Dream-weaver Nick Bantock

Famed mythmaker Nick Bantock has returned to the realms
of magic in the first of his latest trilogy. BARBARA HARRIS reports.

Artist and writer Nick Bantock has turned his dreams into gold. Like the alchemists of old, he was searching for something extraordinary after years of illustrating books, including children's pop-up books, when he graduated to mythmaker.

His invention: a fanciful trilogy for grown-ups that blended elaborate images with teasing storylines, letters to be opened, gossip and intrigue to be devoured and wild imaginings contained in fictional journals.

In doing so Bantock created a genre and propelled himself into the league of the rich and famous virtually overnight.

Readers lapped it up. His first trilogy sold more than 3 million copies worldwide and each volume - Griffin & Sabine, Sabine's Notebook and The Golden Mean - spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Half a dozen fiction books have followed but now, a decade after the first volume of the trilogy, 51-year-old Bantock has picked up paintbrush and pen.

He continues the fable of Griffin and Sabine when their correspondence is rediscovered in The Gryphon, almost as though he had never left off.

The first book in the Morning Star trilogy, The Gryphon, is set in Egypt, so I find it odd that Bantock hasn't visited Alexandria or journeyed along the Nile..

"I didn't go to Egypt. I wanted my whole mythological image to remain intact," he explains on the phone from his home in Vancouver.

"I felt that if I went there, and I considered it, I would be overwhelmed by reality. I always wanted people to feel they could have climbed out of somebody's dreams."

British-born Bantock, who crossed the Atlantic 15 years ago, is emphatic about the cause of his migration - and his decision had much more to do with reality. "Margaret Thatcher," he says.

"I stuck around for a fair bit of time, but when I realised she was [seemingly] permanent, I had a young son and I thought no way did I want to live in this [claustrophobic] environment."

Visiting his parents in Canada he was "so impressed with the way people reacted to ideas, the vitality and enthusiasm", that he moved.

Today there are no discernible regrets. "I'm a Canadian as far as I'm concerned. Of course, I have those English roots and when it comes to the World Cup I support England." And Bantock is quick to point out Vancouver constantly shares the honours with Auckland in surveys of the best cities in which to live.

His typical working day is long. Up at 6 am and into his studio next door to work before taking a short break to see his 16-year-old son, Paul, off to school. (He and wife Kim divorced three years ago and their daughters Kate, Ruth and Holly now live with their mother.) Then it's back to the studio to write, paint and draw.

"I do put in a longish day - 12 to 13 hours - but it doesn't feel like I'm working because I'm doing what I want to do."

Conversely, Bantock has the constraints of an English art school, where he was a student for five years, to thank for the evolution of his work.

"They wanted us to be obsessive but they meant that in a narrow sense - to put up boundaries and define that as your own territory," he says. "I was obsessive in exactly the reverse way. When I came to a wall I climbed over and went into another field."

This approach translated into a wide body of work, initially as a book illustrator - "I liked to call them paintings" - followed by abstract paintings, then on to distinctive collages, nonsense verse and pop-up books.

"Accidentally, I stumbled into my own domain - an area in which I could bring together many of the things that really interested me. The images fed the words and the words fed the images."

In this respect Bantock seems to be the literary equivalent of magician David Copperfield. While the kaleidoscopic pictures are the real power, Bantock knows how to toy with people's curiosity - the name games, the way the stories are left deliberately vague and the voyeuristic pleasure of opening others' letters - creating a heady mix.

"I want to stimulate the thought process, not shut it down.

"Every single line that I write or every image has to function on four to five levels at once."

It seems they do. On the road, Bantock's work has become performance art. At book tours round America, middle-aged housewives, art students and actors clamour to read the character roles. His mail includes letters from 11-year-olds through to 95-year-olds.

Bantock says despite his fine arts background, these days he gets more from going to old museums than from an art gallery. "I've got to a point where I've unintentionally reached saturation point of analysis of other people's paintings."

Meanwhile the serial nature of his books seems to be have had more advantages than downsides. "It's surprising how many people who bought The Gryphon hadn't read the first trilogy and are now going back to the others," says Bantock.

It will be nine months before the Morning Star trilogy is completed. And then Bantock intends trying to transfer his alchemy to the silver screen by adapting his two trilogies to film.

* The Gryphon, by Nick Bantock, Chronicle Books, $59.95