Tim Wynne-Jones By Melanie Fogel Volume 16 Number 6 1988 "If you think you have nothing to learn from a hole, I suggest you have not examined your life closely enough." Canadian writer Tim Wynne-Jones, author of Odd's End and The Knot for adults and several books for children including Zoom at Sea and Zoom Away, stopped in Ottawa during his book tour promoting his new novel Fastyngange and talked with CM reviewer Melanie Fogel. We present highlights from their conversation. The portrait of Tim Wynne-Jones lurks inside the back cover of his latest novel, Fastyngange. The photograph is of a burly intellectual, a philosopher of the streets. The man Tim Wynne-Jones arrives at CLA headquarters. Despite this being the seventh interview of a rainy September day, he is alert and charming, an articulate, congenial collocutor. He settles into the unsettling confines of the boardroom and talks about his craft: "I write a novel to find out something. I write lots of other things where that isn't the problem. When I write a radio play--and I've written a lot of them (I'm good at that; I've won an ACTRA award)--I have to hand in a two page summary to a producer, who will buy it based on that. So I know everything that's going to happen. With a novel I don't do that. I just set out to find out something and each novel is therefore going to be different. "The story comes before the genre. It makes its presence known and you go fishing for the right medium. It's like a fish under the water and you've got to find the right lure to get it out. "Writers use anything that's out there, including the categories of other books, and if an idea requires the medium of a genre, or using part of a genre, that's just the same as deciding to set your book in Sri Lanka, because Sri Lanka's out there, too. So are genres; they're just as real for a writer. "Categories are hard to deal with. When The Knot was given a glowing review in the Globe and Mail. My editor at M&S was upset because it was reviewed by the mystery critic. She had thought William French would do it. "I love writing but [writing as a way to immortality] is a notion you have to get rid of pretty quickly. It's what gets people into writing, I know. I'm sure I thought that way when I started. If you don't learn quickly that you're not even remotely famous, it's terribly disappointing, because you're constantly meeting people who've never heard of you. When I go on reading tours, children ask me if I'm famous, to which I say, 'Not even vaguely.' " He speaks without affectation or illusion, a creator of fictions at ease with reality and intimately acquainted with both: "I'm not altogether convinced that reality is all that real. So much of it is perception. We invent the world as we look at it--l'm not the first to say that. We've all been guilty of making decisions based on misinterpretations of events and fabricating a history for those misinterpretations.... The news is the greatest fiction of our age. It's frightening because it's seen from one tiny, limited point of view. Those Americans who shot down that airliner in the Middle East had every reason to believe that what was happening was a real act of warfare, when in fact it was a fiction.... We have to be very aware of the fact that we live in a kind of fictional world. "Juggling truths, that's how I try to live.... A constant juggling act of different perceptions of the way the world is. That's probably why I get really angry at fundamentalists of any sect. Because what they've said is, 'Okay, I've finally decided that this is true.' And then, ' Whew! This is great! Now I don't have to believe anything different ever again in my entire life. And if something doesn't fit into this narrow viewpoint, then I'll pervert it until it does.' And you can't live in this world that way. You've got to accept that there are other people who have a completely valid vision of the way the world works. "I don't have the arrogance to assume I have any sense of what's going on, and I don't like it when people do. It's all a juggling act [pantomiming a juggler]; this is true...and this is true...and this is true...and I can keep it up; it requires using your brain. "Everything in a work of fiction is ultimately fiction. Even if you write a kitchen-sink reality book, even if it's autobiographical, it's still fiction.... Fiction is nothing more than a fantastic world made up of real, or recognizably real, objects. American poet Marianne Moore] referred to it as 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them.'" We are working under a handicap. Fastyngange does not end the way it begins. Indeed, it metamorphoses through realities severally discrete, yet each redefined by the other. It's difficult enough to discuss a book whose ending should not be revealed, but how does one talk about a work whose beginning is dependent on its ending? "This book is all about Nothing, the most scary thing of all: when Nothing starts talking back to you; and how you answer it? It's also a black comedy. "It started off as a children's story about a little boy with a toy castle with an oubliette in it. He makes himself small and goes down. But when it was written, there was something horribly sad about it...tinged with a kind of morbidity. There was obviously something there that I wanted to explore in a much more developed way. "Fastyngange starts off very deliberately as a Gothic romance. A crumbling castle in Somerset--what else could it be? But if it were to be a Gothic romance, it would end on that same note--on some stormy night, with Alexis being rescued by some man. In the end, Alexis redeems herself; this is something that could never happen in a Gothic romance. "I know what Alexis is like: I've been living with her a while. But I don't care so much about what she's like as a woman as I do about how she deals with this enormous, pathological predicament. She could never be a character from a Margaret Atwood novel; quite frankly, I wouldn't dream of her becoming one. She's a protagonist who owes more to The Castle of Otranto than to anything in contemporary literature. Another thing that militates against Alexis' becoming a contemporary character is the rhythm of the book, which is one that owes more to the thriller. "A few years ago, I wouldn't have dared to write a female protagonist. If Alexis is not entirely a female character, she is undoubtedly my anima, to use Jung's term, just as Maria in Zoom at Sea is. "Fastyngange is a blending of different genres, different fictions, but there are also layers of truths, and I want them to be read at all those levels. I want all [the things that happen] to be true and none of them to be true. That's the way I want the book to be read." Tim is an artist--as well as teacher, musician, book designer and "Daddy." He also writes award-winning books for children, but he doesn't illustrate them: "I can't illustrate my own books. I have a mental block-I don't know why--but it's deep-seated. In the Zoom books, before I went to a publisher, I went to Ken [Nutt]. Now, that isn't the way things are done in publishing, but I'd seen his work in an art gallery and I wrote a story for him to illustrate. We went to a publisher after three drawings were done. "Because my background is in art, I do tend to get involved with the bookmaking process. That's a luxury that, unfortunately, other writers don't have. The best and most important input you ever have is agreeing with the publisher on an artist; at which point, if you really believe in that artist, you've got to step right back. It's like a marriage--I wouldn't want one where my wife did everything I wanted her to do. "[The choice of colour illustrations] is not an economic decision, but it is a publisher's decision. With Zoom we wanted to do a black-and-white book. Ken is a brilliant draughtsman and we wanted to make a point about black and white. I grew up on black and white and I still believe in it. We're far too ruled by Technicolor. Don't get me wrong, I love [seeing colour in my books], but Zoom at Sea is in its sixth printing." We've talked over our allotted time. Tim has to go (to a hotel for a well-deserved rest, I hope). If it's been a grind, he doesn't let me know. "I love discussing books with people. I'm curious to know how the novel holds up under a different kind of scrutiny. Of course, everybody isn't going to see it the way I see it." He exits, grinning. Books by Tim Wynne-Jones Fastyngange. McClelland and Stewart, 1988. I'll Make You Small. Groundwood Books, 1986. The Knot. McClelland and Stewart, 1982. Madeleine and Ermadello. Before We Are Six Press, 1976. Mischief City. Groundwood Books, 1986. Odd's End. McClelland and Stewart, 1980. Zoom at Sea. Groundwood Books, 1983. Zoom Away. Groundwood Books, 1985.