In The Rag­pick­er King, the fol­low up to Sword Catch­er, acclaimed author Cas­san­dra Clare returns to the fraught and fas­ci­nat­ing city of Castel­lane with all its polit­i­cal machi­na­tions. JBC spoke with the author about incor­po­rat­ing Jew­ish cul­ture and his­to­ry into fan­ta­sy, craft­ing her cast of char­ac­ters, the pow­er of per­cep­tion, and so much more. 

Simona Zaret­sky: The city of Castel­lane is rich­ly craft­ed and tex­tured. In book two of the series, the read­er returns to famil­iar haunts and delves deep­er into the secrets of the city. How did you go about craft­ing Castellane?

Cas­san­dra Clare: It was a com­bi­na­tion of his­tor­i­cal research and wild inven­tion. I knew if I was going to set an epic fan­ta­sy in a world, it would need to be a world I want­ed to spend a lot of time in myself. I love to trav­el as much as I love to write so Castel­lane is a sort of ode to trav­el, to a time when we couldn’t just get on a plane and hop to anoth­er loca­tion. Here trav­el is all about not just the exchange of goods but of cul­tures. Castel­lane is a place, like Venice or Con­stan­tino­ple dur­ing the height of the Silk Roads, where every­one comes. It’s the cross­roads of a whole world and there­fore, while it is obvi­ous­ly influ­enced by the his­to­ry of Silk Road Italy and France, it is a city where all sorts of cul­tures have blend­ed. In the big mar­ket square you can find silk from Shen­zou, dumplings from Geumjoseon, car­pets from Hind, samovars from Nyen­schantz, and so forth, and there are all sorts of quar­ters of the city, like Lit­tle Kutani, where expats have made a home for them­selves and brought their own foods and music and so on to Castellane.

SZ: In a sim­i­lar vein, the Sault, the walled city where the minor­i­ty and monothe­is­tic reli­gious group known as the Ashkar reside, is an entire world unto itself, though it is nes­tled in Castel­lane. It’s a small, tight-knit com­mu­ni­ty that offers pro­tec­tion but also restric­tion. Could you speak a bit about this ten­sion between pro­tec­tion and restriction?

CC: I would say that while the walls of the Sault are real walls, like the walls of many Jew­ish ghet­tos in Europe, they also stand in for the ten­sion between assim­i­la­tion and cul­tur­al preser­va­tion. As long as we’ve been a dias­poric peo­ple, so for thou­sands of years, there has been that ten­sion between not let­ting go of Jew­ish cul­ture and her­itage, and seek­ing accep­tance via assim­i­lat­ing. The Ashkar are dis­crim­i­nat­ed against — their move­ments are restrict­ed, what they can wear is restrict­ed, the laws do not equal­ly pro­tect them — but inside the walls of the Sault it is pos­si­ble to feel safe. Yet Mayesh and Lin also wor­ry that the walls rein­force their oth­er­ness in the eyes of those out­side. It’s a ques­tion we all grap­ple with as Jews, and have for centuries. 

SZ: When not in the Sault, Lin Cast­er, an Ashkar physi­cian, is hyper aware that she is not part of the dom­i­nant cul­ture and that there lurks dan­ger in this: ​“She could hard­ly remem­ber the day she her­self had real­ized that to be an Ashkar was to always be unsafe; to belong nowhere out­side the Sault, but to know that walls could not entire­ly pro­tect you.” How do you see this sense of ​“oth­er­ness” shap­ing Lin as a character?

CC: Lin is very much shaped by her Ashkar iden­ti­ty. She is also unusu­al among her peo­ple not only because she is a female physi­cian, but because her grand­fa­ther is the King’s Coun­selor. Also her par­ents were Rhadan­ites — traders on the Gold Roads, which par­al­lel the Silk Roads in our own world — so she’s in a unique posi­tion even with­in the Sault in terms of her knowl­edge of the out­side world. This has made her a bound­ary-cross­er, some­one who is much more aware of what is going on in the rest of Castel­lane than her neigh­bors are — many of the Ashkar can iso­late them­selves from what the world out­side thinks of them, but she can­not ignore what’s hap­pen­ing out­side the walls of the Sault. She has in her own way a clear­er pic­ture of her­self and her peo­ple as out­siders than those who nev­er leave the ghet­to of the Sault do. It makes her aware of her own vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of all the Ashkar. Which in turn, makes her a good choice as a leader.

SZ: There were so many care­ful­ly drawn and fas­ci­nat­ing con­nec­tions between the Ashkar com­mu­ni­ty and Jews. Exile and wan­der­ing fea­ture promi­nent­ly in their mythol­o­gy. Anoth­er facet that stood out to me was that the Ashkar peo­ple pos­sess a bit of mag­ic from a long time ago when it ran free in the world. When used it is called gema­try, which seems quite rem­i­nis­cent of gema­tria, the numer­i­cal val­ues of Hebrew let­ters. What par­al­lels to Judaism felt impor­tant to you to portray?

CC: You’re absolute­ly right about gema­tria! It is in itself a sys­tem of mag­ic — look at chai and the num­ber eigh­teen. There are plen­ty of oth­er direct par­al­lels to aspects of Jew­ish his­to­ry, from the pres­ence of the San­hedrin in the book, to the Exi­larch, to hav­ing a fam­i­ly of Mak­abis (Mac­cabees), to the Rhadan­ites and the Hall of Hewn Stones. All of that comes from our writ­ten his­to­ries. But the thing that was the most impor­tant to me was to sit­u­ate Jews and Jew­ish­ness in this kind of fan­ta­sy world. I love fan­ta­sy and read a lot of it, and a lot of the genre is sit­u­at­ed in these sorts of sim­pli­fied Medieval and Renais­sance Euro­pean worlds. But you nev­er see Jews or an ana­logue to Jews in those fan­ta­sy worlds (you rarely see peo­ple of col­or either!) — which to me, as an Ashke­nazi Jew, is bizarre. Jews were an inte­gral part of Europe, even as they were dis­crim­i­nat­ed against. Our cul­ture flour­ished and thrived in places like Vil­nius, which was col­lo­qui­al­ly called ​“Jerusalem” because it had so many Jews in it. So I want­ed to cre­ate a world and say, ​“Look, there we are, here are the Jews in this world, here is the oth­er­ing we face, but here also is the mag­ic of our cul­ture, our rich his­to­ry, here are the bonds between us.”

SZ: Books and access to them play a piv­otal role for Lin; they offer the poten­tial for a cure for her dear friend and a greater under­stand­ing of cur­rent polit­i­cal events through his­to­ry. Addi­tion­al­ly, there is also the oral tra­di­tion of Sto­ry-Spin­ners, live per­form­ers who enter­tain city-goers with wild tales, often con­cern­ing the Prince. How do you see sto­ry­telling, writ­ten and oral, work­ing in the world?

CC: The Castel­lane books are ones in which almost every­body is always lying to each oth­er. Part of the fun, I hope, is fig­ur­ing out when peo­ple are lying and when they’re being hon­est. But there’s some­thing at the heart of fic­tion and books that tran­scends pre­tense. Lin finds the answers to the ques­tions she has in books, and the tales of the Sto­ry-Spin­ners, if you pay close atten­tion to them, tell the truth of who Conor real­ly is. The Cold Heart of the Lone­ly King, for instance.

SZ: The sto­ry is told through mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives, many car­ried through from the first book, Sword Catch­er. Were there any voic­es that came to you more eas­i­ly than others?

CC: In this book I con­tin­ued with Lin and Kel as the major char­ac­ters, but I also added inter­sti­tial sec­tions from oth­er points of view, which allowed me to fea­ture a broad­er range of expe­ri­ences among the peo­ple of Castel­lane. One of the things that sur­prised me was delv­ing into the voice of the vil­lain, who turned out to be a lot of fun to write. There’s noth­ing like being able to be total­ly blood­thirsty and with­out morals in fic­tion. It lets you work out a lot of anger!

SZ: Sev­er­al char­ac­ters find, per­haps unex­pect­ed­ly, much-need­ed cama­raderie and com­pan­ion­ship with the tit­u­lar Rag­pick­er King, who resides in his infa­mous house in Scar­let Square and pre­sides over the city’s less savory endeav­ors. How did you craft these intri­cate relationships?

CC: When I’m cre­at­ing a big cast of char­ac­ters, I like to throw lots of peo­ple from dif­fer­ent back­grounds togeth­er and see how they get along. With a char­ac­ter like the Rag­pick­er King, he draws peo­ple to him, and often those peo­ple are ones who have been cast out or oth­er­wise sep­a­rat­ed from their fam­i­lies and com­mu­ni­ties of ori­gin. Their endeav­ors may be less-than-savory, but among each oth­er, they find con­nec­tion of sorts, and a home. Mer­ren lost his par­ents when he was young, and he’s now involved in ille­gal activ­i­ty; Ji-An was exiled from her coun­try for mur­der; Jer­rod used to work for a dif­fer­ent crime boss, Kel is under­cov­er, Lin is involved in for­bid­den mag­ic. All are out­casts in their way, and at the end of the book, we find out Andreyen, the Rag­pick­er King, is the biggest out­cast of all.

SZ: Through­out the series there echoes the phrase, ​“The King on the Hill and the King in the City,” refer­ring to Prince Conor’s father, the sequestered King, and the Rag­pick­er King. What made you grav­i­tate towards this unique pow­er dynamic? 

CC: This is a dynam­ic that grew out of the con­struc­tion of the book. I always knew that half of the book would be told in the rar­efied atmos­phere of the Palace, and the oth­er half would take place in the city where ordi­nary peo­ple live their lives. The Rag­pick­er King got his name very ear­ly — I thought there was an inter­est­ing ten­sion about being the King of the rag­pick­ers, the very poor­est — and at some point, I real­ized there was mir­ror­ing going on between the roy­al King and the Rag­pick­er King. They had a lot of the same inter­ests, after all, and their atti­tudes toward pow­er are fair­ly sim­i­lar. They actu­al­ly both have the good of Castel­lane at heart, as well, even if Andreyen is most­ly inter­est­ed in not hav­ing his prof­itable busi­ness inter­rupt­ed by chaos. But the roy­al fam­i­ly feels very similarly!

SZ: What was the writ­ing process like for The Rag­pick­er King?

CC: Well, the inter­est­ing thing is that once upon a time Sword Catch­er and The Rag­pick­er King were one giant book. But while epic fan­ta­sy is known for its high page count, this book was just too long. So part of writ­ing The Rag­pick­er King was tak­ing what had been the back half of a longer book and rework­ing it so it could stand on its own as a nov­el. Doing so opened up space to expand the sto­ry in ways I end­ed up being very hap­py with.

SZ: Per­cep­tion is a pow­er­ful tool in the nov­el for so many char­ac­ters, whether it’s a lit­er­al or mag­i­cal mask they hide behind, or just art­ful­ly con­struct­ed lies. How do you see manip­u­la­tion of per­cep­tion oper­at­ing in the story?

CC: To sur­vive in the com­pli­cat­ed, back­stab­bing world of the Hill and equal­ly in the streets of the city, these are char­ac­ters who must con­struct iden­ti­ties in order to pro­tect them­selves while nav­i­gat­ing the pow­er struc­tures around them. We look at some­one like Kel, who car­ries an amulet that lit­er­al­ly con­ceals who he is, and has to pre­tend to be some­one else every day. In a lot of ways he is lit­er­al­iz­ing with mag­ic the thing every­one around him is doing with lies and pre­tense. Look at some­one like Antonet­ta, who has no mag­ic, but has care­ful­ly craft­ed a false iden­ti­ty that allows her to move among her peers with­out them per­ceiv­ing her as a threat. Or we have Lin, who, des­per­ate to save her best friend’s life, has tak­en on the man­tle of a god­dess who will save her peo­ple. What’s unique about Lin is that she real­ly could turn out to be the god­dess, which illu­mi­nates the ques­tion at the cen­ter of all of this — when does a lie become truth? When does a false iden­ti­ty become real?

SZ: Were there any books or authors that inspired your cre­ation of this world and characters?

CC: The big epics, of course, like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. But also a lot of works of non­fic­tion that illu­mi­nat­ed the time I was writ­ing about — City of For­tune and Frankopan’s The Silk Roads. That was where I found out about the Rhadan­ites, the Jew­ish traders on the Silk Roads. And of course, some of the Jew­ish fan­ta­sy that does exist, like Spin­ning Sil­ver by Nao­mi Novik or Gen­tle­men of the Road, by Michael Chabon. And Guy Gavriel Kay does a won­der­ful job of tak­ing real events and places of the past and turn­ing them into fan­ta­sy realms.