MICHELLE PAVER IS showing me how to make friends with a wolf. “If you give it a hard stare” — her eyes drill into mine — “it’ll get upset. Whereas if you look at it with an open attitude and a soft, grazing look in your eyes” — her large eyes melt into something between toffee and chocolate — “it knows not to be scared.”
Wolves have every reason to consider Paver a friend, since she began writing Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, the successful children’s series based around Torak, a Stone Age boy who befriends a wolf cub orphaned like himself. The series has electrified adults and children with its excellent plotting, vivid characterisation and deep feeling for the natural world, and netted Paver a record £1.5 million advance.
Inevitably, there have been comparisons with other crossover novels by J. K. Rowling, Philip Pullman and Lian Hearn. Yet it is wolves that have given Paver the edge, and that appealed to the director Ridley Scott so much that he paid a reported £2.7 million for the film rights.
Paver’s Wolf is all animal, from his tingling whiskers to his hard, sensitive pads, but Torak can talk to him, and their adventures are told from both their viewpoints. Torak is brave, loyal, proud and clever; Wolf is simple but intelligent and often funny (he sees Torak as “Tall Tailless”). Together, they have redefined a generation’s view of wolves:long the villains of children’s literature. This, Paver points out, is only a return to the way that they were seen in ancient times, by hunter-gatherers. “It’s only since people became farmers that wolves were demonised as a threat to livestock,” she says.
Paver, an elegant, modest woman of 45, thinks that her love of the species stems from having been left as a baby in the care of a large German shepherd. Her family (father a South African newspaper publisher, mother a Belgian teacher) lived in Malawi for a while. The dog was “protective and very, very tolerant”, but nothing, not even African snakes, could get near her.
One of three sisters, she had a happy childhood in Wimbledon, but suffered an unhappy year being picked on at secondary school. “I used to come home and howl. I disappeared into books. I’d be on my own in the playground, making up stories — it taught me the power of stories.”
Paver’s love of science led her to read biochemistry at Oxford, where she wrote two unpublished novels and was, she says, pretty introverted. She then went into law as a City solicitor. Yet, despite making “silly money” from patent litigation, all she really wanted to do was to write fiction, getting up at 4.30am to do so After 12 years in the City, she took a sabbatical when her father died and plunged into full-time writing.
Her historical romances enjoyed respectable sales, but when she found herself wondering why the characters didn’t “just get together and stop complaining”, it occurred to her that she might be writing the wrong kind of novel.
Twenty years earlier, she had written a story about a 9th-century orphaned boy and a wolf, which had been rejected. In 2002, she dug out the manuscript and thought: “Oh, wow!” The key elements of boy-wolf-bear-girl-forest were all there. Now she knew that she had to set it in the Mesolithic period, after the Ice Age but before the advent of the farming that turned humans against wolves.
The adventures of Torak and Wolf are compelling. So is their world. The forest itself is alive and conscious, and the various clans co-operate or live apart. Torak is threatened by the evil mages who murdered his father. Like Harry Potter, he and Wolf and his friend Renn (a girl from the Raven clan) grow older with each novel, something that Paver predicts will cause problems, not least because “wolves mature faster than humans”.
A natural loner, she is happy to be without husband or children. Home is a modest two-up two-down cottage in Wimbledon with a 20ft garden. “I wouldn’t want to own lots of land — or a wolf!” she exclaims, laughing. “I’d far rather support them by being a patron of the UK Wolf Conservation Trust. They do such good work. Wolves are still portrayed badly in films — you get them prowling and growling when they hunt and it irritates the hell out of me.”
Paver is a master-storyteller, whose clear, taut prose overlies complex research. There is magic, but it is natural magic, dependsing on perception or superstition. The new novel, Soul Eater — the third in the series — is really frightening. Wolf is captured for sacrifice by the evil mages who want to gain powers from the spirit world; the demons everyone sees may not be real, but the reality of evil and the need for clans to respect nature and one another is never in doubt.
“It has to feel real. Everything could have happened, the bear could have been possessed by a demon or it could have been the way a boy living 6,000 years ago saw it. The shaman tradition shows the human brain has amazing capabilities.”
The novels are meticulously imagined, researched and described. Paver is able to convey exactly what swimming with killer whales or driving huskies is like because she’s done these things herself, travelling to remote parts of Sweden, Norway, Greenland and most recently Canada, where she saw a polar bear not unlike one that attacks Torak in the Soul Eater.
Yet for her: “The best bit is living characters’ adventures with them.” Unencumbered by children or the desire for Armani clothes, she is free to explore her childhood fantasies.
The thrill of this remarkable series is that it makes readers perceive the world differently. Paver brings out a fine green cord that a 10-year-old girl in Oxford, inspired by Renn’s archery, made from twisted nettle fibre. “She wondered whether it would make a good bow-string.”
We twang it, delightedly. It’s been 250 years since wolves lived wild in Britain. If they are reintroduced, it will be thanks to The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness that they would be welcome again.
