ALI SHAW

I love writing about landscapes.  I’m probably guilty of finding them far more interesting to write about, at times,  than human beings.  That’s because I think so much of humanity is defined by the natural world we emerged from (and I include the weather as a part of that).  For so many thousands of years we depended so crucially on the land, on the fertile earth and the just-right ratio between sunshine and showers, that the behaviour of the landscape dictated the terms of our culture.  I bet you could root everything that we do and are in the way the Earth behaved back in the day.  Landscapes are a mirror held up to humanity, which may explain our tendency to romanticise them, to take comfort in the idea that there is a wild country out there to which we might one day retreat and in which we might be better connected to ourselves.  It could also explain part of the affront we feel when a landscape is bulldozed or sliced in half by a new motorway or rail link.

I like writing that reflects these notions by making the landscape something or someone who gets involved in the lives of those who inhabit it.  Likewise in the ‘real world’ (I hate that term but there are few alternatives for what it implies) … Likewise in the world of sticks and stones, some landscapes lend themselves so well to personification that they become distinct characters.  Mountains are good examples, named and ascribed with personalities that reflect their nature.  A mountain of sun-bathed sloping meadows where sheep graze and crops grow is a gentle giant.  Conversely, a collossal tor atop which the stormclouds muster and down whose flinty slopes the flash floods race is a menacing behemoth who’d like nothing better than to snuff out the little beings who dwell beneath its shadow.

I try to save up and collect pictures of landscapes that appear to me so rich in character that I can imagine them rising up to walk the horizons when everybody else is tucked safely in bed.  While I was writing The Man who Rained I filled my pinboard with Turner’s landscape paintings.  I bought a hefty catalogue of his work and filled a notebook trying to describe his mountains and his skies in prose.  Much of the descriptive writing in the novel originated in such scribbling.  They call Turner the painter of light but he’s as much for me the painter of the air itself, for wherever he paints a mountain he paints a haze or formative cloud, or a full-blown Biblical torrent smashing its way to the foreground.

I had vague intentions of posting various other images and photos saved up during the writing process.  The internet is a great source for creating virtual scrapbooks to reference when stuck for words.  But rather than include those I’ll just link to the below video, which came out when I was finishing up the novel’s final edit and which tours rather breath-takingly the sort of places I was aiming to describe.

We think of ourselves as land animals, but in truth the air is our element.  We live on the seabed of a gaseous ocean, and just because the air we inhabit is invisible to us that does not mean it does not exist.  What is invisible to us is so often what is most important.  While writing this book I have come to think of the air as something reassuringly connective.  Something that links me to you, as it does you to everyone you know.  We are all submerged in it and drawing upon it together.  The air in your lungs becomes the air in your blood, in your heart.  As long as you remain alive and breathing, a part of you is always air.

We think of the clouds as distinct objects floating in empty space backdropped by blue, but in truth they are just patches of air that have lost their invisibility.  They are a heavy sort of air more susceptible to gravity.  They are the patternation of the thing we are breathing and we can breathe them on mountaintops or on foggy or misty days.  Then the air we are breathing is cloud and because the air we breathe becomes a part of us we are part cloud too.

In books and films the weather has always been part human, raining in sympathy with characters who are down, raging during wars and ordeals, letting rip the feelgood fuzzy sunshine when the happy ending comes to pass.  At some point a few years ago I began to wonder what it would be like if the weather really did come to life, becoming flesh and blood in various forms.

These are some drawings I made while writing The Man who Rained.  They’re studies of Finn Munro, who is the titular character.  He is, of course, part weather, perhaps all weather, although you’ll have to read it to determine for yourself his exact complexion.

I love this time of year.  Mistletoe and wine (and port, of course, and brandy and mulled ale if you can), and trying to grab an hour to read beside the Christmas tree.  I enjoy the retrospectives that appear in the press, the closing year’s events considered at a pace there’s no time for during the preceding fifty one weeks.  That said, it’s tricky for me to be retrospective this particular year, with The Man who Rained published on the 1st January.  It’s nerve-wracking, to say the least.  I’ve just got back from some last minute Christmas shopping, from weaving through the long queues at the butcher’s door and the cheesemonger’s, and while out I spotted it already on the shelves, which was an experience just as surreal and rewarding as first seeing The Girl with Glass Feet there.

Above are some drawings to accompany those first glimpses of the novel.  I drew a lot of black-and-white mountains and smudgy skies while I wrote it, and will post more over the next few weeks.  In the meantime I hope you have a marvellous Christmas this year.  If you don’t celebrate Christmas, I hope you have a recuperative holiday.  Either way, may 2012 bring you magic and gladness.