Many still regard Garth Nix, Australia's top-selling fantasy author, as Canberra's own, even though he has lived in Sydney for just over three decades.
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This reviewer remembers Garth Nix working in the now long gone, but still fondly remembered, Dalton's bookshop in Garema Place. Interestingly, Garth will have a new book out in 2020, titled The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, set in the 1980s, which will draw on his bookselling and publishing experience.
I also remember in 1991, reviewing for The Canberra Times, Nix's first novel The Ragwitch, which spins off the finding of a rag doll in a a midden heap, inspired by a midden near the Nix family beach house at Bawley Point.
He's been a full-time writer since 2001 with over 6 million books sold, especially the Old Kingdom fantasy series, comprising Sabriel; Lirael; Abhorsen; Clariel and Goldenhand. His last book Frogkisser! is being developed as a Hollywood film.
Nix believes that, "Often the most successful and enduring fantasy books offer an element of escapism, while at the same time also offering an alternative means of looking at and perhaps understanding ourselves, our world and our problems".
During October, Nix is visiting 30 cities in 22 days in Britain and America to publicise his blockbuster new novel Angel Mage. Interestingly, it's being marketed by Gollancz, his publishers in Britain, as an adult novel, whereas in America it is being marketed as a young adult (YA) novel for readers from the age of 14 upwards.
Nix says these labels are essentially publisher marketing ploys, depending on who the publisher sees in their country as the "core audience". In this context, he says, readers should "abandon their preconceptions", as his new novel Angel Mage will appeal to all ages.
The Three Musketeers, which Nix first read as a teenager, is the inspiration for Angel Mage, a novel which he says has "been building up for decades". Nix feels, however, that Dumas's novel, like other crossover novels, "work on different levels", depending on the age at which they are read, so that readers have "different experiences". His "preferred definition of YA books is that they are essentially adult novels that have particular appeal to teenagers and up".
"Fantasy brings together a lot of my passions, like history and mythology," Nix says, certainly readers seem to like the mixture of fact and fantasy. That is certainly true on both counts of Angel Mage, set in an alternative 17th-century Western Europe, with the main narrative taking place in Sarance (France) and to a lesser extent Ystara (Spain) with characters from Alba (England).
"[I'm] a great reader of history of all kinds, from fairly heavy academic tomes to popular histories and biographies, and historical fiction," Nix says.
"I tend to mentally collect small details that will come in handy in my own fiction."
He has dedicated Angel Mage to Alexandre Dumas and Richard Lester and George MacDonald Fraser, director and writer respectively, for The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974). Nix's British publicist has said Angel Mage infuses The Three Musketeers with "magic and kick-ass female characters", which is perhaps as good a short summary as one could get of a nearly 500 page book.
Spin-off Dumas details abound within the text. "I wanted to create a similar feel of adventure and derring-do, while not actually being a retelling or version of the same story," Nix says.
That is certainly true, particularly as most of the main characters in Angel Mage are female, with different skin colours. Nix says that he wanted his world to have gender equality, in contrast to the largely white male world of Dumas.
"I'm trying to break an age-old mindset and expectation in fiction that it will be all male, to reflect the modern realisation that gender and skin colour should be irrelevant to employment, position and power," he says.
Angel Mage takes place in a world in which icons are physical symbols of heavenly powers and can be used by humans to connect with angels for a variety of requests, although that contact can come with dangers, depending on the level of angel summoned and the mage involved.
Each country has a Cardinal who liaises with an Archangel. In the case of Ystara, Cardinal Alsysheron summons Archangel Palleniel to avert the disaster of the Ash Blood plague, but Palleniel refuses as "another commanded him now".
This turns out to be Liliath, "the Maid of Ellanda", a 19-year-old powerful icon maker, "obsessed beyond the point of madness". As a result of the "grey ash" plague unleashed by Liliath and with the country unprotected by Palleniel, two thirds of the population of Ystara die, while nearly another third are transformed into zombielike "beastlings".
Neighbouring Archangels, acting as a sort of angelic border force, quarantine Ystara, although Liliath manages to escape across the border to Sarance and falls into a magic sleep. 137 years later, she wakes up, still nineteen, and renews her single-minded quest to be united with her now fragmented love, Palleniel.
Sarance is notionally ruled by Queen Sofia XIII, with an ineffective King by her side, but her female Chief Minister, Cardinal Duplessis, "was in most cases the actual Governor of the realm". As with Dumas, different armed groups serve the Queen and Cardinal. So, Captain-General Dartagnan and her Musketeers side with the Queen, while Captain Rochefort and her Pursuivants protect the Cardinal.
His female characters, Nix says, "are well-developed individuals with their own plans and desires, leading countries or actively working to destroy them - I loved that the women are the heroes, the villains and everything in between".
Liliath realises she will need the help of four 18-year-olds living in the Star Fortress of Lutace, who are unaware of Liliath's intent and unknown to each other. The four comprise Agnez Descaray, an ambitious and headstrong cadet in the Queen's Musketeers; student doctor Simeon MacNeel, Cardinal's clerk and fortune hunter, Henri Dupallidin and Dorotea Imsel, a student icon maker with magical skills..
The four will find themselves beginning a dangerous journey against their will to seek a resolution they cannot understand. Will they be able to bond, given their different personalities, and come together to resist Liliath in her desire to use their combined skills to reconnect with Palleniel. Liliath has already destroyed one world. Can they prevent her destroying another?
Once readers have digested the complex background of human and angelic power structures, Nix delivers a fast-moving narrative, bringing it to a dramatic conclusion, pivoting around love and power, obsession and passion.
Nix, by his own admission, likes to tell "a really good story". That is certainly borne out in Angel Mage, which although billed as a stand-alone novel, has considerable potential to become a series. The last line indeed states, "their past adventures done, their new ones just begun".
- Garth Nix will be in conversation with Leife Shallcross , in a free event, at Harry Hartog bookshop, Woden on November 2 at 5.30pm. Bookings at eventbrite.
- Angel Mage, by Garth Nix. Allen & Unwin. $24.99.