The Magpie Rhyme
I pressed the button on The Magpie Rhyme, the new novel, tonight. It will be available from Amazon on 27 April. As I write this, only an hour or so after the files were uploaded, I already have one pre-order (in the USA), which is gratifying. It may seem arcane or trivial, but pre-orders and reviews are important because Amazon’s algorithm pays attention and might – just might – give the book a wee boost. Unfortunately, Amazon only allows pre-orders of Kindle editions, not paperbacks at present. If you want the paperback, you’ll have to wait until the 27th to be able to order it.
I rather like this one, which picks up from The Raven and the Hart but veers off in another direction, the fantasy elements, latent in Raven, are more overt in this. Canty and Ven are off the scene most of the time, and the modern-day elements feature Constance house-sitting a haunted property in the Scottish Borders. Finding a way to deal with a sleazy prog-rock keyboard player with an unhealthy obsession with the occult is the least of her worries.
The other part of the story is set in an alternative 17th-century Scotland in which the Reformation didn’t happen. A succession crisis is looming in both Catholic Scotland and Protestant England and Owain DInsmore has the distinct feeling that something has gone wrong with history – and then he finds out what is really going on.
For those of a literary analytical bent, Maria Tatar’s The Heroine With 1,001 Faces was influential on the way Constance and Owain’s stories interact.
For anyone interested, I’m working on the second (and final) set of stories in the Coyote in the Corner sequence. It has the working title Up The White Road, which is drawn from Eliot’s The Waste Land. I’m enjoying writing it, but climate change is part of the background, and each time I think I’ve made it too harsh, the news gets worse, so I’m constantly recalibrating. I hope you’ll get to see it sometime in 2024.
I’m also working on something entirely new that may – or may not – be another sequence. It’s too early to say; it might end up as just one – very big – book. It began as a short story to keep me amused and sprawled out to 35,000 words with no end in sight. At that point, I knew I had to rethink and restructure it into a novel. It won’t be ready until 2025.
A third, and probably final, instalment of the Sanctuary sequence is still quite some time away, unless my rough notes suddenly coalesce and fly from my fingers. At some point in between I hope to have a short story collection ready, but at present it would be a bit too thin to justify.
Anyway, with Magpie almost hatched, I think a whisky is in order (whisky delivers quite a low glycaemic load, I’m delighted to discover).
I knew The Dark is Rising was part of a sequence, but I hadn’t realised that the first volume, Over Sea, Under Stone, was written as long ago as 1965. It was read on Jackanory in 1969, so well remembered! TDiR followed in 1973, and the fifth and final novel in 1977.
Whenever I got home of an evening in East Kilbride, my Dad would be reading a Gollancz detective novel, in one of their distinctive yellow jackets.
The Dark is Rising was first published in 1973, a tad late for you to be listening to Jackanory. Hadn’t you moved in to science fiction by then? The author’s work hasn’t been adapted much, but Robert Macfarlane dramatised TDiR for BBC radio last Christmas, which might be how I became aware of it.
Some of your themes are there: parallel worlds, the responsibility that goes with power and the influence of place, in this case a Manor House and old straight tracks. I kept thinking of Alan Garner.
The novel is set in the imaginary village of Huntercombe, which could could be Nuffield, high in the Oxfordshire Chilterns. Huntercombe golf cub is nearby (£120 green fees, membership ‘on application’), and Boris Becker was recently accommodated in HMP Huntercombe. The ancient Ridgeway passes through, and there is a Grim’s Ditch, a local phrase for an old cart-track with a wooded earthwork running alongside. They are spooky, atmospheric places.
I bow to your knowledge of the date of publication, but when I read it it seemed familiar from somewhere. Yes, by ’73 I was onto science fiction, definitely Foundation plus whatever I could find in St Leonard’s Library – I seem to recall they had a lot of Gollancz hardbacks in their bright yellow jackets. I still have quite a few paperbacks I bought then – the Asimovs and the Doc Smiths plus some others
I have just read The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper for the first time, on the basis of one of those ‘you really should have read’ newspaper articles. I enjoyed it, not least because the action takes place within half an hour’s drive of my house. There are some parallels with your work, Ian – do you know the books?
I know the first of them, I read it in late 2017. I keep meaning to read the rest of the series. I have a very vague memory of it from years ago – Jackanory, maybe?