fter the publication of his first novel in the mid-1980s, Paul Park swiftly attracted notice as one of the finest authors on the "humanist" wing of American SF. His powerful, densely written narratives of religious and existential crisis on worlds at once exotic and familiar won him comparisons with Gene Wolfe and Brian Aldiss at their best.
His first major project was the Starbridge Chronicles, a triptych of novels consisting of Soldiers of Paradise (1987), Sugar Rain (1989) and The Cult of Loving Kindness (1991); elaborate and elegiac, full of keen historical echoes and penetrating spiritual understanding, the series remains one of the most splendid literary architectures SF has yet produced. Coelestis (1993) more sparely assesses the alienation wrought by colonialism on its practitioners and victims, to superb tragic effect, and The Gospel of Corax (1996) offers a sublimely heterodox account of how an oddly mute Christ may have learned to transfigure the world. Like Park's oblique short stories, all of these novels are strange, challenging, magnificently surreal.
Those exceptional short stories were collected in If Lions Could Speak in 2002, and a second major revisionist novel concerning the life of Jesus, Three Marys, was published in 2003. An impressive novella, "No Traveller Returns," followed in 2004, and in July 2005 Tor Books issues A Princess of Roumania, a brilliant alternate-world fantasy commencing what is likely to be one of the finest speculative fiction sequences this decade.
Science Fiction Weekly interviewed Paul Park by e-mail in April 2005.
Your new novel, A Princess of Roumania, is a remarkable book—visionary, intense, beautifully written. It's the first in a series, to be followed by The Tourmaline and The White Tyger. When did this Roumanian setting first occur to you, and by what stages did it develop into its final form?
Park: I first sketched out the introductory scenes for A Princess of Roumania in 1998, and I'm working on The White Tyger now, so it's been a long haul. It's easier for me to keep track of the genesis of ordinary novels—projects of a year or so. I remember precisely where and when the idea for The Gospel of Corax came to me, for example, in more or less its final form, clamoring to be written. These Roumania books are not like that. And I'm sure my ideas about my starting point have migrated over time. But after those caveats I have to say I've always been fascinated with Romania, its natural beauty, its strange cultural and linguistic mix, its peculiar history atop one of the dividing faults of Europe. And I've always been interested in places with a tradition of bad government that can't easily be explained.
So I'll say now I've always wanted to do a Romania book, and I imagine part of that comes from the same reasons other people have made it a location of dark myth. More than many places in Europe, in Romania there is a sense of a sophisticated, cosmopolitan tradition in close proximity to something wilder, older, magical and more savage. Much of that is an illusion, of course. I've been to a lot of places, but I've never been there, and I'm not sure I'd like to go—at least not yet.
"Dark myth" indeed! But Romania is associated in the fantastic imagination primarily with Dracula, the Transylvanian connection; you've gone a very different route, evoking an alternate, imperial Great Roumania. What elements of Eastern European history, tradition and folklore have particularly inspired you in this?
Park: Well, you don't want to rewrite other people's wonderful books, and you don't want to put up a scrim of literary or mythic references between your work and your readers that might distort what they perceive. I've stayed out of Transylvania for that reason. One of my earliest ideas for the book was that I wouldn't base my conception of Great Roumania on magic or enchantment or anything dark and fuzzy like that, but on historical antecedents that people might recognize or almost recognize. Though this is a fantasy, I didn't want the background of the story to feel fantastical. I wanted the locations and events to seem hard-edged, real. So that's why I gave it a kind of turn-of-the century feel, so that people could imagine old photographs of these buildings and landscapes, and that's why I broke apart and reassembled a number of well-known events in European history. As for what specifically these are, I'd prefer not to say.
The alternate Earth in A Princess of Roumania feels very rich in implied historical detail—Graeco-Roman paganism surviving into the present alongside Judaism and Christianity; a great inundation removing Britain from the historical stage; tribes of white men foraging around in the wilds of Massachusetts; and much besides. To what extent does the Roumania series constitute a formal alternate history? And will there be further startling counterfactual revelations in subsequent volumes?
Park: Hmmm. I remember working on previous novels—the Starbridge books and Coelestis, for example—and I'd lie awake for hours putting together timelines, and histories, and geographies, and imagined maps. I felt I had to realize a new world in all its solid detail before I started to write. And I noticed that the complexity of the imagined world tended to determine the plots: Stuff would happen at least partly for the purpose of moving the characters around to different places, so the readers would be able to see another aspect of my invention. Lots of times people were just sort of wandering around. But in this book I decided early on I wanted to base everything on plot, and make the imagined details follow or enhance the plot. Which means I'm much less methodical in my approach, and I've tended to invent things as I need them. It feels different, more organic, riskier, less determined, less secure. So I'm not really trying to come up with a complete and rigidly coherent alternate Earth. I'm trying to tell a compelling story first of all. As for new revelations—I should hope so!
Of course, Princess begins in contemporary New England in our timeline, in a vividly realized college town. You communicate Berkshire County just as magically as Great Roumania; why this particular contrast and comparison of settings?
Park: Yes—I'm proud of that. For reasons evident in the text, I wanted the recognizably real world to feel more fantastical than the imagined one, without sacrificing any of its "reality." It helped me to use locations from my childhood, places with a mythic importance to me when I was growing up—the ice house, certain woods and fields. When I was as young as my characters start out, I had rich and peculiar experiences in this same landscape. Now I revisit it, and sit among the roots of some specific tree, and everything has changed.
Princess, as its title implies, has a strong fairy-tale quality: The heroine, Miranda, is (dispossessed) heir to an otherworldly throne, and her quest to regain it is, for herself and her friends, a transition to adulthood. Yet you transform this material into something rich and very strange. Were you following any specific literary models here?
Park: I'd never written a fantasy novel before, but it seemed to me the holy grail was going to consist of using recognizable themes and elements—a magic jewel, say, or a journey to the underworld—in a way that makes them unfamiliar. I think a lot of people try to do this. Maybe everybody tries to do it.
To what extent should Princess, given its teenage protagonists, be seen as a (transcendentally good!) young-adult novel? Are comparisons with Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials and Le Guin's Earthsea books appropriate?
Park: I wondered about this, and wondered about whether I should worry about it. To an extent, these divisions—YA, adult—seem arbitrary to me, having more to do with marketing than anything else. As a sequence of books, I wanted mine at least partly to be about growing up, using various fantastical devices as metaphors for that complicated process. So I had to start the characters young, which was a challenge. I'm helped by having young children, not so much as models as because I'm reading a lot of excellent books with them, Le Guin and Pullman among them. Comparisons with Pullman are going to be inevitable, I think—have already started in the blurbs. Partly I am reassured by his obvious lack of interest in this issue. The first volume of his series seems very much a child's book, the others not so much.
Somewhat as in Pullman's trilogy, every character in Princess appears to have a totemic animal—most notably, Miranda's friend, Andromeda, who literally assumes the form of a yellow dog. Why this symbolic strategy?
Park: These creatures or familiars are an old tradition, and different writers use them in different ways. I try to use them mostly as a metaphor, as a way of talking about powerful internal forces that conflict with each other. I remember when I was young, I felt like a zoo in human shape. Even now.
The villains in Princess—Baroness Nicola Ceausescu (recalling a real tyrant) and the Elector of Ratisbon—are strikingly characterized, nasty yet very human also, with quirks, personal affections and pangs of conscience, as well as run-of-the-mill domestic difficulties to distract them. Few fantasists impart such complexity to their black hats; are you consciously setting a new trend in the literary representation of evil?
Park: I certainly hope so. One thing I dislike about even some of the great fantasy texts is the extent to which the protagonists struggle against evil forces that are essentially impersonal, though usually they are represented in the novel by evil people. And those people often have compelling characteristics. But their characteristics often seem decorative only—that is, they aren't part of the process by which the evil person makes moral decisions. All that seems determined from the outside. And it has an effect on the suspense, because you can largely predict the way the malevolent forces in the book are going to respond in most situations. But if you make a character's badness just one of many qualities, then you can build, I hope, a more organic plot.
Besides, it's always interesting to see the extent to which you can sympathize with evil.
The descriptions of magical procedure and fugue in Princess are some of the best I've read—convincingly exacting on practitioners, wonderfully imaginative, symbolically resonant on a very deep level. This numinous intensity goes right back to your early Starbridge novels—how do you manage to portray extreme and altered states of mind and being so remarkably persuasively?
Park: I'm not sure I can answer this. I guess I always knew I was going to have a lot of "magic" in my book, and that in some sense it was going to be about "magic," but I wanted to avoid anything mystical—I don't much respond to mysticism in the books I read. So I was drawn to alchemical models, the idea that magic could be a subset of science, and subject to the same kind of examination, trial and error, proof and disproof. And just as in the late 19th, early 20th century there were a lot of powerful but imperfect new ideas about how the natural world works, so in the book there is a lot of imprecision about magic, mistaken or conflicting theories, huge areas of ignorance. And a few practical methods that seem to work, though not everyone agrees why. Magical exploration is presented as part of a larger process of scientific exploration, a way of trying to explain the world, whose nature is mysterious and obscure.
On top of that, I love thinking about how changing emotional states alter perception, and how to describe dispassionately unusual states of mind. Writers are often good at what they love to do.
In your recent work, you've repeatedly described journeys into the Land of the Dead—there's your narrator's venture into a totalitarian posthumous wasteland in No Traveller Returns, and now Miranda's sortie into "Tara Mortilor" in Princess, a crucial crossing of the Styx and visit to a storehouse of souls. Why this current emphasis on afterlives—does it have something to do with the sad death of your good friend Jim Charbonnet, to whom you've dedicated Princess?
Park: Yes, I suppose it does. Both that section of Princess and No Traveller Returns are Orpheus stories, where the characters descend into death to see if they can bring someone out. It's not just Jim, though he was certainly the center of a wheel that seems broken now. My friend Sandy Banks died terribly of brain cancer while I was writing Princess. And my own parents are old now, and my children are young—it is astonishing, I think, and a mark of horrifying privilege, that middle-class people in the developed world can reach their 50s without thinking about death. When it touches us so late, it seems especially unfair and frightening, an enemy that can and must be fought.
A disquieting implication of Princess is that our timeline is merely a disposable fiction, contrived expediently by a not-especially-villainous aunt of Miranda's. Somewhat Borgesian in overtone ... is this a commentary on the nature and function of fictions?
Park: In Sugar Rain there was a throwaway line, a character in a library who imagines escaping from an enemy into the pages of a book, where he—or she, I can't quite remember—will be safe in some bookish landscape. I always meant to return to that idea someday, and when I did I found it changed. I was certainly a child, though, who escaped into books, some of which seemed more real than reality.
Coming now to your other books of the last few years: Like The Gospel of Corax, Three Marys retells the story of Christ's life from an unaccustomed standpoint: In this case, that of Jesus's mother, his putative wife, and Mary of Bethany. Why this female perspective? And why the book's striking atmosphere of grim alienness?
Park: "Grim alienness"—I'm glad that wasn't on the jacket copy! What's interesting about historical writing, for me, is the challenge of presenting a compelling and coherent vision of the past. It feels a lot like writing science fiction and fantasy, or at least the kind I do. I am less interested in historical—or scientific—accuracy than I am in clarity and internal logic. I was interested in the female characters in the Gospels because they seemed the hardest to turn into human beings, if you try to follow the way they are described in the text. Jesus of Nazareth obviously cares about them, but more than that, he is interested in them as people. The evangelists don't share that interest, which suggests, for me, the fundamental dissonance at the heart of the New Testament story as they describe it—the division between Jesus the man and moral philosopher, and Jesus the symbol and the god. I don't think—always assuming you care about these things—you have to choose between these options, but people do choose, Saint Paul and the evangelists first of all.
As for the grimness, I suppose I wanted to make some sort of comment on the constraints of work and forced ignorance that dominate the lives of many women still, especially in patriarchal societies in developing countries. Some sort of comment, also, on how it is possible to achieve practical power and moral dignity in spite of these constraints.
Three Marys accepts the miraculous nature of Christ—to a degree—but puts a profoundly melancholy spin on the consequences of his miracles, as with the story of Lazarus' resurrection. Does this serve as a summary of the wider story of Christianity since then: disappointment, disillusion?
Park: I guess so. It's hard to feel hopeful about the positive effects of organized Christianity these days, especially if you live in the United States. My thesis in the book, if you can call it that, is that piety and worship can be a way of distracting yourself into thinking you have made a profound moral change when in fact you haven't. The challenge of the great religious philosophers, of whom Jesus of Nazareth is just one, is to transform your values and your life. But people don't want to do that, really. They just want to pretend, and prayer and worship help them fool themselves—as Jesus says somewhere in the book, "Those who call me lord have already cast me from their hearts." Jesus' miracles—for me they're a distraction too, and what I tried to show in Three Marys was that Jesus himself was distracted by them in tragic ways. Have you ever read Thomas Jefferson's version of the Gospels, with every reference to magic or miracles taken out? It's a powerful, short book.
Your collection, If Lions Could Speak, is a striking assemblage of shorter works, many oblique, some experimental, all immensely surprising. How do you set about crafting such cunningly unconventional tales? And which other short-fiction writers do you admire most?
Park: There is a reason why novel writing is an art form that adheres so stubbornly to convention. A novelist depends on his or her readers for such an investment of time, he or she has to make a very serious negotiation with their expectations. Many writers as they learn this start to simplify their work, at least in terms of form. As they grow older they grow less ironical, less interested in innovation. I can feel that happening to me, and it feels like progress. In some ways my novels have become less and less ambitious, while at the same time—I hope—better and better.
But a certain amount of pressure builds up. Short fiction requires less of a commitment from the reader, so I feel free to play all kinds of fancy games—it's a release. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm not jerking my readers around, I'm not trying hard enough. At the same time I'm trying to build a block of stories that feels different from the novels, different in tone, style, character—does that make any sense? Already people tell me they are surprised the novels are all written by the same person. But nobody says that about the stories—they resemble each other, no matter how rigorously "unconventional" I make them. Maybe that gets back to my first point.
As for writers I admire—the usual, I suppose, although Borges never delivers for me quite what he promises. There are great short-story writers in the genre. I'm teaching a class at Williams College, and these are the authors on the list: John Crowley, Karen Joy Fowler, Carol Emshwiller, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Swanwick, Connie Willis and, of course, Terry Bisson. That's incomplete, of course. For my own pleasure, I'm reading Kelly Link these days.
Finally, a question about your novella, "No Traveller Returns": Why is Death cast here in totalitarian terms? Does the history of fascism, communism, et al., make such a juxtaposition inevitable?
Park: I guess age and illness feel to me like a steady erosion of choices. Death comes when all choices are gone. As a child I was always frightened and awed by Nazi uniforms and design, as much for their self-conscious necrophilia as for anything they represented. Years ago I saw Ian McKellen play Richard III at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The production was designed in 1930s high-fascist style, which was intermittently effective, like most transpositions of Shakespeare. But once in particular, when in jackboots, brown shirt and narrow tie, the king gives some kind of speech from a high podium with a death's-head banner above his head—I remember it vividly, though I might be getting it all wrong. The image has stuck in my mind.
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