......I’m pretty sure that my desire to be a story-teller was seeded very early by a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that my mother bought for me. I remember the way my imagination was steeped in a weird yet familiar light as story after story opened on a realm that was magically at a remove from, yet curiously available inside, the grimy industrial landscape of northern England where I was growing up. I believe now that the pleasures these old stories give have less to do with the fascination of strangeness than with the surprised delight of recognition, for tale after tale is about bringing something new to life through the mysterious and difficult processes of self-discovery. My own education in the nature and laws of the imagination was deepened when I first encountered the myths of the ancient world, and was further enlarged when, as an undergraduate, I studied the medieval romances.
......I had gone up to read English at Cambridge in the belief that it might further my apprenticeship as a writer. It took me about twenty years to recover from the ruinous effects of that misperception, for though Cambridge filled me with an abiding love and awe for the glories of our literature, it also robbed me of almost all belief that I could ever be a writer myself. And so, like many before me, I gave up on the dream and turned to teaching instead. I became a member of what was intended at the time to be a sort of lay clerisy, spreading the word of humanist reason and tolerant scepticism. I taught in West Africa for a time, where I was brought up against some of the limits of that liberal intellectual tradition, then I returned to work in Further Education in the UK. Woken to the political injustices of the world, and infatuated by the powers of the rational intellect, I used them in a well-meaning but arrogant effort to legislate acceptable standards of reality for everybody else. Eventually, under a growing awareness of the contradictions in my work, the pressures of early marriage and fatherhood, and an abiding sense of failure, I retreated into an ever falser, more withdrawn condition, until with the simultaneous collapse of my embattled ego and my first marriage, I went through a brief but intense episode of breakdown. It lasted for two days and three sleepless nights during which, as Joseph Campbell would say, I dropped into the unconscious - which is another way of saying that I made a journey into the otherworld. For the mythical fact is that, while still dimly aware of my external circumstances, I was everywhere, in the interior, traversing an arduous terrain, and encountering some fearsome figures on the way. Eventually I fell asleep, and when I woke up it was to the exhilarating sense that the unfolding flow of life was not only larger but richer in meaning and interest than my tightly managed model of it had been. My collapsed ego would build back quickly enough, of course, but the terms on which I lived my life were irrevocably altered, and out of the need to recognize more of the transforming nature of that journey for myself, and in the hope that it might help others to similar recognitions of their own, I knew that I had to find both a context for it and a language.
......The novels that most interested me now were those that act on the reader’s imagination with something of the force of an initiatory ordeal - stories that draw us into deep vicarious involvement in a process of transformation, attended by ambiguous tutelary figures offering ‘a homeopathy of anguish’, and from which the reader emerges with heightened recognition of comparable moments in their own past lives; and perhaps also with an enlarged sense of the possibility for change and renewal in the future.
......Looking back on my earlier studies from this new perspective, I found in the medieval romances a rich trove of initiatory stories actively concerned with the high adventure of the human soul. For in their imaginative approach to the general problem of how one becomes a whole person in a violent, complicated world those old stories were seeking to renegotiate the balance between many of the apparently contradictory forces that rack out our lives.
......Most evidently they were looking for a new relation between the masculine and feminine principles, both in the erotic relations between the sexes and as an inward dilemma of the individual life. And in particular they were questing for ways to convert the male talent for aggression into energy available for the cultivation of the feelings. In examining that problem they took seriously all those dynamic aspects of the unconscious which feel as though they belong to the otherworld, yet which are lively guides to the complexities of this one - the encounters with imperious summoners, with unexpected helpers, with demanding mentors, with coldly daemonic shadow figures, and with those ambiguously characterized contrasexual aspects of the psyche in whom are incarnate both the perils of the quest and its rewards. Above all, in its preference for the vision-quest form, the genre of the romance seemed to be an appropriate instrument for exploring the difficulties and wonders encountered when a person begins to feel their centre of consciousness shifting from ego to soul, from a sense of wounded isolation into a renewed, feeling relationship with the deep ground of our being. The best of those stories seem to suggest that this can only be done by holding opposing powers in tension together until they are reconciled and a renewing evolutionary way opens between them.
......All of this seemed to me to be urgent contemporary issues. I began to see that, when I found the confidence to tell my own stories, they would be contemporary romances in that ancient tradition - a tradition that reaches back to the origins of the novel-form in the Hellenized north Africa of 2000 years ago, and which, I believe, remains excitingly alive today as a vehicle of evolving consciousness in our own transitional times. So that’s why I write the kind of novels that I do.