Q&A Thursdays #12: Tom’s Question

Over the past year, I’ve been reprising a Daughter of Blood (and by extension The Wall Of Night) Q&A series that featured in 2019.

In doing so, I’ve been struck all over again by the degree to which the readers’ questions rock – and today we’re rocking on with Tom’s Question.

UK/AU/NZ

Tom: Your blog and Twitter peg you as a foodie, but it doesn’t come through in Daughter Of Blood and your other books. Not like the feasts in “Harry Potter”. Why is that?

I am a foodie, so you’ve definitely pegged me right there. 😀 And the feats of feast-dom in Harry Potter are certainly stupendous. When it comes to The Wall Of Night, though, the story has to be about the characters and the world they live in. In this case, it’s not a story centered on food and drink: for example, unlike Joanne Harris’s early novels, Chocolat and Blackberry Wine. So the references to food and drink have to derive from and support the story being told, in the same way lembas bread supports The Lord Of The Rings’ story and the Hogwarts feasts support the story being told in Harry Potter.

In WALL such references are fleeting but I hope aid the worldbuilding and /or scene setting. For example, in The Heir of Night’s Feast of Returning, early in the book, Malian is eating (or not eating, in fact) “a piece of dried fruit”, as opposed to fresh fruit—a small detail but consistent with the Wall environment. In The Gathering of the Lost, though, in the more clement if not less dangerous environment of Ij, Haimyr the Golden offers the heralds white wine from Emer and candied fruit—an echo of the refreshments offered in fairytales. Later, in the wild country of Northern Emer, a starving, exhausted Carick thinks a stale pie tastes marvelous. In other words, food is present in the series as the circumstances of the story dictate: a supporting actor rather than a player in its own right. I feel that being a foodie, though, helps me to choose the details that count.