The Venetian’s Wife < reads like an episode of Charlie’s Angels.
That’s what I tell Nick Bantock, author of Griffin & Sabine, about his newest illustrated novel. Each of the characters (in this story of an art researcher who engages in a mysterious email correspondence) has a parallel in the 20-year-old TV series that jiggled its way into late-night cable reruns. Conti stands in for Charlie, Marco is Bosley, and Sara Wolfe is the Angel played by Kate Jackson.
“I was thinking more of Jumping Jack Flash, actually,” Nick responds, over breakfast at San Francisco’s Triton hotel where we’ve met to discuss The Venetian’s Wife, the future of CD-ROM, and, of course, Griffin & Sabine.
Carl Steadman: When I went into the Rizzoli bookstore, I asked for the new Bantock book and was met with the kind of patient smile that told me I’d have to spell that. “The author of Griffin & Sabine,” I explained, and was pointed to The Venetian’s Wife on a display table close to the entrance. Sure enough, the front cover read, “By the Author of the Bestselling Griffin & Sabine Trilogy.” Is that who you want to be?
Nick Bantock: That’s partly due to Chronicle Books. I think they see themselves as publishers of a certain kind of book. And it’s probably more important to them to maintain their image than it is to build an author’s name. Of course they want the money from a bestselling success, but they just don’t go about it in the usual way.
The interesting thing is that the trilogy was perceived as a phenomenon, and phenomena tend to be perceived, within the selling world, as acts of God, accidents. There were about a half-dozen mimics of Griffin & Sabine, but what we have not seen is a whole lot more books working within this same area. One of the main reasons is that there’s been a misunderstanding of what it’s all about. What publishers saw was a book with envelopes in it that you could take letters out of. Basically they saw it as a three-dimensional book for adults that was also a love story.
But I think it’s about something else. My push has been to try and develop a language, an ongoing narrative, that relies on both word and image. So if you take the image out, you’re not taking away the illustrations. You’re taking away a section of the story.
CS: So you want to produce more than just books – you want to produce a genre. Yet there’s already the graphic novel, where you have books like Gaiman’s and McKean’s Mr. Punch.
NB: Yes, there is, but what you don’t have is an equality between word and image. What you have is either a children’s book, or you’ve got a novel where you have some illustrations. There are those who have a vested interest in publishing as being either coffee-table books or novels – anything else makes people uncomfortable because it creates a new category.
CS: There’s an awful lot of open space in new media. You’ve dabbled in that with the Egyptian Jukebox, which is being ported to CD-ROM.
NB: It’s in the process. It’s not done yet. The one that’s really happening will be released at the beginning of next year. The Griffin & Sabine trilogy is being done by Peter Gabriel’s company in England, Real World. We’ve been working on that for a year and a half now.
CS: Are you pleased with the results?
NB: Yes, it’s not simply a book on CD-ROM. What we’ve done is try to bring the thing to life. We’ve used the same images, but you can interact with them, and you have to pass through them in order to move through the narrative. The extent to which they have put their energies behind it has been phenomenal. Look at the people involved – for example, Isabella Rosellini is Sabine, Ben Kingsley is Farati.
That’s just the voice-over. The music is recorded by incredible musicians. People in Prague are building claymations. We’ve had a taxidermist building animals. We’ve had somebody in the South Seas filming lion fish underwater. This thing is one hell of an extravaganza. But it’s all contained within these postcards and letters. It has a sense of great personalness in the fact that you have to interact with them. You have to work your way through to get the story, like turning it over to find out what the next part of the story is. There’s a sense that it’s real. You are in there, you are doing it.
The other thing is, we were able to bring out stuff that was much more subtly referred to in the book. The Yeats poem, “The Second Coming,” was to me a fundamental part of the backdrop and the story line, but I simply put it in by a few words here and there in the beginning and the end of each book. In the CD-ROM, we’ve brought the poem forward much more. We’ve got a wonderful reading of it that we’ve worked on. It sounds like Yeats himself reading it through an old crackling radio. It’s really lovely, but it’s so bloody powerful. It sends shivers down your spine.
CS: But you’ve lost the physicality of the book in order to embody the voice.
NB: There are things you must live with. That’s the first thing you have to accept. You have to look at the book and say, “What are the things that are of essence? What are the things that, no matter how hard we try, we won’t be able to maintain?” The tactile nature of the book. There’s no way. You’ve got a hard screen. Let’s not even talk about it being a book. Let’s talk about it being the experience of receiving cards and letters. Once you let go of that, then you try to give it a life out of all the possibilities of animation, of theater.
CS: Is this your chance to form a genre within CD-ROM? More so than with books?
NB: With CD-ROM, in a way, I don’t care. Once it’s over, I feel I can step out of it. Either our passion is successful or it’s not. It may move a few people who will spread it down the road, trying to do the same thing after it. Or someone else’s efforts will inevitably ride an art form that has far more extended possibilities.
CS: So are you trying to shrug off the responsibility?
NB: No. Put another way, I have four children. In the last 5 years I’ve done 15 books. I’ve done more pop-ups. My children are young. I’m involved in two CD-ROMs. I’ve had to deal with vast quantities of publicity. I’m exhausted. It’s time for me to go back and dig my hands into the ground and just solidify myself again. If I keep on dreaming and just float away, my children will grow up and disappear – I don’t know how I’ll feel in a year’s time.
CS: But you’ve been at this crossroad many times. When Griffin & Sabine was a success, for instance. That wasn’t really a trilogy when it started, was it?
NB: It was in my mind, and Chronicle knew. But we thought it would be 10 years to do it. Nobody in their wildest dreams could have conceived that it would go from the original print of 10,000 to what it is now. If someone had told any of us that that was going to happen, we would have just laughed ourselves under the table. For me, what it did was confirm how many people are out there. Put aside those people that just simply bought it because they felt they were getting a straightforward love story. Put aside those people that bought it for the novelty factor and those that bought it because their neighbor had got it or those that were given it at Christmas and never looked at it. Put aside all of those, it still proved that there was a massive audience of people who actually cared about books and ideas and different ways of looking at things. I think the same applies to the electronic world.
At first, there was over-expectation of what it might do. A great deal of money from a great deal of people poured into it, because they thought they were going to have fast returns. They didn’t get them. They panicked. They either withdrew, or they said, “Where is the marketplace?” Not, “Where might the marketplace be?” But, “Where is the marketplace? We’ve got to replicate it.” Standard practice within the system. But it requires someone, an outsider, to say, “OK, fine. Let all of that go on, but what I really care about is something else.” I was in a freak position that, because of the phenomenal success of the trilogy, people looked at what I did and they said, “Ah-ha. You could work in the electronic area because you think pictures and you think words. So therefore you must be who we’re looking for.” My attitude was, “I don’t know, I’m probably not the person you think I am, but there is something I want to do, and there’s something I’d like to say. So, if you’re going to give me permission to do it, I’ll go ahead and do it.” And I believe in it. Whether it becomes a market success is in the lap of other guys. If it just jogs a few people into starting their own projects, then I’m happy.
CS: It’s a cliché, but you want to be the Velvet Underground.
NB: I want to be influential, and I want to sell a lot, and I want to stay, remain, anonymous. I want to be dead Elvis, I guess.
