WOLF SISTER: AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHELLE PAVER

Michelle Paver is showing me how to make friends with a wolf.
“If you give it a hard stare” – her eyes suddenly drill into mine like agates – “it’ll get upset. Whereas if you look at it with an open attitude and a soft, grazing look in your eyes”- her large eyes melt into something between toffee and chocolate – “it knows not to be scared.”

Wolves have every reason to find Paver a friend, since she began writing one of the most successful crossover children’s series in Wolf Brother, the first of her Chronicles of Ancient Darkness. An epic six-part adventure featuring a Stone Age boy, Torak, who befriends a wolf cub they have electrified adults and children alike with their excellent plotting, vivid characterisation and deep feeling for the natural world, and netted Paver a record £1.5 million advance. Inevitably, there have been comparisons with other successful crossover novels by JK Rowling, Philip Pullman and Lian Hearn. Yet it is wolves that have given Paver the edge, and which appealed to the director Ridley Scott so much he paid a reported £2.7 million for the film rights.

Paver’s Wolf is all animal, from his tingling whiskers to his hard, sensitive pads, but he is also complex, sociable and intensely curious. Torak can talk to him, and their adventures are told both from the human viewpoint and the wolf’s, something that entranced Ian McKellen so much that, as a rare honour, he has recorded each audiobook in turn. Where Torak is brave, loyal, proud and clever, Wolf’s perceptions are simple but highly intelligent and often very funny (he sees Torak as “Tall Tailless”). Not since Kipling’s Jungle Book has a wolf and its boy been described with such sympathy, insight and superb prose. Together, they have captivated a generation to the extent that wolves, long the villains of children’s literature, are now deeply admired by over-8s.

This, Paver points out, is only a return to the way they were seen in ancient times, by hunter-gatherers.

“To hunters, wolves aren’t baddies but brothers,” she says. “The Native Americans still respect them and have many tales about them being protective and helpful to humans. It’s only since people became farmers that wolves were demonised as a threat to livestock.”

Paver, a slim, elegant, modest woman of 45, thinks her love of the species stems from having been left as a baby in the care of a large Alsatian. Her family (father a South African newspaper publisher, mother a Belgian teacher) lived in Malawi. The dog was “protective and very, very tolerant”, but nothing, including African snakes, could get near her. An ardent reader who, back in Wimbledon, longed for her own wolf, she was fascinated by their pack structure, their language and, of course, their beauty. One of three sisters, she had a happy family life, but her interest intensified during an unhappy year at secondary school.

“There was a new girl who became a ringleader who picked on me. I was called Caveboy.” She pauses, amused by the coincidence. “It was quite savage. I used to come home and howl. I disappeared into books. I’d be on my own in the playground, making up stories – it taught me the power of stories.”

Paver was not just good at English, however. Her love of science led her to read biochemistry at Oxford; she still speaks with the gentle precision of the nicest kind of academic. Here she wrote two unpublished novels and was, she says, pretty introverted. She then went into law as a City solicitor, becoming partner in five years. For a woman in the mid 1980s, this was no small achievement. Yet despite making “silly money” from patent litigation, all she really wanted to do was write fiction, getting up at 4.30 am to write. Stressed and miserable after 12 years in the City, she took a sabbatical when her father died, and took the plunge into full-time writing.
 
Her first four historical romances enjoyed respectable but unspectacular sales. Eventually, she began to ask herself crossly, “Why don’t they just get together and stop complaining?” It occurred to her that she might be writing the wrong kind of novel. Twenty years before, she had written a story about a 9th century orphaned boy and a wolf, which was rejected, but at this point in 2002 she dug out her old manuscript and thought, “Oh, wow.”

It was “massively inconvenient, like an unplanned child” because she was in the middle of the three-book contract for her admired Daughters of Eden series. Nevertheless, the five key elements of boy-wolf-bear-girl-forest were all there, and now she knew that she had to set it in the Mesolithic period, after the Ice Age but before the advent of the farming that turned humans against wolves.

The adventures of Torak, and Wolf, both orphaned, are utterly compelling, but so is their world. The Forest itself is alive and conscious, and the various clans within it or outside each choose to co-operate or live apart. Torak is threatened by the evil mages who murdered his father, and like Harry Potter, he and Wolf and his friend Renn (a girl from the Raven clan) are growing older with each novel, something that Paver predicts, teasingly, will cause problems - not least because “wolves mature faster than humans.”

A natural loner, she is happy to be without husband or children and has made no changes to her life apart from increasingly adventurous travel to the remaining wild places of the world. Home is still living in a modest two-up two-down cottage in Wimbledon with a 20 foot garden.

“I wouldn’t want to own lots of land – or a wolf!” she exclaims, laughing. “I’m delighted to see the ecological benefits of reintroducing them in Yellowstone Park, but I’d far rather support them by being a patron of the UK Wolf Conservation Trust. They do such good work. Wolves are still portrayed badly and inaccurately in films – you get them prowling and growling when they hunt and it irritates the hell out of me.”

Wolf may not prowl but he does fight, magnificently, on Torak’s side, in a series of adventures which grip like a wolf’s jaws from the first page. Like Torak, you fall desperately in love with him, from the moment he appears as a bewildered, starving cub. Paver is a master-story-teller, whose grasp of narrative is unfaltering. Her clear, taut prose overlies a lifetime of natural lore and complex anthropological research. There is magic, but it is natural magic of a kind that depends as much on perception or superstition as anything to be found in the pages of Harry Potter. The new novel, Soul Eaters, is really frightening when Wolf is captured for sacrifice by the evil mages who want to gain powers from the spirit world; the demons they all see may not be real, but what is never in doubt is the reality of evil and the need for clans to be respectful both of each other and of nature. Paver has learnt about shamanism from the Inuit as well as researching the religious beliefs of peoples such as the Lapp, the Native Americians, the African Kwaio and the Japanese Ainu.

“It has to feel real. Everything could have happened, the bear could have been possessed by a demon or it could have been the way a boy living 6,000 years ago saw it. The shaman tradition shows the human brain has amazing capabilities.”

Exquisitely produced and illustrated, everything about the novels is meticulously imagined, researched and described, so that a reader feels they, too, would be capable of surviving with just a slate knife and other Stone Age tools. Paver describes exactly what swimming with killer whales or driving huskies is like because she’s done it herself, travelling to remote parts of Sweden, Norway, Greenland and most recently Canada, where she saw a polar bear not unlike one that attacks Torak in the third book, Soul Eater.

“I couldn’t have expected the power of the wind when you leave the forest, how you just can’t think of anything else,” she says; adding gamely, “it was fairly miserable.” Yet for her, “the best bit is living characters’ adventures with them.” Unencumbered by children or the desire for Armani clothes, she is free to explore all her childhood fantasies.

She fishes out a smelly reindeer gauntlet she got in Churchill, Canada, and points out the way its palm is sewn with the fur pointing inwards, so you can grip even in ice. Paver shows me tiny flint arrowheads, explaining why they would have to be small in order to fly. Her appearances at literary festivals are packed out partly because of this.  She describes what raw seal tastes like, and has got to know two wolves so well that the UKWT has named one of their three new wolf cubs Torak, after her hero. The thrill of this remarkable series is that, like all great children’s literature, it makes you perceive the world differently. She brings out a fine green cord that a 10-year-old girl in Oxford, inspired by Renn’s archery, made for her from twisted nettle fibre.

“She wondered whether it would make a good bow-string.”
We twang it, delightedly.  It’s been 250 years since wolves lived wild in Britain, but if they are reintroduced here, it’s thanks to The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness that they should be welcome again.    

The Times, September 2006