The Lives of Christopher Chant, in terms of the four books, if you consider them as a whole, because he is that figure that can help either guide or direct or whatever, I mean, he's there behind the children's development and discoveries, and then when you read those three books and go through that process with Nan and Cat and so on, and then come to The Lives of Christopher Chant and find he went through that too, it's enormously satisfying.

It is, isn't it.

And it really enriches the other books, to think that, oh well, he had a right to be there and to do all that because he knew what it was like, he'd been there.

That's exactly what I was after, and it took me a really long time to get the shape of The Lives of Christopher Chant so that it did that, and I really had to work at it, and that's one I had about six shots at actually, I couldn't decide what kind of material it was that would illustrate this best.

Was there a danger of repetition in that one?

Well, there was a tremendous danger, yes, and in fact it is repetition, it has almost exactly the same plot as Charmed Life, you can't really avoid that.

And yet, putting them side by side, they really only enrich each other, I think.

They're extremely different, yes, I hope that's so, because they really are very, very different, and they were written almost sort of deliberately in a different spirit, as you say, to show that Chrestomanci had a right to say what he said because he'd been through it and he knew it from the inside out, which is very important.

Which is different from the adult imposing things on the child simply because of the power, the ability to do so.

That's right, yes. In the earlier books it does appear that way and I did wish at some point to make it clear that it isn't that way.

I think there's enough action on the children's part not to make that completely his control and his decision making, and I think the children making decisions is very important, that they do have a great deal of control.

Yes, that's true, and I did rather hope that in Witch Week it would sort of help to make my point for them to find that Chrestomanci was having so much fun pretending to be the Inquisitor, because I think one of the things which struck me enormously right from the beginning was that the man had tremendous job satisfaction, it was a lovely job to have to do, if you were equal to it.

Even though he didn't want to do it initially, and nor does Cat particularly.

No, I mean, you get thrust into it, because this is what your abilities make you eligible for, and this is a difficult situation, and it really worries me, you know, I mean, so many people do find this about their lives, their abilities thrust them certain ways, and this is not the same as being thrust in a certain way by your parents, which is another thing again. Of course, Christopher had both those.

You talked a lot about how the stories, the actual stories you read influenced you, the heroic stories, and the journeys of the heroes, and that story is still important to you as a writer. The Magicians of Caprona is also largely about language...

I suppose it is, yes.

There's so much in that that's talking about the importance, the power of language, and that comes up in Nan's ability to describe as well...

Yes, I think that the whole origin of The Magicians of Caprona was really rather significant that way, because this was one... it was my husband who acquired a new record, and it was one that I'd only heard a little of before and that was "Ma Vlast", was it Janaçek? It means "My Country", and he was Czech. Anyway, it's a beautiful, beautiful suite, each movement is about certain aspects of his country, and one is about... this is why I called the river that, actually, in Caprona... is about the river Voltava. It's a beautiful, beautiful piece of river music, and when the river swells and becomes itself a river, and therefore itself, it has this wonderful tune, and it's a tune, I thought, "My God, why has nobody put words to it?" This was the origin, the need for words. That's how the book came about.

And that's how the book begins, "Everybody knows, a spell is the right words..." and so on.

Yes, and the whole thing fell into my head then. That was one of those, I simply had to go away and write it.

Was the language of those stories that you read, the Odyssey and Morte d'Arthur and so on, was the language significant to you at the time, or did that come later? I don't remember as a child being conscious of language, I remember being conscious of concepts and plot.

Yes, I think I was too, although at an extraordinarily early stage I began to feel that if a thing was worth saying, it was worth saying in the most plain, straightforward, clear kind of language, and I suppose it was possibly my natural style, because I remember my mother in her snotty way, when I'd written the first chapter of one of these books that I wrote as a twelve year old, she picked it up and looked at it and cast it aside on the bed, "Well", she said, "at least you've got..." I forget her exact words, at least I don't, but I must have suppressed them at the instant I was about to say them, because they really were rather painful, except that they were very descriptive. What she meant to say was that I'd got a very brief but sort of fairly vivid style, but she said it in a derogatory way. This has always been the way with me, I do find it very hard to write long.

And you avoid long descriptions, which you've commented on.

Yes, very much so, but then you don't need them, I find, if you've seen it yourself, you can get other people to see it. I don't know why it comes through, I mean, you can get people to draw a sketch of the room where an action happens, and they'll put the window in the right place even.

Somebody in these discussions on fantasy in the book I was telling you about, the Innocence and Experience book, I don't remember who it was (NOTE: it was Zilpha Keatley Snyder), or which book she was referring to, but she had created a fantasy kingdom, or land of some sort, and she said, and I'm still not sure whether she meant it literally, but she said she knew it so well that she knew what the plumbing was like, even though it never appeared in the book.

Oh yeah. That's right. Exactly. I mean, this is absolutely true. In the same sort of way, I'm accustomed to tell children that before I start writing a book, I have to know the people in it so well that I know the shape their toes are, and the way the hair sprouts out of their head, and only then can I get the way they actually speak like themselves. It's absolutely true, you have to know these amazingly silly things, the small and very mundane details, and they never get into what you write, but they somehow they make it real for the person who's reading it, in the most extraordinary way.

And I suppose when the reader then fills in the gaps, while they may not be the same fillings, they're compatible in some way.

They are compatible, they work all the way through, right back to the plumbing! I never thought of plumbing, I suppose because I don't have a very good relationship with plumbing! I mean, that's one of the things that I would have going grotesquely wrong!

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©Judith Ridge 1992