BBC对Susanna Clarke的访谈 （哪位同学请来翻译一下）
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As the publication of her much anticipated first novel - Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - approaches, we speak to the Nottingham born author Susanna Clarke.
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Who are your 5 favourite authors, and why? : c8 [$ z- v2 q% `1 a- L
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Jane Austen, who got as close to perfection as anyone can.
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Alan Moore, who, in the words of Jonathan Ross, causes middle-aged men (and women) to fall to their knees in comic shops, weeping in gratitude.
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) W+ x" y; k/ u" w5 \" N- e; k$ q3 |Charles Dickens: There is no one Dickens novel I could pick over all the others. Dickens is huge—like the sky. Pick any page of Dickens and it’s immediately recognizable as him, yet he might be doing social satire, or farce, or horror, or a psychological study of a murderer—or any combination of these.
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Neil Gaiman, who is the most audacious and surprising writer. In the first comic of his I read, he emptied Hell. I was quite shocked. I thought, Are you really allowed to do that? Apparently you are.
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[) g! a, | ]) J, zJoss Whedon and other assorted writers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not perfect. The plots often creak. But the dialogue is wonderful and the characterization is almost as good.
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Who or what was your biggest influence in deciding to become a writer? What inspired you to write Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell?0 E& r: {# `8 b" f- m4 ^/ z4 @/ m
" @% X: C. o' ^9 TBoredom, probably. And a restless, intrusive sort of imagination. I could always imagine more interesting places to be than where I was. And more interesting people than me being there. Eventually this led to making up stories and writing things down.
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I always really liked magicians. I’m not even sure why—except that they know things other people don’t and they live in untidy rooms full of strange objects. In C. S. Lewis’s Narnia stories there are only two magicians. One is weak and wicked, and the other barely gets two lines of dialogue. But they both fascinated me. One (the weak one) has a tray of magic rings, green and yellow, as shiny and bright as sweets. They’re magic, they’re jewellery and they look like scrummy sweets. What’s not to like?
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9 E* D8 }7 j% Q& p) G4 e; qIn Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell I wanted to create the most convincing story of magic and magicians that I could. The closest model was Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea stories. While you’re reading them, magic seems perfectly real. You feel it must exist and it must be just as Le Guin describes.
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It seemed to me that you make magic real by making it a little prosaic, a little difficult and disappointing—never quite as glamorous as the other characters imagine. As one of the characters says in Strange & Norrell: "
Magic! Do not speak to me of magic! It is just like everything else, full of setbacks and disappointments." That’s a very key statement.
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Is there any particular ritual involved in your writing process (favorite pen, lucky charm, south-facing window)?
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I can write most places. I particularly like writing on trains. Being between places is quite liberating, and looking out of the window, watching a procession of landscapes and random-ish objects, is very good for stories. I like darkened rooms too, and lamplight, and the sound of rain. On sunny afternoons I’ve been known to draw the curtains, switch on the light and play a CD of rain falling. It creates a sort of quiet, private world which helps writing sometimes.
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6 k6 F: s- T% U- p& u4 Z4 w- }Were Jonathan Strange, Mr Norrell and the Raven King modelled after any historical figures?
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Not really. Their antecedents are mostly literary. Strange has a touch of Byron in him, I suppose, and a little of the eighteenth-century rakes—Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses and so forth. I wanted him to have a little wickedness in him—or the potential for wickedness, at any rate.
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The Raven King had an odd genesis. Ursula Le Guin has a magician in the Earthsea trilogy who has no name: the Grey Mage of Plan, whose magic was so dubious, his name was forgotten. And there’s a magician in The Lord of the Rings, right at the very end, who comes out of Mordor to do battle against our heroes, and no one knows his name because he himself has forgotten it. I thought this was rather cool, and when I was developing my magicians, I wanted one without a name. Unfortunately I hadn’t quite understood what would happen if I had a major character without a name. The consequence has been that he has
acquired more names than most people: the Raven King, John Uskglass, the Black King, the King of the North and a fairy name that no one can pronounce.
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$ o0 _# Y8 e& t' O5 rMr. Norrell is more difficult. The only person I can think of that he might be based on is me. We share the same hobbies: staying at home, surrounded by books and not answering the phone. I think I got him originally from a jigsaw puzzle. It was a really great jigsaw with a picture of a huge library and two or three old gentlemen with eighteenth-century wigs reading books. I carried the image of that library around in my head for years until I knew what to do with it.
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How do you feel knowing your book is being touted as the next Harry Potter or Harry Potter for adults?
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I don’t take it very seriously. I don’t think there ever could be another Harry Potter—it’s such a unique phenomenon. And I don’t think there could ever be an adult Harry Potter. Harry Potter reaches into children’s imagination and takes them over. It enchants them. It would be wonderful to think that any of my readers might be enchanted in the same way. But I think it’s harder for adults to be enchanted --it’s hard for them to switch off their critical faculties and just be swept along by the story.
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3 B7 K# k7 m( @* @Comparisons with other books are useful as rough guidelines for readers. If you like Harry Potter/Jane Austen/The Quincunx/Instance of the Fingerpost, then maybe you’ll like this—or maybe you won’t. Readers are very sharp people—they’ll know how to take such claims.
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How long did it take you to write Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell? How much historical research did you have to do?
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7 S% l3 a1 h9 \* Z9 KIt took rather more than ten years, which is a crazy amount of time to spend on anything—except building a cathedral, growing a garden or educating a child.
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7 L7 R& l" R( ^9 C% x+ ~/ ^I did a lot of historical research, obviously, particularly politics and military history, and stuff about London and Venice. I enjoyed the military history much more than I expected. There are many, many eyewitness accounts of battles and campaigning, which make military much more immediate and vital than other kinds of history—you can easily discover what it felt like to be a soldier and what their everyday concerns were. Some of the people I came upon in the research made it into the book as minor characters: the exploring officer, Colquhoun Grant, and the chaplain, Samuel Briscall, for instance. Samuel Briscall was a great character to research. As far as I could tell there’s only ever been one article written about him. It’s about four pages long. I found it, read it—research done! So much easier than Wellington.
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+ Y& S& `9 H7 [5 }$ Z6 XDo you have a favourite character?: @: e2 g8 Y6 l- @( b9 A0 \) k; x5 R" _ a2 B
$ s7 `9 j, F5 z7 e- qStrange, Norrell and I are like three people who’ve worked very closely together for a long time: We know each other a little too well and we don’t really want to socialize together. My favourite character is probably Childermass. He’s the one I’d most happily meet at the pub and have a drink with. He was meant to be a villain at the beginning, but I realized that he’s more complex than that. I love that he’s so subversive and independent—but he’s also (I hope) a man of his period. He begins as a servant and, although he’s very bright, he knows he can’t expect much more from life, so he sort of makes do with his position.
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What’s next for you? What’s next for Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell?
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' j5 g4 I. [: C% A" eThe next book will be set in the same world and will probably start a few years after Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell finishes. I feel very much at home in the early nineteenth century and am not inclined to leave it. I doubt that the new book will be a sequel in the strictest sense. There are new characters to be introduced, though probably some old friends will appear too. I’d like to move down the social scale a bit. Strange and Norrell were both rich, with pots of money and big estates. Some of the characters in the second book have to struggle a bit harder to keep body and soul together. I expect there’ll be more about John Uskglass, the Raven King, and about how magic develops in England.
