Michelle Paver shares tories from her research trips to Greenland and talks about her respect fo anthropological science

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MICHELLE PAVER interviewed by NIKKI GAMBLE

Born in Malawi to a Belgian mother and a father who ran the tiny 'Nyasaland Times', Michelle Paver moved to the UK when she was three. She grew up in Wimbledon and, following a Biochemistry Degree from Oxford, she became a partner in a City law firm. Eventually, she gave up her career in law to follow her long-held dream of becoming a writer. Successfully published as an adult author of historical fiction, CHRONICLES OF ANCIENT DARKNESS are her first - brilliant - books for children.

On your website you mention that Tove Jansson’s Moomin stories were favourite books from childhood. I can see the connection with your writing, which like Jansson’s has a depth of feeling for landscape. In Soul Eater you describe the frozen North so evocatively. I understand that you went to Greenland to do the research, that must have been amazing. Can you tell us something about it?

Yes, I’d been to Greenland in the summer to research for Spirit Walker and did a little for Soul Eater while I was there. Even in the summer, icebergs can be seen crashing into each other and I managed to get close to a glacier, but of course it was quite sunny. I was keen to get back to experience cold Greenland. So towards the end of winter I took a trip to the east coast, which even the Greenlanders call the back of beyond because there is a population of just 2,000. The first day, I travelled on a husky sled with an Inuit guide. What struck me was the chaotic way in which Greenland huskies run. Not in neat pairs. No, the Greenland way is just to have them fanned out, so they leap over each and get tangled up. Sometimes a dog decides to hitch a lift on the sled, and the others get annoyed. The weather was foul; there was a very strong wind and it was freezing cold. Of course I already knew that Greenland was cold, but it was the power of the wind that struck me. When we stopped all the dogs huddled behind a rock, as did I and the guide. We just had to get out of the wind. That’s why as soon as Torak and Renn leave the forest in Soul Eater, the power of the wind hits them.

One of the things that struck me when I visited Churchill in Northern Canada was the change in the landscape. First the trees peter out and then there are a few low, windswept trees and then nothing. I wasn’t really there to scope the scenery but to see some polar bears. I had considered going to see them at London Zoo; after all, a polar bear’s a polar bear. But really I knew I had to do it properly, so I went all way to the Churchill, Hudson Bay. It’s a great place to see polar bears. The scenery is amazing it’s not just flat ice. It gives you the sense that you really are going to the edge of the world. I thought, I’m going to have re-write the book because the landscape is completely different to the way I had imagined. That’s why I do location research because there are always surprises.

Your writing is very sensory ...

If you’re sitting in a nice comfy study in Wimbledon, there’s only so much you can imagine. So first hand experience is essential for me, because I need to use all the senses. It’s one of the reasons that I don’t take photographs when I’m on a research trip. I take a few snaps for the publisher, so they can see me with the husky dogs, but I never use them as research tools. Photographs just show a little bit of what you can see, not what you can hear and feel.

I find your descriptions of animal behaviour completely convincing, the difference between the ways that polar bears and the brown bears behave, for instance.

Thank you. Well I am pretty careful. So far the experts, the archaeologists and the wolf behaviourists have said, “Oh, we like your books and we haven’t found any mistakes.” So, I feel confident, though I’m not an expert.

Does that level of accuracy come from observation or from book based research?

Both. I spend a few weeks holed up in the British Library researching archaeology and anthropology for every book, which I love doing. I’ve read the classic studies on wolves and polar bears, and that’s great for generalities: how the animals behave, when they breed, the latitudes where they are found. Documentaries are very useful; I have watched David Attenborough. But that sort of research doesn’t help you experience what it’s really like to meet a polar bear; that’s why I had to go to Churchill. The first time I saw a polar bear was at night. We went out in the moonlight searching for the bears. I was in the tundra buggy: a huge truck with wheels about ten feet high and very thick, so they don’t damage the tundra too much. There’s a little open air platform that you can stand on and look down. There were clumps of snow around and as I was looking, one of these humps just got up and started towards us. It was a bear. He’d been sleeping and we had woken him up. I’d seen the documentaries about polar bears and I knew how they moved but I was surprised that this huge bear didn’t make a sound, not a sound. As he walked across the ice it was silent. You could see the breath, but you couldn’t even hear the breath. It was awe inspiring. Of course the polar bears hunt seals on ice, and if his claws were busy clicking away they would starve. So when Torak meets the ice bear it’s the silence that I emphasise. And when his eyes meet the bear’s eyes, I’m describing what happened to me. I’ll never forget that experience everything is prey to the polar bear and that was another realisation that came from that encounter. I already knew it in biological terms but the force of what that meant came home to me on that trip. So I would say it’s the emotional experience as well as the sensory details that you uncover on location research.

You also learn about anecdotal, anthropological science. The Inuit have been observing polar bears a lot long longer than we have. Their observations are not necessarily scientifically verified but I can show respect for them in my novels. For example, there’s an Inuit tradition that wolves are believed to be so clever that if they want the reindeer to think they’re further away, they put their noses in the snow to muffle their howls. To my knowledge, no scientist has observed this behaviour, but it’s a strong Inuit belief. I’ve used that in Wolf Brother.

In writing the dream sequences you shift from using the past tense into using the continuous present. Does that happen intuitively or do you plan to write like that?

You try it and see. Clarity is the most important thing, especially as my readers are quite young. The first time Torak’s spirit walks, which, of course, isn’t dreaming, I did try going into the present and it got too confusing trying to communicate the idea that his soul is leaving his body. But for dreams it does seem to work, partly because I think dreams feel so present.

I write from three viewpoints. One of them is a wolf. Although I knew I was going to write from wolf’s point of view, I didn’t know how I was going to do it. I did a lot of research on levels of smell and taste. The first scene from Wolf point of view comes after his pack has just drowned; it’s based on a documented incident. The first time he pats the fire, I hadn’t realised he would do that. Then I had to solve the problem of how it would be interpreted by Wolf and that’s when I thought he would call it a ‘bright beast that bites hot’. This is very like Anglo-Saxon. In Soul Eater I had to imagine what wolf would think dreams are? He calls it ‘the other now’. Children enjoy decoding wolf’s thoughts but it’s an effort. So, with the dreams I’ve got to be very careful not to make things too complex.

Thank you Michelle Paver for talking to Write Away