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Welcome to the book show A Celebration of Reading and Writers. I'm Joe Donahue.
Kiddler Carr is the critically acclaimed author of The Alienest, The Angel of Darkness,
The Lessons of Terror, and many other novels. He has taught military history at Bard College
and worked extensively in film, television, and theater.
Demonstrating the rich storytelling, plotting, and depth of research that he showcased in The Alienest,
Carr has written a new novel, The Legend of Broken.
Some years ago, a remarkable manuscript long rumored to exist was discovered, The Legend of Broken.
It tells of a prosperous, fortress city where order reigns at the point of a sword,
even as scheming factions secretly vie for control of the surrounding kingdom.
Meanwhile, outside the city's granite walls and industrious tribe of exiles known as the Bain forages for sustenance in the wilds.
It is a great pleasure to welcome Caleb Carr to the book show.
Thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here.
Very nice to have you with us.
Give us a sense of what brought you to this type of book.
Is this something that you have long thought of doing, of going into a fantasy genre?
I first started this book in about 1984.
And it was one of those projects that I kept coming back to and kept coming back to in between projects.
And it was never the right time because of the fact that we were still living in an age of such pigeonholing.
And really, you can describe it as fantasy in that it takes place in an imaginary place.
But it's not fantasy in the sense that you're not going to see any dragons or the wizards or anything like that.
The whole emphasis of the book is on reality, the reality of the time and how the reality in the dark ages could have been different.
Had certain historical trends not taken place.
It's always been an allegory, but it's funny how allegories grow.
J.R. Tokie and most of his life trying to deny the fact and live down the fact that that Lord of the Rings might be an allegory for World War II for the interwar.
Well, it was obviously an allegory for that, but the mistake he made was that it was an allegory for a great deal more than that at the same time.
And that's what happens with allegories.
When I started in 1984, I was living in New York and it started out as an allegory about New York City.
And then it grew in its scope and it grew in its depth and its philosophical depth so that now it's an allegory for many things.
The one thing I didn't want to do was have magic in it because I've always found magic to be a terrible contrivance that you can work your way in and out of situations literally by magic.
When we finally got to a place in publishing where those people kept saying over and over again, well, it's a great book.
We would publish it, but we'd have to have magic in it.
We don't know what to do with it otherwise. We don't know where it fits.
And then there came a point at which the lines between genres got blurred, which was a good thing.
The lines between genre friction got blurred and the lines between literary and popular friction got blurred.
One of the things that scares me the most about the book world now is we seem to be slipping back into a phase where everything is highly regimented.
And that's due, of course, to the nature of the companies that are buying up the book world, the publishing world.
And they're desired to sell books as if they were any other product. And books really aren't any other product.
They are a distinct phenomenon unto themselves and you cannot, you just can't run it by the business model.
Give us a sense of why name alone isn't enough for a writer.
You would think after the alienist and you have a huge, you have a huge hit that your name would be enough to say, okay, here is my idea.
But you still have that, you have to have the hook of where to put it in the bookstore.
Oh, yeah, they still very much. I remember there was a funny incident in I was in Scotland once talking at a bookstore in Edinburgh and a very good Scottish mystery writer came to the thing.
He asked me this kind of bitter question. He said to me, what, how do you feel about the fact that your the alienist novels get put into the fiction section of the store as well as the mystery section of the store.
And he really felt it was a slight that he was not put into both as well.
It's that kind of regimentation was still very strong in the industry and it was a conscious effort.
I mean, the alienist was among many things a conscious effort to try to break down those walls.
And I don't pretend that I was alone in doing it, but there was a tremendous effort to try to do that.
And it did happen for a little while, but with the rise of the Internet and e-books, it seems like people need to have the regimentation again.
They need to know where they go to get what they get.
So you don't go to McDonald's for Kentucky Fried Chicken. It's that kind of thing, which is a sad sort of slip backwards, I think.
The thing I love about this novel and what I think what I find fascinating about what it turned general is that you as an artist are able to create a world.
And yes, it is a magic free zone, but you have still created this incredible world.
It's still an imaginary world. It just works by real terms.
Now that, to me, would seem obviously a lot of work, but also it seems to me it would be tremendous fun to create that.
Where you are not, you are not mired in, okay, this is history, this is fact, this is my imagination.
Yeah, the problem is once you say I'm going to make it work by real terms, then you have to say, well, how far are you going to take that?
And everything outside of this little world you've created has got to be real.
And it's a terrible curse doing these books because you always go into it.
I went into the alien thinking, oh, this will be easier than writing history because I'm writing historical fiction.
Well, of course, it was as hard as history and as hard as fiction both.
I mean, it was an incredibly challenging project.
In this one, I thought, well, this will be easier because it's just the product of my imagination.
But then I had everything in it and around it that had to function according to what we know about that age.
So it became extremely difficult as well in terms of research.
It begins with a manuscript that is long rumored to exist and this document is discovered and it is remarkable.
And that sort of gets us rolling.
Yeah, that's a kind of tip of the hat to, there's a lot of tips of the hat to not contemporary authors really, but older authors.
That's kind of a tip of the hat to Robert Graves and I Claudius with the buried manuscript.
And I make no pretense that I'm not tipping my hat because I want people to know about those other, some of them are mentioned in the back of the book.
I want people to know about the whole idea of the lost city, the disappeared city.
That, that Harkins very strongly back to, I think, I forget who it was, I think the Wall Street Journal guy was smart enough to say, that that Harkins back very much to a try to Haggard and Arthur Conan DeWill, that kind of lost world.
That's what it was supposed to do.
And that's a rich tradition that's been kind of lost in magic because in those stories they were terribly concerned with having it appear to be real.
King Solomon's minds, it had to, the possibility had to exist.
I like that. And the simple fact that we now know, you know, think we know what, what most of the history of the world is, well, there's a lot of it that we don't, not a lot, but there are pockets of it.
And it so happened that in the 8th century and in central northern Germany, that is one of those areas that we just don't, we just don't know who was there and what language they spoke and what they did.
It was a perfect setting for it.
Bring us to that place, to Germany of what led you to well to that country and ultimately to that place.
Well, I think what led me to the country originally, we're seeing, you can't see the mountain of what's called Brockin in German, or what I changed to Burrowkin for obvious allegorical reasons.
But it has been the site since ancient times. It has been this mountain that has been considered accursed in some way.
And the site of evil, terrible doings, go to in Faust, set the of Alpurgus, not seen on that mountain.
It's beautiful, but it's viewed with a great still with a great deal of, I don't want to say suspicion, but people are kind of iffy about it.
And also at the same time, it was a mountain that was very similar to the mountain where I live.
I live at the base of a mountain that's about just a little smaller than Brockin and about where about at the same latitude,
so that I could be here writing about there and you know, when I needed to get an effect in terms of being out in the forest, as opposed to, you know, being out in any city, I could get that effect if I needed to feel like what it was like on the mountain top.
That's how it got fixed on that exact spot.
Caleb Cars, new book is The Legend of Brockin and is published by Random House.
And then as I said, there is the creation of this world and this legend and these people and with your background in military history and teaching this as a professor, of course, and writing about it so extensively, that comes very much into play.
It does. It does because there are one of the things I object to about fantasy novels.
People are always telling me I should like fantasy novels because there are all these great huge battle scenes like in word of the rings.
And I tell people my answer is they're not battle scenes. They're just masses of people crashing into each other.
There's no suggestion of any kind of thought behind how they should crash into each other.
And that's no fault of Tolkien's. He was a linguistics professor. I mean, you know, his big point was to create a new language.
But my point was partly to show what we do know of the world as it existed outside this city state that I've created.
And then also the citizens of this city state took their cue. Basically their founder was had served as a mercenary with the Romans. They took their cue very much from the Romans and yet gave it their own, their own national tint.
So it was fun. It was great fun for me to sort of create a synthesis out of those two military traditions.
But that really was only one of the strands of the book. I mean, it's by the time I had finished, I had to do similar amounts of research with medicine, with metallurgy.
It goes on and on. The science, the science I had to learn that would have been possible that a little like the alien is in, you know, that book concerned what could psychologically, what could, what's the earliest we could have identified the serial killer.
And this is really more what, what's the earliest we could have seen progress if, you know, people had been brave enough to make significant progress and and brave the punishments because the punishments were very severe between the six century and the 16th century scientific progress was was dead in Europe because of the influence of the various monotheistic religions that stamped it out.
And in your book science really defies all expectations. Yes, it defies all expectations by echoing some, some things that are still we still use today that is still controversial today weaponry that would have been available to someone with a really good command of chemistry explosives and that part of it appeal to me too.
That there were comments to be made on how our armed forces conduct themselves within the context of an eighth century story that part I really liked.
And again, I mean back to the fortress city and that that story is always interesting to me, but the those who are inside and those who are out and those who want to get in and those who want to get out right that's endlessly fascinating and probably always will be well.
Well, yeah, I think, you know, it's the old, it's the old Shakespearean thing about the city and the will and the forest that surrounds it, you know, and how much fluidity is there in and out what what happens in which sphere, you know, people have to leave the city to attain a certain kind of basic enlightenment that they may have forgotten about and people outside the city are always dying to get in to.
Enjoy the to enjoy the pleasures and the profits so it is and it isn't endlessly fascinating story it's one, but again it's when we've largely lost because people think there's no place left I mean there's no there's no place left to go in many sense a friend of mine once said to me you know history is really the last exotic place on earth.
Because we can sit at home and watch anything travel logs beautiful you know high definition pictures of any place on earth, but what you can't watch is the past and that is is sort of a in a moment he kind of summed up what I've been doing for the last 20 years.
It is the last exotic place and it is the place you can go that it's different for every person every person experiences the past differently it's full of character who are exotic yet totally credible action that's totally credible I mean it's it it's that part of it I really love.
That part of it I really love of course that results in extra research so you know going this this took twice as much research as the alien this did.
Once you're in it it's it's it's you know it's like your own private Vietnam it's just you're in you're in it and you can't get out you know it's just well I can't turn back and say I don't really want to do this project so the only way I think the apocryphal the apocryphal phrase it was attributed to Winston Churchill if you find if you find yourself going through hell keep going which I which I'm not going to do.
I think it's they don't know whether he said it enough so do you feel as a writer you have come out victorious in the sense that it is the story you wanted to tell.
Oh yes that part of it I'm that part of it I'm very happy about.
You know it will if if if previous books like it are any or any judge it may it may take you know it may take some people.
Some time to get into the book I mean any of these but I mean it was the same thing with the alien is that I had dozens of people readers and reviewers saying well the beginning was hard to get into then it was great.
Because the beginning is always hard to get into you know when you're creating an alternate reality you have to set the terms for everybody so that parts always hard.
But I think once you get past that part I think people will will be rewarded but I certainly have been rewarded by having it done.
One of the things is struck me about the book is that when you compare it to much of your other work where there was a very relatively small cast and very controllable.
This is this is a door stop of a book and it has a very large cast there's a lot to keep track of yes there is a lot to keep track of and believe me my my study at home was.
All walls were plastered with you know story lines that you just have to keep simultaneously simultaneously going you know but you're in you're in for what you're in for it it just doesn't never it never seems that way when you start you know you get into these huge worlds even the alien is that was a huge different world than anything we know now.
And you get into it and you think well I can handle this and then you just get deeper and deeper into the details and you're just like well we got to include this I have to include this I have to and before you know it you've got you know a whole big cast the characters and a whole lot of material to cover with them.
But hopefully you do it in a fun way much of this when we think of fantasy we think of we think of series we think of stories that go on because once this world is created there's much more to find out about the life that goes on with within and with outside of those walls did you ever think that way I can split this up oh yeah.
Yeah I don't think I'm telling tales out of school by saying that I was I was told by my publisher that the words book one or part one would not appear on the cover of this book at this book it was a necessity that this book stand on its own and then depending on what the reaction was maybe we do another one down the road.
Now there's a lot of reasons why they had that opinion at the time that they voiced that they weren't doing so good with fantasy series and I probably shouldn't get more specific than that but they had random house had waited a very long time for the latest installment of a certain fantasy series and they were tired of it and they didn't want they didn't want to see anymore any more books that where you had to look down the long way.
I'm not going to be a good one to get the story but the door is left open in this book. Absolutely. Yeah.
Absolutely. Yeah. Left open and and it's open for you. I mean you're willing to go there if if the oh yeah.
The interest is there. If the interest is there. The reviews I've read of this book I find fascinating because so many people talk about it as as a departure and I don't know if I see it as really that much of a departure and that it has all of your home marks.
You are wise not to see it as a departure because it isn't it's it just goes back you know okay it goes back a thousand years before the 1890s but it it is much more of a historical mystery than it is a fantasy in the traditional senses.
I mean what they're trying to figure out what all this great cast of characters the different things they're trying to figure out are all real and they all involve you know specialized cognitive thinking rather than magic or impulse.
So it's really not a departure at all but it's very hard to get people to see that if they don't take a look at it. I just have to ask you because I'm curious but when they first showed you the cover and there is this this white tiger creature coming to you did you like the panther did you like that I actually for the most part design that cover that's beautiful cover because it they wanted one iconic figure from the book.
And you couldn't there was no one person and yet the soul of the book is really wrapped up in that white panther.
The thrivoting stuff it's the legend of broken is the new book it is published by random house.
Caleb Carr a great pleasure thank you so much for for being with us.
Thank you so much for having a great a great pleasure and honor.
Caleb Carr's new book is the legend of broken is published by random house.
We enjoy hearing from our listeners about our programs you can email us at book at wamc.org and you can listen again to this or find past book shows at wamc.org.
So we'll do produces our program bookmarkers for next week and thanks for listening for the book show I'm Joe Donnelly.
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