Griffin and Sabine redux
New book concludes long-running series, author promises
Not that anyone’s holding him to it— especially his fans. But Nick Bantock’s book The Morning Star, published 13 years ago, was intended to be the final instalment of the Griffin and Sabine series.
The writer/artist himself said so.
“That’s absolutely for sure,” Bantock told the Times Colonist in 2003.
Now, as any self-respecting Griffin and Sabine aficionado already knows, there’s a new one out: The Pharos Gate — Griffin & Sabine’s Lost Correspondence.
Interviewed recently at his Cook Street village home, 66-yearold Bantock explained The Pharos Gate is intended to be a “bridge” between two previous books. In terms of narrative it fits between book three, The Golden Mean, and book four, The Gryphon. Formerly two trilogies, there are now seven books in the G&S series.
So in a sense The Pharos Gate is not really new, it’s just filling in a gap. While not exactly actionpacked (one commentator noted “nothing much new is happening”), The Pharos Gate does provide one nugget of information that will thrill any bona fide Griffin and Sabine devotee. In this book, the star-crossed lovers finally meet.
And that’s big news, given the uber-slow trajectory (in the snaillike tradition of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte) of Moss Griffin and Sabine Strohem’s pen-pal love affair.
Like the other books, The Pharos Gate is a collection of beautifully rendered letters, illustrations and postcards. The images have an antique, collage-y, surrealist flavour, as though some long-lost correspondence between Kurt Schwitters and some mysterious paramour has been unearthed.
An amiable ex-Londoner who once toiled in an East End betting shop, Bantock stressed he “really, really thought” The Morning Star was to be the last of the series. The Pharos Gate is the result of the fiction writing and artwork Bantock’s always doing. Gradually, he realized the characters he was channelling represented the return of Griffin and Sabine.
“It became obvious it was their voices coming through. And their images,” he said.
Bantock chatted in his backyard studio, a picturesque outbuilding with a battered-looking leather couch and his canvases leaning against the walls.
Once he realized what this latest project was, he contacted his publisher, who was understandably delighted to learn another Griffin and Sabine was in the offing (a blockbuster hit in the publishing world, the books have sold in the millions).
But there was a catch. The publisher said in order to be published on the 25th anniversary of the first book’s publication in 1991, The Pharos Gate needed to be completed within six months. And while Bantock’s epistolary novels don’t contain a lot of text, they are artworks that take time to produce.
He was undeterred by the deadline.
“I wasn’t rushed. I could call it concentration, incentive. Adrenalin, risk, all of those things.” Did he like it? “I loved it,” Bantock said with a laugh.
He composed the storyline in bits and pieces, sometimes in his backyard studio, sometimes while walking in the neighbourhood, sometimes in a local Starbucks.
Bantock said the voices of his two most famous characters represent two different facets of his own personality.
“Griffin is tight and controlled and would do everything neatly and carefully. And he’s anxious. That’s what I was more like when I was young. And Sabine represents intuition, openness, self-expression, old soul. All of those things,” he said. “So the dialogue between them is my own internal dialogue.”
The left-brain (Griffin) and right-brain (Sabine) exchange that defines the books is a fundamental reason for the popularity of the series, Bantock said. He believes the books tap into the same primal struggle everyone deals with. In daily life we might tamp down one side of our personality, yielding to societal pressures. The Griffin and Sabine books allow free imaginative rein — everything goes.
“Readers felt like it was telling their story. Their internal story that they’d never really had permission to acknowledge or express,” Bantock said.
One might imagine after writing six Griffin and Sabine books, penning a seventh might come easily. Not so, said Bantock. He deems his acts of creation a “stumble-bum journey” akin to “falling down holes and climbing out again.”
So far, he has written more than 25 books. Bantock said ongoing projects include the creation of tales influenced by Zen and Sufist philosophy, black-comedy fiction and a book about “Moorish beauty.”
And will he write one more Griffin and Sabine? “No,” Bantock said. “With this one, I am actually making the definitive statement. It does what it needs to do. It creates the bridge. That’s what I wanted.”