TENDAI HUCHU

Ghost writer: meet the creator of your new favourite urban fantasy

Unlocking The Library Of The Dead. Just think of the overdue fees, though.

THE WORLD IS SURPRISINGLY FULL OF novels where you find yourself quietly admiring the writer’s mastery of craft. Rarer are those novels that pull you along with a sense that the book’s creator is having huge fun and, moreover, has the technical chops to match the sheer energy of the storytelling. Despite its ominous title, The Library Of The Dead by Tendai Huchu (TL for short) is one such novel.

“As a writer, you want to sound a little bit tortured and all that shit,” Huchu tells SFX, “but I had a great time writing it, it was a total blast.” So how did Huchu come to write such a fantastic urban fantasy? As the man himself tells it, he “pretty much ripped off my own work” by drawing on two of his short stories: a tale similarly called “The Library Of The Dead” (2017), set in his adopted home of Edinburgh, and “Ghostalker” (2015), set in his Zimbabwean hometown of Bindura.

The latter gave him teenage protagonist Ropo, school drop-out and resident of a shantytown located on the edge of Scotland’s capital. Living in a near-future where things have clearly gone awry, she’s streetwise beyond her years and makes a living delivering messages to and from ghosts: “a Royal Mail, telegrams-type death mail service”, as Huchu puts it. It’s dangerous work, especially when Ropo investigates the case of a missing child on behalf of a spectral mother.

This is a fictional world where the past impinges on the present, one of the reasons Huchu chose Edinburgh as a setting rather than a semi-rural Zimbabwean locale. “Edinburgh is a pretty tiny city, but what you lack in a spatial dimension you get from the temporal aspect – the layers of history through the city, which play out in the story I’m trying to tell.”

THE FULL ENGLISH

Ben Aaronovitch adopts a similar approach in his Rivers Of London novels, which feature copper and apprentice wizard Peter Grant. The parallels between the books aren’t wholly coincidental. Huchu first met Aaronovitch at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Sitting together at lunch, Huchu began “a cracking conversation” with a writer whose work he didn’t then know. Aaronovitch even paid for lunch – “and then it just became a thing that he usually comes to Edinburgh about once a year, and I will try to sponge a free meal off him!” laughs Huchu.

More seriously, he realised that an act of what he mischievously calls “cultural appropriation” was a way forward. “I remember at some point just telling him, ‘Ben, I have stolen your idea!’” Huchu jokes, by which he means the idea of using urban fantasy to tell stories that are contemporary yet make connections with the past.

But that’s certainly not all that Huchu is doing here. His own voice is distinctive and rooted in experiences a British-born writer wouldn’t share, such as his realisation that his own use of English was rather more “stilted and formal” than the version he first heard around him in Barking, where he lodged with an aunt.

“When you get here, you are sorely disappointed,” he says. “I mean, you’ve taken all this time to master the language with some degree of proficiency, and then you get here and no one speaks proper English. Can you imagine how devastating that is?” Subsequently, he adds, he’s “fallen in love with these different dialects that you have going on here” – as Ropo’s Scots-inflected speech reflects.

OUT OF AFRICA

In other ways, after moving to the UK “because things in [Mugabe’s] Zimbabwe were going to shit”, he was more impressed with what he found, both in London and then in Edinburgh, where he first moved to study podiatry. There was the fact that a paperback cost as little as an hour’s wages. “For the first time in my life, I was able to buy books for myself,” Huchu says. He read voraciously and “stumbled across” Dostoevsky, finding “uncanny parallels” between 19th century Russia and Zimbabwe, both agrarian societies where land ownership, health problems and the place of religion in day-to-day life were hugely contested issues.

His first two books were set in modern-day Zimbabwe. He’s written another contemporary novel, but is now working on Our Lady Of Mysterious Ailments, which will return us to his near-future dystopia – a place that’s fun, but also perhaps contains a warning to Brexit Britain. To be Zimbabwean, he says, is to be keenly aware of moments in recent history “where everyone’s thinking ‘This is a bad idea’” but events kept rolling on, including times where nationalism was to the fore. He sees signs of something similar happening here: a scary notion, but a useful one for a novelist. “I kind of transpose that onto this society and say to myself, ‘Okay, how’s this going to play out?’”

The Library Of The Dead is out 4 February, published by Tor.

You want to sound a little bit tortured, but I had a great time writing it