On the Monkey's trail

By Yang Guang (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-11-10 14:32

Neil Gaiman (top) has won numerous awards for his works including American Gods (2000) and The Graveyard Book (2008).

The 500-odd fans who lined up at the recent Singapore Writers Festival would scarcely have guessed that the man whose autograph they were seeking was once repeatedly turned down by publishers.

The 49-year-old English author of science fiction, fantasy, comics, audio theater and films, the "rock star" of the literary world, shot to fame with his 1990s comic series, The Sandman. Since then, Neil Gaiman has entertained readers of all ages and grabbed numerous heavyweight awards with a list of notable works, including Good Omens (1990), Neverwhere (1996), Stardust (1997), American Gods (2000), Coraline (2002), Anansi Boys (2005) and The Graveyard Book (2008).

Gaiman is no less popular in China. He was in Chengdu, Sichuan province, recently to pick up his second Galaxy Award, China's top honor for science fiction and fantasy, given out by the Science Fiction World magazine, based on reader votes. His speech, How To Be A Popular Writer, won him several rounds of applause at Chengdu University.

But the one topic most people wanted to talk to him was about his "monkey project" - a non-fiction book that draws inspiration from Journey to the West, an ancient Chinese literary classic featuring the legend of Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) monk Xuanzang's pilgrimage to India to obtain Buddhist religious texts.

"Every conversation I had with people about China, about literature and about what I knew of China would always at some point hit the Journey to the West and always hit the monkey," he says.

Gaiman's lingering childhood memory gave that engagement a personal twist.

"The only book in my life that I have ever really missed is a gift from my father which he found in England and bought for me before I was born," he says.

It was an "incredibly beautiful" hardback illustrated edition of Journey to the West. His father did not give it to Gaiman because he was too young to read. When he looked for it several years later, it had gone missing.

"But the book has always fascinated me," Gaiman says. "I imagined the monkey as being in this glorious and magical book with everything in it. And the fact is that it is a real journey that took place in the 7th century."

Gaiman's abiding fascination with this book led him to spend five weeks in China last year and three weeks this year, on his own "very, very peculiar" journey to the west, starting in Shanghai, going up the Mountain of the Fruits and Flowers, on to the birthplaces of Wu Cheng'en (1501-82, author of Journey to the West) and Xuanzang.

"We have this one man who did an amazing 7,000-mile roundtrip that should have been impossible, and he survived," Gaiman says of Xuanzang. "He even wrote about the journey in his letters and journals in the 7th century, when back in England we were wearing skins and eating things that couldn't run fast enough."

He reveals that his "monkey project" revolves around three aspects - Xuanzang and what he did to bring Buddhism to China, about the Monkey King and about Gaiman's adventures in China.

The author is honest about his expectations of China. "I expected something very gray and repressed, a world in which people did not have things."

But he found it was nothing like he had imagined. "I did not expect to fall in love with China and went away from the country desperately wanting to come back, which is why I persuaded my publisher to let me write a book about Journey to the West."

Once an undisciplined writer who had to lock himself in hotel rooms when deadlines approached, Gaiman says he plans to straighten himself out for his big "monkey project". He hopes to create a world in which everybody knows that from 1-6 pm each day he is off the radar, saying, "Excuse me, World. I will vanish for five hours."

Asked about when it will be published, Gaiman answers tongue-in-cheek, "It will probably be published extremely shortly after it is finished."

He says the writing of the book will go at most to 2010, but "if it goes out of control, it may go to 2011".