Mr Wolf and the White Princess

Author's notes

‘Mr Wolf and the White Princess’ is a rather odd book both in what it has to say and its mix of genres: fairytale, political and social satire and action thriller. I thought I ought to write a few words on how it came about and the ideas I was trying to convey in it.

In terms of its derivation, I had previously been writing current affairs-based thrillers for Harper Collins. I wrote three Alex Devereux novels – Legacy, December and Warlord. The story lines for these are all rooted in factual, modern events, reflecting my background as a historian and general news junkie. 

I had great fun writing them and spent a lot of time researching the political scenarios, trying to get them as accurate as I could. As this was happening, part of my brain started flipping out wanting to just mess around, to get away from all this seriousness and have fun. Hence part of my desire was to write an escapist fantasy. I would make up bits of the story as I was driving to work, shopping or at the gym.

The character of Mr Wolf himself started out from a Friday night feeling for some anarchic payback after all the gravitas and burdens of the week. 

The idea of doing a fairytale also fitted this escapist mood. I wanted to create a sense of dislocation and oddness because I think we all have a feeling that we don’t belong in the world, that everyone else is fine with it and that I am the only one who feels out of place. Writing a trippy fairytale allowed me to explore how strange normality is and how unreal reality is.

Another reason I liked the fairytale style was that it allowed me to get to the concepts and ideas much faster and more directly than by writing a conventional narrative. As G.K. Chesterton said: ‘Stories are more real than reality.’

The particular feel of the book, with its mixture of absurdity and moments of realism, came from an album I had been listening to by an Australian rock group called Wolfmother. The particular song that I was grabbed by was Love Train, this mixes up the high, falsetto vocals of the lead singer, Andrew Stockdale, with grinding low, bass guitar. It is always off one end of the scale, never sitting in the middle and that is the feel I wanted to achieve with the book.

The other best way of explaining the derivation of the book is to say that I am a Romantic, not in the Mills and Boon or Italian restaurant sense of the word but in the sense of a follower of Romanticism. This movement was a reaction against the Enlightenment and the idea that all human behaviour was entirely rational and predictable. The rationalists argued that, like the planets going round the sun, we are all subject to Newtonian laws of physics and merely behave like robots. From the early nineteenth century, Romantics wanted to push back against this reductionist view and emphasised feeling and mystery - think Wagner, Tchaikovsky, landscape painting, wild cliffs, crashing seas, flowing locks and puffy cravats.

The White Princess therefore comes out of this tradition. She represents a focus on true experience and beauty over shallow modern falsehood and ugliness. She is very sensitive and connected to the natural world, being able to see true beauty amongst the rushing mundanity of modern life. In this vein, I was interested to read Wordsworth’s Preface to the 1805 edition of the Lyrical Ballads, which is seen as a manifesto of Romanticism. In it, he says: ‘For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.’ This struck a chord in me.

It was also interesting to read what Wordsworth didn’t like – art is motivated as much by hate as love. He rages about how: ‘The invaluable works of our elder writers... are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.’