Exclusive Interview: “The West Passage” Author Jared Pechaček

 

Given that he hosts a podcast about J.R.R. Tolkien, you’d expect Jared Pechaček’s dark fantasy novel The West Passage (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook) to be very Lord Of The Rings-ish.

But in the following email interview about it, Pechaček talks as much about the impact Moby-Dick, Hieronymus Bosch, and his religious upbringing had on this story as he does Frodo’s long walk.

To start, what is The West Passage about, and what kind of a world is it set in?

The West Passage is set in a crumbling palace ruled by eldritch Ladies, populated by weird creatures. (Sort of like if you took the Luttrell Psalter and made a castle out of it.) And wandering in this world are the young Mother of Grey House, who’s trying to fix the weather, and the apprentice to the eponymous passage’s Guardian, who’s trying to get promoted. At the same time, something is rising from the depths beneath the palace…

Where did you get the idea for The West Passage?

I was sitting at home one day, idle and quiet, when a thought occurred randomly to me: What if there were an epic quest fantasy, but about someone walking down a hallway? Now we’re here. And even though the story doesn’t stay in a hallway, that notion of keeping things as confined as possible is definitely still there.

In the book, snow in summer foretells the coming of The Beast. Is there a significance to The Beast’s coming being weather based as opposed to, say, some numbers on a baby’s head or lights in the sky?

It wasn’t consciously done, if I’m honest. When writing, it felt important that The Beast be heralded by things within the natural world: wrong weather, birds behaving strangely, etc. Now, looking back, I see why. The beginning was written in 2019, as the climate crisis was really starting to take unmistakable hold in the Pacific Northwest. No longer just “my goodness, we are having a warmer June than normal” but “holy hell, the air is full of burning forests.”

Now, The Beast doesn’t necessarily represent that crisis, but that sense of nature itself yelling disastrous omens in your face certainly permeates the book.

It sounds like The West Passage is a fantasy story, but not a medieval one like The Lord Of The Rings or an urban fantasy tale like Harry Potter. How do you describe it, genre-wise, and why that way?

Dark fantasy. Medieval, too, but more a fantasia on medieval themes. It’s not accurate to any one time or place, partly because the setting has fossilized in different periods. In the region where the story begins, everything is in a sort of “British Isles in 715 CE” cultural mode: untailored clothes, lots of porridge, a reliance on oral tradition. But in other parts of the palace you have people wearing ruffs, eating potatoes or dragonfruit, and reading printed books. Certainly none of those is medieval.

So the reason I think of it as “medieval” has more to do with the outlook of the characters. Shortly before starting it, I’d read a book about gothic cathedrals and their relationship to scholasticism, which pointed out that people in that era were extremely interested in a very specific kind of learning: representation, categorization, and explication, rather than exploration. Not so much learning new things, but fitting what is already known into a schema, and thereby making the world understandable. Like, think of astrology or humors, and how those provided a way to understand people or plants. We conceptualize the world almost as a machine, something that can be predicted or understood if you know the right numbers. The medieval world was more like a system of basically unchanging interlaced terrestrial and celestial hierarchies, understood through resonances and images. The dandelion is under the sun’s astrological influence because it looks like the sun. That systematization is a huge part of Passage‘s setting, where people live in a static hierarchy, inherit their jobs and names, and interpret the world through imagery.

Because of all these hierarchies, the medieval world is pretty claustrophobic: spheres nested in spheres, and God always peeking in over the edge. In The West Passage, there is no god as such, but there are the Ladies, who might be monsters or goddesses or both, and their domination and influence provide a similar closed-off structure for their world.

And in less meta territory, Passage actually is super medieval in ways The Lord Of The Rings isn’t. Illness and death are always around the corner; the extreme stratification of the palace means characters are swept up in petty political struggles that have little to do with their own lives; and there’s an emphasis on the body that you often find in medieval literature and art — on the functions of the body, on its possibilities as a fragile vessel for spiritual power, and on its destruction. Which is also very dark-fantasy territory.

The West Passage is your first novel. Are there any writers, or specific stories, that had a big influence on it?

The most obvious one is Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series. The second is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Tombs Of Atuan. Even though her Tenar and my Yarrow are on very different trajectories, I love a sheltered character whose training has not fit them at all for the world outside their walls. (Yes, I was homeschooled; why do you ask?) And the third, funnily enough, is Moby-Dick, not in terms of plot, but more in the way it plays with what you know, how you know it, and whether that ultimately matters when the thing you’ve been chasing finally rises from the deep.

Wait, not J.R.R. Tolkien? I mean, you host a podcast about the guy called “By-The-Bywater.”

He’s an influence not in story / setting terms, but in expansiveness. The impression of depth, is the term he used. I do hate a fantasy novel where the map in the front contains every place the story visits. Even though the palace is, again, pretty claustrophobic, it’s much larger than we ever see and contains much more than anyone knows. That sense of lives being lived beyond the story is hugely important to me.

I also find Tolkien pretty influential when it comes to meaning: he famously hated allegory and preferred reading books that enabled the reader to find meaning, rather than the author dictating it for them. (Of course, he did get pretty snippy when people misunderstood what he was trying to convey, but still!) Just as the One Ring is a polyvalent symbol, I don’t want stuff like, say, The Beast to represent any one thing, but I would be very pleased for people to resonate with it on certain frequencies.

And then how about non-literary influences; was The West Passage influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games?

This is a bit outside the question, maybe, but: Pentecostal Christianity. I grew up Foursquare, and boy, does that do things to your brain chemistry, no matter how long it’s been since you left it. The aura that the Ladies have is my attempt to convey the numinous sense of a worship service where people are speaking in tongues and falling on the floor.

The other biggest influence is Hieronymus Bosch. Whenever I was stuck for a new character, I’d pull up The Garden Of Earthly Delights and drag some weird little guy from it right into the story.

The third biggest, oddly enough, is the music video for Onuka’s song “Zenit.” There’s a scene in Passage where a character is talking to a Lady for the first time, and it wasn’t quite clicking for me. I happened to watch that video around then, and there are several shots of a very costumed Nata Zhyzhchenko seated among robed children, like a goddess’s statue flanked by cultists, and I went Of course. That’s the vibe! And so I went back to that scene and added courtiers, and there was the click I was looking for. Before that, Ladies were less goddess-like; after that, they usually have entourages of devotees. There is other music that fed into it, but I’ll specifically shout out Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 as well as the Hieronymus Bosch butt music.

There are movies, too, like Julie Taymor’s Titus, with its gorgeous “throw it in and see what happens” vibe. Also Tarsem Singh’s The Fall and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in terms of childlike sincerity painted on bloodspattered canvases, as well as in terms of spectacle, the surreal spaces no less than the costumes by Eiko Ishioka.

What about opera? Your author bio says you like to sew things to wear to the opera, and operas tell stories…

God, I love spectacle. I love artifice. I love drama. Opera is all of those. The book often is, too. But also, I think the value of opera is that it teaches you the delight of the improbable. The joy of something outré being rendered beautiful (or simply comprehensible) by the art form it inhabits. There are moments in The West Passage that feel to me like a character breaking out in an aria, and I could never get away with them if I was committed to a certain kind of realism, and never would’ve been open to them at all if I hadn’t experienced Il Trovatore or Akhnaten.

Now, when not writing, you’re an artist. And, in fact, did illustrations for The West Passage. Why did you want to include illustrations in Passage?

So, I actually don’t remember that part very well. I know Carl Engle-Laird, my editor, asked if I wanted to, and I said yes. And I think it’s because Carl has always been very in love with emphasizing the book-ness of Passage. The table of contents was his idea, after all. Illustrations are obviously pretty booky, and he knew I’d already done some art related to it, so why not take advantage of an entire other skillset? Either that or he was gently kissed with inspiration by one or more angels.

Conversely, why did you decide to write The West Passage as a prose novel with illustrations as opposed to as a graphic novel?

The reality of The West Passage is slippery. Often you’ll be introduced to a character and only pages later discover they have whiskers or claws. Or mice will be mentioned, then given the traits of beetles. Basic facts are often called into question. One statement is made about the world only to be contradicted by another. This produces a disorienting effect that would be reduced by representing the story visually. In a graphic novel, you’re often asked to accept that the art is showing you something more or less as it is, or at least as you’re meant to understand it. Obviously, so many exceptions exist that it’s not a rule so much as a convention. But even then, the specific kind of disorientation that I’m interested in would be very difficult to do with illustrations. Or difficult for me, anyway. A mouse that is not a mouse would have to be drawn as such from the beginning, which spoils the surprise. But you can call something a mouse, and a phrase or sentence later pull a tiny rodent-shaped rug out from under the reader, and that’s the part I find fun.

So, what kind of illustrations did you do for The West Passage, and why was this the best choice for Passage?

Related to the above, I didn’t want the illustrations to look like accurate depictions of the book’s world and events. I wanted it to look like people within the world could’ve made them. And so the art is generally in two styles: an insular Celtic type for Yarrow, the Mother of Grey House, and a more international gothic type for Kew, the guardian’s apprentice. For the former, picture the Book Of Kells. For the latter, it’s probably whatever you picture when you think of medieval manuscripts. The Celtic type is much older and is the work of religious communities left behind by the Roman Empire’s slow receding. And Yarrow comes from a similar setting of believers abandoned by power and left to carry on their own traditions. The gothic type is newer by a few hundred years, and rises out of the mixing of different artistic practices; in a sense, it’s the more “educated” style, and Kew is more book-learned than Yarrow. All of this meant a ton of research and buying a lot of books about medieval illumination, as well as registering for various academic databases, all so I could ignore historical accuracy in favor of what looked cool.

So much for the setup. The execution: I drew everything in ink so that there would be visible errors and imperfections, then I photoshopped out the worst of those and shaded everything digitally. My goal was to keep everything looking as handmade as possible, because I was interested in the idea of this kind of art, rather than reproducing it faithfully. If you look, for example, at spirals in the Book Of Kells, they are unbelievably perfect. (Seriously, if you’ve never taken a close look at the Book Of Kells or other insular manuscripts, do it. They’re absolutely incredible.) My spirals are usually a bit wonky, because I thought if they looked even half as good as the originals, people would assume they were done with digital tools. And it was important for me that readers got the sense of handcraft here.

Fantasy stories like The West Passage are sometimes stand-alone novels and sometimes the start of larger sagas. What is Passage?

One and done. Unless I have a really, really good idea for continuing it, but even then, my preference is for very small fantasy series or stand-alones. As a writer, I start getting hung up on worldbuilding. As a reader, I don’t have the patience.

Earlier I asked if The West Passage had been influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games. But to flip things around, do you think The West Passage could work as a movie series, a TV show, or a game?

Related to the graphic novel issue, I don’t think it would really work in a cinematic format, but here’s my TV pitch:

The West Passage is divided into eight books with a few interludes and some other interstitial material. Make each book an episode or season and assemble a wildly different creative team for each one, but keep the actors the same. Have one episode be entirely stop motion animation. Another one is a musical. One has a live studio audience. Et cetera. This will be incredibly expensive and please nobody but me.

If Hollywood is too cowardly for my pitch, I think it would make a good video game. The book is mostly exploration anyway. There are built-in zones to visit with their own distinct visuals and rules; you could collect miracles to aid or hinder you on your quest; the character generator would be a thing of beauty. Heck, forget the plot of the book: I’d be very happy if the game was something like “return this fish to its rightful owner” or “don’t tell mom the babysitter’s a trickster god.” Dr. Suess meets Bloodborne.

So, is there anything else you think people need to know about The West Passage?

I haven’t seen many people talk about how gender works in it, but also I think the surprise is part of the fun, so I’ll everyone to discover it for themselves.

I’ll just add that my favorite part is probably the frogs.

Finally, if someone enjoys The West Passage, what fantasy novel of someone else’s that you read recently, and enjoyed, would you suggest they check out next?

Ooh, ooh, I want to call out a book from the last couple of years: Simon Jimenez’s The Spear Cuts Through Water. A sprawling, gorgeous, behemoth book about two young men carrying the body of a goddess across a dying empire. It reminds me most of Marlon James’s Dark Star trilogy in its beautiful brutality, only the setting is closer to ancient Southeast Asia. There may not be much obvious connection to Passage, but there are similarities in the young people forced to bear the weight of centuries of oppression, the tactile handling of divinity, the horror, and the pervasive queerness. It’s so, so good.