Age of Iron (56 page)

So I began to research the Iron Age. I got another article commissioned in the
Telegraph
, this time on Iron Age hillforts directly, and went off to meet Peter Woodward, prehistorian and curator of the Dorset County Museum (this article is also on my website). As we walked up Britain’s finest hillfort – Maiden Castle, just outside Dorchester – I asked him flippantly whether the Iron Age was like Conan the Barbarian. Was it a time of lone warriors raiding temples and rescuing women from snake cults?

“Yes,” replied Woodward in all seriousness. “Some of the visuals in films like
Conan the Barbarian
are as valuable as any others.”

I decided that moment to write a novel set in the Iron Age, based around Maiden Castle (which became Maidun Castle in the book, as you may have worked out).

Over the next couple of years I worked out the story and the characters, and the book became a trilogy.

It is, of course, a fantasy story, not intended to be serious history. However, the history in it is generally accurate. I’ve made up the tribes and the characters, but all details – their homes, the towns and villages, clothes, industry, farming, flora and fauna, weapons, etc. – are as correct as they can be. One exception to this is Lowa’s longbow, which doesn’t officially appear in history until over a thousand years after the events of the book, but I think it’s conceivable that the secret of Lowa’s longbow lived on through her or Elann Nancarrow’s descendants in Wales before surfacing again for the Hundred Years War.

As for the magic, sixty-two years after this book is set, according to a lot of people, a chap was born who could bring people back from the dead, multiply fish and so on. Is it that much of a stretch to believe that he wasn’t the first person who could drum up a little magic?

T
hanks foremost to my wife Nicola and her tireless and unfailingly cheerful support. Despite being a high-flier in a serious career, she has always listened attentively and compassionately to my gripes about writing a non-serious book, even when she knows that while she’s been in board meetings and on conference calls with New York, I’ve spent the afternoon in the bath, reading history books.

I’d also like to thank my brother Tim for his ideas about the plot, my agent Angharad Kowal for taking me on and finding me a book deal, and my editor Jenni Hill at Orbit for her enthusiasm and excellent editing.

In his twenties,
Angus Watson
’s jobs ranged from forklift truck driver to investment banker. He spent his thirties on various assignments as a freelance writer, including looking for Bigfoot in the USA for the
Telegraph
, diving on the scuppered German fleet at Scapa Flow for the
Financial Times
and swimming with sea lions off the Galapagos Islands for
The Times
. Now entering his forties, Angus is a married man who lives in London with his wife Nicola and baby son Charlie. As a fan of both historical fiction and ep
ic fantasy, Angus came up with the idea of writing a fantasy set in the Iron Age when exploring British hillforts for the
Telegraph
, and developed the story while walking Britain’s ancient paths for further articles. You can find him on Twitter at
@GusWatson
or visit his website at
www.guswatson.com
.

Find out more about Angus Watson and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at
www.orbitbooks.net
.

What was your favourite part of
Age of Iron
to write, and why?

The interaction between Spring and Dug. The first book may be ostensibly centred on the love affair between Lowa and Dug, but I think the platonic relationship between Dug and Spring is more interesting and important.

If people are interested in the Iron Age, where should they look to find out more?

There’s a good museum in Dorchester, Dorset, and there are various books (see Historical Note for authors). However, it takes about ten minutes to find out ninety-five per cent of what’s known about the Iron Age (which you can probably do on Wikipedia) and after that it’s pretty much all just analysis of pottery samples. So the best thing to do is to walk up to your local hillfort, stroll around and imagine what might have gone on there.

Was there anything that surprised you about researching the Iron Age?

I was disappointed when I discovered that the history in Asterix the Gaul books, particularly Asterix in Britain, is far from spot on.

What prompted you to start writing
Age of Iron
?

I’d always wanted to be a novelist. After ten years’ travelling and mucking about, then ten years of writing features, I hoped the time was right. I came up with the setting while on a hillfort, but made up the characters and the outline of a story on a long bus journey in France in 2009. I started writing the book as soon as I was back at my desk.

Who are your biggest influences as a writer?

Aged about eleven, I would read parts of
The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams to anyone that would listen, particularly the passage about the filing cabinet with a sign on it saying “Beware of the leopard”. That was the first book I remember loving, alongside
Watership Down
by Richard Adams. I’ve read those two books more times than any others, so daresay they are the strongest influences. I also read a lot of James Herbert and Sven Hassel as a child. Their influence just may have made itself heard in my gorier passages. Since then, Joseph Heller, John Irving, Thomas Hardy, William Boyd, Iain Banks, George MacDonald Fraser, Patrick O’Brien, Carl Hiaasen and Joe Abercrombie have probably all changed the way I write. I was lucky enough to interview Iain Banks once. He was an excellent man, genuinely interested in the novel I’d just started. That fact that both he and Douglas Adams died so young has not helped to dispel my atheism.

Talking of that sort of thing, my parents both died before I reached my teens. That changed the way I thought about everything, and so I’m sure has had a massive effect on my writing. I can’t say I recommend early parental death, but I don’t think the effects were all bad.

I also should mention the Asterix the Gaul books by Goscinny and Uderzo, which are set just a couple of years after
Age of Iron
and should be compulsory reading for everybody (although, with apologies to Uderzo, they haven’t been quite so good since Goscinny died in 1977).

You started writing as a features journalist for national newspapers – what’s the strangest thing you’ve ever been asked to write about?

Freelance features writers usually come up with ideas themselves and propose them to papers. An article I wrote about the noise ducks make when they land was voted
Guardian
readers’ favourite feature one year. It was good that Dug got to enjoy the same noise on the island of Mearhold. I like putting things in my books that people who know me will spot. Writers probably aren’t meant to do that.

What do you do when you’re not writing?

I read a lot more since I’ve been writing for a living because I can justifiably call it work. Years ago I pioneered the afternoon working bath (i.e. reading in the bath), and have been perfecting it ever since.

I love video games, particularly the
Elder Scrolls
and
Fallout
games. I’m also a keen photographer, serious enough that I have several lenses and process every shot with Photoshop. That processing now takes all the time that I used to spend playing video games. Photos are a more productive hobby, but I do miss the virtual world excitements of storming fortresses and finding slightly better swords than the one I’ve been wielding for the last ten hours of gameplay.

Do you sympathise at all with the bad guys you write?

Completely, since most of the good characters I’ve created have bad sides and most of the bad ones have good sides. Weylin, for example, could have been a perfectly decent fellow in different circumstances and with better role models.

The totally bad ones, like Zadar, I respect and understand, rather than sympathise with. Listening to right-wing radio in the USA, I’ve heard intelligent men articulately and persuasively flummox left-wing callers by explaining right-wing views that I find abhorrent. I don’t like these men much, but I do respect their minds and the way they make me challenge my own beliefs.

While I’m on the subject, I think that as soon as people define themselves as left wing or right wing, they put on blinkers and lose about twenty IQ points. Both sides have their good points and their really dumb ones. Right or wrong should be the focus, not right or left.

What were the challenges in bringing this book to life?

I was lucky not to have to work in an office or factory or similar while writing the book. I can’t write when I’ve spent most of the day working on something else – I just don’t have the brainpower or energy. Beyond that, I think the biggest challenge was the constant nagging suspicion that what I was writing was a stinking pile of crap that nobody will ever want to read. A book is a very long project and you’re very lucky if there are any points during it when someone says, “That’s good; you should carry on with it.” As I write, I’ve just finished the first draft of the second novel in the Iron Age trilogy. It’s been well over a thousand hours’ work, and nobody else has read a word of it. What if it’s rubbish and those hours were wasted? Thoughts like that might keep me awake at night.

What advice would you give to budding writers?

Go on a course. You may think it can’t possibly improve your marvellous writing and it may even stifle your wonderful style, and you can’t teach genius, but that’s all crap, and, if nothing else, a writing course will get you to start writing. That’s the other piece of advice – start.

What are you reading at the moment?

I’m reading
Dune
by Frank Herbert, which I’d been meaning to do for ages. I’m enjoying it so far. I like older fantasy books (like the Conan series) because they’re great stories, but also because they tell you about the time that they’re written in. I’m also reading a book on North American history, because I’m planning to set my next book or series of books there (after the third Iron Age book). My book will be set in prehistoric times, but I’ll probably get some plot and character ideas from post-Columbian America. I find the USA fascinating and spend quite a lot of time there, usually staying in Las Vegas and taking photographs of the Mojave Desert. You can see these pics on my anonymous Twitter account
@LasVegasHood
(followers currently 52).

The people in the book have some quite modern characteristics. What made you write about them in this way?

I think there’s a bizarre kind of prejudice about people from the past. We think of them as less than us and one-dimensional. But, of course, they were just as full of playfulness, jealousies, wit, passion and so on as we are.

Women and men have something like equality in your version of the British Iron Age. Is that a nod to political correctness?

No. I don’t like tokenism. There are strong women in the book I guess because I’ve known a lot of strong women and I do believe that women are equal to men (and everybody’s equal to everybody, for that matter). I’m not trying to court a female readership or be right on. Similarly there’s a guy from Africa, not because I thought “ooh, better have a black bloke”, but because his origin is exotic and interesting, just like Chamanca’s (Spain), Lowa’s (Germany) and Felix’s (Italy).

Are you trying to get any messages across in your book?

The book is stuffed full of messages. If readers notice any of them, fine, if they don’t, also fine. There’s no need, for example, to work out that Tans Tali is an anagram of Atlantis or see the parallels I’m trying to draw between Atlantis, other flood stories and climate history to show that there were definitely vast, forgotten civilisations, with who knows what levels of technology and sophistication, which were obliterated ten thousand years ago at the end of the last ice age when the sea level rose three hundred feet …

What’s coming next for Dug, Lowa and Spring?

Their immediate problem is to consolidate their victory over Zadar. They’re going to face attacks by more powerful tribes in Britain, and something pretty terrifying that they’d never imagined from across the sea to the west. On top of that, they’ve got the invincible Romans to worry about. Ragnall’s life is going to change a lot, and some other characters from the first book will go to Gaul to see what they can do to halt Caesar’s relentless march north to Britain.