HG Parry on her alternative history novel A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians at the 2021 Dunedin Writers & Readers Festival

Wellington author HG Parry writes complex and engaging fantasy novels.

She talks to Lynn Freeman about reinventing the French Revolution in her novel A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians.

This conversation is a highlight from the 2021's Dunedin Writers Festival.

Slaves in 19th-century Jamaica are not only under physical domination by their masters but also under magical control in A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians.

Parry intertwines the story of Fina - a young slave working on a sugar plantation who has her magical abilities held in check by her owner - with a reimagining of how the French Revolution might have unfolded if 18^th-century France had been a place where magic was a potent force, suppressed by those in power.

Lynn Freeman:

I found an extra degree of horror when you think about that era. Fina is taken as a child, which happened [in real history]. But the extra element that you’ve added in within this magical realm is that she is spellbound. That just chilled me.

Given that it’s in the first three or four pages, we can probably talk about how you wove into the story an extra layer of horror for these slaves ripped from their homes.

HG Parry:

I put it in the first few pages partly so if it was getting too dark, people would know not to read any further because my first book was a lot lighter than all this stuff.

But it definitely wasn’t a question of trying to make slavery worse.

I don’t think you can make slavery any worse looking at magical control vs. what really happened. They were routinely tortured and beaten.

Among other things, the idea of spellbinding was [introduced] to kind of cast that light on the idea that that is literally what slavery is trying to do.

I mean we don’t have magic but the idea of taking someone and trying to strip them of as much bodily autonomy as possible, and telling yourself – which they do in the book – that when you’re doing it they don’t have minds either.

That attempt to dehumanise is exactly what the purpose of slavery is. So if you’re horrified by the idea of that happening by magic, then you should by rights be horrified by the intention of slavery at all.

Lynn Freeman:

Well, the sad thing is, Fina’s only young and has heard rumours that if you eat this food it’ll take the pain away. She wanted to die. She’s shackled in a boat – a horrendous situation. I can completely understand her hoping that this would be her escape. But it’s not. How does the spellbinding work?

HG Parry:

The intention of it is if you enslave a person then you put them under a spell so that they can’t move unless they are given a command to obey. And the argument of the slave owners in Parliament is essentially that they don’t have any feelings. They’re no longer human and don’t need to be respected.

Lynn Freeman:

They’re automatons.

HG Parry:

Exactly. And without the magic, those were real arguments [from the period]. What really got me was the fact that so much of those parliamentary arguments were taken up with trying to persuade people that, you know, Africans were in fact human, that they were not in fact enjoying their lives.

That’s a tactic. I mean the more you try to get your opponents to waste time, having to prove the most fundamental points of humanity, the more time you buy, you know? So it’s not necessarily that they believe it. It’s the fact that they can give people a way of looking the other way. You’re forcing your opponents to waste a lot of time arguing with you.

Lynn Freeman:

Fina is a heartbreaker when she’s talking about maybe being able to escape. She says, “I don’t remember being free. I don’t know how to be free.” It kicked me in the guts, but that would be the case for those who did find freedom. It was not easy.

HG Parry:

Even now, when you read prison accounts, institutionalisation is a definite thing. The autobiography of Olaudah Equiano [a real-life former slave turned abolitionist] is probably the most famous slavery memoir. It starts pretty much exactly like Fina in the book with him being captured and taken at a very young age. So, yeah, it was a thing that happened to very small children.

Lynn Freeman:

To fear freedom is tragic.

HG Parry:

Exactly. If you are in that kind of situation, obviously, you want to be free, but at the same time when you leave - if you achieve it - where is the place for you?

HG Parry

HG Parry is the author of The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep (2019), A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians (2020), and the forthcoming A Radical Act of Free Magic (2021), all published by Orbit/Hachette Books.

She has also written a number of short stories with similarly long and unwieldy titles.

She gained her PhD in English Literature at Victoria University, writing about children’s fantasy and the epic tradition, and went on to tutor English, Film, and Media Studies there and at Massey University before becoming a full-time writer.

She currently lives in a book-infested flat on the Kāpiti Coast with her sister and a growing menagerie of small animals.

This audio was recorded for the Dunedin Writers & Readers Festival by Otago Access Radio with funding from Copyright Licensing New Zealand