Children's fantasy writer Jonathon Stroud talks about his demons

The demon ambushed Jonathan Stroud while he was out for a walk, looking for the "ah-ha!" moment that would tell him what his new book would be.

"I was hunting around for a high fantasy kind of concept. I'd written fantasy books for children before, but, without naming any prominent wizards in particular, there's a sense in which the mainstream is dominated at the moment. If you want your book to be different, you need some kind of hook."

The hook turned out to be a 10,000-year-old demon named Bartimaeus. Stroud realised he could have a lot of fun turning the conventions of children's fantasy on their collective head. Instead of the usual heroic young wizard battling the forces of darkness, he could have his hero be a demon. The wizards could be corrupt and fairly malevolent, with the ambiguous exception of one naive apprentice: the one who summons the demon.

"I zoomed home and started writing the initial encounter between Bartimaeus and this kid. It kind of materialised on the page, rather in the way that Bartimaeus materialises himself at the start of the book. His voice was so immediately beguiling to me that I was really excited — I knew I could do something with it, but I still had no idea what the actual story was. That all came later."

When Stroud chased down the implications of his initial idea and worked them into a coherent shape, he found himself even more excited.

The world of his story, he decided, had for many thousands of years been ruled by warring magicians. "From the beginning I enjoyed playing around with the politics, embedding it in the story." A few millennia ago the most powerful and ruthless of them were Egyptian, but they became corrupted by their success, and were overthrown. The global seat of power shifted to Prague.

Power again led to decadence and, after a series of terrible wars, England became the centre of the most powerful magical empire on the planet. English magicians are feared and despised the world over, but the signs suggest they're overdue to follow their Egyptian and Czech predecessors into history's dustbin.

All this is perfectly obvious to the demon Bartimaeus, who, having spent most of the last 10,000 years being enslaved by one magician or another, has a keen insight into the realities of power politics. But to Nathaniel, his precocious 11-year-old master, it's heresy. Nathaniel is under the impression that magicians are noble, righteous men and women, burdened with the ruling of an ungrateful population of tedious peasants.

So we have Bartimaeus, the demonic equivalent of an unflappable World War I sergeant following an idiotic young lieutenant into the trenches, and we have brilliant, arrogant, deeply clueless Nathaniel, well meaning but sitting right on the cusp of permanent corruption.

"Bartimaeus is charismatic and entertaining, but Nathaniel is the key character of the trilogy. I worked quite hard at the start of the series to get him balanced right — he's an idealistic, warm character, but you can sense that that warmth, that spontaneity, might well be crushed out of him by the other magicians. I didn't want anything as simple as a sympathetic boy hero. I needed Nathaniel to get a bit unpleasant as things progressed, a bit harder to like, so he could have a meaningful shot at redemption at the end."

As to whether Nathaniel would actually achieve redemption, and how — that is another question. Stroud approached Ptolemy's Gate, the last book in the series, with several possible endings in his head. "Some were more astringent than others. When I got there, it became very obvious which way things had to go."

It's not giving too much away to say that Ptolemy's Gate focuses firmly on the relationships between the various characters — Nathaniel, Bartimaeus, plus Kitty, a commoner involved in a revolutionary conspiracy, and Ptolemy, one of Bartimaeus's earlier masters. "In the last chapter you've got this giant demonic thing running around trying to kill Nathaniel; your basic climactic fight scene, but what interested me was that I found myself writing it almost as background. The focus of the narrative by this point is on what the main characters have to say to each other."

Critics have praised the series for its edginess, its moral complexity, and its overall sense of fun. It has also been a major publishing success. Stroud has been working nonstop on the books for the last three years — "it's kind of dominated my brain to the exclusion of everything else" — and is looking forward to the change of doing nothing for a few months. "After that I can settle down and start thinking about what comes next. I suspect it will be quite different. I'd quite like to do a ghost story ... or perhaps some science fiction. There are quite a lot of areas I've been pondering over, but no great schemes as yet. I'll have to go for another walk and see what happens."

* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.
* Ptolemy's Gate is out now, Doubleday, $29.95.