I have always argued that you should never ask an actor to explain a film (and yes, we always do because how else are they going to promote it?) – they simply do not understand anything beyond their character and its motivation and yes, sometimes, even that, is different to what viewers see and like.

The same principle applies to novelists. Trying to explain a novel that is the result of chasing a vision and trying to render it as faithfully as possible on the page is like trying to put blinkers on the reader and asking him to try seeing things from where you are. So, I have, so far successfully, resisted attempts to get me to explain The Shade and have always preferred to let those who read it decide what it is they see in it.

Now, I am not going to break that rule and try to explain my creation but I have received, this weekend eleven emails wanting me to explain the sex & violence aspect of The Shade. Now here I do have a point of view as well as a cop-out answer. The latter first: that’s what I saw, live with it! That though would not be fair. So let’s begin from the beginning (skipping the dinosaurs, their extinction and the emergence of mammals).

Traditionally fantasy fiction has a very sanitised view of sex & violence with the former depicted only in innuendo and the odd kiss (and The Lord of the Rings has so much to answer for here) and the latter described in a kind of sanitised version that makes it look like a video game aimed for the 10+ age group. Why this should be so probably has as much to do with economics and market forces as it has to do with prude editors and shy writers.

If we take the commercial point of view fantasy fiction is a niche market that aims at an audience no one is quite sure about: adolescents? Toddlers? Their parents? Teenagers? Rebels? Students? Pseudo-intellectuals? All of the above? None of them? You begin to see the problem. Because the readership cannot be precisely defined beyond the obvious point of it there being a readership no one is absolutely certain what liberties to take and what not to when it comes to putting things together in a fantasy fiction novel. Do more boys read fantasy fiction than girls? Can we prove it? Because of the uncertainty of all this it is always safer to sanitise the approach the writing takes towards its depiction of sex and violence and aim for as broad a readership as possible.

Within that context sex becomes something pure (i.e. love) and violence becomes noble and epic.

There are exceptions Marvel Comics in particular which so clearly understood their niche of pre-pubescent boys that they made eroticism and violence ooze off every single frame sometimes overwhelming a subtext that has as much philosophical bankability as, say Plato.

But back to The Shade. Why the sex and why so graphic and why the violence and why so much? Well, if you catch me in a flippant mood I’ll say because I did not care who read it I just wanted to write it. It’s not quite true and I argued it with those who edited it again and again. The Shade has sex and violence because simply it’s the type of world it depicts and the type of world I saw. I can quite honestly and with a certain sense of responsibility to my art as a writer, say that I did not set out to make the sex and violence so much. I instead appeared pen and paper in hand, treading invisibly, by the Slinger’s side as he came out of the desert.

I knew about what he was doing and what he thought he needed to do but I did not know how he was going to behave, what exactly he was going to do or even how he would do it. His character, in other words, was to me as much as a surprise as it conceivably is to you, the reader.

Now, having written it I cold have edited it, after all, as the writer, I have a certain amount of power which you the reader do not possess and I will not lie to you by saying I never considered it. After The Shade was finished I felt drained. I took a break, came back a few weeks later, read it and thought what the f**k? Who put all the sex and violence in there? Then I had to try and explain the same thing to no fewer than three successive editors who saw it and could not make up their minds about it in terms of whether it should stay or go.

One of them insisted, which pissed me off but I went home and tried to edit it and that’s when I realised that it would not work. I will grant you that The Shade has a certain amount of sex and violence which can, at times, overshadow the message of all the other things I have put in there but the moment I tried to edit it I knew that had I taken it out I would have ended up with a work that would have been blunter than boiled noodles.

So I did the right thing and left it all alone.

Enjoy.