The website of author Jane Johnson, aka Jude Fisher, aka Gabriel King
Tuareg rebels today preparing to face down the Malian army as they lay claim to a homeland – the Azawad – for their displaced, stateless people. If you’ve read THE SALT ROAD, this will feel eerily familiar…
A very good Al Jazeera report here (you may need to copy and paste – my link not working!)–
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2012/01/201212614823523986.html
The French edition will be the first published edition, coming in February 2012. Pretty cover, even if Alys’s hair is the wrong colour, a minor detail.
Here’s a story about Morocco, and the warmth of its people, that illustrates all the reasons I fell in love with this country in the first place. And it’s a particularly heartwarming tale for Christmas week too.
We live in a little village a long, long way from any commercial centre, in the foothills of the Anti-Atlas Mountains, in the southwest of Morocco. It’s about three-and-a-half hours by car over the mountains to the nearest supermarket, in Agadir on the Atlantic coast, though our village is nearer the Sahara than the sea. And of course, being a Muslim country, no one celebrates Christmas here, though I like to do whatever I can to make it a festive day.
We will have a roast chicken, stuffing, bread sauce, cranberry, roast potatoes and vegetables for our lunch on Christmas Day; followed by Christmas pudding and cake, both of which I make.
But this year – disaster! – we could not find any brussel sprouts, that staple vegetable loathed by so many, but without which an English Christmas lunch simply isn’t complete. None in the local weekly vegetable market, which was no surprise; but, horror of horrors, none to be found in the supermarket at Agadir, which usually stocks them at Christmas to humour the tourists! Our friend, who had gone there on an errand, and took our small shopping list with him, reported this lack to us with vast apology: Moroccans hate not to be accommodating in all things.
“It really doesn’t matter,” we told him by phone. “Honestly, it’s only a vegetable.” But he was utterly distraught to come back to the village without them.
I had quite forgotten about the whole debacle: but suddenly tonight we have had a phone call. “If you meet the bus that arrives from Casablanca in the village tomorrow, there will be a package for you!”
The word had gone out around friends, cousins, neighbours that Abdel’s English wife would be deprived of her home comforts for Christmas, and that would be a shame, in all senses, to Berbers everywhere. So they called around until at last they tracked down some sprouts in Rabat (coincidentally the town in which lived the Barbary corsairs featured in my first Moroccan novel, THE TENTH GIFT). And tomorrow morning at 10.30am brussel sprouts that have come the best part of 800 miles across this huge country will be in my hands.
Isn’t that delightful? I am humbled by people’s generosity; amazed by their determination and ingenuity. It’s the best illustration I can think of to explain why I love Morocco.
However… given this is the same friend who was asked to us back ‘un morceau de emmenthal’ (meaning a piece of cheese about 250g in weight), and came back with a 6 kilo mountain, I live in fear of receiving a half tonne sack of brussel sprouts!
I have just set up a Twitter account and am posting about life in Morocco, so do come and ‘follow’: and there’s also a page on Facebook for longer discussions: come and say hello!
Follow @JaneJohnsonBakr
Here is the beautiful British jacket for THE SULTAN’S WIFE, for publication by Viking Penguin in May 2012. Look at all that gold: fit for a sultan’s palace, but currently residing in our apartment in Morocco, as you can probably tell. The Canadian edition from Doubleday Canada is the next one out, in October, unless one of my other publishers beats them to it! The book is so far sold in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Canada, France, Italy, Russia, Serbia, Croatia, Turkey and French Canada.
I am very much looking forward to Nus-Nus, court eunuch, murder suspect and unwilling soldier, making his way out of my head and into the rest of the world.
I’m off to New Zealand for the first time in 8 years (the last time was for the Wellington premiere of RETURN OF THE KING) to take up my pen again as writer of the official tie-in companion to Peter Jackson’s THE HOBBIT, so back to my pseudonym of Jude Fisher. I wonder if that old hat still fits? When writing the Visual Companions for the LORD OF THE RINGS movie trilogy I went back and forth, back and forth to New Zealand, enchanted by the visions of Middle-earth being conjured up by all these wonderfully creative Kiwis and their talented cast. I went so often and became so enmeshed in the experience that I was dubbed ‘the 10th member of the Fellowship’, and certainly I was welcomed into production with such warmth and acceptance it was like finding a second family. It’ll be very different going back now, nearly a decade later, with an almost entirely different ensemble cast: thirteen dwarves and a hobbit I’ve never met, though I knew his son Frodo well. I’m looking forward to seeing New Zealand again and to introducing Abdel to the wonders of its spectacular geology, revisiting the places where I watched Middle-earth materialising before my very eyes. But most of all I’m looking forward to finding out how the film-makers have creatively bridged the gap between the epic glories of the trilogy and a linear narrative for children that connects only partially and inexactly in terms of story, and hardly at all in tone and intent. Fascinating stuff: which I will have to keep to myself for the next year, till the first film is released for December 2012 … insha’allah!
In her 18 years in this incarnation on earth our Norwegian Forest Cat Finn has been responsible for the violent deaths of hundreds of mice, shrews, voles, rabbits, birds (sorry) and even, memorably, one golden pheasant. She has climbed trees, curtains, bookcases and the legs of designer trousers; destroyed carpets, bedspreads, sofa arms and a chaise longue.
She has bossed us about with the imperious insouciance of a Moroccan sultan, careless for our convenience or comfort. She has woken us at 5am without a scrap of conscience, taken up most of the bed, disappeared for days on end while investigating wild roads. She had us opening and closing doors at a whim, without even a glint of humour at her own contrariness.
She has inspired a dozen fictional characters and been depicted on the jacket of an American novel; she has wiped out entire chapters with one careless (or possibly deliberate) misstep and reassigned the values of two computer keyboards.
She has wrecked some of my favourite clothes, left drifts of self-weaving fur on two different continents, without even visiting one of them. She has seen off a dozen rivals and fallen in love with the man I married, seducing him more thoroughly than I ever could. She has turned up her distinctively long, straight Norman helmet noseguard of a nose and curled her little Hitler moustache at more varieties of food than you could shake a tin-opener at.
She had a purr like a Geiger counter, X-ray vision for seeing through fridge doors, a wild streak, a mind of her own and a bellow like a beagle pack in full flight; a bellow that could stop a pedestrian dead at 20 paces, despite being behind the firmly closed windows of a speeding Saab. She left malicious gifts and correction letters in places never imagined by humankind. I will never pack a suitcase, Hoover a room, make a bed, open a tin, run my hand over silk, smell tuna in brine, open the front door or fall asleep without thinking of her.
Farewell Finn (b. 27/12/93 d. 6/9/11) aka Thorfinna Lodbrok (Thorfinna of the Hairy Trousers), Finncat, Finny, Finnbag, Furbag, Fat Cat, Fintle Beast, Finny Monster. All of which were preferable to your pedigree name of Lizzara Dorcas. Requiescat in pace et amore.
Tuareg band Tinariwen provided a significant inspiration for THE SALT ROAD, not only for their driving, hypnotic desert blues, but also the experiences of their lead singer Ibrahim, who inspired some part of Tuareg freedom fighter and lead male character in the novel, Amastan. (The other inspiration for Amastan was revel leader Mano Dayak, an extraordinary, charismatic, intelligent desert chieftain who led diplomatic talks and when those broke down took up arms on behalf of his people and was tragically killed in a helicopter crash, which may or may not have been an accident…) By following this link to the excellent article in today’s Observer newspaper about the band you can download for free an 8-track live album by Tinariwen and listen to their wonderful music.
Just paste this link into your browser and see how good they are:
www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/aug/21/tinariwen-tuareg-new-york-city
And here’s a link to a video to listen to them:
http://www.penzance-literary-festival.org.uk.html
It’s the second Penzance Literary Festival and I will be there on Friday 29th July, talking about Morocco: corsairs, Tuaregs and harems, my literary inspirations and the world of books, at 3.30pm at Morrab Library, and I’m really looking forward to meeting readers old and new and sharing some time with them.
Published in The Spectator 8th July 2011:
It should have been such a treat those of us who love a good epic tale: a head-to-head between the Arthurian legend cycle and a great modern myth-in-the-making. On the surface of things, Channel 4’s Camelot should have had the edge over Sky Atlantic’s Game of Thrones: stellar cast, time-honoured story, prime-time terrestrial TV slot.
At first sight they both looked handsome with their gorgeous locations, lovingly detailed costumes and castles, a touch of the other-worldly, eye-catching actors in various states of undress. But oh, what a difference in terms of script and dialogue…
It came as no surprise to me that HBO’s Game of Thrones (Sky Atlantic) should win hands down. As his UK publisher, I’ve been watching George RR Martin’s epic A Song of Ice and Fire cycle (of which A Game of Thrones is the first part) blazing a trail towards classic status for the past 15 years, perfect for the lavish HBO (Rome, Sopranos, True Blood) treatment. But I believe the real difference comes down to the nature of this particular series.
Epics like Camelot, Troy and Alexander all fall down horribly on their tin-ear dialogue and sheer implausibility of the characters. Characters in classical epics are symbolic, larger-than-life beings, more than human. Try to cut them down to size by making them psychologically believable, or worse, ‘relevant’ to a modern audience and you’ll make them sound ridiculous. Add fist-bitingly dreadful dialogue and you’ll have us laughing out loud.
‘Whoever pulls the sword from that stone will unite the land,’ Merlin tells Arthur in Camelot. ‘No waaay,’ replies Arthur, as if someone had just told him to go and do with his homework.
Or the usually excellent James Purefoy channelling Brian Blessed as he blasts into the throne room complaining that he’s ‘bloody starving’: ‘I’m King Lot and I haven’t had any dinner!’
It must have been a relief for both Sean Pertwee (Ector) and Purefoy when their respective characters killed one another off in the first episode.
The characters in Game of Thrones have been crafted by a man raised in the age of film, who has indeed spent much of his career as a screenwriter. As you read George RR Martin’s books, the scenes unspool before you like movies. His characters sound and behave like real people. As a result David Benioff and DB Weiss, the scriptwriters on Game of Thrones, have a far easier time of it (making up for the black marks against Benioff’s name after the dreadful Troy, which even Sean Bean’s sly Odysseus could not save).
In the moral universe of A Song of Ice and Fire the compass points are always equivocal: there’s no clear distinction between ‘good’ or ‘evil’. No godlike heroes or stage villains here. Martin’s characters are fully human in their desires and fears, their greed, ambition and fallibility; their occasional shining moments of decency and heroism, all the grubby, glorious contradictions of life. Tyrion Lannister, his main point-of-view character, is a dwarf with a wicked line in wit and a boundless appetite for wine and whores. But he’s also emotionally intelligent, and a book-lover. Likewise, his brother Jaime, a handsome, arrogant man who has cheerfully committed both regicide and incest, develops over the course of the novels into an altogether more sympathetic and likable chap.
Major characters in this series have long and surprising roads to travel or shocking demises in store (just as in life, being beloved won’t save you, as George swings his author’s scythe!) and that is also one of the delights for newcomers to A Song of Ice and Fire: unlike those grand epics on which we’ve been raised, you just don’t know what will happen next. Game of Thrones is only a taster for the massive epic narrative still to come. If you simply can’t wait for the next series (A Clash of Kings will screen in April 2012), you can read the novel, and then carry on with A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows. The long-awaited (6 years!) fifth instalment – A Dance with Dragons – is published on July 12th. As one of a very privileged few to have read it, I can promise you you’re in for another ecstatic, gritty, grimy, transcendently glorious treat.
