The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents

"Yes, The Amazing Maurice is very much about civilization! It’s a retelling of ‘ The Pied Piper .’ In that story, the guy comes to town and promises to get rid of the rats, and he plays the flute and all the rats leave after him; then he comes back to ask for payment, and the village refuses. So he plays his pipe and all the children vanish. It’s basically a cautionary tale about paying your contractors. In The Amazing Maurice , the rats can talk, they’re intelligent – they’re Rats of NIMH level – and, because it’s a Terry Pratchett book , they have eaten magical waste at the Unseen University and become smarter. There’s a cat who’s a mover and shaker, who is also intelligent, and is basically the manager; and there’s the kid who plays the flute. It’s all a scam: they come in, the rats take over, then the kid comes in and offers to get rid of them. And because the rats of course are in on it, they follow the kid out. “I love that, however weird they get, there’s still something in fairy tales that plucks a string in your psyche” The problem arises when eventually the rats say: ‘We’re tired of this, we want to settle down. We want be recognised as intelligent, and be productive members of society.’ The cat is very conflicted about this for reasons of his own. In the way that Pratchett does so well, it’s about the problems of society. Can a town adapt to having rat citizens? What is going to go wrong? Can they sit down and talk about it and get over it? And because Pratchett’s very good, it’s no spoiler to say it does end well – but there’s a lot of dark things that happen along the way. There is a very nasty monster and an unlikely rat hero… It’s beautifully put together. Pratchett described it himself as the story based on the novel concept that people can talk out their problems. I love that! It doesn’t always have to be the big heroic battle at the end. Sometimes it can just be, ‘Let’s sit down at the negotiating table.’ Yes. While it is definitely based on a fairy tale, it pulls almost all of the elements into the real world – well, you know, the real Discworld – and plays them all very straight. Magic is a force that is understood; it doesn’t have the kind of weird, surreal, dreamlike quality that a lot of fairy tales do. This is very much a thing that is happening to real people, that they are dealing with; it’s very solidly rooted in reality. Magic in fairy tales is not like the magic system of Dungeons & Dragons , or of those fantasy novels where everything is set down and very clearly structured. It is a weird force that just happens. Why does the curse mean that the hero will stay a beast all day, but turn back at night? Why do spots of blood on a handkerchief talk? Why does a dead horse skull talk to the hero? Magic is weird, and it’s not explained; it’s just a force that is there and does stuff. And sometimes it does stuff that’s convenient for the plot, but sometimes it also just sits in the fairy tale as just a weird-ass thing that happens. One of the fairy tales in The Turnip Princess is a very straightforward ‘East of the Sun, West of the Moon’ version, but the hero turns into a stone lion statue all day. Why? Because he does , and that’s just how it is. Why is there a spinning wheel inside a walnut? Because somebody put it there, that’s just how these things go. You don’t stop the whole narrative and say, hang on a minute, what happened there? The way that you do in a lot of other genres. Fantasy as a genre has two camps: in one, if there’s a spinning wheel in a walnut you just say: Magic did it. In the other, you say: Hold the phone, we’re going to need an explanation. Who put it there? What’s going on? Is there an entire guild of spinning-wheel-and-walnut makers? Then, a lot of them would sit down and explain the history of this guild, the training that you have to undergo to become a licenced spinning-wheel-and-walnut-maker, and so on. So those are the two camps in fantasy – is the magic explained, or is it just this elemental background force that you are subjected to. A little from column A and a little from column B . Nettle and Bone started out, of all things, from ‘The Princess and the Pea,’ which is a ridiculous fairy tale that seems very funny. It makes a great children’s story; you can do great illustrations. It’s about a princess who sleeps on a pile of a hundred mattresses, but there’s a pea under the bottom one. She can’t sleep, she’s tossing and turning, she’s got bruises on her back – and that’s how the prince knows she’s a real princess. It’s a very lighthearted fairy tale on the surface. Then you start to ask questions like, why does the prince wants a princess who bruises so easily, and is so sensitive? And it gets really unpleasant really fast. Terry Windling has done some amazing stories – and anthologies, as an editor – about the places that fairytales go very bad, and very, very gnarly. So that was where I started. That led me to the question: What do you do when the prince is the bad guy? What if he has all the power, and he’s messing with your sister, and you want to save her? What are you going to do? Which led me to Nettle and Bone . Mara, the heroine, wants to figure out how to save her sister, who is being abused by the prince. She goes on a quest, and a lot of it has a fairytale resonance. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The questing always come in threes – although is that fairy tales, or is that just storytelling in general? The three-act structure? I drew on a lot of that. Sometimes it uses random imagery that I thought was interesting… Writers have brains like magpies – actually, I should say European magpies, because I was just in Australia and their magpies are very different – in that they collect shiny objects and stash them in their nest. You don’t really know a lot of times where some of the stuff at the bottom came from; you’ve long forgotten. Some of the imagery is probably lifted from a story I read thirty years ago, and some of it was just stuff that I thought would be cool. There was the woman being controlled by a puppet on her shoulder – that really stuck with me… puppets are creepy. The woman with the puppet was purely me saying: ‘Wouldn’t this be really unpleasant? I can do this and no one can stop me.’ That’s a lot of what being a writer is. Well, being a writer for adults. When I was writing for kids, people stopped me all the time. There were old elements in there too. The goblin market, if not actually a fairy tale, was a poem and is in our cultural Gestalt enough that it feels resonant on some of the same levels. And fairy godmothers have been around a lot; I had a lot of fun with fairy godmother characters. But once I was past ‘The Princess and the Pea,’ there wasn’t a specific fairy tale that the whole story is based on. It was just places I went, having a handful of fairy tales in my head, and one really boring job at the streetlight outage hotline in St. Paul, Minnesota, where they did not track our web usage. I just had to sit by the phone and wait for people to call to say their streetlight was out. So I spent all of it on the University of Pittsburgh folklore and mythology archive , which is web 1.0 HTML links to things like ‘50 animal bridegroom stories’, all in a list. Yes! I actually came up with it because at the time I was writing a children’s book retelling of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ called Hamster Princess , where the heroine is basically Xena the Warrior Princess, only as a hamster. She uses the fact that she’s going to fall asleep when she turns twelve. Okay, she says, the magic has to keep me safe until then, so I am now effectively invincible. She takes up cliff diving – she’s a fun character, she’s very fierce. At the same time as I was working on this, my brain was saying: ‘You could go the completely opposite way, you know…’ And so I wound up starting this other story on the side – probably to the detriment of my deadline – where the heroine is not fierce at all. She is she is very meek and timid, and she is essentially the fairy godmother who curses the princess. Unlike in Maleficent , which is a retelling that I love, she is not scary or hardcore. She is just trying to do her job, and she’s afraid she’s doing everything wrong. I relate to that a lot! I am frequently trying to do the right thing and trying to do my job and worried that it is all about to fall apart. She’s a changeling from the other direction – she is the human infant who gets taken, and a changeling is left in her place. She gets thrown to the Greenteeth. Greenteeth are a British water monster: Jenny Greenteeth comes up and drags children into the water. I was just thinking what it would be like if you were raised by Greenteeth and how strange that would be. I had a lot of fun; the water monsters are actually kind of lovely, in a carnivorous, scary way. They love the heroine, and they teach her how to change into a toad, all sorts of things. So she becomes only partly human, and she’s very happy where she is. Then she gets dragged away because she has to be the godmother at the christening, and she kind of screws it up. She winds up having to stay there and keep the infant, who is her changeling, from growing up to become as evil and capricious as fairies are in the old stories. They’re not cute little things: they’re horribly scary, arbitrary beings that will cheerfully turn you into a mat and step on you. So our heroine, the wicked fairy godmother, has to build the wall to keep in the monster. It’s basically a story about the question: When is your job done? When do you get to stop, when have you have done enough? Which is a very hard thing for a lot of us to define. Where’s the endpoint to a terrible job, when it feels like you’re the only person who can do it? Is it fair to ask someone to spend the rest of their life doing this thing they didn’t ask for? It’s an exploration of that. And there’s a knight who is very sweet and charming. I loved writing him."