Michelle Paver is sparkier and less diffident than I recall. We originally met in 2004 when Wolf Brother, the first of her bestselling series of children’s novels about Stone Age life, appeared. Outcast, number four of a planned six in the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series, is just out and Paver is becoming used to celebrity: interviews, book signings, author tours — and director Ridley Scott has optioned the entire series.
Her publisher, Orion, which gave her an advance of £1,8million for the six books, will be hoping it has the next JK Rowling on its hands.
Not that the sensible Paver (47), a former commercial lawyer, is pushing such comparisons. “I’m not the next JK Rowling,” she says. “It’s flattering to be compared to her and I like her books, but apart from the fact that they’ve got young boys as heroes, they’re very different. She writes pure fantasy. What I’m trying to do is make the world I write about real. Everything could have happened.”
Paver’s series is the everyday story of boy meets wolf. The central character is Torak, a 12-year-old who is orphaned when his father is killed by a bear. The books follow his struggle to survive, aided by a faithful wolf and a girl called Renn, in a hostile environment — Paver’s vision of northern Scandinavia around 6000BC — and faced by a complex clan system that rejects him.
Paver has made journeys across Scandinavia and into the mountains and forests of central Europe in her quest for authenticity. She has swum with killer whales, peered into the mouth of a large brown bear and eaten elk heart and fish eyes. I’m quite pleased to be having coffee with her in Wimbledon, where she lives.
Paver’s wanderings reflect her desire to present as accurate a picture of the Stone Age as possible. “There’s no message in these books,” she says, “but regarding hunter-gatherers as the Flintstones is something I hope I will have changed a little bit.
For Outcast, her derring-do concerned pythons. “I nipped down to Longleat [safari park] and got them to lay things on for me.” She describes cradling two royal pythons in loving detail. “Have you ever held a snake? They are so strong. You can see why there are so many myths about them; they are unlike any other creature.”
She also visited Sweden, got to know the ways of elk better and studied wolf cubs at the UK Wolf Conservation Trust in Berkshire.
No stone is left unturned in making the Stone Age come alive for young readers. “The great thing about children’s literature, as Philip Pullman has said, is that you can deal with the big themes you feel constrained writing about in adult novels: life after death, losing your parents, loyalty, betrayal, the nature of evil, our relationship with the natural world.”
She gets to meet her young fans at literary festivals. In Edinburgh one boy gave her a beautiful drawing of Torak and Renn, dressed in ultra-cool Mesolithic gear that wouldn’t look out of place at Gap. Another presented her with a sharpened arrowhead flint. Once, in Bath, a girl asked if she had ever eaten squirrel. Paver hadn’t, but the survivalist girl, who was modelling herself on Renn, had, cooked in a den she had constructed at the bottom of her garden.
Paver has written fiction since she was an undergraduate at Oxford, but it has been her job only since 1996. Before that she was a lawyer, specialising in patent litigation, earning a fortune and getting sucked into a high-status, high-pressure world that she increasingly came to dislike.
“I enjoyed the challenge of being a woman in law back in the 1980s because we were outnumbered five to one,” she says. “But by the mid-1990s I realised I wasn’t happy. The big thing was my dad dying of cancer. It forced me to ask, ‘What have I done with my life?’ I was putting things off and saying, ‘Next year will be different.’ Of course it was never going to be different in that job.”
She took a sabbatical for a year, travelled and wrote a romantic novel called Without Charity. Then she went back to work. “It was like a bad dream. You’ve had your year of freedom and now you’re facing 3 000 unread emails and acting for a tobacco company. That was when I started plotting.”
Paver knew she had to quit rather than wait for a publishing contract. She sold her swanky penthouse and lots of her possessions, abandoned Armani in favour of T-shirts and started writing furiously. Soon after she had handed in her notice Transworld gave her a two-book deal.
She wrote five romantic novels in quick succession and met with reasonable success, though she now accepts that the genre was not entirely suitable. “I was in my 30s and still thought I was going to get married and all that Bridget Jones stuff.”
Her career caught fire when she returned to a long-ignored draft of a story about a boy and his wolf companion, changed the setting from the ninth century AD to the Stone Age and, over a week, sketched out a six-book sequence. Her agent loved it and quickly sold it.
The Bridget Jones wannabe never did get a man. She is happily unmarried — or perhaps she could be said to be married to her cast of Stone Age characters. “It’s a self-reinforcing thing, because I’m enjoying these books. I don’t want a husband and children because it would interfere with them. I don’t feel I’m alone because I’ve got my characters.” — Â