In Which I Forget Stuff Again

 Once again I've made the mistake of reading a Carnegie winner long before I come to write about it. I read A Pack of Lies by Geraldine McCaughrean a few months back but when I took it off the shelf again I couldn't remember a single thing about it!

Of course, when I started reading it (again) it all came flooding back, but it's set me wondering about a few things, chiefly whether some books are more easy to forget than others. Or perhaps I should say, easier for me to forget. I do know that it has nothing to do with how enjoyable a book is. I enjoyed A Pack of Lies very much, both times! And I often pick up books by my favourite crime writers in charity shops and read a few pages, then buy the book, convinced that I haven't read it before, only to find, once I'm 50 pages in, that I actually do know what's going to happen.

Looking back over the list of Carnegie winners I realised that the act of writing about them seems to have cemented them into my brain fairly securely, even the ones I didn't much like, even the ones I didn't think were very good. But I have come increasingly to wonder if, as one gets older, one's memory banks might possibly just get so full that there's no room for anything else without throwing something away, rather like our bookshelves here at home. I can sort of fix that problem by building more shelves, but I really don't know how to build more bookshelves in my brain. And I find it interesting that the brain seems to choose to chuck out recent memories to make room, leaving even seemingly trivial ones from long ago completely intact. This is what has happened to my mother, 96 years old in a month's time, who has virtually no short-term memory left but can hold a perfectly lucid conversation about events during WW2.

Carnegie bookshelves - most of these are here 
because of reading all those winners

Anyway, while I can still remember it I'll say a bit about A Pack of Lies. Unlike some other Carnegie winners (and losers too) Geraldine McCaughrean does not need rescuing from obscurity. She's one of our most prolific children's authors with somewhere between 170 and 180 books to her name, along with two Carnegie medals and a bunch of other awards. And I have to confess that, until I read A Pack of Lies I hadn't read a single one of her books.The thing is, when I started trying to write books for children, right about the time that A Pack of Lies was published, I also started worrying that I might unconsciously copy the books I was reading and so, for a while, I stopped reading children's books altogether. 

And when I began again, a few years later, I approached  the books I read very differently. I remember starting River Boy by Tim Bowler and thinking, after a few pages, 'I might want to write about this kind of stuff. Better stop.' I'll have to read River Boy shortly as it won the Carnegie medal. Anyway, enough excuses. I started this Carnegie thing because I knew there were authors I knew nothing about and here's another gap to fill in. 

A Pack of Lies reminds me of those sampler albums that started appearing in the late 1960s and early 1970s with titles like You Can All Join In and Fill Your Head With Rock. For those who are too young to remember, they were compilation albums featuring tracks from different artists on a record label. Tasters, I suppose. So A Pack of Lies offers tasters of a range of different literary genres in a series of short stories linked together in what I suppose you'd have to call a meta-fictional structure that reminded me both of Flann O'Brien and of Italo Calvino. Which is to say, not your run-of-the-mill children's book, and quite unlike anything that had previously won the Carnegie.

It's very entertaining, very witty, and brilliantly realised. Tales of horror, suspense, romance, revenge and even a whodunnit all find a place and the structure cleverly solves the problem of how to sell a collection of short stories, such collections notoriously causing publishers difficulties. 

Geraldine McCaughrean is not alone in having been neglected by me. I have 33 Carnegie winners left to read, (I've read 7 of them already, but obviously I'll need to read them again!) and, of those, fourteen are by authors whose work I don't know. But let's face it, none of us is ever going to read everything.

I haven't really told you much about A Pack of Lies and I'm not going to, mainly because any discussion of the overarching metafiction that joins the stories together would inevitably give the game away. Some young readers have been puzzled by the ending, and I'm not surprised. And, speaking of the stories themselves, when I read them I couldn't help thinking of Saki. There's a nice edge of bitter humour about them. 

Now I think I'll make start on a few of Geraldine McCaughrean's many other books so that when I come to write about her second Carnegie winner, Where the World Ends, I'll know a little more about her work. 

I have a lot of catching up to do.

 Geraldine McCaughrean's excellent website 

Originally published on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure March 2023