Absolutely, by magic, fortune-telling, and fairy tales.

In the book, the characters are making a magic film, full of special effects. André, the director, is a stage magician; he runs the Grand Necropolitan horror theater and his specialty is showing people eaten by wolves onstage, people torn apart by madmen, that sort of thing.  I looked at videos of a lot of magicians to see what André could do and how he’d think, and I have the great good luck to live near to Beverly, Mass., where Marco the Magi and Le Grand David run a company of stage magicians.  I had a chance to talk to Marco the Magi—Cesareo Pelaez, who is one of the greatest modern stage magicians.  And I read a wonderful book, which every mystery writer should run out and read, Henning Nelms’ Magic and Showmanship.

Nelms was a magician and a mystery writer (under the name Hake Talbot).  He says the essence of magic is the essence of mystery-writing, which is to tell two stories at once.  One story is what’s really happening, the strings being pulled and the endless rehearsal and the assistants running around behind the scenes.  But the bigger story is the myth, the effortless marvel that the magician is creating for the audience; and if you want to be a successful magician, that story must appeal to the deepest wishes and desires of the audience, to the audience’s love of the marvels beyond ordinary reality.

Magic is witchcraft is making a myth. 

I was hugely influenced by fairy tales while I was writing A Citizen of the Country, and especially by a friend, Kelly Link.  Kelly is amazing; she’s won the World Fantasy Award and the Tiptree Award for her reworkings of fairy tales, and I just kept saying, “Ooh, if only I could make this story feel like what she does.”

(Read more about Kelly Link and the Interstitial Arts Movement, the home of American inter-genre magic realism)

Fortune-telling is a sort of mythmaking, don’t you think?  The fortune-teller gets out her cards and the audience is invited to ask a question, the most important question they can think of. The fortune-teller spreads out the cards, and there are all the big deep things of life in colored pictures: death, love, friends, betrayal, children.  When you have your fortune told, you are opening yourself to the ultimate questions.

I didn’t really talk to fortune-tellers because I’m scared of them.  I have a friend who uses Tarot to plot her books, so I did a little experiment and used fortune-telling myself in writing Sabine’s parts of the book.  Sabine uses a card deck called the Oracle of Napoleon.  I got a copy from U.S. Games Systems, and every time Sabine told a fortune, I’d spread out the cards and use the way they came out.

The book is about people who practice witchcraft, and in that sense it’s a real historical novel.  What they practice isn’t modern Wicca or neopaganism.  It’s a very old religion dating at least in part from before the Romans came to Gaul.  The boves, the tunnels underneath the city where the “witches” meet, are real, two thousand years old; you can still take a tour of them, and they really are unmapped and extend miles into the countryside.  The castle where most of the book is set is a real castle—Mont St. Eloi, an incredible place, like Mont St. Michel or Stonehenge.  It’s been a Christian holy place since 660 but it was holy to the local religion before then.  You can just see the ley lines converging on it. 

a Flanders witch, about 1910

The First World War.

A Citizen of the Country is set in French Flanders.  “In Flanders field the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row…” Before the war Flanders was a bit like Holland, a land of woods and streams and little villages, and it was full of sorcerers and magic.  The sorcerers were solitaries—shepherds or, fairly often, priests.  They lived in the little towns along the Arras road, or in the fields with the sheep.

When the Germans invaded France in 1914, the German army dug in at Vimy Ridge—which you can see from the castle where my story is set.  The Germans, the French, the British and Canadians fought here for nearly four years, and when they were done, the woods were nothing but splintered stumps in mud; the sheep had run away or been eaten; the villages had been bombed to the ground. 

Now, eighty years later, there are no woods and no villages; there are only flat beet fields, still pockmarked from the shelling.  Fields near Vimy Ridge still can’t be plowed because so many unexploded shells are under the soil. 

And there are no more witches in Flanders.

(Note: After this interview went up on the site, I got a nice email from a witch in Flanders telling me I was mistaken. I'm glad.--SS)

In this book, at least, everyone’s trying to change fate, either the fates of their families or what is going to happen when the war comes. André, Maurice Cyron, Perdita, the spies, Gilbert Knight… Reisden in particular tries to change André from a madman to a sane person, tries to change the doom of a family that’s been unhappy for generations, and he tries to change the fate of his own family for the sake of his son.

She thinks she does.  She sees a grey veil drop over people who are about to die. 

What actually happens, you ask?  Read the book but don't ask me; I have no idea. 

I actually know someone, though, who used to see people who were dying.  It was during the Second World War; she would see friends walking down the street and when the person came closer it was someone quite different. She’d think “How could I have taken this person for X?” And a day or so later she’d hear X had died. 

Student films.  Back when I was a film student in England (back when we used dinosaur-fat torches for fill lighting), there was no such thing as synchronized sound unless you had money, which we didn’t.  So I wrote a lot of silent scripts, which came in helpfully here.

I've acted a little, but I don’t really have a camera face. Instead I used experiences from other people, including Marty Meyers (thank you, Marty!) and Andreas Teuber who as a young amateur actor acted with Richard Burton.

While I was writing this I saw a lot of silent films on video.  I have huge respect and love for them. Silent films are brilliant, they’re not just Keystone Cops shorts and jumpy, grainy prints.  Film got sophisticated very early, especially trick films. The trick shot André is trying to get, a decapitation, was first done by Edison on film in 1893--and as a magic trick, it's very old, about 4500 years.  From about 1900 to 1912, George Méliès, who was a magician, made what are probably still the best trick films created before computer animation.  But Edison and Méliès used a jump cut, and André is going to do it in one single long shot.

(See Melies' trick films at Google Video. Start with Un homme de tetes, still amazing--and it was made in 1898.)

I knew what I wanted, and a couple of magicians helped me work them out.  (Thank you, Yvette!)

Film is myth; film is a fairy tale.  In films people really can live happily ever after.  Sabine is not just a witch; she wants to be a film star.  She sees herself on film and, in a real sense, she’s enchanted.  She wants that fate, she wants to be that beautiful blonde on the screen, perfect for one moment that lasts forever.  And she is. 

If this book ever gets made as a film, I want them to make parts of the silent film André makes, because I want to see Sabine on screen.  She’ll be gorgeous.

It’s a book about the countryside and country people—nobody’s more country than Sabine—but also about where you live and how you live there, how you take responsibility for creating a part of your world.  You can make a myth; you can try to change fate; you can be a citizen and take responsibility; you can be a patriot; you can get married and have children.  Laurie King said a lovely thing about this book, bless her, which is that there aren’t any bad people in it, or any wholly good ones; everyone is trying to do good in their own way.  It reminds me of my favorite line in Rules of the Game, which very roughly goes “The trouble is, everyone has their own version of being right.”  That is as good a recipe as any for war and mayhem and destruction. 

Everyone in this book tries to do good in their own way, and it causes terrible troubles.  Reisden and Perdita both love their baby, in very different ways, and want very different kinds of family for him.  Maurice Cyron, the famous actor, takes personal responsibility for his country’s welfare, and for his stepson’s, and it doesn’t come out well in either case.  André is trying to fulfill his responsibilities in society.  And, like citizens in wartime, they end up caught up in events.

A country is like family or fate; you think you own land, you try to own it; you try to own your family and your fate; but land and family and fate own you.  You are the person you are because of how you take up your responsibilities toward your family, your piece of ground, the place where you live. 

This trilogy is definitely over. You’ll see why when you read the book.  But Perdita, who was far too busy looking after a small child in this book, has been telling me all sorts of things she’d like to do next. 

And April 1912 is coming up, and I've been a Titanic fan for years...

The next book I've written, though, is a standalone about William Shakespeare.