Ali Shaw is reluctant to call himself a writer of magical realism. Award-winning Oxford-based author of The Girl with Glass Feet and The Man who Rained, which are about as magical as their intriguing titles, his latest novel is simply entitled The Trees (March 2016). Lest readers be misled by this simplicity, the stunning cover art, which represents a stylized animal head made of autumnal leaves, offers a worthy visual counterpart to Shaw’s poetic language.
The Trees is about an apocalypse, Shaw explains, “about a forest that appears everywhere in the world fully grown in the blink of an eye. It comes up through the ground and smashes everything that was there before. And in a sense the whole world has just been reforested and utterly devastated. But also the forest isn’t just some sort of radioactive accident. It’s kind of a magical forest, it’s full of wolves and bears and all that stuff, but it’s also full of things that are a bit creepier and more enchanted and trees that have their own agenda and are alive – not so much getting up and moving around, that doesn’t happen, but certainly playing a very active role in human affairs.” Nature usually plays an active role in Shaw’s writing, often as a primeval and personified force. His books are set in wild places, on the fringes of civilization, as Shaw puts it. “I think in a sense, setting them there and then putting in all of this fantastical stuff in a sense sense is also grounded in reality. I suppose it’s made-up places that allow a lot of fantastical things to happen. Hopefully, it also allows it to be grounded in a far truer sense as well, in the rocks and stones and forests than cities would have done.”
Fairy stories are obviously one of his main influences. Shaw recalls being inspired at an early age by The Storyteller, a 1980’s animated show, narrated by John Hurt. Later, he read Kafka’sMetamorphosis and became interested in a darker side of adventure stories and magic, or perhaps in a more human side. “I think they’re really explicitly designed to instruct people how to deal with fear,” he muses. “And that’s not necessarily how to conquer fear. Fear is a precondition and you have to live with it. They’re so hopeless, they end so bleakly and so unsatisfactorily as well.”
This synthesis of reality and fantasy is often described as magical realism, a genre first pioneered by South American authors such as Gabriel García Marquez, but Shaw hesitates to put labels on his work. Genre, in his opinion, is generally more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to fiction. “I think the thing that’s unhelpful about it is the sheer amount of effort that goes into deciding what genre is what. I don’t think it’s such a problem now but when The Girl with Glass Feet came out, I received a whole lot of warnings from people who said, oh books like this are really difficult to categorize, readers don’t know what to do with it. Is it fantasy, is it magical realism, is it general fiction? There was almost a sense of panic over it, sort of a ‘what have you done? Did you have to make it about glass?’ Could you take that out? But it was fine!”
The label magical realism may help to succinctly place Shaw’s work. But in many ways, his writing is firmly rooted in a quest for vanished countryside, a quest that is made explicit in The Trees. Indeed, he tells me, only half-jokingly, I think: “My ambition in life is basically to own a pair of cows. I want a really big cow called Thoreau and then a little cow called Emerson and if I could have that, I’d die happy.”
