The Great Zoo of China

AN INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW REILLY ABOUT THE GREAT ZOO OF CHINA

Well, Matthew. We always think your books can’t get any bigger or faster and then along comes The Great Zoo of China! How do you do it?

As my regular readers will know, I love big-scale action. As the years have gone by, I like to think that the action in my novels has got bigger and bigger. From the early stuff in Ice Station—hovercraft chases, blowing up submarines—to the wild car chase and the exploding aircraft carrier in Scarecrow, and then to the even bigger action scenes in the Jack West Jr novels, I have always seen it as something of a progression for me. But—and it’s a big but—I always felt that, at some stage, I would reach a point where the action might simply get too big.

And then I decided to write about dragons… and suddenly a whole new ballpark of action opened up for me.

When I conceived The Great Zoo of China, I was very excited about the potential the story had for absolutely huge action. Once you can realistically bring giant dragons to life, you can then dream up all the things they can throw, hurl and otherwise destroy! I came up with garbage trucks, buildings, revolving restaurants and fighter planes. I felt like a kid in a candy store when I wrote this one.

How did you come up with the idea of the survival/existence of dragons?

I actually had the idea for a zoo filled with dragons way back in 2003. I was travelling through Switzerland, of all places, when I stumbled upon a ‘dragon museum’. It was a little place, but it had all these fantastically realistic paintings and drawings of dragons: pictures of their skeletons and their musculature. In other words, all the things that would make them seem real.

In recent years, I have been a big fan of the Christopher Nolan–directed Batman movies. What I think those movies do very well is make something that is inherently unbelievable—a guy chasing criminals dressed as a bat—into something entirely believable. They do this, I think, by making it absolutely and utterly real. Batman’s armour is a military suit; his cape is an electrostatic membrane; his Batmobile is a prototype military vehicle. If I was going to write about dragons, then I had to make them real in a similar, believable way. I had to come up with a credible reason for their existence and also for the rarity of their appearances throughout history.

I decided to focus on the idea that myths are often based on reality or real events. So I asked: what if all those myths of giant dragons were based on actual creatures that had shown themselves only rarely.

This idea percolated in my mind for a long time (to give you an idea, back in 2003, I had only just finished writing Scarecrow). I remember doing a lot of research into dragons and dragon myths while holidaying in Queenstown, New Zealand, in 2010. It rained non-stop for the entire week I was there, so, with nothing else to do, I just curled up beside the fire for the week and researched dragons.

It was here that I realised that the myth of the dragon is indeed a global one… and yet there was no mass communication system in the ancient world. How could the features of dragons be so consistent all around the ancient world, from Australia to Meso-America to Greece and Norway, when there was no way to send information around that ancient world? My (fictional) answer was that every now and then a single dragon would rise from its nest and check to see if the atmosphere was suitable for the rest of its brethren to emerge.

What made you decide to set the zoo in China?

When I first had the idea of a zoo filled with dragons in 2003, I asked myself: who would build such a thing? More than that, I asked, who could afford to build such a thing? The zoo I had in mind would be simply enormous, a valley the size of Manhattan Island. Back in 2003 I had no answer to that. The idea was too fanciful, too fantastical. I couldn’t think of a company or a country that could build such a place, let alone have a good reason to do so.

And so I let the idea rest in the back of my mind.

However, as the first decade of the 21st century passed by, I noticed something: the rise of China. I watched the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing: the unforgettable Opening Ceremony and the huge stadiums that the Chinese built. I watched documentaries about how China constructed the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam and her ability to build entire cities within months. I read about the many kilometres of maglev tracks China has laid. I read about its multi-trillion-dollar national savings and the massive debt America owes it. (I also, it should be said, read up about China’s suppression of protests and dissent during the 2008 Olympics, and the way it arrests known agitators every year in early June, just before the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.)

And suddenly, in 2012, I realised that I now had a nation that could realistically build my dragon zoo: modern China. (The fact that China also had a long history of dragon myths helped, too.) My fanciful and fantastical notion of a dragon zoo was no longer fanciful and fantastical. I had just had to wait a decade until the world caught up with my idea!

Having China build my dragon zoo also solved another problem I had: comparisons with Jurassic Park.

As anyone who has attended one of my talks will tell you, my favourite novel of all time is Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. In fact, it is one of the novels that made me want to be a novelist. I loved the originality of it, the pace of it, and the fact it was a gleeful monster movie on paper.

I was very aware that my story of a dragon zoo would inevitably draw comparisons with the dinosaur theme park of Jurassic Park. So I endeavoured from the outset to make The Great Zoo of China as different from Jurassic Park as I could. Jurassic Park sees several experts brought in by the park’s investors to assess the dinosaur park when it encounters difficulties. My novel would be about a press tour: any new world-class zoo needs to announce itself to the world, so I figured its owners would bring in some bigshot journalists to have an early look at it. Given the nature of the new zoo, they would have to be journalists with instant credibility, from trusted newspapers and journals like The New York Times and National Geographic.

But the main difference between my novel and Jurassic Park would be China. The theme park in Jurassic Park was an out-and-out capitalist venture. With their Great Dragon Zoo, China is attempting to do something else entirely: it is trying to usurp the United States as the pre-eminent country on Earth. To do that, it needs to top America’s cultural superiority: basically, it needs to come up with an attraction that trumps Disneyland. To me, this is actually a real issue today and it gave the story a geopolitical reality that I wanted.

Tell us about making the dragons real.

There is a quote early in the novel that I really like: the one that says fairytales sanitise things that were, in reality, not very pleasant at all. Knights have been immortalised as chivalrous heroes in shining armour, when in truth they were swarthy brutes and rapists. I simply adapted this idea to my dragons.

My dragons would not be towering, high-crested and proud-chested beasts. They would be lean and mean, low and calculating. They would be monsters of a bygone era. To make these inherently unreal animals real, I gave them capabilities that only exist in the real world.

In their tempers and capabilities, my dragons mostly resemble large crocodiles. This is because (a) crocodiles scare the crap out of me, and (b) I see modern crocodiles as a species of dinosaur that survived the meteor impact 65 million years ago and still live among us. If you have ever seen a big croc up close, you will agree that they are literally monsters of another time.

I gave my dragons the best predatory senses and skills of the most dangerous apex predators in the animal kingdom: crocs, alligators, snakes, hawks, big cats and sharks. All the capabilities you read about in the book come from real predators. Hawks really do see in the ultraviolet spectrum. Snakes can detect changes in air pressure. Sharks really can sense the increased beating of a wounded animal’s heart (seriously, whoa). Crocs really do have remarkable memories for hunting. Alligators really do communicate with subsonic grunts and vibrating their bodies. Chimps really do make specific vocalisations regarding leopards. By grounding my dragons’ abilities in reality, I felt I made them more believable.

For they have to be believable. A monster movie is only as good as the monster in it. And as anyone who has read my very first novel, Contest, will know, I love a good monster movie. Creating fun and scary monsters is half the fun. By creating the different sizes and species of dragon—a process that took months—I got to populate my monster-movie-on-paper with some seriously kick-ass monsters. (Even the names of the different dragons will sound oddly familiar to many readers. Yellowjackets are a kind of wasp. Red-bellied black snakes are found in Australia. Eastern greys are a variety of kangaroo. By using names that readers are vaguely familiar with, I was trying to make my dragons seem more real. I also just loved the imagery of a red-bellied black dragon! It’s instantly scary.)

The Great Zoo of China also sees your first (adult) female lead character! How did you come up with the amazing CJ Cameron?

You know, it just seemed to work for the story, having a female lead. I wasn’t trying to make a statement or anything. With all the stories I have written, the hero has, well, just suited the story. In Ice Station, Scarecrow worked as a US Marine. Jack West Jr and Jason Chaser worked as Aussies. And a thirteen-year-old Queen Elizabeth and her real-life teacher, Roger Ascham, suited The Tournament.

The lead character of The Great Zoo of China could have been a guy—and indeed, I considered this option—but in the end, several things made me make CJ a woman.

First, I hadn’t done it before. That’s a big plus. As an author, you’ve got to keep doing new things. Second, women view the world differently to men, and I liked the idea of seeing the details of the zoo through a smart woman’s eyes. Third, I felt that a trained dragon like Lucky would relate better to a female handler than a male one. The fact that CJ is a woman enhances Lucky’s character. Fourthly, I also knew that the Chinese Communist Party is a very male-dominated organisation. I felt having CJ as a lone woman among this group of men would create an interesting dynamic.

And, of course, like Scarecrow and Jack, she enters the story with wounds from a previous misadventure. I like the description of her as a pretty woman who men would approach… until they saw the scarring on her face. CJ is as tough as Mother in my humble opinion.

Oh, and for the record, CJ looks like my girlfriend, Kate (except for the scars). But she actually takes her name from a man, a big-hearted golfing buddy of mine from San Francisco named Craig Johnson, who is known to everyone as ‘CJ’.

Tell us about Lucky and how you wrote about her?

I actually love writing about animals. Ever since I wrote the first growls of the Karanadon in the opening scene of Contest, I have found it a challenge to write about the movements and noises of animals, whether real or imagined.

Giving the dragons lithe and deadly movements was one thing, but creating Lucky was another thing entirely. Frankly, this was because Lucky had to have personality. Most of Lucky’s mannerisms and expressions resemble those of my dog, Dido (if you want to see what she looks like, go to YouTube: she made a few unscripted appearances in the web videos I did for The Tournament!). Dido’s ears twitch back when she is happy and her eyes shine when she looks at me. I will often enter a room in which she is lying down; she will register my presence with a lazy wag of her tail without otherwise moving. That’s personality! So while most of the other dragons move like crouched tigers or other big cats, Lucky is actually more dog-like in her movements. Yes, I am a dog person.

Creating Lucky’s voice took many revisions. Because her ‘speech’ comes via a limited database of sounds, I had to make it obviously simple and basic. But given that it would be Lucky who informs the reader about the ‘master’ dragons and the other dragon nest, her speech also had to be very clear. This required many, many revisions. As with many things, if it looks simple, it probably wasn’t.

The story does seem like a simple, straightforward idea: a zoo filled with dragons in China. Was this book simple and straightforward to write?

Not at all. I actually revised The Great Zoo of China more times than I did for any of my previous books, to make sure I got it right.

I knew from the start that I would have to convey many complex ideas in the book—the dragons, the layout of the zoo, the motives of the Chinese in building it, the electromagnetic domes, the dragons’ speech—but it had to flow. I always want my novels to be fast. I didn’t want readers to get bogged down in the technology.

One of the things I have come up against time and again in my career is the notion that because a book is easy to read it was somehow easy to write. This, to me, is one of the greatest blindspots of literary types. Making something fast and easy to read is not easy at all. It takes time and lots and lots of constant revising. If anyone says The Great Zoo of China is easy to read and only takes a few days to get through, then I will take that as a big compliment, because I worked hard to make it that way!

Are there any little secrets in the novel?

There are always a few secrets in my novels. The character of Hamish Cameron is named after a young fan of mine. Hamish’s father, Ewen Cameron, bought the character name in an auction at the Bullant Charity Challenge Ball a few years ago. The money went to charity and I had to find a character to name after Hamish. I hope you liked your character, Hamish!

Similarly, Benjamin Patrick is named after two young gentlemen from my old high school, St Aloysius’ College, Benjamin Liam Lok Yin Chambers and Patrick Laurence Yan Yin Chambers. Ben and Patrick’s parents bought the character name at a charity auction for the school.

Greg Johnson and Kirk Syme are good mates of mine from San Francisco and I just thought they’d like to be in a book. And Bill Lynch from Merion asked me to put his name in a novel. There you go, Bill. You asked for it! Fans often ask me at book signings if they can be in a novel, so there are a few of those in there as well. Happy to help!

Everyone wants to know—will we see Scarecrow or Jack West Jr any time soon?

The answer is: I’m still deciding! Having brought Scarecrow back in Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves, I think it’s time for Jack West Jr to return. And I have a good idea for a fourth Jack West book, but I’m still developing it, and I won’t do it until I am completely happy with the story. I place very high demands on myself and I think my readers respect that.

My readers are awesome. They were very indulgent with me when it came to The Tournament, which was a different kind of novel for me. No matter what I write, they deserve nothing less than my very best efforts and that is what I will always promise to give.

What is coming up in the future for you Matthew?

Having lived my whole life in Sydney, Australia, I am currently looking at moving to the United States to explore some storytelling opportunities there in both books and film. I love Australia dearly but I’m still young and I’d hate to get to fifty and say to myself, ‘Why didn’t I ever give that a go?’ I’ll still write my novels, only from a different place.

Any final words?

I just hope my book took you away from the real world for a while. I hope the dragons scared you and that you liked meeting CJ and her shampoo-stealing brother, Hamish. Like I always say, I just hope you enjoyed it.