Realism and Magic Realism

 Junk by Melvin Burgess is a realistic novel that actually feels real and truthful. The book was awarded the Carnegie Medal in 1996 and it's hard to imagine anything more different from its predecessor, Northern Lights. It deals with addiction, teenage prostitution, and domestic violence, which is why it was controversial, but it presents a far more developed, rounded and convincing  picture of the lives it describes than did Stone Cold, Robert Swindells' earlier winning novel about teen homelessness. It is above all a novel of character, but like all the best books it's about many other things too, and most importantly about love.

I'd read Junk before, many years ago, and it was its grim realism that I chiefly remembered. I think perhaps I didn't read it properly, because Junk offers hope as well as grimness, and even the grimness is done with subtlety and understanding. And it's crucial that along with the pin-sharp depiction of the addict's endless self-delusion about getting clean, we meet people who actually have got themselves out of the grip of addiction. It clearly won't be easy, but it may be possible.

At the start of the book two fourteen-year-olds leave home, for very different reasons. Gemma comes across as a bit of a brat (at least she does to an adult reader). Her desire to live wild and free conflicts with the desire of her parents to keep her safe. To Gemma her parents are monsters. To the adult reader they look maybe more reasonable than their daughter. It'd be interesting to know how a fourteen-year old sees Gemma. 

The other protagonist is Tar, the child of two alcoholic parents who cares for his mother and whose father beats him up. It seems altogether reasonable for Tar to run away from home, and in the book it seems reasonable to many of the people Tar meets along the way. People want to help him. The same people can see where Gemma is heading. There's a bit of an Adam and Eve situation going on here, with Gemma wanting to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. She'll try anything, and she sucks Tar along with her.

I said this was a book about love: Tar loves his mother but he can't help her, and he loves Gemma but she doesn't love him, not really; Gemma loves herself, that's for sure, and her parents love her, but somehow mess up in the way they deal with her. Tar's dad talks about love in a monologue at the end of the book. 'It wasn't a love story,' he says, contrasting Tar and Gemma with his own relationship with his wife - 'That was a love story' but one that went badly wrong.

This is a book which is challenging and thoughtful and which really cares about its characters. My copy has an appendix - 'The Story of Junk' - with a lot of fascinating information about the book's development and its reception. Here we find out why it feels so real: 

My brother was right in it up to his elbows and while the people and situations are not completely real, they are all borrowed quite clearly from real life. There's nothing here that might shock you that hasn't really happened.  Melvin Burgess, Birmingham Post, 24th July 1997

We also learn some extraordinary things about the book's critics: " . . .what did astonish me, and it astonishes me still, is that nearly all of the book's enemies came to the studios without having read it. What sort of idiot goes on TV, in front of an audience of millions, to complain about a book they haven't even read?' Melvin Burgess.

Some of those critics made disparaging comparisons with Arthur Ransome, the first winner of the Carnegie medal. It is extraordinary to think that John and Nancy would have been much the same age as Tar and Gemma, but it's worth remembering that Arthur Ransome himself knew plenty about the hard realities of life after experiencing the Russian revolution of 1917, and the subsequent civil war, at first hand. The childhood holidays which he imagined or reinvented have an eerie parallel in Gemma's and Tar's escape into heroin:

"All that crap - about Gemma leaving me, about Mum and Dad, about leaving home. All that negative stuff. All the pain . . .

It just floated away from me.  I just floated away from it . . . up and away."

Arthur Ransome was also looking for escape, but he had a very different way of finding it.

Tim Bowler's River Boy is a book which I bought when it came out and never read beyond the first chapter because it seemed too close to something I was trying to write myself. Well, I've made up for it now. I enjoyed it very much and I was wrong - I could never have written something like this. I think you'd have to call it magical realism, given that it's a realistic story about an old and dying artist who wants to return with his family to the place he grew up in order to paint one last picture, and which has a brilliantly handled supernatural element.

I would never have had the boldness to do what Tim Bowler has done with this idea. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that the river boy of the title is a mysterious spirit or incarnation or avatar of the dying grandfather's young self. It makes absolutely no sense, at exactly the same time as it makes complete sense! I was reminded strongly of Walter de la Mare as I read this book. Its mastery of atmosphere and its ability to evoke strangeness and mystery are very similar to what you find in de la Mare. It's a book that manages also to exist slightly outside time, even though it has a contemporary setting and features, a Carnegie winners' first, a mobile phone. But no TV. It's astonishing how seldom a TV makes an appearance in these Carnegie winners.

Tim Bowler's website has an excellent section of advice for writers which I really recommend you take a look at. Here's a sample (they're all bite-sized): 

‘Your work is special, however bad you may think it is in its current state. It’s special because no one but you can write it. It may not feel fledged or fully formed or even close to the version of itself that you would love to see, but that doesn’t mean you should stop believing in its potential. Whatever stage your work is at, it carries the seeds of possibility. So don’t knock what you’re trying to achieve or what you have achieved thus far, and, above all, don’t stop writing. The words you haven’t written yet are waiting for you.’

The theme of realism mixed with a supernatural element continued in the next winner, David Almond's Skellig. I think there's a good chance that this book will end up in my top three, if and when I come to compile a top ten of Carnegie winners. I cannot think of a better depiction anywhere of what it feels like when someone you love is in hospital and might easily die at any moment, and I am full of admiration for David Almond's spare, poetic style and his wonderful handling of dialogue. And as for the creation of Skellig himself, I've come across nothing better in the sixty-odd Carnegie winners I've read so far, or indeed in all of the children's books I've ever read. This is, in fact, one of my favourite children's books. 

It has suffered a terrible fate though. They use it in schools, which is ironic given the discussion about schooling/home-schooling that runs through the book. And quite a few reviewers on Amazon say it's boring, which I just don't understand. There seems to be a fairly even mix though among young reviewers, between those who love the book and those who hate it.

Reading books that were published after I'd left my teens has been a different experience from reading the Carnegie winners published before the 1970s and I'm wondering if it's because those earlier books, whether I'd read them as a child or not, formed part of a background to my growing up. Reading those books was a bit like investigating my own past. 

In the 1980s and 1990s there were books that I read to my children, so I could see how they reacted to them but then, when I started writing myself, I became much more reluctant to read the latest publications, as with River Boy, because I was very aware how easy it was to pick up ideas, and even a writing style from other people. And there was always the worry, of course, that I would discover that someone else had already done what I was hoping to do.

As I've mentioned in an earlier post on this blog, I actually did unconsciously steal things from Jan Mark, and I guess that's because she showed me a way to write what I wanted to write - made me feel that I wanted to do the kind of thing she'd done. And when I think about that I realise that there have been very few moments, as I've been reading through all these Carnegie winners, when I've had that feeling that  this is wonderful, I want to do something like this. Skellig is one of those books, and Tim Bowler's advice makes me think I really should spend a bit less time on the allotment and a bit more time writing.

Originally published on ABBA September 2023