An interview with Ramsey Campbell about THE WISE FRIEND

AN INTERVIEW WITH RAMSEY CAMPBELL ABOUT HIS LATEST NOVEL THE WISE FRIEND (Flame Tree Press)

My spoiler-free review of Ramsey Campbell’s latest novel, The Wise Friend, can be found HERE. It offers a hint at what readers can expect from the book, which is out now from Flame Tree Press (hardcover, paperback, and ebook). I recently chatted with the author about the novel, and here’s what he had to say.

Gary: The Wise Friend is the first standalone novel you’ve written since the three-year, three-book project that was your Brichester trilogy, though it shares spiritual connections with the field’s tradition, especially with Machen and Blackwood, I felt. Could you tell me a little bit about the origins of the book?

Ramsey: I see from my notes that as usual ideas gathered haphazardly around a theme. In this case I believe it was the notion of an artist whose late work betrays an occult influence. I’m not sure whether I initially had the idea that a present-day relative would investigate this and succumb to it himself. As good luck or serendipity (in which I’m a great believer when it comes to writing) would have it, while I was working the material up the Tate in Liverpool had an exhibition of Leonora Carrington’s work. I think the idea of the personalities of magicians permeating their burial sites and being roused to reassemble them in an imperfect form came to me early on. In general I think we can say that the uncanny ideas were among the first to assemble and reassure me that I had the makings of a novel, although as often happens, I ended up with too many, and had to jettison some for (I hope) future use.

Gary: One observation I made while reading – and it’s one I might have made previously, as this is a characteristic of the trilogy, Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach, Creatures of the Pool, and others – relates to the central character being the only one who realises that something wicked is afoot, which nobody around him will believe. I’d even suggest that in your later work, this has become a preoccupation for you, much as the “wrong man” was for Hitchcock. How would you respond to that?

Ramsey: You’re right, of course. It’s a pretty paranoid view of the world. I don’t have it personally, but perhaps I’ve inherited it creatively from my mother, who of course regarded the world as a conspiracy focused on her. Perhaps depicting it in fiction is my way of not actually living it, though I have no sense of that threat.

Gary: You seemed determined to make The Wise Friend the quietest of your novels. Even when unpleasant events occur – the few deaths in the book – they occur off-camera. In the context of afterwords to previous novels (e.g. The Claw), in which you berate your inexperienced self for having lapsed into splatter, would you say that this was your preferred aesthetic?

Ramsey: I think it often is, but it really depends on the individual tale. I don’t think showing the violent deaths rather than just the aftermaths would add anything to this book, any more than (say) a more graphic ending would improve Algernon Blackwood’s great tale “The Willows”. From consciously attempting to avoid explicit violence in my novel Midnight Sun thirty years back, I seem to have subsumed the ambition into this subset of my uncanny stuff until I’m no longer conscious of it, which perhaps helps it to work.

Gary: You wrote The Wise Friend in the first-person past tense, while several of your later novels (first-person or otherwise) have been in the present tense. What determines your decision to go with one or the other?

Ramsey: To be honest, nothing but instinct. If it feels right I follow it. Very occasionally this may let me down. In The Overnight all the chapters were to be first-person narratives, but after a while I concluded that the voices weren’t sufficiently individual, and so I recast them in the third person.

Gary: Okay, let’s talk about the occult aspects of the novel. I suppose all horror writers are drawn to the area, and you’ve certainly created some memorable practitioners, from Peter Grace to Arthur Pandemon. Now we have Lumen Scientiae. What is it about these characters that keeps drawing you back?

Ramsey: I think the appeal of the uncanny and in particular the opportunity they give me to let the occult have a voice, in their grimoires and journals. Those manage to engage my imagination in a way that the cosmic visions of Lovecraft do, though I’m not claiming to have achieved those peaks – I’m trying, though. I think those occultists also have a disconcerting amount in common with the criminals in my non-supernatural tales – both of them are generally determined to impose their own view of themselves on the world and try to shape reality to their own vision of it. I believe that comes across in their language.

Gary: It’s interesting. Psychology shows us that at least one definition of pathology involves people unable to change because of the pain involved in doing so. And so they attempt to change everyone or even everything around them to avoid that pain. You seem to suggest that this is true of your “bad” characters?

Ramsey: It hadn’t occurred to me in those terms but yes, I think you’ve pinned them down. I suppose the difference between the two groups in my tales is that whereas the criminals commit acts that they view as justified and indeed as justifications of their own self-image, the occultists actually set out to transform the world or at least a significant part of it, sometimes in terms of a more cosmic vision (though some may strike the reader as more comic than cosmic).

Gary: The Wise Friend is the first of your later novels that won’t have first been produced by PS Publishing. Could you say something about how the new relationship with Flame Tree Press came about?

Ramsey: I followed my old friend and editor Don D’Auria there. He’d previously bought books of mine for Leisure and then for Samhain. I think we’ve both ended up in by far the best of those three. Flame Tree have been splendidly supportive, though some of the events they arranged to help promote The Wise Friend fell foul of the virus, alas. They’ve picked up several backlist titles of mine, and more are to come. I especially like how they publish simultaneously on both sides of the ocean in several formats – hardcover, paperback, ebook and audio.

Gary: Sounds like a great new arrangement. I understand that you’re currently writing a new novel called Somebody’s Voice. Could you give us an idea about what we might expect from it?  

Ramsey: That’s actually completed. It’s about a crime novelist, Alex Grand, whose latest book proves so controversial that his publishers hook him up with Carl Batchelor, a survivor of child abuse, to salvage his reputation by ghost-writing Carl’s memoir. Carl’s account proves less than entirely reliable once the book is published, and Alex’s involvement in bringing Carl’s memories to life begins to undermine his sense of his own identity. When some of the people who figure in the book turn out to be more alive than it depicted them, his grasp on reality begins to crumble, and we’re nowhere near the end.

The Wise Friend is now available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wise-Friend-Fiction-Without-Frontiers/dp/1787584038/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1588148132&sr=8-1