From the Future to the Past

'The only difference was that in the world of Mortal Engines nobody can say,"You've got that wrong," because I was making it all up,' says Reeve. 'In Arthur I'm sure experts will be creeping out of the woodwork saying,"No, that couldn't have happened."

'Although Mortal Engines is nominally set in the future, I always wanted it to feel like a historical novel, and all the influences on it are historical. There is quite a lot of the Napoleonic era and Victorian times and even classical societies, so it wasn't that big a wrench to go back to the sixth century.

'Although Mortal Engines is nominally set in the future, I always wanted it to feel like a historical novel'

'Also, it is the same sort of society in that they're living in the debris of a much greater civilisation and they're trying to grub around and put back together what had existed before the fall. So there is a quite obvious link there, which I didn't notice until I was in the middle of Arthur, but it's definitely there.'

Reeve had read some books about King Arthur as a child, but it wasn't until he saw John Boorman's film, Excalibur, at the age of 15, that his imagination was captured by the legend.

'When I was growing up I was into Tolkien and things like that, of course, and Excalibur has the visual excitement of Tolkien, of fantasy. It has this fabulous armour - it's visually a stunning film. But also it's about real people; it's about actual human beings with failings.

'It's not just about good versus evil, heroes defeating the bad guys. It's much more complex than that. And I guess that's a kind of developmental thing. When you get to that kind of age you start to realise that the world isn't all black and white.'

Inspired by the film, Reeve read classic writings on King Arthur, from Mallory and Tennyson to Chretien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach. Even then, the idea was in his mind to create his own version of the legend.

'When I first saw Excalibur, I thought,"Oh yes, I must write a King Arthur story", but there are so many others that there really wasn't a reason to write one. But it's something that kept recurring throughout my twenties, and when I started writing Mortal Engines.

'And when I finished Mortal Engines I thought that my next thing ought to be historical. I'd done the future; I ought to go and do the past. Arthur was the obvious thing, the thing I knew the most about from having done all this background reading when I was in my teens. Of course it didn't work out that way because I got sidetracked into writing Mortal Engines sequels, but that was where Here Lies Arthur took shape as an idea.'

When he did get round to writing Here Lies Arthur, Reeve looked to source material in the Welsh mythological tales, the Mabinogion, rather than the later romances.

'I probably came across the Mabinogion before I came across a lot of the Arthur stories. They certainly seemed more interesting to me. I've always assumed that that was the root stock of the Arthurian legends. Stuff comes in from other places as well, but I always thought that those were the earliest versions that certainly I'd come across. So it just seemed natural to go back to that.'

'In stark contrast to the chivalrous hero of medieval romance, Reeve's Arthur is an uncouth, brutal warlord.'

In stark contrast to the chivalrous hero of medieval romance, Reeve's Arthur is an uncouth, brutal warlord. Merlin – here Myrddin, in keeping with the story's Welsh provenance – is a bard rather than a magician, orchestrating events and spinning tales in order to transform the decidedly earthbound leader into the stuff of legend.

'It would never have occurred to me to write a story in which there were knights in shining armour at all,' Reeve explains. 'That's just how it arrived in my head - that it would be as gritty and as believable as I could make it. And it's about how we got from that time to the knights in shining armour legend.

'It's about the creation of that story and that image, and it suggests a playful reason for why we have that image of King Arthur. I wanted to show the origins of it as being very muddy and grimy and sixth century.'

Here Lies Arthur is told from the perspective of the servant girl Gwyna, a character out of the author's imagination. Gwyna is taken under the wing of Myrddin, who sees in her a tool to help him achieve his goal.

The androgynous Gwyna passes as a boy and becomes a warrior in Arthur's band before shedding her disguise and going to work as a maid for Guinevere. The character offered Reeve the chance to approach the old story from a new angle.

'I knew I wanted a witness to it, not one of the main players from the legend. I didn't want to write it from Arthur's point of view, or Guinevere's. I wanted somebody new who was creeping round in the background – a worm's eye view.

'I didn't want to write it from Arthur's point of view, or Guinevere's. I wanted somebody new who was creeping round in the background – a worm's eye view.'

'And then, I always seem to write about girls rather than boys given the choice. It seemed to make sense because there are loads… Rosemary Sutcliff, for example, who I read a lot of when I was a child, all her books are about a young boy becoming a man and learning to be a warrior. There was no point doing that because she's done it perfectly, I think.

'So that probably inspired me to make it a girl rather than a boy. Then, I suspect girls in those days didn't get to do very much, so that was a reason to make a change. She disguises herself as a boy and then suddenly there's a story: will she be found out and what will happen to her if she does, and all sorts of things spring from that.'

Myrddin's role as Arthur's spin doctor prompts obvious comparison with events in contemporary British politics. Reeve acknowledges this, but says he didn't have a particular axe to grind when he wrote the book.

'The politics thing seems to me to be inherent in the idea. If you're going back and showing how these stories developed then inevitably you're going to touch on this idea of you can't believe what you're told, that the truth in some way differed from the story we now know.

'I didn't really set out to make any kind of comment on contemporary politics, but contemporary politics shifted while I was writing until it looked as if I had. In fact I toned it down in the final draft. It looked too much like a direct attack on Blair, so I took a few things out to make it date better.

' I didn't want to have something that people would think,"Oh yes, that's a reference to that thing", which in two years' time is going to be forgotten. So I did try to tone that back. It wasn't deliberate, but it sort of partakes of the whole spin culture. I think we're much more aware that we're being lied to.

' I think it was done more subtly in the past, whereas now the mechanics are laid open for everyone to see. I suppose in some ways it's about that; the notion of Merlin as a spin doctor was one that I thought was amusing quite early on.'

And despite the subject matter, Here Lies Arthur is amusing, albeit in an altogether different way from Mortal Engines. Reeve was concerned that readers would miss the earlier books' wordplay.

'I was worried that nobody would want this one because it hadn't got all the gags in it. If you're writing a great big fat book and you're not sure if it's any good or not, if you put a few jokes in then at least maybe the jokes will be good and people will like it for that, so that's always why I do it, but there wasn't room for that in Arthur.

'I couldn't make up silly names and stuff. The idea is funny, maybe, and there are a few gags in there, but not very many. But that's what the book demanded, so it had to be. But I'd be quite happy to keep going the Arthur way. I'm working on an idea set in the middle ages, and that hasn't got room for lots of gags, but then I'm working on things that have, so we'll just have to see what makes it to the finishing post.'