Books: Small steps towards fascism

Jo Walton likes to play with a genre so she won't get bored. Photo / John W. MacDonald

The conversation turns to how to end the world when David Larsen talks to writer Jo Walton.

"A nuclear war." Jo Walton is half-laughing, which is something she does a lot. She seems a happy sort of person. "Or an alien invasion. If I couldn't make the end of the book work, I was going to have one or the other."

We are arguing about alternate history and the limitations of realist fiction, and what you can and can't reasonably do in a novel that starts from the premise that Britain made peace with Nazi Germany in 1941 and withdrew from World War II.

Walton is a difficult writer to describe quickly, because she doesn't stand still. "I get bored very easily. That's why my books are different from each other." Her 10th novel, My Real Children, is published in New Zealand this month; in alternating chapters, it tells the cradle-to-grave life stories of two women who are, in fact, the same woman.

At a certain point in her young adulthood, in 1940s Britain, she faces a life-changing decision. The book maps out the lives that would result from each choice - except that these two lives turn out to be occurring in two increasingly dissimilar universes. "I tried to keep her lives fairly balanced, even though one of the worlds is diverging from ours in what I think of as a positive way, and one is diverging in a negative way, with the nuclear exchanges and so on."

These are not the nuclear exchanges Walton and I were arguing about a moment ago. Those ones might have occurred - in the end she managed to do without them - in Half A Crown, the final novel of her Small Change trilogy. All three of those books are about Britain's gradual, chillingly plausible slide towards facism in the wake of a brokered peace with Nazi Germany: a small change that changes everything.

So that's four novels about alternate versions of mid-20th century Britain. Why am I saying Walton is hard to pin down? Her books do tend to be set in Britain - she's Welsh, though she has lived in Montreal for the past 12 years - and they often play games with recent history.

"I love space opera. I love all that side of science fiction. But I have this great problem with it, which is that it's really difficult to research. If I have to stop and check everything it slows me down to the point where I grind to a halt. If I had a proper scientific background, I'd be able to work out these things myself, the way I can work out historical problems. I did my degree in classics and ancient history. You know - the useful stuff."

But as well as being a somewhat prolific writer - "I know some writers who like having written, they like being writers, but they don't actually enjoy the process, whereas I just love writing, I get a real kick out it" - Walton is a passionate and voracious reader. She won the Hugo and Nebula awards two years ago for Among Others, a heart-piercingly moving fantasy novel about the pleasures of reading. Its heroine, a bereft and crippled teenage girl called Mori, has a relationship with the books in her life that readers all over the world have recognised.

"To a certain extent Mori is me when I was 15. I used a lot of autobiographical stuff in that book, and yeah, the way she reads is the way I used to read. I don't have time to read as much as she does any more."

The thing about having been this sort of reader her whole life - and in particular, this sort of reader of science fiction and fantasy - is that Walton is deeply versed in how genre fiction tends to work. Her most recent book before My Real Children was a collection of short essays, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Part of what drives her writing is the pleasure she takes in playing games with reader expectation, and one consequence is that even
her Small Change books, which form a single continuous story, do not feel like they belong to a single genre.

"Most of my books are playing with genre in some way. So for the Small Change series, Farthing is trying to use both country-house mystery and science fiction conventions. In Ha'penny it's thriller pacing, and Half a Crown is doing a dystopic thing. It's interesting to play with that. I can keep the story in tension with genre expectations and so I don't get bored."

It was her teen reading that initially fed Walton's desire to write. "I think like a lot of people I felt intimidated by the best things I read, and then read things that are less good, and thought, well, that's possible. I might not be able to write as well as Tolkien, but I could write as well as Anne McCaffrey!"

She wrote all through her teens, before giving up in her 20s. "I showed the thing I was working on at the time to my first husband, and he said it was awful, which it probably was. And I believed him, and stopped trying to write, and I didn't write again for eight or nine years. I always tell people this, because there is this piece of wisdom out there that if you're a real writer you'll keep writing no matter what, and it's just not true. You can stop and then start again. I think it's useful for people to know that. You actually can start again."

My Real Children (Constable & Robinson $36.99) is out now.