Fenland

It was my birthday over the weekend and I went with my wife and son to Wicken Fen here in Cambridgeshire.  It is an area of ancient fenland owned by the National Trust and we have been there many times before.  It was rather wet underfoot after torrential rain the day before, but it was warm and bathed in sunshine.  As always with this part of the world, the sky is the main feature - huge and wide, like in a Dutch landscape painting.

Although we have been before, we had never been on the little boat trip along the lodes - the ancient transportation ditches.  The one we were on for most of the short journey was 'only' 8th Century or thereabouts, but the long, wide and straight one we turned around in was one of the many Roman lodes - in continual use since they were first dug all those centuries ago.  

Advance copies...

My box of advance copies of The Dead Men Stood Together arrived today.  Very exciting.  Only a few weeks until publication.

More illustrations searching for a story....

Another couple of experiments from the studio.  They are not for anything exactly - they are just images that popped into my head.  In fact the skull-headed woman started off with a perfectly normal head when I started the picture.

I have a lot of plans for illustrated books and I need to get myself back into a way of working that will suit those ideas.  Readability is hugely important in illustration, clearly - if it is important to the image that a figure is smiling rather than scowling, then that must be clear.  But often this clarity becomes a kind of pedantry.  That is what I'm trying to avoid.

Flexing old muscles

I have been playing around in the studio, using black and white acrylic paint on a smooth surfaced watercolour paper.  This head isn't for anything in particular - it's just me trying to get back into illustration after a bit of a sabbatical.

There will be more in due course....

Early work

We went to the Courtauld Gallery in London on Monday.  I haven't seen the collection in a long time and my son had never seen it.  There is a lot of work there, but not so much that it becomes overwhelming.  Somerset House is worth the visit on its own, with its terrace overlooking the Thames (although the Embankment has robbed it of its river frontage and the river gate it once had is now redundant).  It is a reminder of the time when this stretch of the river was home to great mansions and the river was vital for transport.

More and more, when I visit galleries with a mixed collection like this, I find myself detained longest by the early work.  Admittedly, some of that interest comes from a patina accrued by age and damage, a texture and distressed surface never intended by the artist, but often I just find the imagery and the way in which the image is designed, more appealing.  I love the restraint and stillness in Renaissance - especially Northern Renaissance - portraiture.  Above all, I think I admire the clarity.  It is the opposite of what we have come to accept as 'painterly', but all that shows is how restrictive and biased that term is.

A painted ship upon a painted ocean

I often get asked what books I enjoyed when I was young and the question and the answers I give are usually confined to the literary merits of the books in question.  But this is rarely the only answer I could give.

I will often say - quite truly - that I loved the work of Rosemary Sutcliff, for instance, or Henry Treece. But whilst I did indeed love their books, it was the illustration work of Charles Keeping that first made me take them from the library shelf.

I have always sought out illustrated fiction and was (and am) an avid reader of comics.  I trained as an illustrator and was an illustrator for twenty years before I began my career as a writer.  More and more, I find myself recalling what an impact illustrations can have when paired with the right story.

My next book, The Dead Men Stood Together, is my take on Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  The poem was read to me when I was young - about eight or nine - and I think it must have been the strangest thing I had heard up to that point - with perhaps the exception of Greek myths (another minor obsession of mine when I was young).

I don't know if I was shown the famous Gustave Doré illustrations to a nineteenth century edition of poem then, or whether that came later, but it feels like they have always been linked.  I find it hard to think of the poem without thinking of his work.  Doré's incredible imagination together with his technical ability and the hallucinatory quality of the metal engraving technique, seems to be a perfect match.  He also produced extraordinary images for Dante's The Divine Comedy.

I know that for some people illustrations are an intrusion, but all I can say is that is never the case for me unless the illustrations are poor or mismatched.  Timidity in illustration is a curse, and illustrators who are over-respectful of the work they are illustrating rarely produce anything worth seeing.  'Classics' still get illustrated, but rarely by anyone with the chutzpah to take on the work and bring something fresh to it.  I don't blame the illustrators - I think this is a problem at the commissioning stage.  Books do not need to be illustrated.  They should only be illustrated if the illustrations are going to add something.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has been illustrated many times by many different illustrators, but it must have been difficult for them to escape from Doré's shadow.  The British writer and illustrator, Mervyn Peake, was one who managed this brilliantly in the twentieth century, when he illustrated an edition during the second world war.  Peake's illustrations are disturbing in a different way to Doré's, who in the main is simply visualising Coleridge's words.  Peake brings a dark, psychological edge to his work.  These illustrations seem to reflect Peake's own fragile mental state at the time.  A few years later, in 1945, he would be one of the first civilians to see the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, when he visited Belsen as a war artist.  

Doré's work seems perfect until you see Peake's.  And that's how it should be.  Each illustrator should make us look at the words again.  But how many of today's publishers would commission an artist like Peake to illustrate a classic work?

And why - and I am asked this a lot too - if I am such an admirer and proponent of illustrated fiction, do I not illustrate my own work?  Well, more and more, I am beginning to wonder about that myself....

The body of my brother's son

Next month sees the publication of The Dead Men Stood Together.  Advance copies have already gone out to reviewers and some have contacted me via Twitter.  I will be doing very well if I get a better review than the one I have just received from The Bookbag.

Although, I feel I should say that I didn't invent the character of the mariner's nephew.  There is the line in the poem:

The body of my brother's son 
Stood by me knee to knee

I tell the story from that character's viewpoint.  This allowed me to step back from the tale the mariner tells and question it.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has clearly been a special work for many people, and I hope that it will continue to intrigue and obsess younger readers.  Although poetry may seem artificial at first glance, it never feels that way to me.  At its best, it seems to reach into your subconscious and spark images and emotions as real as a memory.  It seems to operate more on the level of a dream - a shared dream.

I have tried to keep that hypnotic, dreamlike quality that is so much part of the Ancient Mariner, and as with Mister Creecher and Frankenstein, I hope that my book may take readers back to the source that inspired me.