Wolfstongue by Sam Thompson

We hosted Sam Thompson when Wolfstongue was first published so it was a delight to welcome him back for the final book in the trilogy. Its a fascinating glimpse into how one adventure became a trilogy.

I didn’t mean to write a trilogy. When I finished my novel Wolfstongue, I was sure it was a one-off: my young protagonist Silas had been on his adventure — discovering the hidden world of the Forest, helping the wolves escape from the city of the foxes and coming to terms with his own speech difficulties in the process — and I thought there was no more of his story to tell. Then, a few days after the manuscript was done, my editor Matthew asked if I had plans for another wolf-and-fox book. As soon as he posed the question, I realized the answer was yes — and that not one but two more books were waiting to be written.

The first trilogy I encountered was Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea. When we read A Wizard of Earthsea at school, it quickly became (and has remained) one of my favourite novels, with its unique archipelagic setting, its vision of language as magic and its hero Ged on his journey from goat-herd to mage. The book felt like a complete universe in itself, so there was a particular flavour of wonder to the discovery that it was the first in a trilogy. It wasn’t just that Earthsea turned out to be an even more expansive world than it had seemed; it was how Ged changed, ceasing to be the eager young man of the first book, and becoming the troubled adult searcher of The Tombs of Atuan, and then the weary, wise archmage of The Farthest Shore.

The Earthsea trilogy may have been my first experience of how fiction can encompass true change — how it can bring home that if I’m the young hero right now, soon enough I’ll be giving way to other protagonists and other points of view. Le Guin pressed this lesson further in the Earthsea books she wrote later: Tehanu, in which Ged is approaching the end of life as a diminished figure who has lost his magic power, is a tough story for those who grew up on the first three books, but one that takes us more vividly than ever into Earthsea, as the former wizard learns to live there simply as a human being.

Le Guin was an inspiration as I glimpsed the shape of the Wolfstongue trilogy, and so too were other trilogies, all very different from the books I was trying to write: John Christopher’s Tripods, Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl books, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. There was the astonishing example of Alan Garner, whose Weirdstone of Brisingamen and Moon of Gomrath turn English myth into fantasy-adventures for young readers. Those books were written in Garner’s early twenties, but it took him another five decades to complete the trilogy with Boneland, a deeply demanding novel that is written both for the child reader of Weirdstone and the adult she has become, and is completely faithful to the earlier books while transforming them beyond recognition.

As soon as I began to imagine The Fox’s Tower, the second book in my trilogy, I felt that Silas had to grow up and that his daughter Willow must take his place as the young person at the centre of the story. I wasn’t sure how to make it work, but instinct told me it was important. Le Guin and Garner showed me how it could be done. They showed me the power of the trilogy form not just to offer us a rich and sprawling tale, but also to engage us in a kind of syllogism. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis: three books can speak among themselves in complex ways, can make huge leaps and carry us with them to strange places that we could not have reached by any other path.

In my third wolf-and-fox book, The Forest Yet to Come, I’ve tried to remain true to those inspirations and to leap as far as possible into the unknown spaces that were always hidden at the heart of Wolfstongue. I think I’m asking a lot of my reader: I’m asking them to follow the story into a new world, among people who only faintly resemble those they once knew. I’m asking them to keep wondering what all this means, and to believe there’s an answer if we can find it together. I’m asking them to trust the trilogy.