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Talking Location With… author Kate Mascarenhas – OXFORD

13th November 2020

#TalkingLocationWith… Kate Mascarenhas, author of The Thief on the Winged Horse, set in Oxford.

My latest novel, The Thief on the Winged Horse, is about a family of magic doll-makers; each doll evokes a specific emotion when touched, due to the enchantment laid upon it. Despite their use of magic, the-doll makers live in the same world we do. Thief is a type of “low” fantasy – magical events occur in an otherwise familiar landscape. Part of the pleasure of reading this genre can be the contrast of fantastical events with recognisable settings. But such a mixture has implications for location research.

Kate Mascarenhas

As with realist fiction, you may wish to check factual details (whether a church spire is visible from an apartment balcony, for instance). But the additional task for the fantasy researcher, is to ask: how does this location’s atmosphere resonate with the magic you’re imagining?

My doll-making magicians, the Kendricks, are a secretive bunch. They guard their methods through close loyal ties, carefully vetting newcomers when it’s necessary to do so. Generations of isolation mean the Kendricks come across as rather quaint, even though the story is set in the present day. From the earliest drafts, I wanted Thief to unfold in Oxford. I’d lived there as an undergraduate, twenty years ago. The centre of the city is very beautiful—and rarefied in a way that could sometimes make me feel paranoid, not being born to it. Members of the university had bizarre old customs and quirks of language that gave the sensation of slipping back in time. Oxford’s diversity was more evident in the suburbs but throughout my degree I unthinkingly confined myself to college and faculty buildings. The furthest I ventured was the Cowley Road, a street known for its student accommodation, where I rented a ramshackle shared house opposite a club called the Zodiac. Students misperceived this area as the wildest Eastern reaches of Oxford. It wasn’t; it was a short walk from the Bodleian library, but the city beyond the university might not have existed to them. No wonder then that my thoughts turned to Oxford while I invented an eccentric community with arcane barriers to entry.

Kate Mascarenhas

My characters didn’t feel quite like university scholars. (One of the narrators, an ambitious young woman called Hedwig who keeps house for the family’s patriarch, applies and is denied a place). But I took inspiration from a particular plot of university land. Since the nineteenth century Christ Church college has owned an area called Aston’s Eyot. The eyot has an inauspicious history. For decades it was used as a rubbish tip, but it has since mellowed into scrub and woodland and is now available to the public as a nature reserve. Romantically, it is also surrounded on all sides by water; the word “eyot” means river island. The Thames, the Cherwell and the Shire Lake Ditch enclose the land. Although you can easily cross the ditch via a small footbridge, the ring of water creates a psychological sense of being self-contained. In reality, busy streets and bustle can be reached in minutes, yet it is possible to imagine you are remote from everyday life.

Radcliffe Camera

For Thief, I invented a similar patch of land called Paxton’s Eyot. In my version the island has been owned by the Kendricks since the 1790s. A few hundred family members live in workers’ cottages, with the most powerful doll-makers occupying grander Georgian houses. A Palladian-style workshop provides jobs for everyone. Like its real life equivalent, Paxton’s Eyot is in central Oxford. A handsome stranger might plausibly infiltrate the Kendricks’ family and business—coaches from London stop every ten minutes on the next road along. But once inside he would feel in a distinct and separate world. He would be a topic for speculation, as a new arrival. More advantageously, he might feel safely hidden from pursuers if he were running away from an unpleasant past. In practical terms the footbridge to Paxton’s Eyot is simple to cross. In psychological terms, the boundary is more complex.

Such boundaries are useful in fantasy fiction: they enable the reader’s pleasure at moving from a magical world to a more familiar one. My final tip for fantasy writers would be to heed shifts in atmosphere during location visits. Crossing the threshold into a hostile pub, a quiet church yard or a cold corporate foyer might be just the type of portal you’re looking for.

The Thief On The Winged Horse by Kate Mascarenhas is published by Head of Zeus on 12th November, £18.99 in hardback.

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