You've set The Seeing Stone near Ludlow. What's the background to that?

The moment I decided that this was going to be a part-historical and part-legendary book two questions of course immediately arose. Where is it going to be set, and when is it going to be set? I think that gift that Merlin gives Arthur, the gift of a piece of black obsidian, the seeing-stone, is in a way a gift of the imagination. Arthur is conscious, almost straight away, that the seeing-stone is a kind of crossing-place, in which he can cross from the world of his pretty bloody-minded older brother, rescuing his sister when she goes through the ice, having to help kill a pig, and so on, he can escape, as we all can, into the world of the imagination. For Arthur, the world he's escaping to in the seeing-stone is the world of King Arthur. I thought therefore that the book should be set in a crossing-place. And it seemed pretty obvious on further reflection that it ought to be the crossing-place between England and Wales, because that is where the legendary, pseudo-historical King Arthur lived. Likewise I set the book in the years 1199 and 1200 - and future books will go through until 1203 - because it was a crossing-place between centuries, a thing that we've all had plenty experience of, having just entered a new millennium. It also gave me the fun of talking about medieval views on the change of century.

You are very much wrapped up in the East Anglian landscape. To what extent are you familiar with the landscape in which the book is set?

I can tell you it was pretty hard to turn my back on East Anglia. I did wonder if there was any way in which I could hijack it but I decided it was just not on. Despite my mother's mysterious and completely misplaced notion that Arthur had something to do with Canvey Island! So what I did was make repeated visits to the Welsh mountains and decided on this strategy - that I could name quite specific and well-known places like Shrewsbury and Chester and indeed have maps as endpapers and so on, to identify all those places, but right at the very heart of the novel, which is after all a work of the imagination, I would have an imaginary landscape, and the imaginary landscape would actually revolve around Stokesey Castle, which I really effectively renamed Caldicott, and Clun Castle, which features increasingly in the second volume, and I've taken the extreme liberty of renaming the River Ony the Little Lark as it flows past Stokesey. Clun Castle I call Holt. The title of the second volume, reached as usual with extreme difficulty, after my first hundred suggestions had been rejected, is King Of The Middle March.

Why are there exactly 100 chapters in The Seeing Stone?

It might have been a bit more sassy to have 99, 100 then 101 in the three volumes. Firstly I was tickled by the idea of it coinciding with the idea of the turn of the century but then seriously as I went on I thought I wanted two kinds of things to be going on. I wanted the story to pulse on so it would be a cracking good story, but I also wanted there to be moments that are a bit like arias in operas that do a recap of where-have-I-got-to-now. And so there a re quite a number of chapters, if you can call them that, that are less than a page long. Little moments in which Arthur the narrator says What does this mean? I think also that we're living in an age when children's concentration ability is somewhat reduced by the way in which they are flooded with instant rapid information-giving systems and are very used to the sort of quick ad between installments of a drama. Thirdly, there are a heck of a lot of things going on in this novel. It's trying to engage with quite serious issues, like differences between Christian and Islam, like what happens if there's weak leadership and as Yeats says 'the centre cannot hold'. We're in a time when King John, general thought to be a very weak leader has taken over from the inspiring Coeur de Lion... What happens when there is a News of the World type prying into people's private lives? There's the issue of sibling rivalry. The dangers of fundamentalism. There's a young teenager's preoccupation with his body.

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