Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales

AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY BOOKS

Voyages with G.D. Kilworth esq.

An armchair traveller, equipped with all of Garry’s short stories and novels, could effortlessly voyage the known world, not to mention the known world in variation, and a feast of invented worlds all with a hauntingly familiar tinge about them. That traveller could be in modern Aden and the Yemen, where Garry spent time as a child, becoming lost in the desert and remembering that experience in
Standing on Shamsang
and
Spiral Winds
; then an overland journey to Neanderthal Cyprus (
Split Second
, an early science fiction) where Garry did duty in the RAF (not in Neanderthal times, you understand), before a quick hop to Polynesia and Micronesia to sail with
The Navigator Kings
in that vast wilderness of islands; indeed, he could sail via New Zealand, in these books, to reach the north of Celtic Scotland and do battle with its hairy inhabitants. (Geography is mere
play-dough
to a writer like GDK.) Reaching for a new volume, our traveller would find himself in Spain’s Andalusia, on the battlefields of the Moors, in the shadow of the Alhambra, the great citadel at Granada, facing wizardry and wild romance (
The Red Pavilions
). A step forward in time, to the
Sergeant Crossman
series, and he will be in the Crimean War, gearing up for Balaclava and the Siege of Sebastopol, before marching on to India’s Northwest frontier.

Who needs EasyJet?

And it’s not just the landscape of Humankind that Garry explores. If you put on your furs, pelts, hides, floppy ears and canine teeth, you can experience a world of nature that is beyond our normal sensitivities: you can feel the delights and terrors of being a fox (the brilliant
Hunter’s Moon
), a North American wolf (
Midnight Sun
), a hare caught for coursing (
Frost Dancers
), a weasel in many guises (
The Welkin Weasels
), even a mouse among many biblical mice (
House of Tribes
). Garry refers to these books as his ‘vermin tales’; but they are quite wonderful, and they are wonderful because they are naturalistic as well as fantastic: accurately observed animal behaviour informs the stories, the plots, and the drama, reflecting the author’s passion for the natural world. (In particular, bird-life: I
await
with anticipation Garry’s first ‘chick-lit’ novel.)

But perhaps the landscape that features most dramatically and most powerfully in Garry’s work is that of Essex and Suffolk, where his family has lived for generations. It is in many places a bleak and flat land, a place of wind, marshes, stark copses, grey rivers and muddy dikes. It is a place, too, full of a sense of magic. Witchcraft still flourishes. The churches are grey and silent. One, at Canewden, looks out across the scene of the battle where Canute defeated Edmund Ironside. Garry used to live across that raw marsh, where a second church marks Ashingdon.
Two ancient strongholds, now surmounted by cold and eerie churches.
I love the place, but not with the same passion as Garry. When you walk with him across this landscape he
radiates
belonging
;
and memory. The roots run deep. His sense of the place and its people, many of whom are long-gone but remain present in the dialect and in the faces and in the genes, is powerful indeed.

This sense of people and place, this feeling of
belonging
, of the intimate connection between folk and earth, resonates in all of Garry’s work that is set on planet Earth. And perhaps this is seen most effectively in his shattering and moving short novel
Witchwater Country
. It is set in 1952, in and around the saltmarshes of Essex, where a boy and his friends set out in search of legendary creatures called ‘waterwitches’. 1952 was the year of elemental forces in that part of the country: fire, wind and then flooding when the seawall burst. Hundreds died, thousands were made homeless. Garry and his family lived through it, and though to read
Witchwater Country
is to read a thoroughly ‘ripping yarn’, it is also to read a great deal about the author himself.

And of course, there are the short stories.

For our armchair traveller, the stories in this collection–stories previously uncollected–fill in a few gaps in the world itinerary: whale hunting off Vancouver (‘Moby Jack’), artistic temperaments tested in the shadow of Babel, in Babylon (‘The Sculptor’) and a particular favourite of mine, an expedition into The Walled City in the heart of Hong Kong, that maze-like shanty town which–before its demolition–rose vertically rather than spreading horizontally.

‘Inside The Walled City’ is a favourite tale because I was with Garry when he entered the maze. Rats scattered ahead of us and eerie, curious faces peered at us from niches and nooks in the crumbling walls. Living space here was akin to a tomb. I was uneasy
;
Garry intrepid. My mind filled with horror; Garry’s was inspired.

Indeed, Garry comes up with ideas
all
the time. He is a walking, breathing,
living
ideas factory. And the moment of creativity is transparent. Whether talking or walking, he suddenly goes vague; his eyes narrow and his focus
becomes
distant. He is no longer among us.

I have seen the process at work in my own home. Many years ago, he wandered off from a Sunday lunch. I found him in the kitchen staring through the window at the mature Greek
vine which
sprawls over the garden wall. I crept up behind him and tried to
follow
his gaze, to see what was—so to speak—‘stimulating his creative juices’. It seemed to be a bunch of grapes.

‘Getting an idea, are we?’ I asked sourly.

‘Yep.’

When, after several moments, he had said no more, I became a little annoyed. ‘That’s
my
vine. They’re
my
grapes. I demand a share of the notion.’

He laughed in a highly amused fashion; and still said nothing.

The idea-incubus, he later told me, became the story ‘On the Watchtower at Plataea’, in which a group of time-travellers find themselves trapped in a Greek City State during the Spartan Wars. He offered it to me for an anthology I was editing at the time. I grabbed it and scoured it for grapes. There were no grapes. And I still don’t know how the creative process in Garry works. (But I’ve stared through that window for over ten years, now, trying to get ideas for my novel
Vine On The Wall
.)

It was through short stories that I met Garry, in 1974, after he had won the Sunday Times/Victor Gollancz award for best SF collection. With the encouragement of James Blish, I was compiling an anthology called
Time in Hand
–new writers, new stories. The anthology didn’t happen. A long friendship with GDK did. We met with Chris Evans, Dave Wingrove, Chris Priest and others at the White Hart pub and talked ideas; we shared years of being published by Faber and Faber, encouraged by Charles Monteith, before leaving for Gollancz’s Green Pastures. In the mid-80s we enjoyed lazy afternoons compiling–amidst much creative laughter and astonishment at our own perceived brilliance–a novella, ‘The Ragthorn’. Awards were modestly accepted. We travelled with our best pals, Annette and Sarah, through Malaysia in the early 90s, encountering rainforest, spiders, washed-away bridges, taxis without clutches, buses with no seats, monsoons, and enchantment in the form of curious, smiling welcome, and easy and generous engagement between strangers. Like the armchair traveller, I have listened to Garry’s tales of his own journeys to other lands with awe and fascination. In that month in the Far East, I experienced a little touch of what makes Garry’s hand so adept at bringing worlds alive.

So: settle back on those cushions, ensure you have adequate supplies for the journey, turn the page: and begin to feel Earth and Time move around you.

Robert Holdstock March 1st 2005

One night in the pub my friend Peter Beere suggested I write a story around the Tower of Babel. This was the starting image for
The Sculptor
. The rest of the story wrote itself, as many of them do.

N
iccolò reached the pale of the Great Desert at noon on the third day. He dismounted and led his horse and seventeen pack camels towards the last water he would see for six weeks. There at the river’s edge they drank. Some would have said that so many camels were an expensive luxury, but Niccolò knew the value of too many over too few. Only eight of them were carrying the statuettes. Of the remaining camels, two were loaded with his and his mount’s personal supplies, three were carrying water, and three were loaded with fodder to feed the other camels. The last camel was packing fodder for the fodder-carriers but not for itself. It was possible that this camel, or one of the others, would die of starvation before he reached the Tower.

Niccolò had had to call a halt at seventeen. When he had consulted the sage, Cicaro, the old man had recommended that to ensure survival he take an endless string of camels with him. Distance,
food-chains
, energy levels, temperatures, humidities, moisture loss—when all the relevant information had been given to Cicaro, and the calculations made, the result was camels stretching into infinity. Impossibilities were not the concern of the sage. He merely applied his mathematics to the problem and gave you the answer.

At least they were flesh and blood. Towards the end of the journey Niccolò could begin eating them, if it became necessary. At that moment he found the thought distasteful, though he was no sentimentalist, and had refrained from even naming his horse. Niccolò knew, however, that when it came to the choice between starvation
or
butchering one of the beasts, whatever he promised himself now, he would use the knife without hesitation. He had eaten worms, even filled his stomach with dirt when he had been without food. Man is a wretched creature when brought to the level of death. When he has shed his scruples he will eat his own brother, let alone a horse or a camel.

Yet there was a mystery there. Man also perplexes himself, Niccolò thought, as he filled his canteens from the river. When he and Arturo had almost run out of water in this very desert, they had fought like dogs for the last few mouthfuls, would have killed each other for them. Then rescue had come, at the last moment, preventing murder.

Yet, not two months afterwards, Arturo ironically committed suicide, hanged himself in the back room of a way station, for love of a whore.

Why does a man fight tooth and nail to live one day, and kill himself the next? It was as if life was both precious and useless, not at the same time, but in different contexts. Life changed its values according to emotional colours. In the desert, dying of thirst, Arturo had only one thought in mind—to
live.
It had been a desperate, savage thought—instinctive.

Yet that instinct had vanished when Arturo had climbed on that ale barrel and tied a window sash around his neck. Why hadn’t it sprung out from that place in which it was lurking? Perhaps it is hopelessness that kills instinct in its lair? In the desert, if Arturo fought hard and callously enough, the water might eventually belong to him. The love of the lady though, no matter how savagely he battled, could never be his. If she withheld it, could not feel such for him, then he was helpless, because he could never in a million years wrench love from her grasp like a water bottle.