The House With Chicken Legs

"Yes. Now, I thought this book was absolutely outstanding, and it’s very different from the others. She is taking the Baba Yaga stories, the witch or the old lady who has a house with chicken legs that runs around. Is she evil? Is she good? And so far as I’m aware, Sophie Anderson has used that as the basis for a totally original story. This could be my ignorance, but I think she’s taken the character and done something very original with it. It’s different from the other retellings. This is about a girl who is betwixt and between. Marinka lives with her grandmother, Baba Yaga, whose job is to usher the dead back to the stars. So the dead come every night to the house with chicken legs, and the grandmother welcomes them and cooks for them, and then guides them through the doorway so that they will once again be part of the stars. I found the book very, very moving, because as part of the ritual of death, Baba Yaga asks them, “What are you taking to the stars? What has been meaningful to you in your life?” – which is quite a profound and big question. What did you gain from your life here? She’s trying to make a celebration of something that was meaningful in your life on Earth, before you become part of the universe. I don’t want to do any spoilers, but there is a very big twist about Marinka, the little girl who hates being just with the dead – as any child would. She longs to have friends, longs to go to school, doesn’t like living in a house that is always running away and going different places. So it’s really looking at what it’s like to live in a world in the space between life and death. It’s a book set in a liminal place, in that passage. And it’s also looking at the question, what does it mean to be a witch? What is an old lady, what is a witch? She guides them through the gate… Now, I have never read a Baba Yaga myth that’s about Baba Yaga guiding spirits through the gate. I think that’s probably completely original. The book was so outstandingly good: a really wonderful story, really wonderfully told. It’s profound, and a very special way of taking a character from a fairy tale and then spinning a story around the character, so you keep almost just the skeleton of the story – the house with chicken legs – though in her telling, the house is very benign. There’s a symbiotic relationship between Baba Yaga and the house. I thought Sophie Anderson did a really brilliant job. This is more inspired by, as opposed to retelling from a different point of view, but she is looking at Baba Yaga as a much more benign figure than the version often portrayed in Russian fairy tales. These stories wouldn’t last if they didn’t have big resonance. You could say that the House of Names is about the world’s most dysfunctional family, and about the world’s worst dad killing his daughter, and the violence within families. That, unfortunately, is true. But also we can’t escape our own time and our own sensibility. What strikes you and me about the story, what interests me as a writer, won’t be what will interest someone in a hundred years’ time. They will have a completely different interpretation, but I know that it will still speak to them, just as it speaks to us now. The word I often use is bass. There are bass notes here: they are about things that really matter, like, what is important to you in your life? How do you strive to be good? How do you cope with not being good? How do you cope with human weakness? How do you cope with loneliness? How do you cope with feeling outcast? These are universal themes, and they’ve been cast in these stories of heroes and monsters and gods, and woven with magic and power, but the basic fundamental themes are there."