Michelle Paver is just back from a fact-finding trip to the Arctic. The sun
last appeared in Spitsbergen at the end of October, so it was dark and
getting pretty chilly, although Paver doesn’t use that word. “It wasn’t too
bad,” she says cheerfully. “Between minus 5C and minus 12C. Once it gets
below minus 15C it starts feeling cold.”
She went walking on a glacier in snowshoes. “With a head-lamp, in the dark —
it was brilliant.” She would have liked to have made the trip alone “but you
have to go with a guide because of the polar bears”.
Where other fiction writers may rely simply on their imaginative powers,
Paver’s desire for authenticity takes her on research trips to some of the
wildest and most inhospitable places in the world. Her bestselling Chronicles
of Ancient Darkness series for children may have been set in the Stone
Age but she was determined to do as much research as possible into landscape
and lifestyle. That necessitated trips to Finland, Norway, Greenland and
Canada and close encounters with polar bears, killer whales and wolves.
The heavy doses of reality in her fantasies about a boy and a wolf saving the
Stone Age world from demonic magic may help to explain their phenomenal
appeal. The six volumes, about characters whose lives could not be farther
removed from those of modern children, have sold more than a million copies
in Britain and 2.4 million around the world.
The last volume of the series, published in August, has left both the author
and her diehard young fans to come to terms with the end of the adventures
of Torak and his lupine companion, Wolf.
Paver is something of a lone wolf herself. Aged 49, she is single and lives by
herself, utterly dedicated to a writing career that catapulted her into the
international premier league of children’s writers after years of
frustration.
It is not hard to excavate the origins of Paver’s fascination with prehistory.
They are to be found in her childhood, where she remembers being captivated
by an illustrated book about the Stone Age.
Born in Malawi, where her father was a journalist, she moved with her family
to Wimbledon in southwest London when she was 3. Her parents allowed her to
ditch her bed and sleep on the floor, make elderberry wine and skin a
rabbit. They drew the line at giving her a pet wolf. “I don’t hold it
against them.” But the passion for wolves remained until she wrote the first
of the Chronicles, Wolf Brother. The series is “wish fulfilment for
me. I wanted to be friends with a wolf as a kid”.
She has never run with the pack. For a year, at the age of 10, she was bullied
at school. “I had a disastrously short haircut so they called me Cave Boy.
It was a year of utter misery.” Eventually her chief tormentor left but the
experience informed the character of the outsider Torak. She also realised
“that I could live in books and get through. I just ignored everybody else.
The imaginary world became my support”.
As a teenager “I wasn’t happy. No big reason — I was just an overweight,
spotty teenager.” She devoured Norse and Greek myths, then the classics. “I
was clever. I was reading Dostoevsky and my schoolfriends weren’t. So I was
thinking ‘you are idiots’ and my parents were idiots because they watched
television.”
At Oxford, where she achieved a first in biochemistry, she had “a lovely time
but I didn’t really make any friends and I didn’t really want them. I
enjoyed the work but I didn’t go to any lectures. I spent most of my time
trying to write novels. I was totally non-social. At Oxford you can do that
— I wasn’t the weirdest one by any means.”
She certainly isn’t socially inept. As we sip juices in a Covent Garden hotel
bar she is chatty and engaging, pulling treasures from her travels out of
her bag and spinning yarns about her journeys. Her gamine looks belie her
physical toughness and single-minded devotion to her work.
At Oxford she wrote two children’s novels, including a prototype of Wolf
Brother set in the 9th century, and two Mills & Boon-style romances.
All were rejected. She became a lawyer, eventually rising to partner in a
City firm. She was well rewarded but had little time for anything else in
her life and, after 13 years, came close to a breakdown. “I wasn’t eating
well, I was drinking too much. I didn’t realise how tightly wound I was
until I stopped.”
The death of her father from cancer in 1996 after five years of illness made
her re-evaluate her life. “He said he didn’t have any regrets. He had
enjoyed his life. It made me realise that I didn’t have for ever.” She took
a year off to travel, having adventures that included singing Danny Boy
to an agitated black bear that advanced to within 5ft of her when she
stumbled across its cubs in a California national park. “Afterwards I dined
on whisky and coffee ice cream. It felt so basic: ‘I’m alive!’ I have
experienced mortal terror. It was brilliant for Wolf Brother.”
Returning to work was a mistake and she resigned to concentrate on writing.
She published five historical novels before selling the entire Chronicles
series on the basis of the first six chapters and a brief outline. The deal,
for between £1.5 million and £3 million (she won’t be more specific) came in
2003 at the height of the search for the next J. K. Rowling. What looked
initially like a huge gamble appeared sound business even before she had
finished writing the first book, as the sale of foreign rights recouped the
thumping advance. Ridley Scott has bought the movie rights.
The books are about an orphaned boy with strange powers that he doesn’t
understand being called upon to save the world from the evil forces that
destroyed his parents. It is not hard to see how they chime with readers of
Harry Potter. And the idea of the little guy being the only one who can
destroy the world’s tormentor by undertaking a quest into the lair of the
enemy is unmistakably Tolkienian.
But, to be fair, such themes are hardly exclusive to J. K. and J. R. R. And
Paver insists that her books are “not fantasy. This is reality. That’s the
distinction I make”. So while they may seem to be full of magic, it is
possible to find rational explanations for what happens. Where Stone Age man
sees an evil bear, we might recognise an animal suffering from a virus. Her
demonic Tokoroths could be enslaved children. If you were a Stone Age person
“down a cave and inhaling strange smoke and chewing roots and hallucinogenic
plants, you could see a lot of possibilities,” says Paver.
Our knowledge of life in the Stone Age is limited, so Paver constructed a
world based on the traditions and customs of indigenous peoples in the far
north, as well as borrowing from anthropological studies of peoples in other
parts of the world. “I met shamans in Greenland who really do believe they
travel to the spirit world.”
She has ridden on horseback across Lapland, staying in Sami settlements and
learning how to skin a reindeer. She hopped around Greenland by boat and
helicopter and joined a seal hunt. In Canada she came to nose to nose with a
polar bear while out of paw-reach in a tundra buggy.
In one of Norway’s deepest fjords she swam with killer whales that were so
focused on a shoal of herring that they didn’t mistake a woman in a drysuit
for a seal snack. When one swam right beneath her, she thought: “I am not
religious but, my God, I am in his world and he is letting me. Then I raised
my head in this choppy sea and another one was swimming straight towards me.
I remember there was this little silver wave curling back from this very
big, wobbly dorsal fin. I put that in the book.”
When she began planning the books, she says, she did not know if children
would find the world of hunter-gatherers appealing. “I didn’t have children,
I didn’t know any children.” Now she thinks that part of the attraction is
that the world she describes is as far removed from their existences as it
can be. “It is a very life-and-death world so there are big emotions
involved.” The children in the book “don’t have school
exams. There are no mirrors, so they don’t know what they look like. Compare
that to now and the pressures on children in London to wear all the right
things. It just doesn’t matter!”
When she was growing up she was fascinated by the question of whether she
could survive on her own in the wild without her parents, as her characters
have to do. After all her travels, how would she get on today? “If I was in
Northern Europe and if it was summer, I might survive for a few days.” She
pulls a little box of Stone Age arrowheads out of her bag and observes that
learning how to knap flints for the most basic tools and weapons takes years.
Although there is a relationship between Torak and a girl called Renn, the
real love story is between boy and wolf. Paver has heard wolves and seen
their fresh tracks in the Carpathian mountains but never seen them in the
wild. However, she has been able to bond with the wolves at the UK Wolf
Conservation Trust in Berkshire, where the largest animal is named Torak.
She went there recently with Sir Ian McKellen, who recorded the audio
versions of her books. Torak “put his paws on my shoulders and licked my
face. Gorgeous.” She has learnt the essentials of the vocal and body
language that wolves use to communicate and can speak basic “wolf”.
The millions her books have earned allow her to make the research trips but
she still lives in a two-up, two-down house in Wimbledon, near her mother.
The money “gives security. Obviously the ideas will dry up at some stage if
I live that long. When I am older I’ll have to look after myself. At some
point a dog would be nice but I am happy being on my own because, you know,
[I have] the characters.”
When she finished the Chronicles this year she felt bereft. “It was
quite a big deal for me. I don’t really do much else but write. It felt like
Torak and Renn are my children. Now it’s finished they are out in the world,
so I felt a bit sad. But I also felt a sense of achievement because I feel
that I have kept up the standard, done what I wanted to do.”
She doesn’t think that she could have written the books if she had a family.
“I can’t imagine it. As I am not a mother I can’t say, ‘This is what you
ought to do when you have children’. But my mother certainly made us feel
that we were the centre of her universe. [A family] would necessarily take
some of my attention away. And how could I have gone off with killer whales?
I don’t think I could have had a boyfriend, either. I wouldn’t have wanted
it: ‘Go away and play golf or something’.”
She felt that she needed a break from children’s fiction, so the next book,
also set in the far north, is for adults. After that she will begin work on
another children’s book, set in a different part of the world in a slightly
later period of prehistory.
That is the only clue she will give her fans. They log on to her site in their
thousands, though she rarely looks at it. She works on a 15-year-old
computer and does not use e-mail or have an internet connection. She reads
in the British Library and aims to write for six hours a day.
Tomorrow she is heading off to a rented cottage to work. “Although I live on
my own, I still feel I have to go away to the country sometimes, to be
completely alone.”
Ghost Hunter by Michelle Paver (Orion Children’s Books) is out now
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