ondering the notion of fairies, missing persons and the slippery slopes of the human heart makes The Mysteries, Lisa Tuttle's first adult fantasy novel since The Pillow Friend (1996), not only fascinating but compelling. Why do people vanish? Where do they go? Does an ancient, surreal fairyland truly co-exist alongside our own world? Can one actually go there and return, unchanged, to live as a normal person, whatever "normal" means? Tuttle's fantastic fictional investigation not only explores these questions, it successfully illuminates our culture's perennial hunger for unsolved mysteries.
Tuttle is a former John W. Campbell Award winner for Best New Writer (1974) and a Hugo award winner (1975) with George R.R. Martin for "The Storms of Windhaven" (later expanded into their novel, Windhaven). She was born in New York, reared in Texas and now lives in Scotland with native Scot Colin Murray and their daughter, Emily. She earned her bachelor's degree in English literature from Syracuse University. Other solo adult novels include Familiar Spirit, Gabriel, Lost Futures (shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Tiptree Award), The Pillow Friend and a novella, "My Death" (www.pspublishing.co.uk). Collections include A Nest of Nightmares, A Spaceship Built of Stone and Other Stories, Memories of the Body, Ghosts and Other Lovers and My Pathology.
Recently, Tuttle shared some intriguing thoughts with Science Fiction Weekly on the subject of missing persons and what drove her into this remarkable investigation of overlapping worlds.
In our 2002 interview for www.fantasticmetropolis, Tuttle noted that
"Around the ages of 8 to 10, one of my favorite words was 'mysterious'—although I didn't know how to spell it—and I wrote a number of stories with titles like 'The Myserous Voice' and 'The Mysterus Door.' These generally involved a small group of children, bored out of their minds in their quiet, suburban homes, discovering a previously unseen door which led into an amazing underground world; or finding a magical object which could grant wishes; or seeing a strange, ghostly person or light and following it into some adventure."
Why has that the word haunted you for such a long time?
Tuttle: I think that a lot of people are intrigued by the mysterious—certainly all those of us who love to read tales of the fantastic, supernatural fiction, mysteries and other such gothic literature. Until I hit upon the title The Mysteries for the book I was writing, relatively late, I don't think I'd ever looked up the meaning of the word in a dictionary. Although I knew about "mystery plays" and "mystery religions," I was completely surprised, and rather pleased, to discover that "mystery" was also a slang term for "a shiftless, drifting girl."
There's a quotation which I love, used by Robert Aickman as an epigraph to his short story collection, Cold Hand in Mine: "In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation."—Sacheverell Sitwell, "For Want of the Golden City." That defines my feeling—and it's why, although I do enjoy detective stories, I love fantasy and supernatural fiction so much.
Would you say the genesis of this novel can be found in that childhood fascination?
Tuttle: Oh, it definitely goes right back to my childhood fascination with stories of mysterious, unexplained disappearances. Another major input goes back to my late 20s, when I first read, and was hugely struck by, the Irish legend of "Mider and Etain," which provided the core plot element of the book. And then there's the wonderful landscape of the western highlands of Scotland, where I now live. That had a large influence on the way the book developed.
When did you decide fairies were one of the keys to unlocking this particular door?
Tuttle: Genre fantasy is not my cup of tea; I don't much like sagas set in made-up worlds, or any kind of epic or heroic fantasy; The Lord of the Rings leaves me completely cold. There, I've said it! Maybe Tolkien was a genius, but I find him pretty much unreadable, and while I don't want to slag off any living writers, in general anybody writing "in the tradition of J.R.R. Tolkien" is somebody I do not feel drawn to read. On the other hand, I absolutely love the work of writers such as Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, Philip Pullman, Jonathan Carroll and Elizabeth Hand, all of whom write fantasy of a different kind. I tend not to like novels set in completely imaginary worlds (naturally there are a few exceptions). I prefer fantasies which have at least one foot firmly in the real world, and I find the notion that there might be another realm, just touching this one and occasionally overlapping with it, so that people might slip across the border, especially attractive. This might be an alternative reality, as in my earlier novel "Lost Futures," or a time-slip or fairyland; they are all variations on a theme.
Dean Koontz described this novel as a "thriller, detective story and a fantasy all in one." How would you describe it?
Tuttle: "A novel."
Ian Kennedy is an American detective/author who finds himself almost obsessed with people who vanish, including his own father. Why did you opt for a male protagonist?
Tuttle: It took me by surprise, actually. I almost invariably start from a female point of view, whether first person or third. The first draft of the novel moved between the point of view of Laura and her daughter Peri; that was how I'd always imagined I'd tell my contemporary version of "The Wooing of Etain." But I started having trouble with Peri's experiences as soon as she left our world.
What really appealed to me about the idea of the Otherworld was the mystery of it; that, for me, was the fascination of a mysterious disappearance: When someone comes back and says they've been to fairyland, what really happened? Once I began to describe what Peri's life with her immortal lover was like, it became too ordinary; I didn't want to depict the Otherworld as a sort of Disneyland. Then, while I was still struggling with this problem, one of the minor characters—a detective Laura hired to help find her daughter—started to become more important. He was originally called Joe Kennedy, came from Ireland, was quite a bit older than Laura, and he was full of stories about dealings with the Good Neighbours, tales of changelings and fairy abductions and so on ... in fact, it was all getting a bit out of hand; he was only meant to be a minor character! And then it occurred to me that there might be a better way of telling this story than through the two women's eyes ... having an "outsider" tell the story, and puzzle it out. ... I'd always loved detective stories, too. Once I thought of this, the voice came to me, and the character of the P.I. changed—became American instead of Irish, about 10 or 15 years younger, maybe not quite so experienced or comfortable with the idea of the Otherworld. ... It was an unusual step for me, definitely, to have a male narrator; not at all my natural inclination, but that's just how it worked out!
Why do you think the topic of missing persons is so enormously popular in the current media?
Tuttle: I think it's an innately fascinating idea—there's so much potential for emotional power when someone vanishes, the urge to find out what happened propels you on. ... I agree that it does seem to have become more popular in recent years, but I think it's always been around.
Do you feel many people would like to become "missing" persons, in the sense of starting new lives? Is that the mystique at the core of the fascination?
Tuttle: You could be right. I'm sure the fantasy about running away and starting with a fresh slate is part of it; but I think there's also the other side of it—what happens to the people who drop out of your life? Everyone wonders at some time what happened to people they knew in the past; isn't that what's behind the popularity of Web sites like Friends Re-United? —and with the world being the global village that it is now, with people constantly moving from one place to another for all sorts of reasons, it must be increasingly common to lose track of people ... your best friend in primary school, the first boy you kissed, the funny girl across the hall in your first apartment building, the guy you talked to for hours at a party then never saw again ... they may not have "disappeared" in a real sense, but they're missing from your life.
You've also stated a preference for speculative fiction over fantasy. Was it difficult to dip into traditional fairy folklore or refreshing?
Tuttle: I think the first time I saw fairies in a "speculative" light was many, many years ago, when I was reading some books about UFOs that made a connection between modern "close encounters" and stories from centuries past about visits to fairyland, human-fairy interactions, trades, relationships, marriages and abductions. It was a kind of "eureka!" moment for me, and ever since then it just kept simmering away under the surface. One book which I've had, and loved, for many, many years is Katharine Briggs' An Encyclopedia of Fairies, and getting to go back and re-read that as research for this book was pure delight. I found the research absolutely fascinating—it's anthropology rather than fantasy, reading about people's experiences with the supernatural and non-human worlds. A couple of the books I found especially enlightening and helpful are The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries by W.Y. Evans-Wentz and Scottish Fairy Belief by Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan. I'm also quite fond of British Fairy Origins by Lewis Spence, Mysterious Britain by Janet and Colin Bord and Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race by T.W. Rolleston.
Ever seen a fairy?
Tuttle: No ... I don't "believe" in UFOs or ghosts, either. But I do believe that people have had experiences down the ages which they've variously classified or described as being encounters with aliens or immortals or spirits or some other sort of non-human beings—and I love trying to explore what these experiences "mean" in my fiction.
Is a sequel planned?
Tuttle: Not exactly planned, but I'm curious about what will happen to Ian next, and just recently have started to get some vague ideas about it. I'm writing a different novel at the moment, but possibly the book after that will be a sequel of some sort to The Mysteries.
Did you ever think about becoming a P.I.?
Tuttle: Not a P.I., but when I was a kid I thought I might become a secret agent or an explorer, in between writing books.
In your research, what was the most intriguing fact you discovered about vanishing people?
Tuttle: I'm not sure that there is one "most intriguing" fact ... all stories are different ... but the most disappointing thing I learned was that the "holy grail" of unexplained disappearances, the person who disappears in full view of one or more other people, is, so far as reliable evidence goes, a complete myth. I was so hoping to find that even one of the instances of this that have been reported was genuine, but ... it appears not. Sigh.
Tell us about Sydenham Hill Woods. Did you experience any strange phenomena there?
Tuttle: Sorry to disappoint, but nothing mysterious happened to me, or, as far as I know, anyone else, there—it was just a wonderfully atmospheric, slightly eerie, half-hidden woodland park, utterly unexpected to find in the middle of an otherwise prosaic London suburb ... but then, London is full of weird and wonderful hidden treasures like that. I searched in vain, when first writing this book, to find some spots in London that were connected with fairies, but I couldn't. I guess London has been a city for too long; fairies are connected to the countryside and out-of-the-way places, and not to urban settlements and sprawl.
In your book on page 38, Kennedy recalls that his mother once said: "People are mysteries ... There are no solutions." Do you agree? Why?
Tuttle: Yes. And just because there's no definitive solution doesn't mean that it's not necessary and rewarding to try to figure people out! I find that one of the main reasons to read, and write, novels is the attempt to explore the mystery of other people.
Can you expand on that? Do you mean there's one essential mystery for each person?
Tuttle: I'm talking about individuals. I don't exactly mean there's a specific "essential mystery" to each person ... hmm, or maybe I do ... What I mean is that people are complex, and even when you think you know someone well they can astonish you. The reasons for things that people do, whether major, like breaking up with a partner or deciding to start a new life, or seemingly insignificant are rarely easy to explain. Sometimes, listening to people talk, I have the sense that they are even mysteries to themselves! They do things without really knowing why ... and then have to make up a motivation to explain it. "I just didn't love her anymore." "I took one look and knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with that man." The appeal of the classic detective story, as with that of a lot of fiction, is that it offers a simple solution, clear answers such as we rarely find in life—The murder was committed because the victim had been blackmailing the killer; the woman killed her blameless, loving husband because she'd been abused as a child; that man became a killer because he'd been brainwashed by the Chinese. In life, I think, even when you have what seems to be an explanation, it actually raises more questions.
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Also in this issue:
Stephen Chow of Kung Fu Hustle
