In your teenage novels, there are the ones with a heavy supernatural element, and the ones, while they do deal with the fantasy life of a character, could be loosely described as more realistic. Do you distinguish between the two, how do choose what novel needs which approach?

When I began, I never consciously set out to write a novel for the area that's called "young adult", and indeed the categories that we form in these areas are a little bit tricky. The first book that I wrote when I became a full-time author was The Haunting, which I thought of as a book for people of about 11 or 12, and I wrote that quite quickly because I'd thought about that for quite a long time. It was one of a number of stories that had begun as short stories, and which I had put aside until I had quite a lot of time to work on them, and I realised that they were becoming too long and too involved to be short stories. So I wrote The Haunting and I felt very pleased with the story, it wasn't the sort of traditional story I'd been writing, because quite a lot of the stories I'd written for the short stories and picture book stories were fantasies of one sort or another, and I went on thinking I was going to write The Changeover as another version of The Haunting, well, what I mean is, at the same level. It began like that, and I wrote a certain way into it, bearing in mind the short story that I had originally begun writing, and I was a certain way into the book and I actually thought "this is actually sounding a little bit tedious". There were two girl characters in the story and I thought it would be more interesting if I changed one of those girl characters into a boy. I did that with the character Sorry, and I found to my surprise, although possibly I shouldn't have been so surprised, that once I'd done that, because obviously the relationship between the two characters took on quite a different necessity, and it became suddenly very intriguing to me to make them a little bit older and quite bluntly make the relationship a sexual one, or potentially sexual one. I think that the basic idea of the story is not really a fantastic one, in that it is to do with the fact that you take on and incorporate changes and alterations in your life which you then can't surrender, and you have to live with the responsibility of the alteration you make. As you go through adolescence you make a lot of alterations, you find out things, you get new knowledge, which you can't pretend not to have. That story (The Changeover) is expressed in terms of the supernatural. The information the girl takes on is in fact a supernatural function which I suppose if you wanted to look beyond that it's really that she starts to take on the power of the aspects of being a woman, as opposed to being a child.

The next story that I wrote was also a supernatural story and it took a long time to write and then I wrote another story which didn't take nearly as long to write, because again it was a story that I had been thinking of for quite a long time, in a rather different form, and that's The Catalogue of the Universe. The Catalogue of the Universe is not strictly speaking a fantastic story, it's a much more realistic story, and in fact that was published ahead of The Tricksters because the publisher said it would be nice to have something that's perhaps a bit more of a contrast to what you've done before. So did that one next, and then The Tricksters was published, and then Memory, which is again its a story with a lot of fairy tale elements in it I think, but of all the stories that I've written that would be one that was most intimately based upon elements of my own life, because the time that I was writing it I was looking after my aunt who had lost her memory. The first three books I wrote were all fantasies, the next two were realistic stories, but it's almost as if, looking back that I wrote through the fantasy as an external presence in the stories, and it became located as an internal presence in the stories, because I think that there are fantastic elements in both The Catalogue of the Universe and in Memory, because Memory really is in many ways, in terms of it's structure, in terms of its basic events has got a lot to do with fairy stories. And some time after I'd written Memory I thought, well there's a lot of stories about a young man who sets out into the world without the parents blessing and who encounters an old person or sometimes an animal who asks for help and the way his fate evolves depends upon how he responds to that request for help so its got a very fairy tale structure. At the same time it's got a lot that's starkly realistic in it, because I was living with somebody at that time whose response to the world was set free from consensus reality.

I feel that often, say in Underrunners, Tris has a very active fantasy life, so while the mode of the writing isn't fantasy — and of course, Sophie (Memory) being demented...

Yes, well it's a sort of fantasy. I don't think that that's unrealistic...

So do you distinguish...?

Well, no because I— well obviously there are people who, adults and a lot of children, who have a very powerful fantasy life, which impinges a lot on what we'd regard as their real life. To write about that sort of character without their fantasy life would in actual fact be to reduce the realism. That sort of vibration, that sort of resonance is part of the reality even though it's not part of what we'd call stark reality. Somehow or other most of us have some sort of fantasy life and in some people it's very highly developed. Of course, it's very unfortunate when that takes over too much and you find that people are living their fantasies in inappropriate ways. But most of us use our fantasies as touchstones by which to interpret the world, even Margaret Thatcher, of course. The fantasies of people like that, they do exist, only often in those cases you don't choose to regard them as fantasies because the people that they're operating with — such an enormously pragmatic realism that you don't associate them with fantasy but the fantasy is still there. What I have done in those later stories, and in Underrunners and in one or two others it becomes very plain where the fantasy leaves off and reality begins, whereas in The Changeover the fantasy flows through.

So in terms of setting out to write a book, you don't distinguish between those genres?

I don't always. There are times when things have become and I haven't expected them to be, but mostly the story expresses itself, the emphasis of the story seems to go on a particular sort of event. I did write a story called Dangerous Spaces which is a fantasy. I would get the idea for that from the fact that when you look in a stereoscope you're mind is tricked into establishing space that doesn't really exist, and I began to think of a story in which the action was played out in that space. So the original idea of Dangerous Spaces came from the contemplation of a certain sort of illusion, a poetic illusion, an imagines space. But with Underrunners I was walking over a piece of land, a peninsula, which it turned out I was actually in the process of buying, and which I now own and we were walking over the land and the man from the Ministry of Forestry that we were walking with said "it's got very big underrunners". I'd seen these holes in the ground, some of them quite big, I knew they existed because when people talk about any engineering work in our areas the fact that there's these tunnels where the ground's cracked underneath, but not always visible from the surface, the fact that they exist is something that an engineer has got to take into consideration. Of course as I thought about this bit of land which was haunting my mind very much, and which appears also briefly in Dangerous Spaces, as I though about it I thought these underrunners are very significant sorts of things because in a way they're like metaphors for life which appears one way on the surface and has all these tunnels underneath. So it's a poetic image but it wasn't an imaginary bit of land and the space, the tunnel, wasn't imaginary in this case, so I suppose it might have something to do with the fact that the story seduced what was a realistic story.

You were saying that in a number of your books you can't tell where the fantasy leaves of and real life begins. In a lot of fantasy books the resolution allows you to remove yourself from the fantasy, that the fantasy or the supernatural element is separate from the real world but in your supernatural books there's no retreat from that element, that the flow between the two is so seamless and you don't retreat back and say "ok that bit's over now and this is the real world." To me that moves the supernatural beyond metaphor, if you like.

It might do that. In the stories it's beyond metaphor. If someone were to ask me how I expected it to work in the everyday world I'd probably say that I did think it would give... I'd probably say it did give the metaphorical way, really, and that it's some sort of acknowledgment of a part of life that certainly was important to me when I was a child, and to quite a lot of children. It seems to come very natural to children. I'm aware they try out all sorts of things regarding their own identity and the boundaries of the world in terms of all sorts of fantasies. When I was a child, I've certainly talked about this a number of times, I had a time when I did maintain that I could speak the language of the animals. Obviously I couldn't and I knew I couldn't but I was still very puzzled as to why people didn't believe me.

And why they reacted so strongly to that fantasy?

Yes, and why I refused to retreat from it too, and I never ever at any stage said "I was making it up, I can't speak the language of the animals". There was a whole lot more to it than that, it became a very elaborate and very heavily defended fantasy. I now think that probably what I didn't realise successfully and that perhaps other children did realise was that there is a sort of level at which this would work and be appropriate and there's a level that just doesn't work at all, and I tried to drag it through into this other level where it didn't work at all.

But you can do that in fiction.

Well, you can certainly do it in fiction, and perhaps that's why I enjoyed stories so.

The seamless flow between the two I think is really strong within The Tricksters. I read an interpretation that suggested that the carnival triplets and the whole set of events was basically Harry's imagination, and yet they impact on the lives of her family as well, physically as well as emotionally.

Very early on in The Lion in the Meadow the editor said to me "do you think that the mother saw the lion?" and I said "Yes" and she said, "Oh but that doesn't make sense, there couldn't be a lion". I didn't know what to say after that. When they first had it illustrated, and then when it was re-illustrated 15 years later, by the same illustrator, in all the pictures the mother is never looking directly at the lion. Now, I'm quite happy to have it that way, in actual fact I think that it's quite sensible. I think that in actual fact that when I said yes, that I think that the mother did see the lion, and she said that she didn't see how she could, there was a difference between us, and that my different view of the story was perhaps a perpetuation of the sort of errors that I'd made in childhood. At any rate, in the world of the story, I would say the mother did see the lion, the child's imagination was so strong that it caused the lion to appear and the mother saw the lion, which the editor wasn't prepared to countenance. So in the end, I suppose it's left to the reader to do what they feel is appropriate with that idea, and I'm quite happy about that.

There are certain ways in which a writer is entitled to say "this is what the story's about" but then I think that there are certain ways too when the reader receives the story that the reader is entitled to say "this is what the story's about". Naturally, I don't want to misread any writer, but there are times when I get the story and I read it and this is what it means to me and it's probably something a little bit different from what the writer originally intended. Also, there's sometimes things you miss out, or there's allusions you miss out on, but on the other hand sometimes as a reader you create your own and tuck them in. There has been cases where people have written to me, written about what they've received from the stories, I've seen one or two interpretations of The Changeover in terms of, say, feminist politics, which was not really my conscious intention in writing it. That doesn't alter the fact though that you do find — I mean, feminist politics isn't anything to do with the conscious intention of the folktale, and yet there's lots of things you can look at the folktale and say, well you know, women are often given passive roles, they're not exclusively, there's actually quite a lot of women in the folktale.....

There's a lot more when you start looking for them, a lot more than you think...

Yes, there are, and if you look in Italian fairytales, the Italo Calvino book, he mentions that there was a storyteller who was a female storyteller and she chose stories that featured women. But then there's also the thing that the heroines are named, and so they're much more characters than the... I mean, Cinderella is Cinderella, the Prince is just the Prince. He might be called Prince Charming in some versions, but not too often. Or the Sleeping Beauty, you know, a lot of them. There are a few men who are named too, but overwhelmingly it's women with the names.

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