I first met Graham Joyce at Mexicon 4 in May 1991, at the Cairn Hotel in Harrogate. It was my seventh convention — my first, coincidentally, had been Mexicon 3 at the Albany Hotel, Nottingham, in May 1989. I think Mexicon 4 was Graham’s first UK sf con. I forget how we actually met, but he was there to promote his debut novel, Dreamside (1991, UK), and since I’d just become co-editor of a small press science fiction magazine, I thought it might be a good idea to read Dreamside and then interview the author about it.
So that’s what I did.
The novel is about lucid dreaming, a topic that was new to me, but I found it a fascinating read. It opens with the protagonist waking up, performing his morning ablutions, only to wake up yet again, as the previous occasion was a dream. Bizarrely, after finishing the novel, which I read pretty much on the Friday and Saturday, I had just such an experience myself. I woke up and spoke to my room-mate — co-editor of the aforementioned small press magazine —decided that I’d missed the hotel breakfast, and went back to sleep… Only to wake up again soon afterwards and discover it was much earlier than I’d thought and I had plenty of time until breakfast finished. My roommate had no memory of our conversation. Apparently, I’d dreamt it all.
It provided some amusement when I discussed it with Graham, but our chief focus was the interview I’d planned for my magazine. We’d both been up until 3 a.m. the night before, so neither of us were feeling especially intelligent. My only preparation, I should point out, was reading Graham’s novel. We sat in the hotel foyer, in armchairs either side of a circular coffee table, while friends sat on the floor around us. I’d borrowed a mini-tape recorder from my co-editor. It had a voice-activated microphone.
Unfortunately, our conversation often wasn’t loud enough to trigger the mike, so, once we’d spotted this, we completed the interview leaning forward over the table and speaking loudly. (My co-editor later told me if I’d turned the volume up to full, the mike would have remained active all the time.) I sent Graham a verbatim transcript of the interview. He replied, “I remember the interview as quite insightful so who were those two fucking Martians on the tape?”. He also wrote, “You could almost hear the thud as we regressed and our jaws and foreheads hit the table”. After some — mutual — editing, the interview was published to positive reviews.
Twenty years later, Graham’s career had gone from strength to strength. He’d even been instrumental in re-invigorating the British Fantasy Society. The small press magazine I co-edited, The Lyre, had lasted two issues — which was not uncommon then — but it did manage to publish fiction by some excellent writers. I’d moved to the Middle East in 1994, and no longer attended sf conventions. I started doing so again in 2005, after returning to the UK. Graham and I occasionally bumped into each other at conventions.
Graham died of lymphoma in 2014. He is sorely missed. Which makes Some Kind of Fairy Tale (2012, UK) a bittersweet read. In it, a young woman, Tara, follows a lover to the land of the fairy, and everyone assumes on her disappearance that she’s dead. She returns twenty years later — but for her it has only been six months. No one believes Tara is who she claims to be, but she knows enough of events two decades earlier to persuade people some part of her story may be true. Except for the fact she has not apparently aged…
The people most affected by her reappearance are her parents, with whom she had a bad relationship, and Richie, her boyfriend, a gifted guitarist whose dreams of stardom were torpedoed by Tara’s disappearance. The story never quite commits to one explanation or the other — is Tara telling the truth, or has she confabulated her tale of fairies in order to avoid explaining some trauma? Her parents send her to a psychiatrist, and while he falls on the side of confabulation, he cannot explain her lack of aging. Tara also meets a local pensioner who claims to have had the same experience many decades before, and who offers Tara a warning.
Tara and Richie reconnect — but he’s never entirely sure whether he believes her. (The fact she is still apparently fifteen years old also causes problems, although she does act older than her years.) Their rekindled relationship, however, does pull him out of his downward spiral.
There’s something very… quotidian about Some Kind of Fairy Tale, for all that its premise is predicated on a well-worn fantasy trope. But the focus on ordinary lives and relationships, and the uncertainty over Tara’s missing years, indeed even her actual identity, pushes the fantasy elements into the background. It works extremely well. The cast feel like real people… which only makes Tara’s tale all the harder to credit, so much so her detailed description of life with the fairies feels like an invention. (I should probably add these are not the twee little fairies of popular culture, but a race of human-looking, but not at all human, magically powerful hedonists.)
After reading Dreamside back in 1991, I followed Graham’s career, and bought and read each of his novels as they were published. But I stopped when I left the UK, and didn’t start reading him again until 2008. Fantasy, and especially urban fantasy, is not my first choice of reading genre, but Some Kind of Fairy Tale reminded me how much I’d enjoyed his novels back in the early 1990s.
It wasn’t a twenty-year gap for me between stopping reading his novels and coming back to them, more like fifteen years. And the United Arab Emirates is hardly fairyland (although these days, it’s closer to Disneyland). However, I’d forgotten how good Graham’s fiction was, and I now regret those missed years.
Happily, they don’t have to stay “missed”, as his books are still available. I plan to take advantage of that, and catch up.
