So this actually came out of a fight. It was a very friendly fight. It was years
ago now, when the cast for The Hobbit was announced and we had the fight
I always have with my friends. I'm like why can't this be a more diverse cast you know?
Why must we always have this where we are talking about why can't there be more
diversity and then the push back against that whole thing. And the pushback was
it's a very British story, it's reflecting British culture and British
myths and it's European. And I said to him, you know, Lord of the Rings isn't
real, you know, if an Asian Hobbit appeared in the Shire, nobody would
have cared. And then after a while I just said you know what, keep your Hobbit.
Which is not a diss on Tolkien because I'm hugely inspired by Tolkien. In fact there are so many
Tolkien-isms in the book. But it actually sent, that argument
actually sent me on a process of self-discovery. It's enough to talk about
diversity and so on but even I didn't know a lot about African mythology other
than what came over into the colonies. And thinking about fantasy which I've
always, fantasy and crime have always been my first loves. In fact
most of the films that I thought I saw, I actually didn't see. It was a shocker
to me when I first saw Empire Strikes Back
because I know everything about that movie and I realised I did not see this.
I read the novelisation of it. So even the great sci-fi films which
are a huge part of my vocabulary, it's the novelisation of the books I know. I knew
very little about ancient African myths and African storytelling and as soon as I
started to really read those and catch up on the research and
doing my own work, this novel almost started to write itself. In
all sorts of ways; one crucial way in which
that kind of storytelling happened was me letting go of the idea of the kind of
heroic narrative that we see in a lot of fantasy.
Even though there are... you know the damsels in my novel are not
in distress. At all. You know the vampires in the novel are
perfectly fine with daylight. So there's no opening of the coffin, they'll just
eat you anyway. So these really wonderful subversions started to happen
and a story started to happen even though I was still years away from
knowing what the novel was about. But thank God for that friend.
As much as it sounds like I was reacting to Tolkien, Tolkien ended up
being a huge influence on the book.
You mentioned about representation, you used to read a lot of these books but you didn't see yourself in them
Is it almost like you saying then I will write that book that doesn't
exist. I will give that to other people.
So yes and no. I mean I didn't
necessarily have a problem with not seeing myself in them. I think
that's just a reality of a lot of stories.
If I were Asian I would say the same thing. But you do after a while start to wonder
well why can't somebody who looks like me be a part of a heroic
epic? You know in film where you know the wisecracking black guy, always joking when I'm
on trips with my friends, like, just so you know, as the wisecracking black
person here: I die last. Just so you know. The serial killer coming for me last.
But it highlights the sort of limited choices that I grew up with and
took for granted. And it's not necessarily trying to rectify things
and make things right so much as you know I just want to slay the dragon too.
You know we can do something other than saying that dragon is so big and run off
in the other direction. But not just slaying dragons and saving
the Queen and so on but being a part of complicated narratives, even complicated
fantastical narratives. And it's not like this is necessarily something new being
done. There are lots of writers right now in the African continent who are
doing it. There are lots of writers directly inspired by African storytelling like
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who've always done you know written stories like that.
I do believe that you should write the story that you want to read and you
should write a story that you've been looking for to read and sometimes the
reason why you haven't found it is because you're supposed to write it.
This is going to be a trilogy and in each of the books we're gonna be focusing on
different characters but in the first book we're going to be focusing on
Tracker. Could you tell us a bit more about them as a character.
Yeah, Tracker so doesn't want to do this! You know he's a man of
very simple pleasures and simple lusts. You know it's just food, money, sex,
and off to the next place. So he's nobody's idea of a hero, including his
own. And he ends up taking a very simple task and
that part of the story is pretty much known, I've told everybody. He's
supposed to find a child who's been missing three
years and he thinks nothing of it. And the novel follows him so the novel
also thinks nothing of it. Until this story starts to get more and more
convoluted and people's stories continue to shift and people's allegiances start
to shift and this child becomes more and more of an enigma. And at one point the
big question is: is this child worth saving because of what he he turns into?
And Tracker, who tries everything possible to have a narrow life, ends up
seeing it explode in his face. Great things happen, great joys happen,
epic tragedies happen. All of this is sort of not what he bargained for.
So he's not really anybody's idea of a hero, including his own, but he
ends up being pushed to do things heroic. To an extent he becomes a
better person. He would say no. He ends up being one of the survivors
of this sort of great expedition and while he's telling a story part of the
device of the the novel and of the trilogy would be whether you believe him
or not. The unreliable narrator. Well he thinks he's reliable. And we've seen with
something like Black Panther we've seen how a story that is sort of
ostensibly told from the African perspective and has all of those
influences can prove to be hugely popular, and commercially do very well.
Are you hoping, presumably as an author definitely, that your books will have a
similar wide appeal. What kind of readers would you like to see being attracted to this story.
I've always thought that one of the reasons why Game of Thrones
and Neil Gaiman's books are so successful is that as much as we
become older and more mature, there's a part of us that always reach for the myths.
That's why the myths are still here. It's why we read Margaret Atwood. And I think
that there is and there's always been an audience. And I think people are also
very hungry for stories that are unlike their experience. Even Europeans are
tired of European mythology. And so I think there is, I think people are, I hope
people are hungry for not just different stories from different
geographical areas but stories that are told in different ways. One of the
things that readers should know about this trilogy that I can say is
that it's not a part 1, part 2, part 3. You know, it's three witnesses with three
very different ideas about what happened and each witness gets it gets their own
book. So it is a kind of a reboot which is in a way a very African
way of telling a story. In a lot of African storytelling there's no 'this is
the authentic story', you're not gonna have the director's cut edition.
Although that's a nice idea. But there is no director's cut. There is I'm just giving you this story
in three ways which I will tell you over three days and you have to decide
which one is true, or are all of them true, are none of them
true. And so with this trilogy the reader does have some work cut out for them.
Marlon, thank you so much I'm looking forward for you guys reading it , thank you.