Discworld and Member Articles
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Written by terrypratchettbooks.org
Sunday, 13 November 2005 |
from: Scotsman - United Kingdom
by JACKIE MCGLONE
NEIL Gaiman is on the last leg of his world tour. He's done America and England, is about to do Ireland, and has just done Scotland. But he'll be back here soon. "Just try to keep me away," exclaims the cult novelist, who is the literary equivalent of a sexy rock star.
He'll return in March because he plans to sit in on final rehearsals in Glasgow for the National Theatre of Scotland's production of his weirdly wonderful children's story, The Wolves in the Walls, and, of course, he'll be at the first night.
A musical version of the graphic novel, which is clever, creepy and very funny and which tells of Lucy, who hears a pack of wolves in the walls of her house, opens at the Tramway. No one believes the child until it's too late; the wolves burst out and the family is forced to flee - but the resourceful Lucy persuades them to fight back.
It's a smart move on the part of NTS artistic director Vicky Featherstone to choose a work by the hip novelist, who has just toppled Dan Brown from his perch at No 1 on The New York Times Bestseller List, for her debut production. "Yes, Dan Brown is trampled in the dust of my feet!" exclaims Gaiman, over late-night dessert and drinks after a sold-out Edinburgh gig.
"It's strange, rather thrilling - and very, very cool."
The NTS musical is a collaboration with Improbable Theatre and their director Julian Crouch, of Shockheaded Peter fame. Since Gaiman, whose admirers include Norman Mailer, Stephen King, Harvey Weinstein, Lenny Henry, and Tori Amos (she writes songs about him, with lines like, "Will you find me if Neil makes me a tree?"), is incredibly prolific. He's even dashed off the odd lyric for some of the songs while the show was being workshopped.
"I couldn't help myself," he says, adding that - "surreally" - he had only recently returned from Hollywood, where he watched filming of his screenplay for the Robert Zemeckis epic, the $100m Beowulf, starring Angelina Jolie and Anthony Hopkins - "and the dragon fight to end all dragon fights". It's due out in 2007. Is Angelina Jolie even lovelier in the flesh? "Everyone asks that. I've no idea - she was in costume and had hundreds of light-reflecting patches on her face."
Despite this brush with mega-stardom, he seems even more boyishly excited at the prospect of the Wolves in the Walls musical. "I guess it'll bring in the kind of audience that never goes to the theatre," drawls the former journalist, who though British-born has a slight transatlantic twang after living in the States for many years with his American wife, Mary, and their three children, whose ages range from 22 to 11.
They live in Minneapolis in a rambling Addams Family-style house, complete with turret and wraparound porch - a childhood dream come true, says Gaiman. Nonetheless, his idea of "pornography" is to surf estate agents' websites lusting after Scottish mansions and stately homes. "I think one day we'll settle in Scotland - and I'll become a Scottish writer by adoption."
In Edinburgh to promote the deliciously dark and deliriously comedic Anansi Boys, Gaiman is surrounded by 250 adoring acolytes. The black leather-jacketed 45-year-old - he looks like a latter-day, tangle-haired Byron touring with a rock band - spends almost two hours signing copies of supplicants' books using one of his trademark vintage fountain pens.
Happily, no one asks him to autograph a limb only to return later with Gaiman's signature freshly tattooed, the i's dotted with gouts of blood, as one guy did in America, where Gaiman reckons he's still the most famous writer many people have never heard of. Lately, though, he's become an adjective. Reviewers write of other lesser novelists "doing that whole Gaiman thing".
Indeed, as SFX Magazine remarked recently, tap 'Neil' into Google and you don't get either Young or Diamond, you get Gaiman. As for his blog www.neilgaiman.com it gets around 1.4 million hits a month and he's contributed about a million words to it himself.
Heaven only knows how he finds the time. He is indubitably the world's most successful graphic novelist, the author of the fabled Sandman series, brilliantly illustrated by his long-time collaborator, the artist Dave McKean, and described by Mailer as "a comic strip for intellectuals" and by Stephen King as "a treasure-house of story". By the time it finished in 1996, Sandman had racked up sales of 1.2 million copies a year and was selling more copies than Superman. Come 2008, Sandman will be back, Gaiman promises, hand on heart, to mark his 20th anniversary.
He's won innumerable awards in the fantasy field and his comic, The Last Temptation, was a collaboration with Alice Cooper, around which the shock-rocker based his album of the same name. Gaiman's last novel, the breathtakingly imaginative American Gods, was a top ten bestseller, while a collection of grisly poems, Now We Are Sick, which he co-edited, is a collector's item.
GAIMAN'S HIGHLY original novel Neverwhere, about a yuppie who falls into a secret, magical London of sewers, tortuous tunnels and hidden underground places "where you crunch the corpses of dead pigeons underfoot", was made into a TV series by the BBC. Mirrormask, a gorgeously inventive film collaboration with McKean and the Henson Corporation, premiered to acclaim at the Edinburgh Film Festival this year, but still awaits a general release date. Gaiman has also somehow found time to collaborate with Discworld author Terry Pratchett on their novel Good Omens, which dominated the bestseller lists for seven years.
"It's not true that I wrote it and then Terry put the jokes in - that's what everyone always thinks. But, hey, I can do funny! And that's why Anansi Boys balances humour with the horror. It's my homage to PG Wodehouse and a long-forgotten American writer called Thorne Smith, whose very witty book The Passionate Witch was filmed as I Married a Witch. He's one of my all-time favourites. So, yeah, I really wanted to make people laugh - and then think."
Currently preparing the pilot for a TV series, based on his prize-winning short stories, he's just embarked on a new children's story and it's so scary that he even gave himself the creeps with the first few paragraphs and has had to lay it to one side until he is less disturbed. With typical Gaiman gall, it's called The Graveyard Book.
The Wolves in the Walls previews at Tramway, Glasgow, from March 23 before touring Scotland
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