamiliar world. So my parents did valuable work! I also read William Horwood’s Watership Downalike (Watershipshape?) Duncton Wood books, which I remember enjoying to a surprising degree. I keep thinking of rereading them, but I fear I won’t enjoy them to any degree on a reread, and their memory will be sullied.
After Tolkien I pursued similar books, and I read a few of Brooks’s Shannara novels, a couple of Donaldson’s Illearth books, the first two or three Wheel of Time novels, but at this point I was getting diminishing returns. Brooks was readable but obviously derivative. Donaldson was more original but I found the books repulsive. I gave up on Wheel of Time very quickly because I felt it was just another Brooks-like retread, obviously it became much more its own thing as it went along. This rather put me off fantasy from the age of about eighteen (1996) for about a decade, alongside an entirely mistaken and dumb notion that I should put aside childish things. (Although I kept reading SF — probably revealing some prejudices there, although I have since shed them.) I did read, and greatly enjoyed, Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun in that late teen period of disillusion though. I should also mention HP Lovecraft who I’ve been reading since I was ten or eleven, and who led me to Ashton-Smith, Dunsany, etc etc and their weird fantasy, which is directly referenced in the geography of The Last Blade Priest. The Gothic and “weird” have been huge influences on me but I will go on forever if I get into that. Er, what else? Helliconia, Once and Future King — I can’t list everything but these are things that steered me one way or another.
Beyond books, trying to be as brief as possible: I adored comics and read 2000 AD for years, which had some excellent fantasy, notably Pat Mills’s Sláine and Nemesis the Warlock. I played some Dungeons and Dragons but preferred Warhammer Fantasy Battle, and WH40K, and I read White Dwarf. I think the art in White Dwarf affected me very deeply: Ian Miller, John Blanche, Gary Chalk. Simon Bisley and Mike McMahon’s art for Sláine as well, and Kevin O’Neill art for Nemesis. Art is very important. It’s amazing how a single book cover can lodge in the mind and shape fantasy worlds. I won’t recap all film & TV but I do think some of the stranger, darker cartoons we got to enjoy in the 80s helped a lot: Ulysses 31, Cities of Gold. And in films: we’ve talked about Dark Crystal, also Labyrinth, Laputa, Time Bandits …
AR: I ask this next question with a particular sense of Last Blade Priest in mind. It’s this: what is the proper balance, would you say, in a Fantasy novel between worldbuilding and storytelling/character/everything else? By worldbuilding I suppose I mean not just the geographical and social lineaments of the imagined realm, but coherent (or otherwise) magical systems, or religious systems? You’ve already partly answered this with respect to magic but I wonder about the larger question.
WW: I suppose the simple, true and useless answer is “I don’t know” — I don’t know what the perfect balance is, or even if there is a perfect balance. I certainly doubt there is a single perfect balance, as it must depend on the tastes of the reader as much as anything, and some have a higher tolerance for worldbuilding than others. There are some readers for whom it’s all about the worldbuilding, and they can’t have too much. I think the increasing emphasis on worldbuilding in the discussion around Fantasy is an interesting phenomenon, and possibly stems from this being an age driven by content creation, since world-building provides excellent material for secondary content … here’s everything are told about X (land/religion/magic system/whatever) … here’s what we don’t know, but can infer or speculate about; here’s why X is good … here are the shortcomings of X. Effective worldbuilding would of course seamlessly tie-into story-telling and character and so on, so they aren’t in competition for space on the page and unfold together. That’s the trick, I suppose, not finding a balance but finding a synthesis.
A very similar question applies within worldbuilding itself, the iceberg question. How much of “worldbuilding” should go on the page, and how much should be left in the author’s head? Naturally the author knows more than the reader and there’s always a portion of the iceberg that’s hidden away, that never makes it onto the page. But the proportion of hidden/revealed varies. Leave too much hidden, and the reader may struggle to follow what is happening to an unpleasant degree (a little struggling is pleasant exercise, but too much ….). Spew too much onto the page and you end up with pages-long digressions into history or magical technique or whatever, and that can also be a struggle. It’s my belief that the reader wants to feel that there is a lot of iceberg under the surface, out of sight, and that this was what gave Lord of the Rings such power, that immense treasury of imagined myth that meant the characters on the page could realistically make historical allusions or references and so on. It certainly felt that way to me, anyway. You want to feel that the history is there.
However I don’t mean that every fantasy novel needs a Silmarillion sitting behind it. It just needs to feel that way. Effective worldbuilding works largely in allusion, I think. The author might, in fact, be only a couple of steps ahead of the reader, and not know anything about the allusions they are making — Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you! — but as long as it has the right ring to it, it works, it intrigues and enchants and gives a sense of a rich living backdrop. And writers should be helped here by remembering that people (real people, and also characters in books) don’t have accurate pictures of their own history or literature.
I’ve talked about my feelings re magic already, but the role of religion is an important one as well. In a lot of fantasy religion is oddly muted, amounting to characters’ choice of mascot, or it doesn’t feature at all, supplanted entirely by myth and magic. What religion are the Hobbits, for instance?
AR: Preshobbiterian?
WW: Certainly not. And you can see why it gets muted, as religions are very complicated things to render in an effective way. They have a particular body of history, myth and literature of their own. They have power structures and social structures, sometimes more than one, in competition. They shape and direct the thinking and behaviour of their followers — sometimes in straightforward ways like dietary restrictions, but also in hugely subtle and important ways, like the way the concept of forgiveness sits at the heart of Christianity. That’s a lot of world to be built, and it’s the subtle philosophical influence of religion, the mindset, the way it guides characters’ choices and internal dilemmas, that is the hardest to create and to render realistically, in a way that’s still engaging to the reader. You can’t always gloss and contextualise a character’s feelings in cases where they’re very different to our own — “rather than anger he felt shame because of this or that aspect of what his upbringing said about this situation”. It can be done, of course, and some of the greatest fantasy does it very well, which contributes to its greatness, but it’s difficult. No wonder most authors don’t really get into it, and stick to “we worship the mouse god, that’s why I have a mouse on my clothes and we don’t eat cheese on Tuesdays” or whatever. Or religion is made entirely literal, and you know what the mouse god wants because she came down here and told you (cheese, I expect). This is really something I wanted to dig into in my own fantasy — the mindsets and philosophies,I mean, not the mouse god.
AR: But the Mouse God is Apollo — also god of poetry, and our — yours and mine — patron saint!
WW: To be honest I only said mouse because we have one as an unwanted tenant and they’ve been on my mind. We’ve been leaving him offerings in temples of doom.
AA: The next question is lengthy, though your answer may be as brief, or nonexistent, as you like. But I want to lay out one of the theses I’m interested in developing in my History of Fantasy, and I’m curious what you think of the argument it makes generally, and how you think it relates to a novel like Last Blade Priest specifically. It’s not my thesis, in fact: I’m nicking it from my friend Alan Jacobs, who published an essay a few years back called ‘Fantasy and the Buffered Self’ [The New Atlantis 41 (2014), 3–18]. Jacobs takes the idea of the ‘buffered self’ from Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who says this:
Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world. We might think of this as our having “lost” a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are “buffered” selves. We have changed.
Here is Jacobs’ gloss on the idea:
To put that shift in simple terms, a person accepts a buffered condition as a means of being protected from the demonic or otherwise ominous forces that in pre-modern times generated a quavering network of terrors. To be a pre-modern person, in Taylor’s account, is to be constantly in danger of being invaded or overcome by demons or fairies or nameless terrors of the dark — of being possessed and transformed, or spirited away and never returned to home and family. Keith Thomas’s magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) specifies many of these dangers, along with the whole panoply of prayers, rites, amulets, potions, chants, spells, and the like, by which a person might seek protection from the otherwise irresistible. It is easy, then, to imagine why a person — or a whole culture — might, if it could, exchange this model of a self with highly permeable boundaries for one in which the self feels better protected, defended — impermeable, or nearly so.
The problem with this apparently straightforward transaction, Jacobs notes, is that the porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic, while the buffered self is closed to both alike.
Those who must guard against capture by fairies are necessarily and by the same token receptive to mystical experiences. The “showings” manifested to Julian of Norwich depend upon exceptional sensitivity, which is to say porosity — vulnerability to incursions of the supernatural. The portals of the self cannot be closed on one side only. But the achievement of a safely buffered personhood — closed off from both the divine and the demonic — is soon enough accompanied by a deeply felt change in the very cosmos. As C. S. Lewis notes in The Discarded Image (1964), the medieval person who found himself “looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music” gives way to the modern person who perceives only emptiness and silence. Safety is purchased at the high price of isolation, as we see as early as Pascal, who famously wrote of the night sky, “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie” (“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me”).
I quote this at length because it seems to me so interesting. Anyway, to the point: Jacobs’ thesis is that a kind of yearning back towards porosity and its attendant enchantments is behind the great contemporary vogue for Fantasy:
Might it not be possible to experience the benefits, while avoiding the costs, of both the porous and the buffered self? I want to argue here that it is precisely this desire that accounts for the rise to cultural prominence, in late modernity, of the artistic genre of fantasy. Fantasy — in books, films, television shows, and indeed in all imaginable media — is an instrument by which the late modern self strives to avail itself of the unpredictable excitements of the porous self while retaining its protective buffers. Fantasy, in most of its recent forms, may best be understood as a technologically enabled, and therefore safe, simulacrum of the pre-modern porous self.
Do you think this is right? Does it have any point of connection with what you, as a writer of Fantasy, are doing?
WW: Yes, this all sounds very plausible. Though I think there is perhaps more porosity in the modern “buffered self” than we might at first believe, and we do have our own demons and rituals and amulets and so on — and possibly this tendency is increasing as modernist certainties fracture into a hall of mirrors. I am reminded of Carl Sagan’s much-circulated quote about “clutching our crystals, heading into a new Dark Age”, where information isn’t lost or suppressed, but is overwhelmed by the signal-to-noise ratio and the decline of commonly agreed authorities. There are quack cures and pseudoscientific charms — magnets, crystals, copper bands etc to ward off 5G rays — but you can also see ritualistic behaviour around public health measures of proven merit, like mask wearing. If we’re not getting a good signal on our phone, we raise it in the air, even when it makes little sense to do so. Send us your bars, oh lord …
There are those who have fallen prey to disinformation and conspiracy theories and who believe that satanic child-trafficking cults rule over us; but there’s also a counter-tendency to that which sees disinformation and the hand of the enemy everywhere, like puritans seeing the devil’s work, and has developed into a rigid and brittle kind of “rationalism” that I think of as junk scepticism. But I suppose a key difference is that many of these tendencies fester in our little media cocoons rather than through direct personal contact with people in the agora, which we should be doing more of. We might have a slightly better rational apparatus than the pre-modern villager, but to our disadvantage we spend a lot more time on our own in the dark, staring into the fire, seeing visions of Hell. There’s also medicalisation: birth and death mostly take place in the hospital, not at home, and have little in the way of ritual accompaniment. We’ve just seen a vast and fascinating ritual exercise unfolding in this country, following the death of the Queen, with attendant effusions of popular enthusiasm and ritual behaviour — notably The Queue, a pure pilgrimage, undertaken by many not in spite of how arduous it was, but because it was arduous, and a physical expression of depth of feeling. These things evidently matter.
In terms of whether these things connect to my work: they absolutely do. I studied history at university, specialising in medieval history — a choice which was probably partially influenced by my fondness for fantasy. And various works of history, ones that do a particularly excellent job of getting within the often alien-seeming minds of people in that long, varied era, have become touchstones for me — including Keith Thomas. I would also mention The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy, about iconoclasm and Protestantism and state versus popular religion; Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, about a Friulian miller who came to the attention of the religious authorities in the 17th century for, more or less, coming up with his own religion, or cosmology, based on rather eccentric reading — an absolutely exquisite book; and Peter Burke’s work, in particular Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. And I think it’s significant that when I started writing TLBP, I was reading John Julius Norwich’s three-volume history of the Byzantine Empire, although that wasn’t something I read at university. (Runciman’s history of the crusades was.)
But there were two books that I would say have mattered above any others. First is Johan Huizinga’s classic The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919), which does a remarkable job of conjuring the people of the middle ages, and their lives and beliefs and sensory universe, into being for the reader. “Luminous” is an overused word when it comes to describing books, but it applies here. He seizes the reader in the famous opening paragraphs, and does not let go — it’s an opening that connects very strongly to what you outline above:
“To the world when it was half a thousand years younger, the outline of all things seemed more clearly marked than to us. The contrast between suffering and joy, between adversity and happiness, appeared more striking. All experience had yet to the minds of men the directness and absoluteness of the pleasure and pain of child-life. Every event, every action, was still embodied in expressive and solemn forms, which raised them to the dignity of a ritual. For it was not merely the great facts of birth, marriage and death which, by the sacredness of the sacrament, were raised to the rank of mysteries; incidents of less importance, like a journey, a task, a visit, were equally attended by a thousand formalities: benedictions, ceremonies, formulas.
Calamities and indigence were more afflicting than at present; it was more difficult to guard against them, and to find solace. Illness and health presented a more striking contrast; the cold and darkness of winter were more real evils. Honours and riches were relished with greater avidity and contrasted more vividly with surrounding misery. We, at the present day, can hardly understand the keenness with which a fur coat, a good fire on the hearth, a soft bed, a glass of wine, were formerly enjoyed.”
I could happily quote on. Huizinga cemented my affection for the study of the Middle Ages by making it feel like a quest into this fascinating, sensually rich, lost world, and of course that has a bearing on what I like to get out of fantasy as a reader and a writer.
The second important book was Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, about millenarianism, apocalyptic cults, and waves of religious mania, which more or less lies at the foundation of The Last Blade Priest and (if I am allowed to write them) its sequels. These religious manias — flagellants, pogroms, sudden revolts, roving peasant-armies — are superficially baffling to us. People would throw away their lives for them. And it takes a great deal of scene-setting and explaining and social and cultural history to understand them, which is what Cohn provides. He calls the fever dreams that drove these manias “phantasies”, which is apt. A particular recurring feature of many of these movements supplied The Last Blade Priest with a crucial aspect of its plot, although I can’t say what because it will spoil it.
The common thread through all this is religion, rather than kings or queens or knights and horses. Which is why I wanted religion to be at the heart of my own fantasy — and ultimately why I want to try and create this same sense of religious mania, cults, crusades and so on, through the series. A world that is in an advanced state of decline, but that rottenness is causing dozens of weird flowers of possibility to bloom. This seemed like territory in which something original could be done, and informed all the choices I made.
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Buy The Last Blade Priest from: [UK] Angry Robot; Waterstones; Amazon; Kobo; Black Dragon; signed-copies from Broken Binding. [US] Penguin; Amazon
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