Brian Selznick’s new book, The Marvels (Scholastic), is a heady journey. More than 600 pages long, the book is a big bundle of magic, more than half of it covered in full page, wordless, breath-taking blacks-and-white illustrations that play with endless shadows and light. The story that the pictures and the words that follow them tell, is complex, a saga which that pulls together threads of fantasy and reality, truth and fiction, and doesn’t shy away from difficult questions with no one right answer. The Marvels cooks up a kind of magical feast, to be devoured hungrily, with the hope of more soon to come. Excerpts from an interview:
Could you talk about the genesis of the book — the “foundational bedrock” which that is the Dennis Sever’s House and the way it led to the creation of The Marvels ?
I’d visited the Dennis Severs House many years ago and was swept up in its magic. The House is kept as if it’s still the 18th and 19th century so you feel like you’ve fallen back in time. I wanted to create a book that was, in part, a homage to this house and the man who created it.
Swati Daftuar When you begin creating, in which form does the idea first come to you — words, or pictures?
I think in pictures, but I always write down my ideas first. Once I have the ideas written down I draw quick little pictures to see what the specific drawings in the book will look like.
And how do you decide, or choose, which parts of the story will need words, and which will need to be drawn?
It depends on the book. For The Invention of Hugo Cabret, I told a single story going back and forth from words to pictures because I wanted the book to feel like an old-fashioned movie. I drew any sequence that had action in it, or focused on a face or an important object. For Wonderstruck , I used the pictures to tell the story of a girl who is born deaf, because her world would mostly be visual, and for The Marvels , I used the pictures to create a kind of collective memory for the characters (and the readers) in part two.
Your drawings are full of shadows and light, and sometimes, they are striking in their simplicity. A little about the art itself, and developing this style?
I draw very small, about one-fourth the size you see in the book. I work under a magnifying glass sometimes. When the drawings are enlarged for the book it makes the lines bolder and you can see the texture of the pencil even better. I like that it emphasises the hand-done quality of the art. I’ve been influenced a lot by artists like Maurice Sendak and Edward Gorey, and how they tell their stories through pictures.
Could you talk about creating a book that’s not one or the other, isn’t a graphic novel, not just prose? Could you tell us about us about choosing this medium of storytelling?
The first book I tried this with was The Invention of Hugo Cabret . At first I was going to tell the story like a regular novel with all words, but then I thought about how the book is about the history of cinema. Movies are a visual medium, which we mostly look at, and I wondered if there was a way to tell the story of Hugo sort of like a movie, where you look at parts of the narrative and watch them unfold... like a movie. I also like graphic novels and picture books for younger readers that rely on pictures to tell their stories, so those influenced me as well. I'd never seen a book that was for older readers which told part of the story in words and part of the story in pictures but it seemed like an interesting idea so I tried it.
Everything in The Marvels is linked, interconnected through time and realities — you’ve created a story that carries more stories within it. Tell us about choosing the motifs — the ships, Shakespeare, the broken watch, Tar, even the books Joseph brings along with him?
Everything is simply based on things I love. I love the Dennis Severs House, and the theatre and The Winter’s Tale by Shakespeare, and all the books Joseph brings with him are my favourites. Part of the work I did over the three years I made the book was trying to figure out what the connections would be between all these things.
There are other aspects of the book too, that are both beautiful and unique in the way they are addressed — the love between Billy and Albert, George and Joseph; the AIDS clinic that Barbara works in, death, the way you've handled the idea of broken homes and absent parents. Could you talk a bit about these?
I based much of the book on the real life of the man who created the Dennis Severs House, as well as his friend who now is the curator, David Milne. David told me stories about coming to the house for the first time when he was young, meeting Dennis, organising Dennis's funeral when he died, and I wanted to put all that into my story. Yes, there are many big serious themes in The Marvels , and there are people who die and there are people who fall in love, but this is all a part of life, and it's things that we all think about, children and adults, even if we haven’t experienced some of these things directly ourselves yet. I wanted to present these big things in a very straightforward way, so that there was no judgement, and no bias.
Almost as soon as it begins, The Marvels plays with ideas of reality and fiction and the overlapping spaces between the two. The world of theatre and Shakespeare, the act of “making stories up” in a way that they become real. Is that how it is for you? As you write and draw, do these boundaries become more smudged?
I’ve always been interested in why people tell stories, and what it means to create a narrative. Even if we are telling someone about an event that happened to us, we are making it into a story and sharing it. And sometimes over time, and over generations, those stories change and shift. Sometimes we also make stories up, we write novels or short stories, and those fictional stories can feel true if the emotions are believable and we identify with the characters. All of these ideas can be found in the real Dennis Severs House and I have explored them a little bit in The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck . But it’s The Marvels where I found a way to really delve deeply into all these thoughts around stories and fact and fiction and how we can help ourselves survive through making the pain of our lives into art.
Albert finds stories in the objects he surrounds himself with, and he also sees the people around him in these objects. The Angel boy painted on the theatre’s ceiling, for example, becomes Marcus Bloom. Is that how you find your stories too?
Yes. As I mentioned, all my stories begin with things I love, and people I love, and the books I make are the result of trying to find what happens when I mix different elements together.
You write about children, but do you only write for them? Isn’t this book, with its adventure and stories and reality, for everyone?
I think of myself as a children’s book-maker, but what's strange is that when I’m making my books I don’t think about children. The main characters are always kids, but I never think “Is this a good idea for kids.” I only think, “Is this a good idea?” I try to make the best story I can, because kids deserve the best. I write about things that interest me now, as an adult, many of which would be topics you’d think kids wouldn’t be interested in, like silent movies, the history of museums, Deaf culture, and 18th century theatre. I think kids find my books interesting because I’m writing about things that I find interesting myself.
I know that children are my main audience, but I love when people of all ages tell me they are reading my stories. So, even though I write knowing kids will be my main readers, I think it would be fair to say my books are in fact for anyone who wants to read them, for anyone who might find something true or compelling or meaningful in them, no matter what their age.
The Marvels; Brian Selznick, Scholastic, price not mentioned
swati.d@thehindu.co.in
