Many-Coloured Realm is different!
Anne Hamilton
‘Alice in Wonderland meets Matthew Reilly—tops for twists and turns and unexpected terrors’
Liz Shelton
Many-Coloured Realm really is different. On the surface, it can be enjoyed simply as a fairytale fantasy that shimmers with grace, humour and the occasional shot of hard science. It has characters you’ll come to love and illustrations that offer special clues about what’s really happening.
Below the surface, it’s a masterpiece of carefully planned numerical literary style and Qarath writing. But the most obvious thing fantasy lovers will notice about it is what it lacks. It has no map.
A FANTASY WORLD WITHOUT A MAP
Yep. I know. No map! It’s flirting with heresy. What is a fantasy novel without a map? It just not serious, not orthodox, not ‘real’, is it?
Now I wouldn’t like you to think this is an oversight on my part. Absolutely not. Many-Coloured Realm was conceived not simply without a map but with a desire to make it impossible to create a map for it. Ever.
Ok, I know I’ve just put out the ultimate challenge to some map-loving reader who has just given an appalled shriek, ‘You what?! You didn’t!’
Fact is, I did. With malice aforethought.
I just don’t like maps. I know it’s a serious personality defect but, because of it, I gave a lot of thought to a plot where the landscape was always shifting, thus making a map next to near impossible to create. This decision naturally had a huge impact on the storyline.
It enabled me to play with some relatively complex ideas about the nature of time. Without going into complex explanations, I was able to paddle around in the shallows of Einstein’s special theory of relativity and to splash around terms like ‘time distortion’, ‘time flow’, ‘time differential’ and so on.
I ignored the predicted effects of relativity on mass and length, while creating the concept of turbulent vortices springing up between the realms. Because of the different time flows, each realm would, as Chris points out at one point in the story, be traveling at a different speed. At different fantastically fast speeds, as a matter of fact, but let’s not go into exactly how fast. We’d need some heavy-duty equations to figure it all out.
Now into this mix, there dropped another important consideration. Although I’d never read The Lord of The Rings until comparatively recently (I gave up when I realised I had completely confused Sauron and Saruman), I had read Tolkien’s writings about fairytales and his concept of ‘eucatastrophe’. Now his theory is great, but in practice, I felt there was something still to be desired.
So the epilogue of Many-Coloured Realm is my statement about what I think ‘eucatastrophe’ should be. If you’re going to have a happy ending, it should be no holds barred. It should go for it; it should not compromise. And so it doesn’t.
Now the names in the story are disconcerting to some people. Yes, I know there might be a tendency to believe the penguin was a tip of the lid to Artemis Fowl, but no. It took me nearly 27 years to find a publisher for this book and in that time, lots of names and situations have found their way, as these things do, into other authors’ fantasy tales. If you think it’s a matter of simply changing a name to something different like Plutarch or Kullervo, then you don’t know much about either writing or names.
The names of the elves and the goblins were massively influenced by Tolkien. No, they’re nothing remotely like his. It was simply that, having muddled Sauron and Saruman (I mean, come on, Black Hand and White Hand, orcs and more orcs, Black Tower and Iron Tower - I thought it was just a fairly transparent disguise until I realised that I had not the slightest clue which was which or what was happening in the story), I was determined that when I came to write a fantasy:
- You could tell goblin from elf immediately by the type of names they had.
- Every name would be sufficiently different that the possibility of character confusion would be minimised.
- The attributes of the characters would be evident in the way they spoke; hence each goblin has a different speech characteristic while the elves have a tendency to repeat stock phrases.
Tolkien had one final input into the story. This time it was a positive, not negative, influence. There’s a phrase I love from The Silmarillion. I’ve tried to quote it in various books but my editors keep removing it. I finally devised a cunning plan. I’d just use the idea, not the phrase. It’s the profoundly beautiful concept: the deeps of time.
The end result should have been predictable but it wasn’t. It was only when I was studying some Hebrew and realised that the word for ‘day’, yom, is related to the word for ‘sea’ that I realised how perfectly Tolkien had described the notion of time in the Bible. To me, yom seems to have the idea of relativity already embedded in it.
If I said to say what the storyline of Many-Coloured Realm is about, that pretty much sums it up. It about a yom.
NUMERICAL LITERARY STYLE
The other unusual feature of Many-Coloured Realm is its numerical literary style.
I once taught mathematics.
Actually I taught it for nearly 30 years. One day when I was looking for material for a unit integrating algebra, English, science and art, I discovered the research of Joan Helm, Ed Condren, Robert Stevick and David Howlett — medieval specialists who maintain that certain poems of past centuries were designed with an embedded mathematical architecture.
It was a wow moment! It was like clouds parting to reveal Everest or looking up at the night sky and spotting a supernova. I couldn’t wait to implement a fusion of word and number in my own writing.
I read everything I could lay my hands on about this topic and, very soon, I was so fascinated I began my own research. This is terrain so unexplored that major discoveries can be made by rank amateurs like myself. In fact, it’s so unexplored that those intrepid trailblazers have all worked independently and thus have invented their own very different names for it: numerical literary design, arithmetic metaphor, Biblical style.
Yes, it goes back to the Bible.
Poetry was routinely written this way for thousands of years. Around the sixteenth century, the format fell into sudden disuse. On rare occasions, however, even into the twentieth century, it was used by poets such as DH Lawrence and AD Hope.
It was also often used, apparently as an authentication method, in the writing of letters such as the epistles of Paul and the pastoral letters of Patrick of Ireland. As far as prose goes, however, I believe that the last time it was used was in the composition of the gospels.
Well, what an act to follow. I’d love to be the person to revive this technique but I’m realistic. Most people are fairly phobic about mathematics. So I haven’t gone all out in Many-Coloured Realm. I would have liked to have emulated my hero, the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight but his mathematical architecture is so ornate I’m left breathless with admiration. I’ve stolen a couple of his best ideas, nonetheless. The blurb on the back cover is 111 words, the prologue is 1111 words and the story itself is 111111 words.
The concept I’ve used for 111111 is not my own; in fact, it’s not original to the Middle Ages. It goes back at least 4000 years. However, it would give too much away about the story and why it is called Many-Coloured Realm to explain here. The reasons are given in detail in The Listening Landwhich you will receive free if you order before 5 June 2010.
QARATH WRITING
Qarath:
From qara’, to call, to call forth, to summon by name, to tear
+ karath, to cut, to make a covenant
For 20 years, I coordinated an annual children’s camp based on The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis. Drama, arts, crafts, tournaments and feasts were all themed around the book of the year.
Each morning, sometime after Rumblebuffin’s ’Robics and dormitory inspection, we’d embark on a dramatisation of one of the novels. A team member would read an abridged version of the story and the campers would raid the costume box, choose their roles and act out the serial.
I was always amazed by the kids who could speak the dialogue before it was read out or would turn to the reader during an abridged section and say, ‘That’s not right. You missed the bit about…’
An astonishing number of kids knew the books by heart. A significant number of them were kids who had never been to camp before, were shy and lonely and had only been drawn by the promise of entering ‘Narnia’, the land of their heart.
After the first decade, I began to wonder what it was about the books that made kids read them so often that they were loved to bits. These were clearly stories that, if the Skin Horse in The Velveteen Rabbitwas even partly right, had become REAL:
‘Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.’
The Velveteen Rabbit Margery Williams
Was it the quality of the writing that drew the kids to the books? I hardly thought so. There were many authors who wrote as well as Lewis and lots who wrote better.
Was it the fact that Christian parents had inculcated a love for the books in their kids? No. In many cases, the parents weren’t Christian and even when they were, mostly the kids had found the books independently and their parents were concerned about their obsession.
Was it the fairytale happy-ever-after aspect of the story the kids loved? Maybe, but there are heaps of those kinds of stories out there which don’t cause the same reaction.
So, what was it?
On a similar note, what caused people I knew of to read The Lord of The Rings once a year or, in extreme cases, get to the end and start over—not once but a dozen times? And what makes The Lord of The Rings the most popular book of the twentieth century, much to the disbelief and disdain of the literati? If it’s just because it gave hope to people at a time when the fear of nuclear destruction was so extreme, how do we explain its increased popularity once that threat is no longer prominent in the public consciousness?
To cut to the chase and not even mention how many years of research led me to this conclusion, I believe the real answer is that both series—The Lord of The Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia—are exemplars of what I have dubbed ‘Qarath writing’.
To explain what Qarath writing is, I’m simply going to give a single outstanding example: The first book in The Chronicles of Narnia written by CS ‘Jack’ Lewis was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. According to his own testimony, it was not an attempt to smuggle Christian doctrine into the nursery by means of a theological fairytale, it was a story inspired by the picture that had constantly appeared in his mind’s eye from the time he was about sixteen. The image was that of a faun standing in the snow. As soon as he began writing about this faun, long decades later, the Lion came ‘bounding in’. Any theological motifs were a result of a Christian worldview, not deliberate planning and insertion.
I believe Lewis totally. Though I don’t think many people really do credit his explanation.
The reason I believe him is simple: I know what the faun standing in the snow symbolises.
Another name for a faun is a satyr, a hybrid goat-human from classical mythology. In English folklore, the traditional name for a satyr was Jack. And the Welsh surname Lewis means ‘lion’ and was linked to the Celtic god of light, Llew Llaw Gyffes, the lion of the steady hand.
Like Jacob at the ford of Jabbok wrestling with an angel until he receives a blessing and a new name, Jack Lewis was struggling with the power of his own name while working through the matter of cutting a new covenant.
Qarath writing is about name. It’s about the call on the writer’s life.
‘One always writes about oneself in the end.’ Alex Miller
Qarath writing can be found in any type of fiction. However, it is most common in fantasy which lends itself naturally to the form. As readers, we generally find ourselves drawn to Qarath writing that explores our own names.
My all-time favourite story is The Last Battle by CS Lewis. (I should point out that CS Lewis also wrote some of my least favourite stories.) The reason for liking The Last Battle is obvious to me now that I understand how to read the signs: it’s a Qarath for the name ‘Hamilton’ —a pseudonym Lewis used early in his writing career.
The power of name holds vastly more sway in our lives than we could even begin to suspect. And it is through Qarath writing that, as both authors and readers, we begin to engage with it.
How else can you explain why Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize winner and Afro-American author of Sula and Beloved, uses names and symbols unique to clan Morrison of the Western Hebrides, when Morrison is her ex-husband’s name?
When I said previously that, if you think it’s a simple matter to change the name of the penguin so that it would not seem to be a tribute to Artemis Fowl, it was Qarath writing I was referring to. This is where the writer taps deep into the heart and soul of their identity and mucking about with names just isn’t an option. Consequently, I’ve chosen to stay with Artemys, despite what people may think. And though I’d love to rave on and tell you more about Qarath writing and overwhelm you with heaps of examples, I’m afraid I must finish. You see, I set myself a target of 1111 words for this section and it’s up right now.