by David Alexander (1991)

You've taken to describing yourself as a fabulist. How would you define 'fabulist' and 'fabulism'?
The term fabulist was primarily used about South American magical realists - Marquez, Borges and so on. But I think it has a wider application. One of the dictionary definitions is a liar, which doesn't hurt! The maker of fables, the maker of fictions which are clearly fabulous in some way or other, seems a more useful catch-all for the kind of work that I do than, certainly, 'horror' fiction, which I've moved out of and yet haven't, because maybe I was never there in the first place. Certainly any science fiction fan would not feel too positive about me describing myself as a science fiction writer. And fantasy doesn't quite fit either, because fantasy is all too often associated, in the reader's and book-buyer's mind, with Tolkien and CS Lewis and with a kind of alternative-world fiction which really doesn't have a huge amount to do with the here and now. The idea of fable is attractive because fable uses metaphor to appeal to the reader's sense of his or her self in the real world, and to analyse and illuminate the real world. I suppose classically our first encounter with fable is Aesop, in which animals talk and do remarkably human things, and at the end of it, in the best of these fables, we are led to some kind of illumination through a description of some fantastical activity or other And so that's pretty much where I'm coming from as far as fabulism is concerned.

I noticed, certainly in Cabal and The Great and Secret Show, that almost every character goes through some kind of transformation or transfiguration...
Sometimes physical!

And it seems to be the dominant motif, certainly in your recent work, this idea of change and metamorphosis.
Yes.

I suppose, implicitly, there's the idea of movement, perhaps to a higher state. Some of them drop back?
Yes, I think that's right. I feel as though, right from my early fiction, I have been interested in the idea of a fiction of transcendence of some kind or other. At the very least a fiction of change, and at best a fiction of transcendence. Even in stories, going back to the Books of Blood where, classically, you would view the transformation in negative terms...

I did a story called 'The Twilight of the Towers', a sort of Le Carre meets werewolf story, the werewolf characters achieve a kind of transcendence by transforming into wolves. Whereas with the usual werewolf structure, if you like, the narrative is about a return to primitive, bestial, in-humane states from which the victim seeks to be released. I posited a drama in which that was actually a moving to something better and rarer and stranger, something that one would actually seek out. So I think even in the early fiction I was really liking to push the idea of transcendence.

The fiction of the fantastic, I think, has always preoccupied itself with certain key movements. I think those movements are essentially religious, when I say movements I don't mean in the sociological sense but in the spiritual sense. The figure of the shaman who appears, named as such, for the first time in The Great and Secret Show, but whose earlier manifestations have actually been in other books, is almost representative of that journey-taker. The shaman's position within the tribe is to be a sort of go-between, between the ghost-world, the worlds of the dead and the ancestors arid the minor divinities, of the haunting spirits on the one hand, and the tribe and common-life on the other. And the shaman goes off, takes his or her dream-trip, ventures into these places and comes back with, hopefully, insights, sometimes healing insights, spiritual insights, news from the gods, news from the ancestors. I think in a weird sort of way the writer of the fantastique is doing the same sort of thing, on a much simpler level, obviously, on a much less intimate level, because you don't get to meet the tribe you're serving. But the trip into the sub-conscious which the writer takes, particularly the writer of the fantastique, and then comes back, if he or she is reporting at all truthfully, is interestingly paralleled by the shammanistic journey.

What we've lost, I think, is the commercial success that's attended so much fantastical writing of late, is a sense of what it's really there for. So that in all these, you know, sword and sorcery sagas, for want of a better phrase, in all these Stephen King pastiches which lesser writers create, in all the splatterpunking and cyberpunking that goes on, when writers like Gibson have already forged the way and done something extra-ordinary, in all of that stuff, which tends to be very diluted, the spark, the inspiration which makes those forts interesting in the first place, has very often disappeared. I am perfectly certain that most of the writers who are writing, you know, five-part series with Spelldragon or Thorne in the title, and an Of or The, are separated from the imaginative force which connects their lives to that fiction. Like movie brats, they're making books about books they've liked, rather than about what their lives are. And that's a very dangerous thing to do; you end with the husk, the for, but none of the content. When CS Lewis was writing about that stuff, when Barry was writing about that stuff, when Peake was writing... Now they were all writing different forms of fantasy, but, nevertheless, they were writing out of very personal, very private urges and endeavours, which they were finding within the fantastical arena; finding forms to express, in Barry's case, an incredible sense of loss; in fact, a sense of loss very often comes behind, a sense of yearning... I don't think that personal connection, that connection with the emotional lifeblood, if you like, that makes writing useful and significant, is there amongst so much of the writing in the area of the fantastic.

It's interesting that you mention shamen, because the immediate thing I think of is the idea of the writer as shaman, and of course the poet as shaman.
Right.

Rimbaud, the poet as 'thief of fire'; Baudelaire, the poet as the 'prince of the clouds'; Shelley, 'the unacknowledged legislator of the world'; this sort of very romantic idea or ideal of the writer as somebody who taps into the subconscious etc, and somehow offers humanity great insights and all the rest of it. Certainly Shelley implied the writer was some kind of prophet and visionary; and at that time there was also Blake and Coleridge, of course. In a slightly different form you'd go along with that?
Of course I would. Absolutely. If I had to name one great hero, it's William Blake. That whole area of English letters, which includes Shelley and Coleridge and, actually, Wordsworth, although, because, he's viewed much more as a realistic poet most of the tine, the visionary elements of his work are often overlooked, I think. But 'The Prelude' is full of extraordinary visionary passages, you know, the scene in Snowden and so on. Of course, an opium fix doesn't hurt once in a while, fuelling these imaginings!

The idea of the writer as somebody who can still make a very personal and intimate journey into a public pronouncement of some kind or other is, I think, very important, more important now, I think, than ten or twenty years ago, because the other media are so dominant, and, in my own estimation, I say this as somebody who occasionally makes films, so much less important, for lots of reasons, which is probably another conversation. One still values painting and writing and, of course, music, though that's an area I just look at, agog, from afar; it really is a magical activity to me, I don't know how anybody does it; it's like higher mathematics, it's just an extraordinary thing people do... and isn't it wonderful that they do. But of the things I do, painting and imagemaking and writing are far more important to me, and significant, in the way I hope the future will view me, than movies could ever be. And so it becomes even more important, as far as I'm concerned, to hold to and value and constantly reassess the media in which these visionaries you listed worked.

Actually there are some much later examples. You mentioned early nineteenth century examples, but there are a few twentieth century examples as well. I think on the fringes of surrealism, for instance, one finds, albeit garbed in a different way, similar desires to legislate, even if it's legislating on behalf of chaos. There's a desire in Ernst, for instance, to really be a poet of the imagination, and, yes, he doesn't want to lay the law down, he doesn't want to lay a system down in the same way as Shelley certainly did, and Blake certainly did, my God, what a system maker! But, nevertheless, the idea is clearly to introduce into the culture some ideas which really come from the trust deep-seated mythological places.

So, yes, I value more and more highly, the more we become an MTV culture, the more we are trivialised by the culture we feed upon, the more important it seems to me to value doing that, and, at the same time, seeking a populism which is the only democratic expression of that. That's the tough thing. I mean, Shelley was actually a popular poet. I mean, everybody knew who Shelley was; he was a figure of his age. Blake wasn't, of course. Wordsworth certainly was.

The thing which infects our culture is the idea that populism, the desire to make democratic statements in fictional or poetic form, is somehow or other a receding from genius, which is so much to do with a kind of nineteenth century attitude to art.

I find it interesting that you mention MTV culture, modern, post-industrial culture. I rather like this culture. Obviously it's very different from the older forms of culture, but there's something about it I like. I do like its disposability and ephemerability.
I hate those things! I mean, I turn on MTV and have a good time with it, but we have our three-score years and ten, and as practitioners in a particular area of art the idea of making something disposable turns my guts to ash. To spend the amount of time and anger and all that stuff making something which is really tomorrow's chip-paper is to reduce oneself to the status of Alexander Walker! And that's a long way down!

Although I say that, although I talk about disposable culture, I suppose it's most obvious in pop music...
Yes.

But there've been great pop records made. For example, in the early 80s there was a band called The Cars... I can't for the life of me remember the name of the song, but it was obviously intended as a kind of disposable pop song, but it has lasted, certainly my mind. So these things can last.
Well, you see, but then you've actually called the bluff of your own... Because it's not actually its ephemerability, you're actually extolling the things which actually break the bounds of their description. I agree with that. If you say one likes pop music because once in a while something comes along that is just for eternity...

I mean, have you seen Ghost?

No.
They use the Righteous Brothers' 'Unchained Melody', brilliantly, in the movie. And I don't knew when that was recorded, '65 maybe, somewhere in the mid 60s, [but] it's fabulous, it still works, twenty-five years on. I mean, it's a chill-down-the-spine number to hear it. And I love it. Blake said, 'Eternity is in love with the products of time.' You know, something comes along which somehow or other makes, within a popular area...

I love musicals, for instance, Broadway musicals, and I love popular music. I suppose the popular music I really like is associated with those musicals. But Cole Porter, for instance, fab! He was writing pop music, absolutely, he was writing stuff which I think he probably thought was quite disposable, but a lot of it's great still.

Someone in a recent issue of i-D, I think, was talking about the trouble British writers, arid indeed British film-makers, have with popular culture, with popular cultural forms. The question was, if I recall correctly, why isn't there a British Thomas Pynchon, someone who writes 'high-brow' stuff and 'low-brow', because he's dealing with... I mean, in his most recent novel you have everything from The Tibetan Book of the Dead right down to 'slasher' pics, like Friday the 13th. So he's a 'literary' writer dealing with forms that're not considered 'literary'.
It's not Anita Brookner stuff! I have two observations on that. One, on The Great and Secret Show, The New York Times Review of Books said if you don't like the new Thomas Pynchon try the new Clive Barker, which was one of the nicest things anybody's ever said. And it was kind of interesting, they were talking about the new Pynchon and saying, you know, if this doesn't suit you, here's a guy who's doing something similar but doing it in a different area, which I found kind of interesting. The second thing is, Pynchon doesn't have popular appeal, truly. We're talking about a literary writer who is extremely difficult, in truth. I don't know, I didn't see the I-D piece you're making reference to, so it's very difficult to make any informed judgement on that. But on the observation you make, it seems to me that what Pynchon does, as a cultural magpie, which is very interesting, is, nevertheless, unrelated, in truth, to the real democracy of writing. I am much more interested in getting to the parts Pynchon doesn't reach, you know, and there's a lot of 'em. I think you've got to have an ambition for your work, and part of my ambition is that I mingle the popular form and the high-art tradition, but bury the high-art ambition so deeply that it never bothers the reader. The reader doesn't think, 'Oh God, this is hard work!'

Another writer who might be described as a populist is JG Ballard. I mean, everybody I know who reads 'seriously', it's a terrible thing to say, 'seriously', I mean they're not the kind of person who picks up the first crappy thing...
Daniella Steele!

Nearly everybody I know has read him and admired him. The interesting thing about his writing is that he, too, is interested in myths, and he uses the stuff of everyday life to create the myths, cars, high-rise towers, concrete islands and so on. He transforms them into these marvellous mythical...
I agree. I'm also a huge admirer of Jim. Jim was not selling very well until Empire of the Sun came along, and I don't think he's ever been given the kind of critical... Maybe now, but only maybe...

Empire of the Sun came along and a lot of critics came out of the woodwork and said, 'Oh, what a good writer!' Well, people like you and your friends, and me and my friends, had know that for a fuck of a long time. When Jim went back to doing the stuff he'd done before, with The Day of Creation, the critics' enthusiasm, though it was still there, wasn't there as strongly, because they're made nervous by, this is the classical problem, the strange and fantastical. They feel they don't have the vocabulary of criticism, and because they don't have the vocabulary I think they feel... they'd rather say nothing at all if they possibly can, but if they're obliged to review, they'll review very cautiously. It's not very often that Jim gets the kind of real celebration he deserves, that so many other poorer writers in this country...

When you think of the column inches wasted on Anita Brookner which could be given over to Jim Ballard, you know. And Ballard's so much more interesting. But the vocabulary of criticism, I don't believe, is for the most part there. I don't think the newspapers, the Sunday newspapers, the heavyweights, quote, unquote, can know how to describe the affect that Ballard has as a writer. And I think that that's a particularly poor reflection on English criticism, 'cos I think the Americans are actually much better at it.

The interesting thing is that your form of imaginative writing, although there are similar roots, the surrealists being the obvious, of course, seems to me to come somewhere between the Ballardian sensibility and conventional fantasy. I mean, you're still using the good v. evil idea...
Though it always gets subverted somewhere down the litre! Again, going back to that New York Times review, they described The Great and Secret Show as a cross between Gravity's Rainbow and The Lord of the Rings, which seemed to me to be hugely indigestible, but in the sense that that reflects exactly what you're saying, yeah, yeah, I think that's right. Part of it is that I like some of the direct, traditional roots of what we'd call classic fantasy. I've always liked the invented world, the quest - the structures which inform, if you like, post-Tolkien fantasy, and via him go back to folkloric and mythological roots - that always strikes me as being interesting. Not, however, because the roots themselves are terribly interesting, but because Jung had an enormous amount to say about that absolute application, and it's their psychological application that I find fascinating. So it seers to me that you can use those roots afresh, you can use the folkloric stuff afresh. It's the absence of insight into... For an awful lot of fantasy writers it's almost as though Jung and Freud never existed; it's almost as though those insights into the subtextual life of those tinges had never been offered up in any form.

My trouble with most conventional fantasy is that it's as if the industrial revolution had never happened.
Well, of course, you're right. But I think part of that is actually a wilful desire, almost a child-like desire, to return to a simpler structure, a feudal social structure, in which you had a boss to blame, and the boss was the baron, you know, and magic was somehow a solution, as opposed to another form of complexity, which is what religion is. It seems to me that that medievalism is in fact a profound form of conservatism, which manifests itself and also allows you all kinds of other things which simplify the world horribly. I mean, look for the sex in Tolkien, it ain't there.

To be fair, in The Silmarillion, although obviously he's a man of his time, there's a fair amount of, I mean there's Luthien and Beren, and there's the story of Turin Turambar, the incest thing, so it is there...
But I was just going to say, it's very very subdued. And it tends to be of a very conventional kind. Very often there are misogynistic overtones to a lot of sword and sorcery fantasy.

A lot of it is positively fascistic.
Well there's that, too. I feel very uncomfortable with certain elements of that tradition, and very interested in others. My favourite book, probably to my dying day, is Peter Pan, because it's the first invented-world book I ever read, and it impressed me with a very simple idea; that one day the windows would open and you'd be gone, you'd be out of this fuck-up. And, in a way, that's never gone away; the simple stuff always torches you.

I found it interesting that you should cast David Cronenberg as Decker in Nightbreed. Now David Cronenberg could be said to represent a newish kind of horror, which is based on science and technology.
And I think he parallels Ballard in some ways.

But I found it interesting that you should, first of all, cast him as a serial killer, the great archetype of modern horror; then, further, you should have him eventually ally himself with humanity against the Nightbreed, the monsters, who could be said, in a way, to represent a kind of old horror.
You're not wrong, I think you're right.

Which I thought was kind of interesting...
It's an insight missed by Barry Norman! Most insights are missed by Barry Norman! You're right. The thing for me was his doing what will probably be the last horror movie I'll do for a while, was the idea of colliding two traditions, very consciously. I mean, the movie is a series of riffs. My two favourite descriptions of the movie: one was that it was an Indiana Jones odyssey on acid, which I very much liked; and the other was that it was like a series of trailers, which is not wrong. It is, it's like a series of trailers for a whole bunch of movies, interweaving arid colliding and then going off at various directions. It's a series of moments from traditions, if you like.

It's unfair on David, that casting, deeply unfair on him, because - and I think this is one of the reasons why he did it - the new horror which he represents, 'Long live the new flesh', is so much more interesting than the tradition he's representing in the movie. Stalk 'n' slash is a very uninteresting sub-genre...

I think it is a pretty dull genre. So I wanted to kind of collide that with, as you rightly say, a much older tradition, which is this kind of fantastical tradition of monsters, which is fairy-tale as much as anything. It's going into the enchanted wood and finding around every corner some kind of strange beast; and you're not absolutely sure whether they mean you good or harm. The great thing about fairy-tale is the dark woods are full of all kinds of creatures, they're all pretty ugly, but some of them are good guys, you know. I've always loved Arthur Rackham's drawings from that point of view, because very often the good guys in Arthur Rackham are kind of ugly-looking beasts, little dwarves and elves and things, with noses that are four feet long. Wonderful creatures.