Interviewing Anna Smith Spark
Hellooo!
This month I was delighted to read the excellent A Woman of the Sword by Anna Smith Spark a tale at the sharp end of war about being a foot-soldier, a warrior and a mother handling young children in a warring fantasy world. It is well worth your time. I was very lucky to again get a chance to talk to Anna about this book and also what else we can look forward to this year!
How do you like to booktempt people to read A Woman of the Sword?
My Brilliant Friend in the Malazan Empire.
Imagine a really bad morning trying to get the kids to school and then the Battle of Pelennor Fields kicks off down the road.
It’s a story about someone trying to just live and get by in a world they have no control over. How you or I might struggle if we were living through the great fantasy clashes we love. I’m a disabled woman with children, I dream of being swept up into a vast fantasy world, I do truly dream of living in the world I created in Empires of Dust, to fight those battles at Marith’s side, see gods and dragons wheeling dying overhead, that’s my heart’s desire – but me and my children, living in that world …. my gods it would be terrifying and I give thanks every day we live a very safe suburban existence.
It will break your heart and leave you trembling, and it’s beautiful.
After the grand scale epic of the Empires of Dust did you want to do a smaller scale tale?
Yes, A Woman of the Sword emerged very naturally from the end of The House of Sacrifice. I got more and more caught up in the lives of the camp followers, the common soldiers, these very normal people living in Marith’s wake. The decisions he makes dooms them or saves them, they make money out of fighting for him, they are loyal to him and love him and suffer at his whims. I wanted to write about their experiences of this vast war, where it’s not about destiny and the weight of history and epic passion and all the huge sweeping things, it’s about daily life, trying to survive and make the best of things, find opportunities for your children, take pride in your job, just … live life like most of us do. A boring job, an okay marriage, a not very nice slightly too small house, but it’s all kind of ultimately okay and could be a lot worse. Poor Marith, maybe if he’d had that – and at the beginning of The Court of Broken Knives he could maybe, briefly, have stayed with Tobias and his troop and had that, grown old as an anonymous mercenary footsoldier tramping pointlessly around Irlast, and been … content? I wanted to write about one person living in that world, a different kind of story.
I love those special episodes in long series where you see the world through the walk-on characters’ eyes. There’s an episode of Babylon 5 through the eyes of station maintenance staff. Or briefly at the beginning of The Force Awakens when you see Finn as an anonymous Storm Trooper only following orders with his colleagues, it’s basically just a low-level boring job. Military historical fiction does it brilliantly – the tragedy of the gap between the generals’ big plans / delusions / betrayals, ‘we will send 50,000 men to their deaths as a diversion but by doing that we will win the battle and thus the war’, and the wretched blokes who have no idea why they’re marching and what’s to come. Blackadder Goes Forth and such, these guys really aren’t the chosen special magic people, they’re cannon fodder and know it, they don’t want to reclaim their kingdom or change the world, they want to survive another few days and have a cup of tea in peace. It’s important to tell those small-scale stories. Politically important, and in terms of basic human empathy.
Finishing Empires of Dust broke me physically and mentally, and then just when I was feeling a bit better, lockdown happened. I didn’t have the mental capacity to juggle multiple POVS and timelines and that. I was writing my own thoughts and experiences, what I feared and dreamed of. It rushed out very raw and ragged, my own feelings and experiences of lockdown and motherhood.
How did Lidae develop for you as a character?
Lidae is me. A lot of the things she says and does when she’s with her children – that’s me. As I said, I wrote myself and my feelings during lockdown. She’s also heavily influenced by Mother Courage and Antigone, both stories about women’s personal lives during war, the personal domestic consequences of war and the conflicts war creates between different relationships and loyalties and hopes. There are several very minor female characters in Empires of Dust who are shown living on the fringes of Marith’s army, their lives got deeply under my skin as I wrote. Lidae articulates a lot of my feelings about Empires of Dust and epic fantasy in general. I don’t like her, in the way I love Marith, but / because / she is me.
(I talk about this a lot more in the essay in the special limited edition, quick plug.)
It is refreshing to have characters who are more than just their job and here we see a tension between war and family life. Why does a lot of fantasy shy away from this?
There’s a certain element of truth to the idea that big commercial fantasy series are predominantly read by young men who maybe aren’t terribly interested in family life. Although of course a lot of fantasy is actually about family life – the adventuring party as a found family; the conflict between fathers and sons; siblings who are rivals for the throne. The Broken Empire series is full of stuff about Jorg’s relationship with his father, his stepmother, his wife, his road brothers (sic); GoT is absolutely about family loyalties, secrets, guilt, hate, love … I spend a lot of time thinking about those families. Marith and Ty and their father, for example – I mean, lots of us have experienced sibling tension, conflict about who’s the ’favoured child’, ended up yelling at our mum or dad ‘you only love him, not me’ over something really dumb and genuinely briefly believed it. But when swords and thrones and dragons and destiny get chucked in on top of angry teenagers with standard slightly rubbish knackered after a day at work I don’t know what to say to him you deal with it parents …
After lockdown, I heard a lot of people saying about their family that ‘you realise what really matters’, getting a dog or whatever because what they value more and more is being at home with family and friends not going out to fancy restaurants and exotic holiday resorts. So perhaps people will right about family in fantasy more.
But … it can also be … boring? I’d love to write ‘hard fantasy’ as the hard science fiction writer Allen Stroud dubbed it: lots of scenes of daily family and community life, people cooking, farming, working in the smithy, building houses, celebrating a birthday or wedding, in a fantasy world; the fantasy equivalent of the drooling over people doing zero-gravity tech stuff that’s actually just car mechanics / plumbing in science fiction. Le Guin does it gloriously in Tehanu, which is really just a book about a mother and her child living their lives in a pre-modern community. But Le Guin’s, well, Le Guin … in other hands I suspect it would be a very dull book. I kind of want to write Middlemarch set on the White Isles, or Emma among the merchant class in Sorlost. But I suspect it would be very dull. Many great literary books about parents and children, husbands and wives, are very very dull.
And to be fair, the heart of fantasy is conventionally the big narrative arc, not simply people living their lives. I mean, that’s the ‘fantasy’ part of fantasy, really – that you’re in a world of kings, magicians, intrigue, battles, not you and your partner bickering over whose turn it is to do the washing up.
Here we see armies not simply soldiers marching and fighting but a whole ecosystem that travels with them. Is there a historical parallel that helped you shape your setting?
I read a lot of military history and military historical novels. I was thinking a lot about camp followers and the wider socio-economics of armies while I was writing The House of Sacrifice, drawing especially on the mobile kingdom that followed Alexander the Great across Asia. Alexander lived his whole adult life on the move, his army and his court following him literally across deserts and off the map. And his soldiers’ children would have grown up to become soldiers themselves during that time. After his death, everyone’s so used to fighting and marching, it’s become so central to the whole huge system’s identity, that it just carries on. There’s a wonderful line in Mary Renault’s Funeral Games about Alexander’s wife Roxanne, that’s she’s known nothing in her life but travelling around in the baggage train of an army, living in a wagon, not really knowing where she’s being taken or why. It’s become completely normal, just how life is. The baggage train itself is a vast collections of workers, traders, servants, women and children from all over Asia, a few real old hands who came over from Macedon, then more and more who can see an opportunity to make money, or who’ve lost everything and have nowhere else to go, or who’ve been taken as slaves. Every time Alexander wins, he gets more soldiers and courtiers, they all need food, clothes, servants, entertainment … then the workers and servants and traders and women and children have needs and wants of their own …. So there’s the army, the camp followers, the camp followers’ camp followers, plus the beggars and refugees trailing along in their wake … By this point, you’ll have people whose lives are totally dependent on the war machine, but are three, four, five layers away from actual fighting. Someone needs to sell food to Alexander’s generals’ mistresses’ dressmakers’ servants’ washerwomen. And if the war machine stops, huge numbers of people are suddenly unemployed. So maybe the best thing is to keep it running. Lots of people will have a massive incentive to keep it running.
Also the Thirty Years War. I’ve been haunted by Mother Courage since I saw Fiona Shaw in the title role years ago. Her whole life is bound up with war (it’s been going on for seventeen years by the time the play ends, after all), she’s financially dependent on war, her identity is so bound up with war. The women camp followers in the Thirty Years War and the Napoleonic Wars probably lived pretty much as Alexander’s camp followers did, but we can access writings about and by people caught up in those wars much more easily.
What else can we look forward to from you in the future and where can we find out more?
I’ve got another new novel, the start of a new series in a new world, out on 12th September. It’s called A Sword of Bronze and Ashes, and is billed as ‘a folk horror fantasy from the Queen of Grimdark’. I love that! You can already pre-order here, and check out the stunning cover (see the end of the interview!!):
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sword-Bronze-Ashes-Smith-Spark/dp/1787588394/
It’s an adult revisioning of the classic children’s fantasy I loved as a child and reread during lockdown like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Dark is Rising sequence, The Hounds of the Morrigan, stories about children taken out of the safe familiar world they know, being confronted with folklore and folk horror and deep magical other realities superimposed onto their safe small world. But the protagonist is the adult protector figure, literally in this case the mother, who is torn between keeping her family safe and ignorant of what’s pursuing them and giving them the knowledge they need to be strong and powerful, to stand with her against the dark. When I was a child, I could never understand why the adult protector doesn’t just tell the children the truth on page two (I mean, if someone had just told H**** P***** who his parents were and what happened to them and everything on his first evening at Hogwarts, everyone’s lives would have been a lot easier, various people might not have died, plus we’d have been spared ten billion increasingly rubbish words and years of Twitter bile …. win-win, right?). But now as a parent myself, the conflict between wanting my children to know the truth about the world, to stride out brave and tall to kill the monsters, and wanting to keep them safe, protected, innocent: it’s a huge weight. And to tell them things about my past, that my life is more complicated than they want to think … that I’ve met monsters, failed against monsters … it’s hard and painful.
That scene in the film of The Fellowship of the Ring where everyone’s arguing over the ring, and finally Frodo says he’ll take it to Mordor, Gandalf’s face when Frodo says it … as a parent that’s everything you fear and hope for, that your child will be strong and brave and good and fight to save the world from evil, but you know the danger and the pain they’ll feel, maybe you’d rather they stayed weak and complicit in evil and safe.
Like A Woman of the Sword, A Sword of Bronze and Ashes is a book about a mother and her children (and her husband this time), but it’s about my hopes and aspirations, not my fears. If Lidae is me, the protagonist of A Sword of Bronze and Ashes is how I’d like to be as a mother and as a woman. Strong, confident, powerful, at ease with herself, but also self-aware and self-questioning. She does everything Aragorn does only backwards in heels, while arranging enriching educational activities for her kids. Plus dragons and folk horror and lyrical Irish myth influenced prose-poetry because that’s what I love.
There’s a taster of the new world (actually it’s kind of the same world just in a different time and place, maybe … or this world dreamed Marith, or Marith dreamed it … or something)and the slightly different aesthetic I use in my prose for it in my story in Grim Oak Press’s Unbound II.
You can get updates at www.courtofbrokenknives.com, Twitter @queenofgrimdark, Facebook and Instragram Anna Smith Spark.
What great books have you read recently?
I should give a shoutout to Jenny Hannaford’s Gates of Hope (Aulirean Gates I), which isn’t the kind of fantasy I normally read (it’s so far from grimdark), but is a fresh, lovely story about good, kind people, with fabulous worldbuilding. Jenny’s a biologist, she focusses a lot on the fauna and particularly flora of her three different planets, writes about plants and herbalism so beautifully and thoughtfully. I could see the plants, and smell them. She also has a lovely relationship between a young man and his dog companion; Jenny so clearly loves dogs and really gets inside the way the two communicate psychically, it’s very touching and gentle (made me want a dog, and I’m a cat person). Like Shona Kinsella’s Ashael Rising, which I was lucky enough to blurb and thus read early last year, it’s a very healing book. Both those books are hugely about family and community.
I also finally read Pete McLean’s Priest of Crowns and was gripped by it. Such a powerful ending to the series. I’ve compared it to Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy before now – I was very disappointed by The Mirror and the Light which tails off into Cromwell’s fall without any sense of why or how, or how he feels as things are crumbling, whether he even notices (which could be a powerful literary device, that he has become overconfident and blinded by his own abilities, doesn’t see what the reader does … but isn’t); Priest of Crowns is so truthful about Thomas Piety and what happens to him and why. And Pete’s folksong influenced prose is superb.
