tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62636502046096699892024-03-14T05:04:08.667+00:00AS IN THE LONG AGOThe website and blog of UK children's author Paul MayPaul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.comBlogger118125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-17273390275460888372024-03-06T09:20:00.004+00:002024-03-06T09:20:43.946+00:00Death and the Carnegie Medal<p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWAStV6WaafOVKxNZh59wiQakkaT5TJGh3ZYrS97BKTbGzL390Ibzu1w2hxpnIMi-3yDd0bbAYLgomTcTU_A4ySxOikZr_R_InzMCFhf3VJZjF7AOPh53R_lD24v6J9iQNmbIUhgEli_6OusxmLc365-pvR2ul37JMTH_kH2BxQmZjQf61VPnz7F-q/s4032/IMG_9406.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWAStV6WaafOVKxNZh59wiQakkaT5TJGh3ZYrS97BKTbGzL390Ibzu1w2hxpnIMi-3yDd0bbAYLgomTcTU_A4ySxOikZr_R_InzMCFhf3VJZjF7AOPh53R_lD24v6J9iQNmbIUhgEli_6OusxmLc365-pvR2ul37JMTH_kH2BxQmZjQf61VPnz7F-q/w300-h400/IMG_9406.JPG" width="300" /></a></p><br />Death has always been a presence in Carnegie Medal winning books. The third winner, Noel Streatfeild's <i>The Circus is Coming</i> begins like this: "Peter and Sarah were orphans. When they were babies their father and mother were killed in a railway accident, so they came to live with their aunt." This is an extreme example of how children's authors get rid of the parents to allow the children some agency. Roald Dahl did a very similar thing in <i>James and the Giant Peach</i> although he waited until the second paragraph to dispatch James's parents by means of an angry rhinoceros.<p></p><p>Both Streatfeild and Dahl are just clearing the ground before they start their stories, cutting the protagonists free from those pesky parents. Books like <i>The Lantern Bearers</i> and <i>Tulku</i> do the same thing in a more organic way, but although people die in both these books, death is not central to the stories. There are other winners with high body-counts, like Ronald Welch's <i>Knight Crusader</i> or Garfield and Blishen's <i>The God Beneath the Sea</i>, and there are books like Philip Pullman's <i>Northern Lights</i> or Susan Price's <i>The Ghost Drum </i>(now available in a shiny new edition by the way!)<i> </i>where visits are made to the worlds of the dead, but in none of these does death take centre stage the way it does in Siobhan Dowd's <i>Bog Child</i> or in Neil Gaiman's <i>The Graveyard Book</i>, the winners of the Carnegie in 2008 and 2009. Both these books are <i>about </i>living and dying and although they are very different they are both outstanding examples of what is possible in a children's book.</p><p>(Spoilers!<i>) Bog Child</i> starts with the discovery of the body of a young woman buried in the peat on a mountainside. She is small, and at first those who examine her think she's a child, perhaps recently killed and buried. It turns out she was buried nearly 2000 years before and has been preserved by the bog.</p><p>This is a story about death as sacrifice. We hear the story of the girl in the bog (the protagonist, Fergus, names her Mel) through the dreams of Fergus. If indeed they <i>are </i>dreams. The device is very effective. It is essentially a parallel story to the one told in the present but a kind of supernatural empathy across 2000 years enables Fergus to experience it. This kind of thing is hard to pull off, because if you think about it for two seconds you know it's nonsense, but Siobhan Dowd makes it work, partly because the modern-day story is so strong that it carries you along, and partly because archaeologists always speculate about what might have happened—make up stories in other words.</p><p>This is Northern Ireland in the 1980s and Republican prisoners in Long Kesh are on hunger strike. The IRA bombing campaign is at its height. Fergus's dad is an IRA sympathiser though not, as far as we know, an active member. Sacrifice is very much in Fergus's mind because his brother has joined the hunger strike, willing to sacrifice his life for the cause of . . . well, here's how Joe explains it to Fergus and his mum:</p><p>"See, Mam, it's like this. I'm not a common criminal. What I did was fight for freedom. (I don't think we ever know why Joe has been sentenced to 10 years in prison) I'd rather die free in my own head than live like the dregs of the earth. And that's how they treat us in here, I swear to God.'</p><p>Earlier, before they've learned that Joe has joined the hunger strike, we've seen the McCann family around the kitchen table, eating a 'fry' and discussing the body Fergus has found, and the hunger strikers:</p><p>'Thank God Joe's not part of it,' Mam said.</p><p>Da nodded. 'It's an odd thing when you thank God for your son not having to make a sacrifice like that.'</p><p>Mam grunted. 'Sacrifice? Some sacrifice.' She reached over to Cath and forked a grilled tomato from the plate's edge towards the centre. 'Eat up, Cath.'</p><p>And then: 'Sacrifice is what Jesus did. He saved us all. Who did Bobby Sands save?'</p><p>Back in AD80 food is scarce and Mel's father, it later turns out, is starving himself to save his family. You could have called this book <i>Hunger </i>and it would have made perfect sense. Fergus agrees with his mam about sacrifice, but none of Fergus's arguments have any effect on Joe when Fergus and Mam visit him in prison. 2000 years earlier Mel also sacrifices herself, but she sacrifices herself to save her family. </p><p>We also see that Joe is the protegé of Uncle Tully, and Uncle Tully is revealed to be a bomb-maker. His bombs kill innocent people, including the young British soldier who has become Fergus's friend, though Tully would regard the soldier as a 'legitimate target.' So is that what Joe is sacrificing himself for? There is a lot to think about here.</p><p>Even the short extracts I've quoted demonstrate that this is a rich and complex text, this despite being written in plain, economical language. There's not room to do it justice here but it's a remarkable book that I'd urge anyone to read, adult or child. There's also plenty of in-depth academic style discussion of the book that you can find on the internet. I was very curious to know how the book is perceived in Northern Ireland so I resorted to Google and discovered that the then Ulster Unionist leader, James Nesbitt, had called for it to be banned in schools. You may remember that Melvin Burgess was amazed that many of the critics of <i>Junk</i> hadn't bothered to read the book, so I was amused to find this:</p><p>"<span style="caret-color: rgb(25, 25, 25); color: #191919; font-family: "Noto Serif JP", serif; letter-spacing: -0.2px;">Let me be clear, this is not an attack on the book,” said Mr Nesbitt. “I have not read</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(25, 25, 25); color: #191919; font-family: "Noto Serif JP", serif; letter-spacing: -0.2px;"> </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(25, 25, 25); color: #191919; font-family: "Noto Serif JP", serif; letter-spacing: -0.2px;">Bog Child, so have no opinion on its value as a piece of literature. But I have read the </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(25, 25, 25); color: #191919; font-family: "Noto Serif JP", serif; letter-spacing: -0.2px;">teaching notes, as endorsed by the Department of Education and I am stunned by what I</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(25, 25, 25); color: #191919; font-family: "Noto Serif JP", serif; letter-spacing: -0.2px;"> </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(25, 25, 25); color: #191919; font-family: "Noto Serif JP", serif; letter-spacing: -0.2px;"> read,” he added.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(25, 25, 25); color: #191919; font-family: "Noto Serif JP", serif; letter-spacing: -0.2px;"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrVt2QNHLXOiCCXN9kYjdy_KDlalafwYonuEVTj1rqILwgALJ_yNGbMl9kgcL8Kk-ZaZtEpLUouDL2nqntIsHueotiU5Q2ZkAQ4XhQznmQh7y5b8gu-241Wh3cBvoDVPCQipdVYLV7cijFf5JBrU1QrwxZmYpg9bAEpux9Rli3nKCx6VAvjxOVFnJ7/s4032/IMG_9407.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrVt2QNHLXOiCCXN9kYjdy_KDlalafwYonuEVTj1rqILwgALJ_yNGbMl9kgcL8Kk-ZaZtEpLUouDL2nqntIsHueotiU5Q2ZkAQ4XhQznmQh7y5b8gu-241Wh3cBvoDVPCQipdVYLV7cijFf5JBrU1QrwxZmYpg9bAEpux9Rli3nKCx6VAvjxOVFnJ7/w300-h400/IMG_9407.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="caret-color: rgb(25, 25, 25); color: #191919; font-family: "Noto Serif JP", serif; letter-spacing: -0.2px;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="color: #191919; font-family: Noto Serif JP, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px;"><i>The Graveyard Book</i> begins with a brutal murder. The killer murders a mother, a father, and a child, but an eighteen-month-old toddler escapes. The toddler enters a graveyard where he's taken under the protection of its inhabitants, dead and undead. </span></span></p><p><span style="color: #191919; font-family: Noto Serif JP, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px;">I'm a fan of toddler bids for freedom and I've witnessed quite a few in real life. I was cycling along a busy country road in Norfolk on a summer's day in 1977 when I saw a two-year-old on one of those tricycles you propel with your feet approaching me on the other side of the road. I could see the entrance to a small housing estate a couple of hundred metres ahead so I turned the toddler around and ushered him back along the road (there was no pavement). Moments later a distraught-looking dad emerged from between the houses and swept his son away. He'd only turned his back for a few moments, he said, and the boy was gone.</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #191919; font-family: Noto Serif JP, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px;">Anyway, Neil Gaiman's toddler is named Bod, short for Nobody. The mysterious Silas agrees to be his guardian. Silas is neither dead nor alive and doesn't venture out in daylight, so the informed adult and no doubt many children know what Silas is (though it turns out he is reformed). And Bod is fostered by a Mistress and Mr Owens, who have been dead for several hundred years. One of the joys of this book, and there are several, is Neil Gaiman's knack of creating fully rounded and engaging characters with a few well-chosen words. I nearly said he brings them alive, but most of them are dead.</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #191919; font-family: Noto Serif JP, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px;">There is a proper plot in this story, that involves a secret organisation of killers rather like the historical Order of Assassins, or like the mysterious underworld organisation in the John Wick movies. They call themselves the Jacks of all Trades. The existence of Bod is a threat to the very existence of this organisation, and that's why his family have been targeted. Bod survives a number of dangers, including a trip to the underworld of the ghouls, but he is remarkably brave and resourceful, even while making very human mistakes. The book is dark and funny, and even has a bit of romance thrown in, and at the end, and this isn't really a spoiler, a teenage Bod walks off into the rest of his life in much the same way as Fergus does in <i>Bog Child.</i></span></span></p><p><span style="color: #191919; font-family: Noto Serif JP, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px;">Both books have great endings, and I do love a great ending. </span></span></p><p><span style="color: #191919; font-family: Noto Serif JP, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px;">Siobhan Dowd died far too young in 2007, before <i>Bog Child</i> was published. The Siobhan Dowd Trust was set up in her memory and there's a link below to its website, but I see that the site hasn't been updated since about 2017.</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #191919; font-family: Noto Serif JP, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px;"><a href="http://siobhandowdtrust.com" target="_blank">Siobhan Dowd Trust</a></span></span></p><p>Originally published on ABBA March 2024</p><p><span style="color: #191919; font-family: Noto Serif JP, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="color: #191919; font-family: Noto Serif JP, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px;"><br /></span></span></p><p><br /></p><p class="default__StyledText-sc-1nhbny4-0 gVsmvl body-paragraph paywall" style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(25, 25, 25); color: #191919; font-family: "Noto Serif JP", serif; letter-spacing: -0.2px; line-height: 2.125rem; margin: 0px 0px 1.5rem; padding: 0px;">.</p><p><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /></p>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-6581400890324313582024-02-11T15:34:00.000+00:002024-02-11T15:34:20.130+00:00Believability<p>All fiction is a kind of conspiracy between author and reader. The author pretends that what they are writing is true and the reader pretends to believe them. I know there's a lot more to it than that—the author probably has something they want to say through shaping the events and characters in their story and the reader may be searching for some kind of truth, or a new way of looking at things, and what is truth anyway? But for the whole thing to work the reader has to be able to convince themselves while they are reading that what they are reading is true. </p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6Kd23Wp10ApD0jrZnZC3DkVextsciJ8p55PdL6NV5CAWbPG7IoDXEnyZxfAfK6jdT8Rr-ONCU5ALe7Zr2P8CRtv3hxxBfIRg7INSx45xxow6gTAlkYZ-rUmWTV2ftAXWpTHRlkGfCWbYl45yEUR6TCq6BW8czRsSZBrN8lxNeerCJCCFM3tq0RG-J/s3975/IMG_9368.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3975" data-original-width="2713" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6Kd23Wp10ApD0jrZnZC3DkVextsciJ8p55PdL6NV5CAWbPG7IoDXEnyZxfAfK6jdT8Rr-ONCU5ALe7Zr2P8CRtv3hxxBfIRg7INSx45xxow6gTAlkYZ-rUmWTV2ftAXWpTHRlkGfCWbYl45yEUR6TCq6BW8czRsSZBrN8lxNeerCJCCFM3tq0RG-J/w271-h400/IMG_9368.jpg" width="271" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>So when I started reading Meg Rosoff's Carnegie Winner<i> Just in Case</i> and discovered that the central character is named Justin Case, that contract between the writer and this particular reader was immediately undermined. I mean, Justin's parents seem quite ineffectual, but I couldn't believe that <i>any</i> parents would deliberately do that to their child.</p><p>Justin lives in a weird world. It's a world where toddlers have complex thoughts well beyond their years and where Justin's imaginary dog is mysteriously visible to other people. It's a world where Justin reacts to a close shave—the little brother he's meant to be looking after nearly falls out of a window—by deciding that Fate is out to get him (Justin) and he's no longer safe anywhere. Fate in this book is a disembodied character who speaks in bold type. A lot of bad things happen to Justin, but who knows whether Fate has anything to do with it? Is he mentally ill? Is he imagining everything? I have no idea. I did not believe in Justin Case for a single second so that, despite the assured and often very funny writing, I found it a real struggle to finish this book. </p><p>You, of course, may well love it! These days when I go to the cinema or the theatre I'm astonished to hear people guffawing at things I don't think are remotely funny. Maybe there's a limit to how much laughing we can do in our lives and I used up too much watching Marx Brothers movies when I was a student. Of course, I'm not the intended audience for this book, but should that even make a difference? I'm also starting to think I must have been a very odd teenage boy because almost none of the teenage boys I've read about in Carnegie winners and elsewhere seem to be like any teenage boy I've ever known, and certainly not like me. I'd have to look to Jan Mark, maybe, and Robert Westall for characters I can relate to.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcgNHePk9Ip58OoS_RJPmdwLGqtW8wHx8ofyq_p0VkaTqyBPM-Gzfvb9iJ47P-MO-151hZm67xqaOtoSA4NnA4yGzqTLPd0UwIKH1THRXqmORya19Mgek4Fu_svyRoYgwWFbNP-KILu98-0qtJv05NO8p4iBZ7zPKGBouH0UmmEvJhlSfD6880-Q9f/s4032/IMG_9369.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="2591" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcgNHePk9Ip58OoS_RJPmdwLGqtW8wHx8ofyq_p0VkaTqyBPM-Gzfvb9iJ47P-MO-151hZm67xqaOtoSA4NnA4yGzqTLPd0UwIKH1THRXqmORya19Mgek4Fu_svyRoYgwWFbNP-KILu98-0qtJv05NO8p4iBZ7zPKGBouH0UmmEvJhlSfD6880-Q9f/w256-h400/IMG_9369.jpg" width="256" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>And then—Oh, wow!—I read Philip Reeve's <i>Here Lies Arthur</i>. It was almost like the clock had been turned back to the late 1950s when historical novels from OUP won the Carnegie almost every year. Except that Philip Reeve begins his <i>Author's Note</i> by saying: '<i>Here Lies Arthur</i> is not a historical novel, and in writing it I did not set out to portray"the real King Arthur", only to add my little thimbleful to the sea of stories which surrounds him.' </p><p>But this is an utterly believable story, even though it's all made up. I love the tag line on the cover: <i>Everyone's heard of Arthur. But no one's heard the truth . . .</i></p><p>Well, this is Philip Reeves's truth. Merlin is a storyteller, conman and chancer who attaches himself to a minor leader of a war band in the aftermath of the Roman departure from Britain. He plans to make Arthur into a great leader by spreading stories about him, creating a myth. He's a kind of sixth century spin-doctor for Arthur. So in one way this is a book about the power of story, and about people believing what they want to believe when they're given a little prompting by an expert manipulator. Merlin, or Myrddin as he's called here, is more of a conjurer than a magician. He loves tricks and illusions and so when he finds a young girl who is fleeing from a Saxon raid and who is a brilliant swimmer he sees a chance to create the illusion of a sword rising out of a misty lake.</p><p>Crisp, clear narrative with real drive, vivid scene setting, great dialogue. I felt an enormous sense of relief when I started reading, knowing at once that this was a book I could sink into and truly enjoy.</p><p>The girl, Gwyna, is the narrator of the story, and she spends a large part of the book disguised as a boy. As a boy she sees all the rough brutality of the lives of Arthur's soldiery, and then as a girl she is in the confidence of Arthur's wife, Gwenhwyfar. Another character, Peredur, has been brought up by his mother as a girl to prevent him being taken as a soldier. A lot of people are fooled in this book, in one way or another, which nicely underlines the point that nobody really knows anything about Arthur. In his <i>Author's Note</i> Philip Reeve recommends Kevin Crossley-Holland's <i>Arthur</i> trilogy and Paul White's <i>King Arthur—Man or Myth</i>. He also says his interest in Arthur was inspired by John Boorman's film <i>Excalibur! </i>But there's another book that's much closer in feel to <i>Here Lies Arthur</i> and that's Rosemary Sutcliff's <i>Sword at Sunset</i>.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjesETqM5DMx1Zt_fX9P1n28y8w5IPBnjVQbGrxjqS2_I9Fbr1c5wJGgICJFhLCUt5JhMHHSKv0j5AhUYTe8y6oUOy1ySiyoZcCNJHaa2ozR3EJRrZkFtP-7rPW6r1Tu5tjif6gIU4teILgRVZxLVL3tUoQjp_tnSkF0Fze7kTkoP6kT4VP3NuYnnbd/s4029/IMG_9370.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4029" data-original-width="2768" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjesETqM5DMx1Zt_fX9P1n28y8w5IPBnjVQbGrxjqS2_I9Fbr1c5wJGgICJFhLCUt5JhMHHSKv0j5AhUYTe8y6oUOy1ySiyoZcCNJHaa2ozR3EJRrZkFtP-7rPW6r1Tu5tjif6gIU4teILgRVZxLVL3tUoQjp_tnSkF0Fze7kTkoP6kT4VP3NuYnnbd/w275-h400/IMG_9370.jpg" width="275" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>Sutcliff's book also attempts to imagine what a real Arthur might have been like. <i>Sword at Sunset</i> follows on from the action of <i>The Lantern Bearer</i>s, and this Arthur, too, is the leader of a band of mounted cavalry trying to keep the Saxon invaders at bay. It is a long and incredibly detailed account of a military campaign lasting for years. It deals with the procurement and breeding of war horses capable of bearing armoured warriors; it deals with the logistics of keeping a band of 300 men (and camp followers) fed and watered. There is extreme violence, rape, murder and treachery (Philip Reeve's version has most of this too), and at its heart is a portrait of a damaged man. Many of Sutcliff's heroes are physically damaged, but Arthur is mentally scarred after he is seduced by his half-sister who bears him a child that she rears in hate to betray Arthur. She may or may not be a witch, but she is bitter and revengeful at her mother's abandonment by Arthur's father.</p><p>That encounter at the start of the book leaves Arthur impotent, unable, save on one occasion, to consummate his marriage to Guenhamara. Sutcliff is interested in bitter misunderstandings between men and women, which reflect her own experiences, but while that element of the plot does make Arthur a more complex character, it isn't the plot that makes this such a great book. A lesser writer might have made Arthur's betrayal by his son the whole reason for Arthur's downfall, but what Sutcliff shows is a gradual erosion of the power and willingness to fight of the British; a gradual dawning of the awareness that the Saxons are not going to go away and that larger historical forces are in play. In the end, as in Philip Reeve's book, it is the myth of Arthur, not his force of arms, that will carry the dream of Britain through the Dark Ages.</p><p>Of course, you do have to buy into the 'Romano-British (and Celts)= good, Saxons, Angles, Scots and Jutes = bad' idea, and, indeed, into the concept of 'The Dark Ages'. You also have to not mind Sutcliff's occasional archaism: 'Sa, sa. It is in my mind that the Saxons will attack at dawn.' I made that up, but there's quite a bit of that kind of thing. But on the whole I felt I'd been immersed for 450 pages in a completely believable world, and as for Sutcliff's descriptions of nature, landscape and weather, they are second to none.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuvlT_tjaF4geyI4TVPnIDvyKTJB7tG1du00OsEG32TYavdETMYnbKsmpaF2sgjaTY-6JVpYYMyHYCFWDm8QZcKrm-THW3FuGuYt061HlwzWeTSkqzl30KUcxmL4JJrA5VYnhAA9aFXtH3KkWLTeHIIT8ayebfDPcnRFxfqmS28_69pUyUSI8hxEGm/s3805/IMG_9372.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3805" data-original-width="2496" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuvlT_tjaF4geyI4TVPnIDvyKTJB7tG1du00OsEG32TYavdETMYnbKsmpaF2sgjaTY-6JVpYYMyHYCFWDm8QZcKrm-THW3FuGuYt061HlwzWeTSkqzl30KUcxmL4JJrA5VYnhAA9aFXtH3KkWLTeHIIT8ayebfDPcnRFxfqmS28_69pUyUSI8hxEGm/w263-h400/IMG_9372.jpg" width="263" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><i>Sword at Sunset</i> and <i>Here Lies Arthur</i> both try to imagine a version of what the real Arthur might have been like. Kevin Crossley-Holland's <i>Arthur</i> trilogy does something rather different, imagining the mediaeval world out of which the legend of Arthur arose. So it shows us, in great and vividly depicted detail, life in late twelfth century England and then in Europe as Crusaders gather in Venice. In these books, twelfth century Arthur is first a page, and then a knight who 'takes the cross' and goes off on a crusade. He's able to look in a 'seeing stone' given him by Merlin to see events in the court of the mythical Arthur, with his round table and all the acoutrements of the Arthur who Malory invented a couple of centuries later. <p></p><p>The final book in the series, which I just re-read, is very dark in many ways, but in different ways to Sutcliff and Philip Reeve. There is murder, rape and treachery here, too, but there is also the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. With Reeve and Sutcliff we see Christianity in its infancy in Britain, and both books show how the old Roman and Celtic religions still have power. In Kevin Crossley-Holland's books, priests condemn love, banish women and children from the Crusade and endorse the slaughter of Infidels, and, really, anyone who gets in the way of retaking the 'Holy Places'. The Church takes almost as thorough a beating here as it does in Philip Pullman's <i>Northern Lights</i> trilogy. I remember writing a while back that I felt Kevin Crossley-Holland's <i>Storm</i> was a bit slight for a Carnegie winner. Perhaps I can make up for that by saying that if I'd been making the decision in 2003 I'd have given the award to <i>Arthur—King of the Middle March.</i></p><p>As Philip Reeve says, these books are a good way in to the world of Arthur. Kevin Crossley-Holland also wrote an excellent compilation of stories and information about Arthur full of lovely illustrations by Peter Malone called <i>The King Who Was and Will Be.</i></p><p><i><br /></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimZ6-sPfjncARob9ycwKzMRkOoFpJ6LzaAL_IiSt_e5wAyl1DnsiwAY1TYwG4EZ2be53YdKfBQl0H1LgGWkFxM1h8fMHIHomX3Se8_qEGJXl0zsJxlrA8fZelmeQlrXtEhW0n-bOIVZepxpSs0MuQDk0oEIaFOrzLdIeQ_N9iMEX6t6pqolxrYpqLS/s3697/IMG_9371.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3697" data-original-width="2712" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimZ6-sPfjncARob9ycwKzMRkOoFpJ6LzaAL_IiSt_e5wAyl1DnsiwAY1TYwG4EZ2be53YdKfBQl0H1LgGWkFxM1h8fMHIHomX3Se8_qEGJXl0zsJxlrA8fZelmeQlrXtEhW0n-bOIVZepxpSs0MuQDk0oEIaFOrzLdIeQ_N9iMEX6t6pqolxrYpqLS/w294-h400/IMG_9371.jpg" width="294" /></a></i></div><i><br /></i><p></p><p>One last thing—my copy of <i>Sword at Sunset</i> is a horrible book club edition with small blurry type on browning paper, and it has NO MAPS! Can anyone tell me which is the best edition of this book? The American one? The original Hodder one? I can't tell looking at them online.</p><p>Originally published on ABBA February 2024</p><div><br /></div>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-66155031746288261422024-01-06T13:17:00.001+00:002024-01-06T13:21:32.450+00:00One Eye on the Grown-up<p>What interested me most, when I started reading the Carnegie Medal winning books from the beginning, was the prospect of discovering books and authors I'd never heard of, or who I'd heard of but had never read. I spent a lot of time, early on, exploring the backgrounds and connections of some of those authors, and I'm glad I did, especially in the case of Walter de la Mare whose novels, <i>Memoirs of a Midget</i> and <i>The Three Royal Monkeys </i>are truly extraordinary books which I doubt are much read today. Reading those early winners was a kind of literary archaeology, but now that I've entered the new millennium I'm not having quite as much fun, and I'm wondering why?</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw6rAAjLdTlGGViHujDsRJKSqZNr_p7-VOwGDT6w1rvQK5oB064sb3HR_k9T4e9km2uZsee9MnalApurjW527Y2MLgashorWM8dJUEJdywCqk-iZ_d0XXdJbtt1Zh1EB7wcKSJUcAHWVJeZYjVK7QCl_0k8E99IAEy-v6RxEJuSywqCnzcP-H9cDgc/s4032/IMG_9118.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw6rAAjLdTlGGViHujDsRJKSqZNr_p7-VOwGDT6w1rvQK5oB064sb3HR_k9T4e9km2uZsee9MnalApurjW527Y2MLgashorWM8dJUEJdywCqk-iZ_d0XXdJbtt1Zh1EB7wcKSJUcAHWVJeZYjVK7QCl_0k8E99IAEy-v6RxEJuSywqCnzcP-H9cDgc/w300-h400/IMG_9118.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><br />I am a confirmed re-reader of books I love. I don't know if this is a bad thing or not, but after reading a dozen or so new books I usually find myself going to the bookshelves and taking down a John le Carré, for example, or a thriller that I remember enjoying but read long enough ago to have forgotten the plot. I have other literary habits that appal my friends. If a book is tense I look at the end to make sure the protagonist makes it through. I'll do the same thing with movies sometimes, and if a series doesn't really grab me, or I don't think it's worth the investment of time, I'll watch the last episode just to see what happens. And then recently I wondered which of the Carnegie winners I've read so far I fancied re-reading. I almost hate to confess—that book is <i>Pigeon Post</i> by Arthur Ransome, the very first winner published 88 years ago (and still in print!) <p></p><p>So I read it again last week (for perhaps the fifth time). Despite the fact that an adult (and especially one who has read it before) can see what's going to happen, I can still get completely immersed in the story and especially in the place. It feels to me as if Arthur Ransome's Lake District is a place which I have real memories of, and that's strange because the Lake District in Ransome's books is the Lake District of<i> his</i> childhood and of his memory. It was already changed when he wrote about it. And in many ways, in its details, it's also an <i>imaginary</i> place. The geography is almost like a dream geography, familiar but somehow altered. It's the same with the geography of the Norfolk Broads where other Ransome books were set. My mother still lives in Horning and the real Horning is like a strangely altered version of the one in the books, and always was.</p><p>The other thing that really stood out on this re-reading was the brilliance of Ransome's handling of the children's imaginative play. He offers a range of perspectives on this. There's Dorothea, the budding novelist turning everything they do into a melodramatic romance. Dorothea is contrasted directly with her brother Dick, the scientist, for whom Nancy's overarching fantasy of being Wild West gold-rush prospectors, staking claims and fending off enemies, is almost irrelevant. When he wants to know more about how to test for gold he's all for consulting an adult, even the one who Nancy has cast as their mortal enemy.</p><p>Nancy is really interesting in this book. It's almost as if she's <i>making</i> herself carry her fantasies through, but every so often we see flashes of another, more mature person. Ransome knows that his readers aren't stupid. They know that all the stuff about pirates and prospecting for gold is make-belief, and it makes it even more real when we see that the children in the story know this too, and are able to switch at will between their fantasies and the real world. But what I really want to say is that this is most definitely a <i>children's</i> book.</p><p>Ransome liked to tell people that they should never write for a particular audience—that they should only write stories they themselves wanted to read. I think it's reasonable to say that Ransome was writing for the child in himself, but I'm pretty sure he knew where the money was, and when he wanted to write a story about evacuees at the beginning of the war he acceded readily to his publishers' prohibition. No war on any account.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaxfhYOdl9BcaX_ZNouyO_JkWvNicHqmssnySnWP1oH_ZNB7XzIEApXYbzHtcZgLLe8yU1CN5vWCnMx2ReLIyMI4tZRW1x8MJCxkUroPLqkB8rd_-HfE1DQLaHacccaOj_SUydXTHInXLmz4Ewk2GbI7QHGBcycrfCq-G1TrO8ys8dq29bSy6v5jF1/s4032/IMG_9116.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaxfhYOdl9BcaX_ZNouyO_JkWvNicHqmssnySnWP1oH_ZNB7XzIEApXYbzHtcZgLLe8yU1CN5vWCnMx2ReLIyMI4tZRW1x8MJCxkUroPLqkB8rd_-HfE1DQLaHacccaOj_SUydXTHInXLmz4Ewk2GbI7QHGBcycrfCq-G1TrO8ys8dq29bSy6v5jF1/w300-h400/IMG_9116.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><br />And so, back to the 21st century. With <i>Ruby Holler</i>, the 2002 winner, Sharon Creech became the first writer from the USA to win the Carnegie. Despite its pacy style and humour I didn't find this one particularly memorable and one aspect of it brought to mind T H White's comment on Arthur Ransome: "He does not write with one eye on the grown-up, as I do, but seems to be a pleasantly childish man himself.'<p></p><p>Writing with one eye on the grown-up has been a flaw in quite a few Carnegie winners, and at times <i>Ruby Holler</i> seems more like a treatise on parenting than a book for children, as though the author was hoping to get through to parents who are reading the book to their kids.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuH_qL4MzdcxUq4PHW7TSiENHp8rdAEuXfuRioLdKgEYIopfvMLRL9ATAvL0rKyxx-XUGTpjxnYerhA4ExSo1pQvKHDxNzqY1c7EoaZjaOetoG6u4v4YZ3eAek-lktKsSNa6-Eml_oP4PCgz4YUIsltKYVR1baP3TScGZPEQQ1tDLqkJ-HVMdPMsHj/s4032/IMG_9114.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuH_qL4MzdcxUq4PHW7TSiENHp8rdAEuXfuRioLdKgEYIopfvMLRL9ATAvL0rKyxx-XUGTpjxnYerhA4ExSo1pQvKHDxNzqY1c7EoaZjaOetoG6u4v4YZ3eAek-lktKsSNa6-Eml_oP4PCgz4YUIsltKYVR1baP3TScGZPEQQ1tDLqkJ-HVMdPMsHj/w300-h400/IMG_9114.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><br />Next, in 2003, we had Jennifer Donnelly's <i>A Gathering Light,</i> the second American winner. It's a very good read—a brilliant mix of fact and fiction (it concerns an historical murder case and includes original letters). I liked it very much but it does seem bizarre to me that this book sits in the same list of winners as <i>Pigeon Post</i> and <i>The Borrowers</i>. It was marketed as 'Young Adult' fiction and much read by adults. It's not surprising that it found a wider audience among grown-ups because it's a book which is very sure-footed in its handling of sex, and I always feel that that it's the uncertain handling of this tricky area which is one of the main distinguishing features of books categorised as YA.<p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUVuPZhdEkQDz3lu9H9PpI03YclWhrMRVEpyviown1_8IjPB12OEdq-4jC7ZAY7_vpLCEldULx0-w_N3v250lKd6DIgBIJG4j3TeiUsagEaS_VxDqpmsv4-6wheG2LqXAy3bLeI30qeRZ1TTD0jZIyibVAod2Cz8AVi9LEh2BISTsK0YyuNjEw1ntp/s4032/IMG_9115.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUVuPZhdEkQDz3lu9H9PpI03YclWhrMRVEpyviown1_8IjPB12OEdq-4jC7ZAY7_vpLCEldULx0-w_N3v250lKd6DIgBIJG4j3TeiUsagEaS_VxDqpmsv4-6wheG2LqXAy3bLeI30qeRZ1TTD0jZIyibVAod2Cz8AVi9LEh2BISTsK0YyuNjEw1ntp/w300-h400/IMG_9115.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><br />Then in 2004 we have a genuine <i>children's</i> book, <i>Millions</i> by Frank Cottrell Boyce. It's funny, witty, moving and a Danny Boyle movie, and I was hooked from the start because I collect school mission statements. They are often hilarious, as Frank Cottrell Boyce has noticed:<p></p><p>'It was our first day at Great Ditton Primary. The sign outside says, "Great Ditton Primary—Creating Excellence for a new Community".</p><p>'See that?' said Dad as he left us at the gates. 'Good isn't good enough here. Excellence, that's what they're after. My instruction for the day is, "Be excellent."'</p><p>In <i>Millions</i>, two boys find a bag containing squillions of pounds in banknotes earmarked for destruction as the UK switches to the Euro. They are also grieving as their mother has recently died. I love this book—who would have thought you could write something so funny about grief? And if you've tried spending cash in London lately you'll have some extra sympathy for the boys trying to get rid of the money. It's also worth noting that this book contains the first mention of the Internet among Carnegie winners. Damien gets his info about saints from www.totallysaints.com and I have a feeling the publishers put up a spoof website for that address once, but now it just takes you to an error message on the Pan Macmillan website. The boys also use the Internet to find out about the robbery of the money.</p><p>Damien's older brother Anthony is a great character. When a bully tries to steal their Pringles at lunchtime he tells the boy their mother is dead. 'On the way to the playground, Anthony said, "Works every time. Tell them your mum's dead and they give you stuff."'</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtBWOjgyAkzSjp13ctWwiS45IvB-fudNrtaEnbLRKxz5WqJ3sL5S2FWvsVREa6i-RmrYAqthVyoknteTIN6TEXm_Aoa6hNW795GyhC1jpEqXAgf-8Q6Y1w6gaB0HyvBa0l09VdiQir8Gyl32vRv5pgs0OfgC6nztlEiTgSjv42Fn5j9CVHS_jFNcB9/s4032/IMG_9117.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtBWOjgyAkzSjp13ctWwiS45IvB-fudNrtaEnbLRKxz5WqJ3sL5S2FWvsVREa6i-RmrYAqthVyoknteTIN6TEXm_Aoa6hNW795GyhC1jpEqXAgf-8Q6Y1w6gaB0HyvBa0l09VdiQir8Gyl32vRv5pgs0OfgC6nztlEiTgSjv42Fn5j9CVHS_jFNcB9/w300-h400/IMG_9117.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><br />And now a fourth book, because I really want to finish these Carnegie winners in 2024. This is Mal Peet's <i>Tamar, </i>the 2005 winner<i>.</i> Mal Peet was a wonderful writer and there's no doubt that Tamar is a terrific book, but I've always felt uneasy about it<i>.</i> It feels to me as if there is an excellent adult novel set in WW2 at the heart of it, which isn't improved by the addition of a modern day plot featuring a teenage girl named Tamar trying to unravel her grandfather's past. There will be spoilers in this next bit. <p></p><p>The main story is set in the aftermath of the Battle of Arnhem, previously used as a setting for Aidan Chambers' 1999 winner, <i>Postcards From No Man's Land</i>. Two young Dutch men are parachuted into the occupied Netherlands to organise the Resistance in preparation for the next Allied advance. What follows is a tale of amphetamine-fuelled jealousy, betrayal and murder which takes place against a brilliantly realised background of the increasingly desperate and brutal German occupation.</p><p>In the present day, Tamar's grandfather kills himself (she imagines herself to be named after the river). He leaves behind a set of clues to lead her both back to her missing father, and to the truth of what happened during the war. Because it's essential to this plot that the reader doesn't know which of the two young Dutchmen survived the war and married the girl, they are only ever referred to by their false Dutch identities or by their Resistance codenames—Tamar and Dart. </p><p>This is unfortunate because it adds a small irritation to the wartime sections and makes the reader constantly aware that there is something plotty going on. Without that irritation you would have a wartime resistance story as good as anything I've read published for adults, or better. Admittedly, the modern-day plot is well done, and I was glad that it provided some relief from the almost unbearable tension of the wartime story, but I still maintain it would have been a better book without it, albeit harder to market as YA (a category which, like all categories, Mal Peet hated.)</p><p>It's interesting that so many Carnegie winners have been set during WW2 and so few deal with the Cold War. The imaginations of those growing up in the 1950s and 60s were shaped at least as much by the threat of nuclear war as by the shadow of WW2. Mal Peet went on to fill that gap with his <i>Life, An Exploded Diagram</i>, published in 2011. That, for me, is his best book, although his <i>funniest</i> book is <i>The Murdstone Trilogy</i>, a wonderfully entertaining satire on the publishing industry published in 2014, not long before Mal Peet's untimely death in 2015. Please, please, do go and watch<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZZyskrmE6o" target="_blank"> this interview on YouTube from 2015.</a> It's great.</p><p>Originally published on ABBA January 2024</p>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-71315467052325789362024-01-05T11:10:00.002+00:002024-01-05T11:12:17.661+00:00Lost for Words<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitn4SJforAeZ-_1yGc81oQqz_RNlnJfVYRixZnes1jQ7KHl5y-VLLVDXfkUbCnK-6wWwRWdbCW89ChI9dNwpOonfncGtYLizoAwujtr_PMdc-Ul5AeU3sQEK3UshkaPtdPSJ05F42ujuqTNJssfpT8AzTWjoEIJ4PDz57ymp-RjWxpbKGDsFSlwdZK/s4032/IMG_9037.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitn4SJforAeZ-_1yGc81oQqz_RNlnJfVYRixZnes1jQ7KHl5y-VLLVDXfkUbCnK-6wWwRWdbCW89ChI9dNwpOonfncGtYLizoAwujtr_PMdc-Ul5AeU3sQEK3UshkaPtdPSJ05F42ujuqTNJssfpT8AzTWjoEIJ4PDz57ymp-RjWxpbKGDsFSlwdZK/w300-h400/IMG_9037.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><p> </p><br />I've read more than 60 Carnegie Medal winning books now, and I've found none of them more difficult to write about than Beverley Naidoo's <i>The Other Side of Truth</i>. It belongs to a loose category of winners that appear to originate in an author's desire to educate their readers. Social realism I suppose. I'd include Berlie Doherty's books here, and probably Melvin Burgess's Junk. It's not surprising that adults writing for children should be interested in the effect their writing has on those readers. Here's Beverley Naidoo on why she writes:<p></p><p>"I am frequently asked, 'Have you a message in what you write?' My reply is that writing fiction is quite different from declaiming from a soapbox or through a microphone. I do not write to deliver a 'message'. Yet I believe passionately in the importance of literature that engages with life and our moral human universe."</p><p><i>The Other Side of Truth</i> shines a light on the abuses of the military dictatorship in Nigeria in the late twentieth century and on the plight of refugees and asylum seekers arriving in the UK. It does this through the experiences of two young children, Sade and Femi, whose mother is shot dead as they prepare for school in the morning, and who are then smuggled onto a flight to London, where they are abandoned and robbed before being helped by police, social workers and foster parents.</p><p>This book was written before the days of the 'hostile environment' or the government plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. And, by the way, I saw a survey the other day that indicated most Tory voters thought that the plan was for asylum seekers to be sent to Rwanda for processing before successful applicants were returned to this country. That is <i>not</i> the plan. Successful applicants for asylum would be resettled in Rwanda and unsuccessful ones returned to their country of origin.</p><p>Back in 2000, in this book, the police were kind, the social workers seemed to have time to be gentle and patient with the traumatised children, and an item on Channel 4 News was enough to save the family from deportation. Things have definitely not improved since then.</p><p>There's no doubt that books like this do a great job. They are incredibly useful in schools to provide a focus for discussion of the many issues they raise and the Internet is full of essays written by young people about this book. Most of those address the central dilemma of the book—should I tell the truth? Or, should I always tell the truth? Or, is telling the truth always the right thing to do? I have to admit that by the end I was suffering from dilemma fatigue.</p><p>I admire this book and I think it's very well written, pitched just right for the ages it's aimed at. It has a straightforward style and the characters are vivid. You can hear the 'but' coming, can't you? There are two buts. The first is the one I've just mentioned—a little too much hammering away at the truth dilemma. The second is that I would really have liked to have seen some exploration of the attitudes of the other children in Sade's class at school, and especially of the two bullies, Marcia and Donna. They are a bit too much like cartoon baddies. These are minor things, yet for me they reduced my engagement with the text and I suppose that's why I've found it so hard to think about and write about. And it's why, although I think it's a worthy Carnegie winner, it won't end up in my top ten. Unlike the 2001 winner, which leaps straight into my top five.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw5ZS4tozzxAkkRWu_0GxYHQE2j-wcoX2gD0nYAmNG54ZJZIHsKgpK5Xa0C9-VPwY-9313A8M6fMAuBj3B5iQVmnOUD7R2y45MNA2WHBOJ6bD1CWtvLQDGVLjhhj2rkl007Xry92F0aP1P3rzG11KUjUqrOGKKLanOjTLP4zdwBGvr2M1lLicE_Rgh/s4032/IMG_9038.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw5ZS4tozzxAkkRWu_0GxYHQE2j-wcoX2gD0nYAmNG54ZJZIHsKgpK5Xa0C9-VPwY-9313A8M6fMAuBj3B5iQVmnOUD7R2y45MNA2WHBOJ6bD1CWtvLQDGVLjhhj2rkl007Xry92F0aP1P3rzG11KUjUqrOGKKLanOjTLP4zdwBGvr2M1lLicE_Rgh/w300-h400/IMG_9038.JPG" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><p><i>The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents</i> by Terry Pratchett is, quite simply, one of the best children's books I've ever read. I can't do better than to quote some of the reviews of the book :</p><p>Powerful, passionate, mordantly funny and, at one point, unbearably sad—Daily Telegraph</p><p>An astonishing novel . . . I marvelled at the ferociousness of the humour, and the willingness to go to dark places—Financial Times</p><p>Despite being mainly about talking cats and rats 'it engages with life and our moral human universe.' to use Beverley Naidoo's words. You might think it odd that I could be moved to tears by the plight of a talking, thinking cat and a bunch of talking, thinking rats when the plight of two vulnerable, grief-stricken children lost on the streets of London didn't affect me in the same way, but that's what truly great writing can do.</p><p>This book has everything—dark places indeed, and very smelly ones too; it has metafiction in Malicia, a girl who has read so many stories that she is sure that, for example, any locked room will have a secret passage to escape by; it has heroes and villains, all remarkably realised; and above all it has humour—humour with an edge to it. It also has one remarkable insight which should be noted by peace negotiators everywhere, even though it comes from a talking cat:</p><p>'That's <i>it</i>?' (says Maurice) 'That's your plan?'</p><p>'You don't think it'll work?' said Keith. 'Malicia says he'll be so embarrassed he'll leave.'</p><p>'You don't know anything about people, do you?' sighed Maurice.</p><p>'What? I'm a person!' said Malicia.</p><p>'So? <i>Cats</i> know about people. We have to. No one else can open cupboards. Look, even the rat king has a better plan than that. A good plan isn't one where someone wins, it's where nobody thinks they've <i>lost</i>. Understand?'</p><p>This, you will probably be surprised to learn, is the first Terry Pratchett book I have read. I did start another one once, a long time ago, and it didn't grab me. I regret that now, but on the other hand I now have more than forty of his books still to read. And I guess I'm predisposed to like stories about talking rats as <i>Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh </i>by Robert C. O'Brien has long been a favourite of mine.</p><p>Both <a href="https://beverleynaidoo.com/writing-the-other-side-of-truth/" target="_blank">Beverley Naidoo</a> and <a href="https://www.terrypratchettbooks.com/about-sir-terry/" target="_blank">Sir Terry Pratchett</a> have excellent websites.</p><div>Originally published on ABBA December 2023</div>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-17715422202486825092024-01-05T11:08:00.002+00:002024-01-05T11:08:46.704+00:00Why I Write<p> <span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Eagle-eyed readers of this blog may have noticed that it is a long time since I published a children’s book. Lately I’ve been working on sorting out my large archive of photographs of Scotland which I’ve taken over the past 50 years and more. I’ve been compiling the images into a book, and putting them into context, because photographs of mountains and islands and lochs and people mean very little unless you know when and why and how they were taken, and who the people are. </span></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW5-r_hO6NVtjExhorZHIpLS72jLisxk4GtQswBz8LCSKtWNyh_lqRiX8yQM6nTRJpBg8dFSYOMpFK4DZIpbUXA6Zijw5a7gQgPTp2Cqt7JtHhP7ADCAj5X7eTVD7AC-o6jN0wwvZcPFPW8LufEU9fM_Ikj2uUwTldkIjWt7JQhrSn136f_ERkEhUS/s3917/skye66-Edit.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2571" data-original-width="3917" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW5-r_hO6NVtjExhorZHIpLS72jLisxk4GtQswBz8LCSKtWNyh_lqRiX8yQM6nTRJpBg8dFSYOMpFK4DZIpbUXA6Zijw5a7gQgPTp2Cqt7JtHhP7ADCAj5X7eTVD7AC-o6jN0wwvZcPFPW8LufEU9fM_Ikj2uUwTldkIjWt7JQhrSn136f_ERkEhUS/w400-h263/skye66-Edit.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Ellie on the Isle of Skye, March 2003</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: times;">From the perspective of what I suppose I must call age I feel as though I am viewing my life from a mountaintop, and I see how some of those now distant events cluster closely together, and how there are periods where the ordinary business of life goes on, untroubled by big events.</span><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: times;">I decided to stop teaching full-time and try to write children’s books in 1993. Just as I did so, my wife’s, Ellie’s, mother had a stroke which changed her life </span><span style="font-family: times;">and ours too</span><span style="font-family: times;">—she spent the rest of her life in care homes. Then, in 1994, Ellie was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the very same time she was applying, then in her late 30s, to do a degree at UEA. During the next nine years she finished her degree (with a First) completed an MA (with Distinction) and embarked on a fully funded Phd. Then, in October 2003, she died.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">While she was doing all that she was undergoing major surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and I was writing children’s books. All of my children’s books (the ones with my name on the cover, that is) were written between the time Ellie was diagnosed and the time she died, and I think that, during that time, we lived with a kind of furious intensity. It wasn’t competitive, it was just that we were so aware of how little time there might be and, eventually, how little time there actually was. While writing about this time though, I realised that illness and death are not that interesting. Anyone who has seen death will tell you that it is a very ordinary thing that we all do. What <i>is</i> interesting is how people respond to illness and death—what they do about it.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKaAS8i4Pbl7FtTmZIinpWsROzrdd-S_wIK8A0o9TBw-sYToxffVyrjRc-SbNcGnecM-mz1OYWX147lCw6WbwCPXcA-Q4E6fqsR5PYNKyZujSiD9oa7RHex0MyPZqTkZ-2uwaNeSYGE3bdeTC9Q87AaBIjKJiVtzvl2XvEQUcfwz3GhNxhECD2p9k5/s640/IMG_2381.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKaAS8i4Pbl7FtTmZIinpWsROzrdd-S_wIK8A0o9TBw-sYToxffVyrjRc-SbNcGnecM-mz1OYWX147lCw6WbwCPXcA-Q4E6fqsR5PYNKyZujSiD9oa7RHex0MyPZqTkZ-2uwaNeSYGE3bdeTC9Q87AaBIjKJiVtzvl2XvEQUcfwz3GhNxhECD2p9k5/w400-h400/IMG_2381.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Ellie's gravestone in Monk Soham churchyard.<br />It was designed and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2014/aug/06/david-holgate-obituary" target="_blank">carved by David Holgate </a><br /><br />The inscription reads: <br /><i>The world is still beautiful though you are not in it.</i><br />The line is from a poem by Sorley Maclean <br />and used by permission</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I didn’t stop writing after Ellie’s death; the habit was far too deeply ingrained by then, but the book I wrote next was very dark and I don’t think it was very good either. My agent didn’t like the first material I sent her, but I’d inherited a bit of cash and I could afford to write without a contract (or so I thought) so I finished the book, and in the end my publisher turned it down. Back then, and I don’t know if it’s the same today, if you missed your slot with a publisher it was a case of starting all over again. So I started writing another book that my agent wasn’t very keen on.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I never managed to make that book into something that was publishable and I do wonder, looking back, what exactly was that mysterious ingredient that enabled me, during those outwardly difficult years to write a series of life-affirming, entertaining books. And the funny thing is that when, a few years later, my original publisher approached me to do some ‘fee-based work’ I had absolutely no trouble writing books with other people or under other names. I even enjoyed it.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Nowadays I have no urge to write for publication. Every so often I take the unpublished typescripts out of the drawer and think about whether there’s anything to be done with them. I have other shorter fiction, too, that I know doesn’t quite work. Maybe I could do something with them. Maybe. But it would take time and energy, and even if I did make them publishable (according to me) I’d still be faced with the task of persuading other people to agree with me. I have other things to do, and other kinds of writing to do.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The books I’ve written lately have been for a small audience of family and friends—books about bicycle travels and family history, and now about the two things combined. It’s fun and interesting to do and full of similar challenges to all those earlier books. I love the fact that nowadays you can produce a completely professional-looking book all by yourself in an edition of one. Here, for example, are a few spreads for the book I wrote for my train-obsessed grandson when he was about 5 years old.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_GX3aNgpcziqpZqrNbN3a7TKUSuKxXrSRdUo4ETtqJgHVJ2piikP5MnxDKHDrvFT9gywTGQmXdxVPow4S3KOSRuxOPfJTldZA7Nrv7aTafPDLKXpoPoUVi5_PHBJlTD6kxSBvrhhhLipMz4IZqzOfl63-VAiRocq6kHYrhc78C40fo69iriWnaRaL/s3258/Screenshot%202023-10-30%20at%2007.23.53.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1596" data-original-width="3258" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_GX3aNgpcziqpZqrNbN3a7TKUSuKxXrSRdUo4ETtqJgHVJ2piikP5MnxDKHDrvFT9gywTGQmXdxVPow4S3KOSRuxOPfJTldZA7Nrv7aTafPDLKXpoPoUVi5_PHBJlTD6kxSBvrhhhLipMz4IZqzOfl63-VAiRocq6kHYrhc78C40fo69iriWnaRaL/w400-h195/Screenshot%202023-10-30%20at%2007.23.53.png" width="400" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM9hhqbbaH5Y7P0iej__45X9SirTeWrQvA3hbh8RxCIbPyzwiQTcF9Bi9Lb7tlXrQ_utDMC-4TsZG1PnO78mGMrM8Sd2bQDasoKoaNYlz36n6ECff_-xRN1Yxgn8aypG3n8ccKt19hrRYk0RM5Z1tdvIu2qiapIR4Uhyphenhyphen2b4o7wJpkewtwuZTRvKrGg/s3266/Screenshot%202023-10-30%20at%2007.25.26.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1610" data-original-width="3266" height="196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM9hhqbbaH5Y7P0iej__45X9SirTeWrQvA3hbh8RxCIbPyzwiQTcF9Bi9Lb7tlXrQ_utDMC-4TsZG1PnO78mGMrM8Sd2bQDasoKoaNYlz36n6ECff_-xRN1Yxgn8aypG3n8ccKt19hrRYk0RM5Z1tdvIu2qiapIR4Uhyphenhyphen2b4o7wJpkewtwuZTRvKrGg/w400-h196/Screenshot%202023-10-30%20at%2007.25.26.png" width="400" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgWJo3qhXmLNQ9jzrZa42pMmuOwqvEUvb8fRTQNkKBvkpQGYY07jq2wG0EvPG8VsaTJOQNN_Nzz4mPfqXxwbAbMN9X1uJIUU91GK0q6OdpSjj3E_FWap4sYw1VzVb9tdqqRi_okgpyTdDPCDOBwKvdt8ELz-6WnkJt-mHnILj7QYZUX7qeaN5rU9eN/s3278/Screenshot%202023-10-30%20at%2007.25.51.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1604" data-original-width="3278" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgWJo3qhXmLNQ9jzrZa42pMmuOwqvEUvb8fRTQNkKBvkpQGYY07jq2wG0EvPG8VsaTJOQNN_Nzz4mPfqXxwbAbMN9X1uJIUU91GK0q6OdpSjj3E_FWap4sYw1VzVb9tdqqRi_okgpyTdDPCDOBwKvdt8ELz-6WnkJt-mHnILj7QYZUX7qeaN5rU9eN/w400-h195/Screenshot%202023-10-30%20at%2007.25.51.png" width="400" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; text-align: left;">And of course I write this blog once a month. Apologies to anyone who was desperate to read about another Carnegie Medal winner. Normal service will be resumed next month.</span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: times;">I have another blog<a href="http://maypaul.blogspot.com" target="_blank"> here </a>where you can read about my books if you want to know more.</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"> Originally published on ABBA November 2023</span></o:p></p>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-46379577681559095272024-01-05T11:06:00.004+00:002024-01-05T11:06:44.021+00:00World War Two Wins the Carnegie—Again<p> <i style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYsKnYTU_u8O8ZTfRZBmtVJ10catg21qe5epX9TgkuuRiWjhAk3DuvQIJGOmFaitCe6FFOUK2hxrsomBwWqOGpR43Bt9IxowKLVbFJvYAxQL3uwALtL6gNGnlQ7Z2Y6hE6b8uIh4_xZscSTQMPTa5L5zcnIMHSgxX3OXGr2tL31O1HlsU91SkDw56m/s1280/IMG_8832.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYsKnYTU_u8O8ZTfRZBmtVJ10catg21qe5epX9TgkuuRiWjhAk3DuvQIJGOmFaitCe6FFOUK2hxrsomBwWqOGpR43Bt9IxowKLVbFJvYAxQL3uwALtL6gNGnlQ7Z2Y6hE6b8uIh4_xZscSTQMPTa5L5zcnIMHSgxX3OXGr2tL31O1HlsU91SkDw56m/w300-h400/IMG_8832.jpeg" width="300" /></a></i></p><i><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />Postcards From No Man's Land</i> by Aidan Chambers won the Carnegie in the year 2000. It's an important book in the history of the Carnegie because it's the first to address homosexuality and bi-sexuality directly, and it also contains extensive discussions about assisted dying, but I found it hard going, chiefly because I couldn't quite believe in the central character, Jacob. Chambers says in the Afterword of my edition of the book that he deliberately wrote Jacob's story in the third person in order to create some distance between reader and character. The book's second, linked storyline about a Dutch girl who falls for a wounded English airman during the battle of Arnhem is told in the first person. Aidan Chambers puts it like this:<p></p><p>"We live intimately with Geertrui, whereas we only travel alongside Jacob as a witnessing companion. And I suppose that's why so many readers have told me how much more moved they are by Geertrui's story than they are by Jacob's. They say they think about Jacob but they feel with Geertrui. And that was my intention."</p><p>I was meant to be distanced from Jacob, but I don't think I was meant to be quite as distanced as I was. I knew a lot of bookish grammar school boys - I was one myself - but I don't think I ever knew one quite like Jacob. As one reviewer says, 'Do young people <i>really</i> talk like this?' And as for Geertrui, I did enjoy this story more, but I couldn't quite shake the feeling that I was getting a history lesson as well as a love story, which was interrupted at intervals by Jacob's struggle through the symbolic labyrinths of Amsterdam. I sometimes felt as if I was reading a Lonely Planet guide, both to Amsterdam and to Jacob's inner emotional turmoil. </p><p>But this is a book <i>about</i> fiction as well as being fiction.. Here's Aidan Chambers again: </p><p>"One of the stories in Postcards is about love of a place, in this case Amsterdam. Another is about the love you can feel for a character in a book - Anne Frank, who was a real person, of course, but you can only know her by reading her book in which she is the main character. So Jacob is a fictional character who loves a real person, who he only knows because she is like a fictional character in a novel. Which is an example of the way Postcards weaves everyday reality with fiction, actual people and events with invented characters and events. Both are true in their own way."</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3SgbFumOO68bzkcG8Mm2gAQ_HkU3MWCub8CYlMhI1r8dWfPmofhdwkPSW-DjEdLhzva7eLx6JuMPIYtljSs7BTKIDo5z0N8fxdqEgs1Hztwq-_b7rlWJwg1to_ulC_oaTLKFTReNO75SXeXNaOQnwiEJZBb31SwEeCfIyQ2vukdW9TczyJVfI0iDv/s1280/IMG_8831.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3SgbFumOO68bzkcG8Mm2gAQ_HkU3MWCub8CYlMhI1r8dWfPmofhdwkPSW-DjEdLhzva7eLx6JuMPIYtljSs7BTKIDo5z0N8fxdqEgs1Hztwq-_b7rlWJwg1to_ulC_oaTLKFTReNO75SXeXNaOQnwiEJZBb31SwEeCfIyQ2vukdW9TczyJVfI0iDv/w300-h400/IMG_8831.jpeg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>That's the kind of book this is. With Aidan Chambers, expect meta-fiction. <i>Postcards</i> is part of the 'Dance Sequence' of seven novels and apparently contains the most straightforward narrative of all of them. I've only read one of the others, <i>Breaktime</i>. It's about Ditto, a clever, bookish, verbose grammar-school boy desperate to get laid, and about his relationship with his father, but at the same time it's a discussion of the value of fiction and literature. It's a clever, bookish book for 'new adults' full of lots of narrative tricks—parallel text, graphics, rapid shifts of point-of-view, play text—but I found this one more fun to read than <i>Postcards, </i>which is odd because Aidan Chambers believes that the more direct narrative in in <i>Postcards</i> is one reason it did so well. In the end though I think that Aidan Chambers's sixth-form boys just don't resonate with me and I've noticed that most of the enthusiastic reviews of <i>Postcards</i> are from female reviewers. But then, female reviewers also love my very favourite sixth-former, K M Peyton's Patrick Pennington.</p><p>Interestingly, on Ditto's bookshelves are Orwell, Lawrence, Joyce and Richard Brautigan. Those are the books I was reading when I was 13 or 14 and onwards, but we didn't spend our time during lunch-breaks and illegal gambling sessions in the common room discussing literature and moral philosophy. We talked about music and TV and movies and football and drugs and I think in the end it's the slight lack of all that in both these books that makes it so hard for me to engage with them. And if you've been reading Joyce I wonder how you'll feel about the Aidan Chambers books.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6T2duhVHOCdgHz7Jg6kYvJ_2eVHy4sG1GSfinjzaEHg0gtd5MLuECEitFlQxTE_n-LokQgkpJOC5tSoKXa7ZRx_UrqpHFN4Z9qSlCJnINITxo_ejDPCAY9HdvpdtP7kc0Jrx2ptuD93SSdlw1dhyphenhyphenhLJ7guP9N_ShS8knsTOmoYOVYR062dz4JVywM/s1280/IMG_8834.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6T2duhVHOCdgHz7Jg6kYvJ_2eVHy4sG1GSfinjzaEHg0gtd5MLuECEitFlQxTE_n-LokQgkpJOC5tSoKXa7ZRx_UrqpHFN4Z9qSlCJnINITxo_ejDPCAY9HdvpdtP7kc0Jrx2ptuD93SSdlw1dhyphenhyphenhLJ7guP9N_ShS8knsTOmoYOVYR062dz4JVywM/w300-h400/IMG_8834.jpeg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p>Don't let me put you off though. I have learned that if certain reviewers dislike a movie or a TV series then there's a fair chance that I'll love it. So if I don't enjoy something then plenty of others will think it's the best thing ever. As indeed proves to be the case. Aidan Chambers says that <i>Postcards From No Man's Land</i> 'brought me more awards and prizes than any of the other novels, as well as a great many appreciative letters and emails.' There are plenty of enthusiastic reviews of <i>Postcards From No Man's Land</i> on <a href="http://www.aidanchambers.co.uk" target="_blank">Aidan Chambers's website, </a>along with a huge amount of other information about him and his work.</p><p><i>Postcards from No Man's Land </i>is<i> </i>an interesting book, and an important one, and it's appropriate that, as the new century began, it looked both backwards to WW2 and forwards to a world of gender fluidity. Not that the Carnegie has finished with WW2 just yet.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCXKNFiREuYjlfji_24NlLqTk_-jqM3RtJ1R6OJISzuJPCe7gsHUgfT3CAK9EZ4TUjZlJ1grj28V_lFtgHfPgOrpyl8tK8Rn7gDbnnRJeyHxoUEss5LXaBepJLLOqLjWo7z-V1ub-10NeDq5p9IEI95Lnl8ulnz_FjGSDZcr1lgC39tYcHd7_vPGMh/s1280/IMG_8833.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCXKNFiREuYjlfji_24NlLqTk_-jqM3RtJ1R6OJISzuJPCe7gsHUgfT3CAK9EZ4TUjZlJ1grj28V_lFtgHfPgOrpyl8tK8Rn7gDbnnRJeyHxoUEss5LXaBepJLLOqLjWo7z-V1ub-10NeDq5p9IEI95Lnl8ulnz_FjGSDZcr1lgC39tYcHd7_vPGMh/w300-h400/IMG_8833.jpeg" width="300" /></a></div><br />Aidan Chambers has been hugely influential in the field of children's and YA literature and education. With his wife, Nancy, he founded the periodical, <i>Signal - Approaches to Children's Books</i>, which was published three times a year between 1970 and 2003 and was essential reading for anyone involved in education or children's literature. He also wrote extensively about children's reading, and <a href="http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2021/08/a-surprisingly-good-read-by-paul-may.html" target="_blank">wasn't afraid to have a pop at the Carnegie selection committee back in the 1960s</a>, so there's a nice circularity about him winning the award nearly 40 years later.<p></p><div>Originally published on ABBA October 2023</div><div><br /></div>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-40799439272150018222024-01-05T11:04:00.004+00:002024-01-05T11:04:37.246+00:00Realism and Magic Realism<p> <i>Junk</i> 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, <i>Northern Lights</i>. 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 <i>Stone Cold</i>, 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.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4yiSVGc2W71fu0IdllqoNjHe83Iy8GbqfEJN-GLHoPstbWJBvdLPtb3JdjonBcoMW5wr8jjxUkXXpQZ2RXp8ahDrdTiDfPPbkslKE4AwwuasEyYy-_6PQDYiGtWEKXM-g1wKhnnxhDGGC_qCoLIlgfNq66Xd5VvofsdvxR4ZfKF7S8644quVCSQpU/s4032/IMG_8613.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4yiSVGc2W71fu0IdllqoNjHe83Iy8GbqfEJN-GLHoPstbWJBvdLPtb3JdjonBcoMW5wr8jjxUkXXpQZ2RXp8ahDrdTiDfPPbkslKE4AwwuasEyYy-_6PQDYiGtWEKXM-g1wKhnnxhDGGC_qCoLIlgfNq66Xd5VvofsdvxR4ZfKF7S8644quVCSQpU/w300-h400/IMG_8613.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p>I'd read <i>Junk</i> before, many years ago, and it was its grim realism that I chiefly remembered. I think perhaps I didn't read it properly, because <i>Junk</i> 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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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: </p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">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</span></p><p>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.</p><p>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:</p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">"All that crap - about Gemma leaving me, about Mum and Dad, about leaving home. All that negative stuff. All the pain . . .</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">It just floated away from me. I just floated away from it . . . up and away."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Arthur Ransome was also looking for escape, but he had a very different way of finding it.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWZYK7eU1y7wbOzTh4lt05gVUkizowXR7HHR56NscVRBwrPT9IEjAGj6uDrZxW5B720n3ZEsY6UUQ4k8B-TV1Fr9KgdOcYiuYD_aBQMfnMg4zNsLdqEsjXXd537HkMGDLJFLAJixoN-4R1d3NTNXAwEPlDOSpNmVdKUQnIeJCAR8DWBUhBxoh3vlgc/s4032/IMG_8615.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWZYK7eU1y7wbOzTh4lt05gVUkizowXR7HHR56NscVRBwrPT9IEjAGj6uDrZxW5B720n3ZEsY6UUQ4k8B-TV1Fr9KgdOcYiuYD_aBQMfnMg4zNsLdqEsjXXd537HkMGDLJFLAJixoN-4R1d3NTNXAwEPlDOSpNmVdKUQnIeJCAR8DWBUhBxoh3vlgc/w300-h400/IMG_8615.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p><br />Tim Bowler's <i>River Boy</i> 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.</p><p>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.</p><p><a href="https://www.timbowler.co.uk" target="_blank">Tim Bowler's website</a> 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): </p><p style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">‘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.’</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-YCwuNk0Htwxz6YL-3-JHBUO9msStLNPrPM8PPdk01pWxkbtSYjOzgdnbiGw2KFeum5N4FG_vz29BHVJTt50h8cO4oPPtJ7-Cc-57Bf__6ldDBsTFowoLRCRtv0jqmkRoF1US9jW7M4Lz234_BiJR0alXjlGLC7FOcW84aTmaqdPCCjCcsynUDl45/s4032/IMG_8614.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-YCwuNk0Htwxz6YL-3-JHBUO9msStLNPrPM8PPdk01pWxkbtSYjOzgdnbiGw2KFeum5N4FG_vz29BHVJTt50h8cO4oPPtJ7-Cc-57Bf__6ldDBsTFowoLRCRtv0jqmkRoF1US9jW7M4Lz234_BiJR0alXjlGLC7FOcW84aTmaqdPCCjCcsynUDl45/w300-h400/IMG_8614.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><br />The theme of realism mixed with a supernatural element continued in the next winner, David Almond's <i>Skellig</i>. 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 <i>Skellig</i> 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. <p></p><p>It has suffered a terrible fate though. They <i>use</i> 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 <i>boring</i>, 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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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 <i>River Boy</i>, 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.</p><p><a href="http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2018/12/jan-marks-norfolk-by-paul-may.html" target="_blank">As I've mentioned in an earlier post on this blog</a>, 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 <i> this is wonderful, I want to do something like this</i>. <i>Skellig</i> 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.</p><p>Originally published on ABBA September 2023</p><p><br /></p>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-25316871160073334252023-08-31T16:05:00.003+01:002023-08-31T16:05:27.867+01:00Four More Carnegie Winners<p> So, here we are in the 1990s and we're starting to see more and more books about 'Issues'.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKrMLWFendvU1avghenu0HEWtCTs1OiWJmnCrgI5LzMwHs8Qo9l_TaBGdHYr9mqJhrPFdr_Q5ysa4TQjs7N_tthy5-mNgM-DDokAUBpWZ8jEnv2BJeqLLRUe089d-BY7q-po2RjEKw1tNsQFbIOT3ib4XCpjiidXNyL9ux0h0hy2VHXe6PJDa0S-RY/s4032/IMG_8487.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKrMLWFendvU1avghenu0HEWtCTs1OiWJmnCrgI5LzMwHs8Qo9l_TaBGdHYr9mqJhrPFdr_Q5ysa4TQjs7N_tthy5-mNgM-DDokAUBpWZ8jEnv2BJeqLLRUe089d-BY7q-po2RjEKw1tNsQFbIOT3ib4XCpjiidXNyL9ux0h0hy2VHXe6PJDa0S-RY/w300-h400/IMG_8487.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><br />In 1991 Berlie Doherty tackled teenage parenthood, and you might say that in 1992 Anne Fine was in the same territory, although while <i>Flour Babies</i> touches on some of the same issues as <i>Dear Nobody</i> it's also funny and poetic and beautifully constructed. It absolutely avoids any kind of preaching and I love the way the words and tune of an old song are woven into the final third of the book and contribute to its transformative climax. This book has a tremendous final paragraph and I do love a good ending. It's a shame I can't quote it but that really would be a spoiler.<p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz0-8fz-Xvo73ys8e17RAfLk2MBI-6ltBlrrqkV13BKIAY6xQbNhQaPNEyqu5_NmYCT81jiinwIhD3r0yIjBh3rwOYbSYlL7eJaMRVRreab5omzHRXXti6NxwnXk98seu2Uk4S4RjjrAERoZsQq8Bp0XIamhN9zegZS9rsq4-HD_h_Prdbq7mx-1M2/s4032/IMG_8488.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz0-8fz-Xvo73ys8e17RAfLk2MBI-6ltBlrrqkV13BKIAY6xQbNhQaPNEyqu5_NmYCT81jiinwIhD3r0yIjBh3rwOYbSYlL7eJaMRVRreab5omzHRXXti6NxwnXk98seu2Uk4S4RjjrAERoZsQq8Bp0XIamhN9zegZS9rsq4-HD_h_Prdbq7mx-1M2/w300-h400/IMG_8488.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br />Then in 1993 as a complete contrast there was <i>Stone Cold</i> by Robert Swindells, a bleak book with a central character who is all victim and has no agency whatsoever, and apparently no hope. It's a book, almost a documentary, about teenage homelessness, dressed up as a thriller about a serial killer preying upon homeless youths in London. I once wrote quite a grim book myself, all about death and stuff. My editors told me I needed to leave the readers with some hope at the end and I did try, but they still didn't publish it. Someone published this, though, and it has been much used in schools. It's not a book I would have ever wanted to read, but it has a good number of positive reviews on Amazon from young readers. I wonder if its grimness makes them feel glad they still have a roof over their heads? It is, without doubt, a cautionary tale. <p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_QSzCEWcx213JYvv2OqHfUgTWFxJu__duAW1vJ3Uu--bhU9wED4vRRn1tdkL9RjKD8JUW9JRKcrSSbYCdEsJt-Lt5_pnmgVdHnMiHeMt4i-2wqEVFTTh_g44umBnb0gC3TssFwmwhdDKzPE-NgvWKQRoHzKlGFgr9W5Qal1BzYLfNZM54MWIqALOO/s4032/IMG_8489.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_QSzCEWcx213JYvv2OqHfUgTWFxJu__duAW1vJ3Uu--bhU9wED4vRRn1tdkL9RjKD8JUW9JRKcrSSbYCdEsJt-Lt5_pnmgVdHnMiHeMt4i-2wqEVFTTh_g44umBnb0gC3TssFwmwhdDKzPE-NgvWKQRoHzKlGFgr9W5Qal1BzYLfNZM54MWIqALOO/w300-h400/IMG_8489.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br />Theresa Breslin's 1994 winner, <i>Whispers in the Graveyard</i> is an 'Issue' book too, the result of a conscious decision by its author to write about dyslexia and its impact. But as <a href="https://www.theresabreslin.com" target="_blank">Theresa Breslin says on her website</a> '... no point wittering on about dyslexia without a good going tale. Without a "story" the book would be that Solomon goes to school, has a rough time, comes home, has a rough time. So what?' <p></p><p>Well, quite. In <i>Stone Cold</i>, Link (the central character) has a rough time at home so he goes to London where he has a rough time, then a rougher time in Camden. At the end of the book he thinks he might try Covent Garden where I'm pretty sure he'll have a rough time. Robert Swindells' answer to the potential lack of narrative drive was to add that parallel story about a serial killer, but the serial killer is a kind of Marvel comics character and the element of caricature sits uneasily with the 'realism' of the street scenes. </p><p><i>Whispers in the Graveyard</i>, on the other hand, feels like a completely organic melding of horror and realism, and when you read what Theresa Breslin says about the book's creation you can see why: "It meshed together unlike anything else I've ever known - the solitary grave, Solomon's father, the stories, the presence of evil inside everyone, the power of words, the infinite resource of the human mind, - it all came together."</p><p>It is a brilliant book - I read it when it came out, and it is still just as good today. And it is, I should mention, only the second Scottish book to win the Carnegie. It contains no easy answers, and has completely convincing school scenes, great dialogue and genuinely chilling horror. And it has a great ending! It's funny how often people talk about the beginnings of books and how seldom about the endings, but I guess it's the spoiler element at work. I might get around to doing a top ten of Carnegie winners' endings one day. I already know the worst ending though - it's from <i>The Exeter Blitz</i> by David Rees:</p><p>"You sound like some pansy poncy poet. What are you talking about?"</p><p>"Exeter. It's a place <i>worth </i>talking about."</p><p>I shudder every time I read that, and I haven't spoilt a thing by telling you about it.</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdcHsoIwDE8zPE2OfK2Z2bDvMDSlO7sT6ta03OttZMvMkxUNG7V18rRx7-ZUrDCgvn8V_sxdJimJ4rlFmkpFArSFDNjLl4JfMTyvyOKolIyMhHPFz0twXAnvvAjP9cXQfVIVM4vCI8jg8D_xodgbwUAl0Pv6XKRXD6F8LS1m-bZyOW4sy0ju4gCE2x/s4032/IMG_8490.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdcHsoIwDE8zPE2OfK2Z2bDvMDSlO7sT6ta03OttZMvMkxUNG7V18rRx7-ZUrDCgvn8V_sxdJimJ4rlFmkpFArSFDNjLl4JfMTyvyOKolIyMhHPFz0twXAnvvAjP9cXQfVIVM4vCI8jg8D_xodgbwUAl0Pv6XKRXD6F8LS1m-bZyOW4sy0ju4gCE2x/w300-h400/IMG_8490.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Got to say, I've never understood<br />these back to front dust jackets.</td></tr></tbody></table><br />And so to the 1995 winner, <i>Northern Lights</i> by Philip Pullman, the first volume in the <i>His Dark Materials</i> trilogy. Is there anything to say about this that hasn't been said? I re-read it this month and one thing I did notice was the pace of it. It rattles along like a good thriller - you're straight into the action on page one and it never lets up. In fact, it's amazing how short some of the episodes are, like Lyra's stay in Mrs Coulter's flat, and how quickly the action moves from the boats of the Gyptians to the voyage to the North, to the armoured bears . . .<p></p><p>I remember hearing Philip Pullman describe how the idea of the daemons came to him. It's an extraordinary and brilliant idea, and clearly it's the one most people fix on, but I think it's the storytelling that's the key to the book's enormous success. And even though I think that the story loses focus somewhat in the third volume of the trilogy, the ending, with Will and Lyra separated forever, redeems the whole thing. We always used to say when I played in a band that there was nothing so important as getting the ending right. Do that and the audience would forget all the mistakes you'd made earlier, and it's the same with stories. Not that I'm saying Philip Pullman made <i>mistakes</i>, but I got a bit lost in all those battles in <i>The Amber Spyglass</i> and all those Angels and Spectres . . .</p><p>As I'm sure everyone knows, Philip Pullman had a lot of harsh things to say about CS Lewis's Narnia books, and about his adult science fiction too. As in: "I loathe the Narnia books, and I loathe the so-called space trilogy, because they contain an ugly vision." (Interview with Huw Spanner for Third Way magazine, 2002). The irony is that I've always felt that those very works by CS Lewis are major influences on Pullman's own creation. Pullman does say in the acknowledgements at the back of <i>The Amber Spyglass,</i> "I have stolen ideas from every book I've ever read," but I don't know whether he's ever specifically acknowledged his debt to Lewis. I'm thinking particularly of the world of the mulefa which Mary Malone enters, and which, in feel, reminded me very much of Lewis's <i>Perelandra</i> - and isn't the idea of moving between worlds through a kind of portal very similar to the way you reach other worlds in the Narnia books?</p><p><a href="http://www.spannermedia.com/interviews/pullman.htm" target="_blank">That Huw Spanner interview is here</a>, and it's excellent. Among other things Pullman is insistent that his overriding concern is to tell a story and is completely open to the idea that there might be artistic flaws in his book. As he says in the interview: "Artistic perfection is not achievable in anything much over the length of a sonnet."</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixj_28IwaBNx1Pnosm8TipnjJvnQglT0i9cZYecmnUKy7NG-9thml_tQxQrlG99v7VMvCFct4S1eEwCs1cJpppxsWbhIKYBG7SMXucns3Ld8c2ISI6GLoUnVZmrbEIi8rpwJcB7lt502VL4S9rqvMeKDu6N3dFZUcMBAWQxCt2r-j0IgtI2nGyqEo_/s954/Screenshot%202023-08-02%20at%2014.11.07.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="954" data-original-width="620" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixj_28IwaBNx1Pnosm8TipnjJvnQglT0i9cZYecmnUKy7NG-9thml_tQxQrlG99v7VMvCFct4S1eEwCs1cJpppxsWbhIKYBG7SMXucns3Ld8c2ISI6GLoUnVZmrbEIi8rpwJcB7lt502VL4S9rqvMeKDu6N3dFZUcMBAWQxCt2r-j0IgtI2nGyqEo_/s320/Screenshot%202023-08-02%20at%2014.11.07.png" width="208" /></a></div><br />Perhaps that's why I still think <i>Clockwork</i> is his best book. It's short, perfect in every detail and perfectly complemented by Peter Bailey's illustrations. I also like <i>Lyra's Oxford</i>, a delightful miniature add-on to the main <i>His Dark Materials</i> trilogy.<p></p><p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEsOtFTuOGxIpQoaeoOmoyPi-dkTQC6f-d19fz9EyeD12V77uYZhsVMUBuqo2CGNuxmNA0cg7skwehDmQzhADiyGK9zWXrzeKuTZK1gafGXDnaEsSSmzTMrYqEvGCYoyJ5UMY3ohTEwnYM0aw1BYcLbnKIojHavXULkw0S4fwClzuNbzpvVRG1TLJV/s4032/IMG_8491.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEsOtFTuOGxIpQoaeoOmoyPi-dkTQC6f-d19fz9EyeD12V77uYZhsVMUBuqo2CGNuxmNA0cg7skwehDmQzhADiyGK9zWXrzeKuTZK1gafGXDnaEsSSmzTMrYqEvGCYoyJ5UMY3ohTEwnYM0aw1BYcLbnKIojHavXULkw0S4fwClzuNbzpvVRG1TLJV/s320/IMG_8491.jpg" width="240" /></a></i></div><i><br />Northern Lights</i> is that rare thing, a Carnegie winner that enjoyed enormous commercial success. And in case you weren't aware, the initial print run was small, so a first edition is worth a lot of money. I told a friend of mine this, who was a children's librarian, and she said she had all three books - signed first editions. She sold them at auction for a lot of much needed cash and then went into a bookshop to order a set of hardbacks to replace them. The assistant told her kindly that she didn't need to spend all that money on hardbacks as they were now available as paperbacks. <p></p><p>So take a look on your bookshelves. You never know!</p><p><br /></p><p>Fist published on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure August 2023</p>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-48579534005985231752023-06-06T09:03:00.003+01:002023-06-06T09:03:28.787+01:00Berlie Doherty's Dear Nobody<p> <i>Dear Nobody</i> is one of those Carnegie winners that has managed to remain in print since its original publication and which has had a life of its own. It has been extensively translated and much used in schools to prompt discussion about teenage pregnancy. Berlie Doherty says on her website: 'I knew that in <i>Dear Nobody</i> I was handling a difficult situation. It is about two young people who love each other, but it's also about the ways in which love can go wrong, and how sometimes it can make us do things that aren't sensible or that hurt people. In a broad sense, it's about family love and family relationships, how sometimes love turns to hate and drives people and families apart.'</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIBPNqSBWqaAWpl5G1TVGXMM-byebwITtZ-UVsrvR5xS94J7qwkPfJPNntFgRtVTsGLxr5KRFg1gMVa0YZ9Js_AwKL4eRaTP9EJoJUdipBdwuz1xnnPQNLwrg8FNOnjPwRT2otZ-LK--KxpEojz5UbKU1OW5iiQDBJrZy1t2GUys7nfkslzZ7U9g/s4032/IMG_8048.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIBPNqSBWqaAWpl5G1TVGXMM-byebwITtZ-UVsrvR5xS94J7qwkPfJPNntFgRtVTsGLxr5KRFg1gMVa0YZ9Js_AwKL4eRaTP9EJoJUdipBdwuz1xnnPQNLwrg8FNOnjPwRT2otZ-LK--KxpEojz5UbKU1OW5iiQDBJrZy1t2GUys7nfkslzZ7U9g/w300-h400/IMG_8048.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><br />Well, yes, it is all that. But what struck me most about <i>Dear Nobody</i> was that it was about choices and how we make them. When I wrote on this blog about Berlie Doherty's first Carnegie winner, <i>Granny Was a Buffer Girl</i> I said that any of the stories in it could have been expanded into a full-length novel. <i>Dear Nobody</i> is an organic development from that earlier book. While the story of the two protagonists is front and centre as Helen and Chris struggle to deal with Helen's unexpected and accidental pregnancy, all of their decisions are set against the background of the stories of their parents' and relations' own histories, which they learn about as the book progresses. I was going to say that their choices were <i>influenced </i>by learning about these stories, but I'm not sure that's true. It's more that those histories are held out to the reader as indications of the different paths lives can take.<p></p><p>In order to provide a range of perspectives, the families of Chris and Helen have dramatic pasts, and some secrets, which cast light on the issues of illegitimacy, abortion and youthful marriage. Chris's mum abandoned Chris's dad and their two young children when she realised that she'd married the wrong person too young. She went off to lead an adventurous, mountain-climbing life with her new boyfriend, cutting off all contact with her children. Helen's mum, it turns out, was illegitimate herself, child of a night-club dancer. She was treated as a 'slut' and Helen's mum, her daughter, as a 'bastard'. Then there's Chris's Auntie Jill who tells Chris and Helen about her abortion when she was a young girl. She's very clear that she didn't want a baby at the time, yet her story ends with a definite sense of sadness and regret.</p><p>Nothing is more life-changing than giving birth and there are very few choices made in life that are as difficult and terrifying as those confronting an accidentally pregnant teenager. You have to decide how and when to tell your parents and friends. You have to decide where and how you are going to live with this new baby. And you have to decide whether you should have the baby at all. Different possible versions of your whole life are revealed to you in ways that have almost certainly never happened before. </p><p>You are also under pressure. Certainly Helen is under pressure from her mum to have an abortion because she doesn't want Helen and her child to endure the stigma and abuse that she and her own mother experienced. Likewise, Helen's dad is obsessed with his ambition that Helen should go to music college because that's what he always wanted to do and couldn't. Chris's dad is more balanced, but Chris's dad is a man who married too young, and both he and Chris's mum (who Chris meets again for the first time in years) warn Chris about the implications involved when he says he won't just walk away from his responsibilities to Helen and the baby.</p><p>In the end, Helen takes control of her own destiny. She alone decides that she will have the baby; she alone decides that she's not ready to share her life with Chris. In that sense the book's message is an empowering one for teenage girls, and perhaps because of that I found Helen a more convincing - or perhaps I mean more interesting - character than Chris. Helen <i>grows</i> through the nine months of the story, and I can't help feeling that Chris is diminished. He wants to take responsibility, but is told that he can't/shouldn't/ is throwing away opportunities/is not ready, and it seems that he takes it all on board. Helen is told she's throwing her life away and refuses to accept that is true.</p><p>I think this is a very different kind of book to any that have previously won the Carnegie, one which is intended to put options before the reader, inviting them to consider what they might have done themselves. The way the book ends does encourage the reader to imagine what might have happened to Helen and Chris later in their lives. I find it hard as an adult reader not to be aware of the artifice in the book, the way it's constructed to put this range of points of view about the situation, but I suspect that younger readers see things differently, and become involved and identify with Helen or Chris or both. Indeed I noticed one young Amazon reviewer (how I love scanning Amazon reviews - a vice, I know) who just couldn't see the point of the story about Chris's mother - it was a distraction from the main story.</p><p>There are very few other teenage love stories in Carnegie history up to this point. The earliest of these few, <i>The Lark on the Wing</i> by Elfrida Vipont, won in 1950, forty years before <i>Dear Nobody</i>. That book was also about a young girl who wants to pursue a career in music (she's a singer), but there's no question of university - she has to earn a living - and the heroine spends the entire book totally unaware that her suitor is in love with her. It makes quite a dramatic contrast to <i>Dear Nobody</i>, and it was no place to look for other stories of teenage pregnancy or indeed sex. Then I remembered Lorna Sage's memoir, <i>Bad Blood.</i> </p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_gKc8acizwP_HKqoSwyZ4YZgOvVcutSO_AcWtHrraRon49JiyBPWB0dxzpe2cvq_uwHoX_B23B1S1FvduQ52mybek0-3qZnLW8tpAyewuRDTaXmksnl18gzQUa2EQ-5O_pkg1_X2p_M1f6NGgsgo6bYKDJXYYXuN1WpYxcLBJw54V4YLmxy2DXA/s4032/IMG_8049.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_gKc8acizwP_HKqoSwyZ4YZgOvVcutSO_AcWtHrraRon49JiyBPWB0dxzpe2cvq_uwHoX_B23B1S1FvduQ52mybek0-3qZnLW8tpAyewuRDTaXmksnl18gzQUa2EQ-5O_pkg1_X2p_M1f6NGgsgo6bYKDJXYYXuN1WpYxcLBJw54V4YLmxy2DXA/w300-h400/IMG_8049.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>As Clive James remarks on the cover, 'This is not a book for children, but neither was her childhood.' It does however demonstrate that teenage pregnancy need not be a bar to achievement, as Lorna takes her A levels and persuades Durham University to change their rules to admit a young married woman. Her husband Vic goes with her and during term-time Lorna's parents care for the baby. The story was remarkable enough to make the pages of the Daily Mail, and you can <a href="https://lornasagearchives.omeka.net/exhibits/show/exhibition/home" target="_blank">read more about Lorna Sage and <i>Bad Blood</i> here.</a></p><p>That was in 1960, so it could be done, even 30 years before <i>Dear Nobody.</i></p><p>Lorna went on to become Professor of English at UEA, where she had the misfortune of trying to teach me about Jane Austen. I can picture her now, behind the crowded desk in her smoke-filled office, fag in her trembling hand, trying and failing to understand why I was incapable of handing my essay in on time. I felt bad about that, and maybe the experience helped me to become more attentive to deadlines later in life. </p><p><a href="https://berliedoherty.com/books/dear-nobody-teenage-pregnancy/" target="_blank">Berlie Doherty's excellent and comprehensive website</a> provides much more information about Dear Nobody.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-47943519053373984232023-06-05T13:01:00.003+01:002023-06-05T13:01:45.282+01:00Wolves and Men<p> 1990 seems like yesterday to me. I mean, it sounds quite recent until I remember that it was the year my son was born and so, obviously, it was 33 years ago. </p><div><br /></div><div>I just watched an excellent documentary about Judy Blume - <i>Judy Blume Forever</i> - (it's on Amazon Prime) and I could hardly believe that <i>Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret</i> was published in 1970, a full 20 years before this month's 1990 Carnegie winner, <i>Wolf</i>, by Gillian Cross. And in 1990 it was books by Judy Blume that my 12 year old daughter was reading, and they were more frank, especially about sex, than any books published in this country for teenagers at that time. The young assistants in Waterstones, where I just bought a copy, were very excited about the upcoming film of the book, and they weren't even born when it was first published.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's interesting to compare <i>Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret</i> with <i>Wolf</i>. The aspects of <i>Margaret </i>that attracted most attention were the frank depictions of twelve-year-old girls worrying about menstruation and the growth of their breasts. These are worries that are massive at the time they happen, but are in general simply resolved with the passage of time. But the story also concerns Margaret's family, which is divided by religion. On one side Margaret has hard-line Christian grandparents, and on the other a Jewish grandmother. Her parents say she should choose which religion, if any, she wants. They have none. That's a problem that is not so easily resolved and is really the heart of the book, hence the title. But it's important to say that there is something light, open, free and optimistic about <i>Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. </i>Whereas <i>Wolf</i> is dark, claustrophobic and frightening. </div><div><br /></div><div>Cassy, the main character, is nearly fourteen but in complete contrast to Margaret she seems to be completely solitary. Kissing, bras and periods do not feature in this book at all. In a way <i>Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret </i><u>befriends</u> the reader, which is why so many readers talk about the book's characters as if they were their own friends. That's unlikely to happen with <i>Wolf</i>, although I certainly feel for Cassy.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_UtuIEQsW6xb6VEkIeW40ZES-Gc7ecn32kEMHbNyWHvotUGZcWCjlasnP9RVOODU_QndunOaDTOTBv9pbuTQtg53BESlBRji7B8oBwDM__PHLfeSDyGlNwLPdynl2kPtc_b6lVt1mfBeazPNV0v0OTCZ0-HLxp7zVo2Px8G3m9gzlaroJF1P4hQ/s4032/IMG_7971.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_UtuIEQsW6xb6VEkIeW40ZES-Gc7ecn32kEMHbNyWHvotUGZcWCjlasnP9RVOODU_QndunOaDTOTBv9pbuTQtg53BESlBRji7B8oBwDM__PHLfeSDyGlNwLPdynl2kPtc_b6lVt1mfBeazPNV0v0OTCZ0-HLxp7zVo2Px8G3m9gzlaroJF1P4hQ/w300-h400/IMG_7971.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div>It's a complex and poetic novel, full of symbolism but with a tightly limited cast of characters and what turns out to be quite a straightforward plot about which I intend to say nothing other than that an adult reader can see what's going on much quicker than most children would, and I wouldn't want to spoil it.</div><div><br /></div><div>Running through the story are references to <i>The Three Little Pigs,</i> <i>Little Red Riding Hood </i>and, most importantly, werewolves. As we approach the book's climax we learn that 'there is no reliable record of <i>any</i> attack by a wolf on a human being in North America. Ever.' This is a line spoken by an actor in an exceptionally realistic recreation of a 'Theatre in Education' style performance, the point of which is to show that when people imagine wolves what they are often imagining are <i>werewolves</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>The wolves in <i>Red Riding Hood</i> and <i>The Three Little Pigs</i> are symbolic representations of people. The fear in <i>Wolf </i> is the fear of the werewolf, something unknown, savage, half human and male. It's a fear that animates Cassy's dreams, or nightmares. And with good reason.</div><div><br /></div><div>But despite all the symbolism the story is told in a very down-to-earth way with convincing dialogue and deftly drawn characters, although Cassy is someone you don't so much warm to as fear for, and that makes this a less comfortable reading experience than I would have enjoyed as a child. It is a properly scary book.</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOHwbPEQ1JSIFxSRaVJ1rWNZIkiqou7qiPc87u6Or7zXquixMmyLeBFBKPAGyLVSPd1uVS_gooPkqy04NI04dTmB6htiWYOF6lIAJcX652rdbcGVCG-VaZmMmgtK3M56i2uTqAa57pPP2SFnpxtPA2fFb5dNF1ms32ZI_qCoTCTTM7cO4GhYqbMw/s4032/IMG_7972.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOHwbPEQ1JSIFxSRaVJ1rWNZIkiqou7qiPc87u6Or7zXquixMmyLeBFBKPAGyLVSPd1uVS_gooPkqy04NI04dTmB6htiWYOF6lIAJcX652rdbcGVCG-VaZmMmgtK3M56i2uTqAa57pPP2SFnpxtPA2fFb5dNF1ms32ZI_qCoTCTTM7cO4GhYqbMw/w300-h400/IMG_7972.JPG" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">PS - I thought this was a really<br /> clever cover. There are, of course, no texts or <br />messages in <i style="text-align: left;">Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret<br /><br /></i></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>Gillian Cross, of course, is still going strong and certainly doesn't need rescuing from obscurity unlike some other Carnegie winners of the past. Her website is <a href="http://www.gillian-cross.co.uk/index.html" target="_blank">here</a>. There are many children's books about wolves so here are some of my favourites:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>William's Version</i> by Jan Mark (In <i>Nothing to be Afraid Of</i>)</div><div><i>Walk With a Wolf</i> by Janni Howker illustrated by Sarah Fox</div><div><i>Ghost Song</i> by Susan Price</div><div><i>Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf</i> by Catherine Storr (excellent for banishing any residual fear of wolves!)</div><div><br /></div><div>Feel free to suggest others!</div><div><br /></div><div>Originally published on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure May 2023</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-3583575602794208272023-06-05T13:00:00.001+01:002023-06-05T13:00:22.876+01:00Shirts v Books v Goggle-eyes<p> Lately, I've been making shirts. It turns out that I make all the same mistakes when I'm sewing as I do when I'm writing a book. Luckily, when a shirt goes wrong you've only wasted a day or two of your life, rather than a year or two - or ten!</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWClTVwsgE8KJAwX8Vss9_rCo0oXcVzPnA7R1iMa4m9KTIt_0j14IfyhPh2LCeHRY5V9cKdfgueQiMeaE_li4_bBNxqunzIvzttTAw0pDGaqqycacBPRoNtUos1J8d0cHDvLpfTgU8lITZDyQape0ymygu0qhIhpnmrcoPD1vK6ogZfHrzmhg_LQ/s1984/Screenshot%202023-04-03%20at%2016.33.26.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1984" data-original-width="1570" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWClTVwsgE8KJAwX8Vss9_rCo0oXcVzPnA7R1iMa4m9KTIt_0j14IfyhPh2LCeHRY5V9cKdfgueQiMeaE_li4_bBNxqunzIvzttTAw0pDGaqqycacBPRoNtUos1J8d0cHDvLpfTgU8lITZDyQape0ymygu0qhIhpnmrcoPD1vK6ogZfHrzmhg_LQ/w315-h400/Screenshot%202023-04-03%20at%2016.33.26.png" width="315" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This free, customisable shirt pattern can <br />be downloaded from the V&A website. </td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><p>Actually, when a shirt goes wrong it's usually possible to fix the problem by undoing what you've done and re-doing it properly, so the shirt isn't really wasted - it's just provided you with a painful learning experience. It would be nice if a troublesome book could be fixed as easily. </p><p>At least with a shirt you do have a pattern to follow, and a set of instructions, although the pattern usually has to be altered to fit and the instructions seem to quite often miss out crucial bits of information. Or, just as likely, I haven't read those instructions properly. </p><p>It turns out that my way of making shirts is very similar to my way of writing books. Plunge in, make mistakes, unpick them, do it again. And of course if you've done something wrong at an early stage in the process then the whole thing is going to have to come apart before you can fix it. But eventually, with each shirt I made I ended up with something I could wear and which, at a casual glance, looked OK. I've made five now, and they all have mistakes, but each one is a little better than the one that came before. I think, on the whole, that shirts are less trouble than books.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpkBm352DOvfC5I19HNO_su3LiujsNfDBVKwjhxeqMMc7-QXmN0xG-hHhiuREEXtBhidi09STBy35V2YaVsoeoktiwXkMk4uVSglDIToacoqXAgrC7k8bXpzu1ctbc8mlUu9cEDBWhs-b4xWk0uQTJy7sJAeoPmSyXGRE8c2uDgOP2PjyOKrvI6A/s4032/IMG_7873.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpkBm352DOvfC5I19HNO_su3LiujsNfDBVKwjhxeqMMc7-QXmN0xG-hHhiuREEXtBhidi09STBy35V2YaVsoeoktiwXkMk4uVSglDIToacoqXAgrC7k8bXpzu1ctbc8mlUu9cEDBWhs-b4xWk0uQTJy7sJAeoPmSyXGRE8c2uDgOP2PjyOKrvI6A/w300-h400/IMG_7873.JPG" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cover by Caroline Binch, who also <br />did the cover of Berlie Doherty's <br /><i>Granny was a Buffer Girl.</i> She's probably<br />best known for illustrating <i>Amazing Grace</i><br />with text by Mary Hoffman</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><p>This month's Carnegie winner is <i>Goggle-eyes</i> by Anne Fine. The book has a very unusual hero in fifty-something, white-haired, slightly tubby businessman Gerald Faulkner (AKA Goggle-eyes). The story is told by Kitty, the older of Rosie's two daughters, and Gerald is Rosie's new boyfriend. Kitty's parents are divorced and her father now lives in Berwick upon Tweed. The book has a Scottish setting though you'd hardly know that most of the time. </p><p>This is a more complex book than it at first appears, always a good thing, I think. Yes, it's the story of a difficult young teenager coming to terms with her mum's new boyfriend, but Gerald isn't just any boyfriend, and Kitty isn't just any difficult teenager. There is an element of instruction in the story which is slyly acknowledged in the device of Kitty telling her own story to another girl who is in a similar situation, and in order to make her point, or points, Anne Fine delights in making the situation as extreme as possible. So Gerald is the most unlikely companion imaginable for Kitty's fiery CND supporting, anti-nuclear weapons protesting mum, and Rosie's fellow protestors are unflatteringly portrayed as ineffective, disorganised, well-meaning and hopelessly ineffective.</p><p>It's hard not to suspect that Gerald is Anne Fine's kind of guy, although his requests for Kitty's mum to wear particular clothes do veer into the slightly creepy and possibly controlling. But exaggeration for the sake of effect is the order of the day here. The first time we see Gerald he pets the family cat, with Kitty watching on.</p><p>'I thought now he'd be bound to try and get me to speak. It's hard to fondle someone else's cat in front of them, and not ask its name. But Gerald Faulkner was made of sterner stuff than that.</p><p>"Up you come, Buster,' he said, scooping Floss up into his arms. 'Who's a <i>nice</i> Kitty?"</p><p>I wasn't quite sure what he meant by that, either.'</p><p>Gerald makes lemonade and brings the children chocolates, but there's no pretence about him and he's not making any fake efforts to ingratiate himself with the children, -especially not Kitty. It doesn't take him long to make his political position clear.</p><p>"So," he said. "You're mixed up in it as well."</p><p>Though I had no idea what he was talking about, I got the feeling he was speaking to me.</p><p>"Mixed up in what?"</p><p>"You know," he said, grinning. "The Wooly Hat Brigade. Close Down the Power Stations. Ban the Bomb."</p><p>If Gerald was just winding Kitty up this would be repulsive. But he's not. He engages with Kitty like an equal, not as adult to child. He takes her seriously and expects his own views to be taken seriously by her. And Gerald, it transpires, is very good for Kitty's mum. The process of Kitty coming to terms with the arrival in her life of someone she doesn't want and who seems the exact opposite of everything she could have imagined is very skilfully handled. But in the end it's Gerald who is the most fully-realised character and who will stick in my memory.</p><p>I do have reservations about the treatment of those protestors. I couldn't determine whether Gerald's views were Anne Fine's and there's an element of caricature to achieve comedy. The author does give Kitty some good lines in her arguments with Gerald, as well as allowing Rosie a shining moment towards the end where Gerald has to admire her passion even if he doesn't agree with her. But what some of my friends who spent time in Wormwood Scrubs after cutting the wire at Greenham Common would say about these comically pathetic protestors I hardly dare think. </p><p>It's effective, of course, just because the differences are so extreme, although I suspect this romance is no more likely than your six-foot-tall ex-husband dressing up as Madame Doubtfire and taking a job minding your children. And, like <i>Madame Doubtfire</i>, this is a very funny book, probably the funniest Carnegie winner so far. There's not a great deal of competition for funniest book though. Of the fifty or so I've read so far only a handful could be described as having a humorous element, but there's no question that dry, witty and sometimes caustic humour is an essential characteristic of Anne Fine's writing.</p><p><i>Goggle-eyes</i> is clearly intended to demonstrate to its readers that it's important not to rush to judgement of people, especially potential step-parents. And step-parents, in the late 1980s, were becoming a lot more common with the rise in the divorce rate, so it's a little surprising that this is the first book with a divorce in it since <i>The Owl Service </i>- though I may have missed one: I really should have been noting down some statistics. We also have a family that watches TV, another Carnegie rarity. I'm looking forward to seeing when the first computers and mobile phones appear.</p><p>And now I'm going to take some trousers to bits to see how they're made. Lee Child did the same thing with a favourite thriller apparently, when he was working out how to write his first <i>Reacher.</i> </p><p>The parallels between sewing and writing are endless!</p><p>Originally published on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure April 2023</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-55067269387786631982023-06-05T12:58:00.004+01:002023-06-05T12:58:45.996+01:00In Which I Forget Stuff Again<p> Once again I've made the mistake of reading a Carnegie winner long before I come to write about it. I read <i>A Pack of Lies</i> 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!</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHJj0S-ytasqmQL95pTgc-QusDOfTDIjYz0POMgPOuLLk4S9dvUwn_x7UElMMyR9Y2afiyNukWfLLPYOKgliwl6Qn4jr581MqW2OEG25po9DggpKrU2EnkdbDjE9V250xvMh-53L26ZPvmSb-v7RH-gab5cjlq4a5kHVqUhFZgo2xSUtHsoLCBLA/s4032/IMG_7754.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHJj0S-ytasqmQL95pTgc-QusDOfTDIjYz0POMgPOuLLk4S9dvUwn_x7UElMMyR9Y2afiyNukWfLLPYOKgliwl6Qn4jr581MqW2OEG25po9DggpKrU2EnkdbDjE9V250xvMh-53L26ZPvmSb-v7RH-gab5cjlq4a5kHVqUhFZgo2xSUtHsoLCBLA/w300-h400/IMG_7754.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>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 <i>me</i> to forget. I do know that it has nothing to do with how enjoyable a book is. I enjoyed <i>A Pack of Lies</i> 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.</p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivhlVpJ7aKpZNO_nJ43KkDr1h_C5l_0mfAlDZucfsq5zKbQX_t0Buy1WZsRuYIhWHwDJVoAm1RUWCoBo3cvi8vE00dm8uA4Cr0hzVXgRcIVsC95VF5qhKt_nbTDzw4zHDPk0Ch6zwxqJUEEy_B3wY3vLwPPIe3XLZ9dYT_rkoSBKRwAAQT6AI3Wg/s4032/IMG_7756.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivhlVpJ7aKpZNO_nJ43KkDr1h_C5l_0mfAlDZucfsq5zKbQX_t0Buy1WZsRuYIhWHwDJVoAm1RUWCoBo3cvi8vE00dm8uA4Cr0hzVXgRcIVsC95VF5qhKt_nbTDzw4zHDPk0Ch6zwxqJUEEy_B3wY3vLwPPIe3XLZ9dYT_rkoSBKRwAAQT6AI3Wg/w400-h300/IMG_7756.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Carnegie bookshelves - most of these are here <br />because of reading all those winners</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><p>Anyway, while I can still remember it I'll say a bit about <i>A Pack of Lies</i>. 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 <i>A Pack of Lies</i> 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 <i>A Pack of Lies</i> 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. </p><p>And when I began again, a few years later, I approached the books I read very differently. I remember starting <i>River Boy</i> 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 <i>River Boy</i> 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. </p><p><i>A Pack of Lies</i> reminds me of those sampler albums that started appearing in the late 1960s and early 1970s with titles like <i>You Can All Join In</i> and <i>Fill Your Head With Rock</i>. 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 <i>A Pack of Lies</i> 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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>I haven't really told you much about <i>A Pack of Lies </i>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. </p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5kAxnSfgY2NfrtNfIy-o47dGGlaqufWfq7NWHb8b1P5ro1d875jE0_5CQpLMxaOwgWcr-1pRNPBJseG3GnVNoSWm27kczL6SzcmLHFRyyeAyLqGeqVX2JwUXfNcKR6QTSA0Q40tdGzzcseUDcuWB0j0b0CfOvXiq_RWG-YHaGvDkNMMfs2zMfww/s4032/IMG_7755.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5kAxnSfgY2NfrtNfIy-o47dGGlaqufWfq7NWHb8b1P5ro1d875jE0_5CQpLMxaOwgWcr-1pRNPBJseG3GnVNoSWm27kczL6SzcmLHFRyyeAyLqGeqVX2JwUXfNcKR6QTSA0Q40tdGzzcseUDcuWB0j0b0CfOvXiq_RWG-YHaGvDkNMMfs2zMfww/w300-h400/IMG_7755.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>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, <i>Where the World Ends</i>, I'll know a little more about her work. </p><p>I have a <i>lot</i> of catching up to do.</p><p> <a href="https://www.geraldinemccaughrean.co.uk" target="_blank">Geraldine McCaughrean's excellent website</a> </p><p>Originally published on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure March 2023</p><p><br /></p><div><br /></div>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-45303694237101622422023-06-05T12:57:00.000+01:002023-06-05T12:57:03.795+01:00The Ghost Drum - Susan Price's Carnegie Winner<p> It's almost 20 years since my wife, Ellie, died of breast cancer, but before she died she contributed to a book edited by Tania Yelland called <i>All Woman: A Life after Breast Cancer.</i> Tania Yelland* also died several years ago, so there's a kind of grim irony about the book's title, but it's not in any way a grim book. Rather, it's a collection of pieces of writing by thirty quite different women about how they coped with their illness and its aftermath.</p><p>One of the things the contributors were asked to do, in addition to having their photo taken by Arthur Edwards who at that time specialised in taking photos of royalty for The Sun newspaper, was to choose a helpful quote for the start of the piece. Ellie almost chose this, which we'd seen at the start of Kevin Crossley-Holland's <i>The Norse Myths.</i></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">'Fearlessness is better than faint-heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors.' </span>(Anonymous lines from <i>For Scirnis</i>)</p><p>Readers of Susan Price's 1987 Carnegie winner, <i>The Ghost Drum</i>, will know at once why I mention this. Here's the old grandmother shaman talking to Chingis, her apprentice:</p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">'Anyone who pokes their nose out of doors should pack courage and leave fear at home.'</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmpiazlyGeAgf9wEJGEe99hmWDK3-PTaBu7rH5ezKVYvY_wyxoxuxPSbzBekDRnogw3Tem8vkJlD9X5g3RXun6qsAdOzZT5oMLJZJqy5GcO0F06sdRaa4fB8iBGfjRJZBSFBVj5Wm1FtwYmE-2ojiVWR8eZc0Sq1FTimAop-xbOxlTjgoO9mHjuA/s3866/IMG_7685.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3866" data-original-width="2565" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmpiazlyGeAgf9wEJGEe99hmWDK3-PTaBu7rH5ezKVYvY_wyxoxuxPSbzBekDRnogw3Tem8vkJlD9X5g3RXun6qsAdOzZT5oMLJZJqy5GcO0F06sdRaa4fB8iBGfjRJZBSFBVj5Wm1FtwYmE-2ojiVWR8eZc0Sq1FTimAop-xbOxlTjgoO9mHjuA/w264-h400/IMG_7685.jpg" width="264" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span><p></p><p>It's important advice, which is repeated several times throughout the <i>Ghost Drum</i> series—there are four books in all. It seems that fear is the cause of most, if not all, of the bad behaviour we encounter in the books, and especially in this first one. I think it's fair to say that Susan Price is extremely interested in bad people, and there are some VERY bad people about, both in this book and in the world we all live in.</p><p>In <i>The Ghost Drum</i> The Czar Guidon has murdered almost his entire family in order to become Czar, but now he has married and has an heir on the way and he is afraid. Not surprising really as murder is the order of the day in this kingdom. Chances are the child will grow up and murder <i>him.</i> That's if his sister (why did he let <i>her</i> live?) the evil Margaretta doesn't kill him first. Then there are all the courtiers and the soldiers and the astrologers who are all terrified of saying or doing the wrong thing because if they do say or do the wrong thing they will certainly be executed. The body count in this book is high—probably the highest in any Carnegie winner since Ronald Welch's <i>Knight Crusader</i>—and you really do need to be fearless to make it through. There is just never any telling what will happen next.</p><p>And that's what it's like for the reader, too. This is a rich and surprising reading experience. Although the story is set initially in a fictional czardom it is also set in the ghost-world, a place to which only shamans can go and return as they please, and where parallel worlds can be accessed by those who know how. Shamans, who live for three hundred years, return to the branches of the ash tree when they die to lie in nests and await rebirth. The ash tree isn't quite the Yggdrasil of Norse mythology and I gather from my usual sources (the Internet) that Siberian shamans also had a version of this tree. Rather like Tolkien's, the book is inspired by a variety of mythologies of the north, but they are woven together into a very coherent whole. I became quite familiar with the confusing geography of the ghost-world, or I thought I did. It even began to seem quite homely after the fourth book. But just because you are a shaman, just because you are without fear, that doesn't mean bad things can't happen to you.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaCoYvbMP0lT1AuvE8j-Q6AtHCnDiu2CfVuYN3kX4-vbju5Y6QfCQDfQUnZ-rufP3c6uF-dlo1sl-OkolDjB_hO8sb9xBm3Ai_aIgEStKxG8OqE_7aX81bbR8YPKJtcKOUwf_CwSaexlsN7oslhYhMh_I4K0efFwtj4m35_m2iLYOT6YUAjCc5-A/s4032/IMG_7686.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="2624" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaCoYvbMP0lT1AuvE8j-Q6AtHCnDiu2CfVuYN3kX4-vbju5Y6QfCQDfQUnZ-rufP3c6uF-dlo1sl-OkolDjB_hO8sb9xBm3Ai_aIgEStKxG8OqE_7aX81bbR8YPKJtcKOUwf_CwSaexlsN7oslhYhMh_I4K0efFwtj4m35_m2iLYOT6YUAjCc5-A/w260-h400/IMG_7686.jpg" width="260" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg23GiFQb05nFT9NuoNBKYUt7s627gZsN8aaKHUnhEBikgP5CRx_daTmLMz-r4BaGP2kDIUNtSpzip0WW34gHrzN7k-JnynvNSfgiSMhklCcias5ugqImSo0o-Wv0CY2phfloeDHdnnWLxcJyf0a0uD-VgjAV6-EQR4Ft-COclrOfwc7udkQvGoSQ/s4032/IMG_7687.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg23GiFQb05nFT9NuoNBKYUt7s627gZsN8aaKHUnhEBikgP5CRx_daTmLMz-r4BaGP2kDIUNtSpzip0WW34gHrzN7k-JnynvNSfgiSMhklCcias5ugqImSo0o-Wv0CY2phfloeDHdnnWLxcJyf0a0uD-VgjAV6-EQR4Ft-COclrOfwc7udkQvGoSQ/w300-h400/IMG_7687.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1pnVdeJNc2dbocpGq5PzUdMPXXtKXYuF3MSAuDLl8UoO53apMs4F1XTUbuUlnSfNgU-kQb_yMv6wtkx4e5Y9Zr_nvRs1bsDzNv-iCiUFpb-oQtpFYS4b-h194yq0xo7hips9-p2QQFNjQ-jt77x2TJBh68Afoe6Z-3NS1RoE4ojVt1UYqPFfjog/s4032/IMG_7688.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1pnVdeJNc2dbocpGq5PzUdMPXXtKXYuF3MSAuDLl8UoO53apMs4F1XTUbuUlnSfNgU-kQb_yMv6wtkx4e5Y9Zr_nvRs1bsDzNv-iCiUFpb-oQtpFYS4b-h194yq0xo7hips9-p2QQFNjQ-jt77x2TJBh68Afoe6Z-3NS1RoE4ojVt1UYqPFfjog/w300-h400/IMG_7688.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br />You could say that <i>The Ghost Drum</i> and its sequels paint a pessimistic picture of humanity, I'm inclined to think it's just realistic. Here's Chingis's grandmother explaining how 'word-magic' works:<p></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">"Suppose that a Czar or Czarina ordered their people to fight a war, a stupid war, a war that should never have been fought. Thousands of people are killed for no good reason, and their families left to mourn them. Much, much money is spent on cannons and swords, so there is no money to spend on other, better things, such as seed to grow wheat to feed the people - and thousands of people are cold and hungry because of this war. The Czar is afraid that if the people find out how wasteful the war was, they will be furious and do him harm. So the Czar uses word-magic. He says to the people, 'The war was not foolish - no! It proved that our people are the bravest and best in the world because they died for us, and killed so many of the enemy. I know you are starving, my children,' he says to them, 'but that shows how noble you are and how willing to make sacrifices for the Motherland. I, your Czar, am proud of you!' He says this and repeats it over and over again, and he makes his servants repeat it over and over to everyone they meet- and the magic works. The people forget to be angry. They grow glad their sons and brothers were kind, and proud that they themselves are cold and hungry."</span></p><p>No prizes for guessing whose face came into my mind when I read that.</p><p>The world view here is very much that of the Norse myths, and Loki, Baldur and Hel all put in appearances in later books. As a character in <i>Ghost Spell,</i> the final book in the sequence, puts it: 'You cannot escape sorrow, Kristiana. All life is sorrowful, but it is very, very sweet.'</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3nKAH5XXCvo6176_y5pIkjc-KMbOLnr8pJX11CV9wgE0rDcX8vM_e96aZjNMi5azaK9zbe0_upZsn2-BajORkwDYFCrJa_GcVYYn3Ss0lVLXSLuAU79kxY14xPWJW3TmRhzP5zVjpO_KnVkqW3-mkqh05KXeqH9HctGpfJhGn2pYVzfzn37IRyA/s4032/IMG_7689.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3nKAH5XXCvo6176_y5pIkjc-KMbOLnr8pJX11CV9wgE0rDcX8vM_e96aZjNMi5azaK9zbe0_upZsn2-BajORkwDYFCrJa_GcVYYn3Ss0lVLXSLuAU79kxY14xPWJW3TmRhzP5zVjpO_KnVkqW3-mkqh05KXeqH9HctGpfJhGn2pYVzfzn37IRyA/w300-h400/IMG_7689.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>These books all have a fantastically rich texture. I read all four in order and probably too quickly, so that now I have them a little confused in my head. There is a lot of repetition running through them, descriptions of the snow and frost and cold, for example, and very detailed descriptions of cities and palaces, but it never feels dull. There are lots of lists, too—wonderful lists with an almost overwhelming quantity of detail, that seem to grow longer from book to book. I was quite surprised, returning to<i> The Ghost Drum</i>, that there weren't so many in this opening instalment, but even so, this will give you a flavour:</p><p>'She set on the table jugs of milk and bowls of butter, salt and pickles. She added plates of black bread and herrings, of sausage and blood-pudding; plates of hard, salty biscuits and dishes of soft cheese; a jumble of apples and sweet, wrinkled, long-stored oranges; onions, eggs, black pickled walnuts, apple cake, sloe vodka, lemons . . .'</p><p>One reason that the lists and the repetitions work so well is because of the way the writing imitates oral storytelling and uses some of its conventions. The story is told by 'a learned cat' which is tethered by a golden chain to an oak tree by a lake. 'This most learned of all cats walks round and round the tree continually. As it walks one way, it sings songs. As it walks the other, it tells stories.'</p><p>We hear the rhythm of the cat's pacing in the rhythms of the storytelling, and when you have a live storyteller sitting in front of you that kind of rhythm is a very powerful way of engaging the audience. And while this technique of inventing a storyteller to stand in for the author is often used effectively for retelling short tales, as in Arthur Ransome's <i>Old Peter's Russian Tales,</i> for example, I can't recall seeing it used to tell a story of this length before.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0GnWC1aGjjjbvz3mCvJJBILoI9fU2kV3Z75PCc-qoabjL4aXM2hGI8mWD9xlm9nEWGJvIC3CltJqkSD7qXK9XUFEKBP_V9gc0dfQOEJt5LBFWMO1JrNZFZa_oQhUXAf-CQ0BeuGR9kyuCflTbM6aWX6ZKUm5lzSkYGCjbUOshAptZYQ6fXR9VTg/s4032/IMG_7690.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0GnWC1aGjjjbvz3mCvJJBILoI9fU2kV3Z75PCc-qoabjL4aXM2hGI8mWD9xlm9nEWGJvIC3CltJqkSD7qXK9XUFEKBP_V9gc0dfQOEJt5LBFWMO1JrNZFZa_oQhUXAf-CQ0BeuGR9kyuCflTbM6aWX6ZKUm5lzSkYGCjbUOshAptZYQ6fXR9VTg/w300-h400/IMG_7690.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>These are perfect books to read in winter. There is an awful lot of frost and snow and I love anything that has a real feel of the north. I used to delight in telling people, when I lived in Norfolk, that I could look out of my bedroom window past the arches of a group of ash trees, and know that there was no higher spot between me and the North Pole, this despite the fact that my house was only 30 metres above sea level. </p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8VnqgElm350nJ9qg56orM5rYGdYo40X-cZCrI6iv_rxD2YVd9mBbgxzr6K3aamZopVw50mkG-h0YI24xlgZ7HzEADpmyyzd9jKLIBi4GGiEOx-bUh7g7mDPCiNi_KBQngX3OPqIYtBfp6BmaRBgT4uAJIt_d9Gckg6EIRXXQjs_KlzKIRukJvMA/s3648/P1083422.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2736" data-original-width="3648" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8VnqgElm350nJ9qg56orM5rYGdYo40X-cZCrI6iv_rxD2YVd9mBbgxzr6K3aamZopVw50mkG-h0YI24xlgZ7HzEADpmyyzd9jKLIBi4GGiEOx-bUh7g7mDPCiNi_KBQngX3OPqIYtBfp6BmaRBgT4uAJIt_d9Gckg6EIRXXQjs_KlzKIRukJvMA/w400-h300/P1083422.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">TM 41553 95469</td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>My inclination is always towards the north, which is why <a href="https://northseasummer.blogspot.com" target="_blank">I cycled around the North Sea</a> a few years ago, and it was after that expedition that someone pointed me in the direction of Peter Davidson's fascinating book, <i>The Idea of North</i>. It's a marvellous and incredibly eclectic read which immediately came to mind when I'd read Susan Price's books.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-EyORxpNty5kUQZW0KRA9TWXbnh2f-kRUCnSbZzNWhhwp_BYFf0bnaor1RnYikcmQqKNvQapqtKGRbvUqAgqWyL4zen8YfGcYrL9xMoIQYLT9CgMFZEwXid6FFF2aaf_ZPJhDRIbODBVHDQQaNLEjzpAdLF97NWrEBxQu6fVH-JH7jl61fxmOHw/s4032/IMG_7691.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-EyORxpNty5kUQZW0KRA9TWXbnh2f-kRUCnSbZzNWhhwp_BYFf0bnaor1RnYikcmQqKNvQapqtKGRbvUqAgqWyL4zen8YfGcYrL9xMoIQYLT9CgMFZEwXid6FFF2aaf_ZPJhDRIbODBVHDQQaNLEjzpAdLF97NWrEBxQu6fVH-JH7jl61fxmOHw/w300-h400/IMG_7691.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>All of the books in the <i>Ghost Drum</i> sequence are in print and available online. <a href="https://www.susanpriceauthor.com" target="_blank">Susan Price's excellent website</a> has lots more information about these and all her other books, including much more detailed reviews than this one. There are also photos of the covers of Japanese editions of <i>Ghost Spell </i>and <i>Ghost Dance</i> which are really beautiful and make me, not for the first time, wonder why we find it so hard to make beautiful books in this country.</p><p>* Tania Yelland was a lovely woman. When she heard that Ellie was in hospital after major surgery she sent us a box packed with bottles of champagne and lots of other goodies. She was married to David Yelland, then editor of <i>The Sun</i>, and for all that newspaper's other faults they campaigned hard back then for breast cancer research.</p><p>Originally published on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure 6/2/2023</p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-82157951845065343662023-01-08T18:14:00.005+00:002023-01-12T09:08:58.004+00:00Berlie Doherty's Buffer Girls<p>Not many teen romances had won the Carnegie Medal before 1986, but that was the year Berlie Doherty won, somewhat to her surprise, with <i>Granny was a Buffer Girl. She </i>gave the world four love stories for the price of one, with added extras.</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsZUpXJIsMYjtD9W3T4beB1cInsNf2CCch-Zy3P7lnKFJPT4kXIhucyBPcK5wvorPEIWRDawVo-HUvwBAAan_zAJveah7eOh0KO5addpHbHncll6S07oywtkhEvGcrt3vNN9l5FHc2BxssNOv_0ojCf2bCv61EdAQwfNvMzxZ7YD4s4EvYj_3C0A/s3873/IMG_7492.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3873" data-original-width="2723" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsZUpXJIsMYjtD9W3T4beB1cInsNf2CCch-Zy3P7lnKFJPT4kXIhucyBPcK5wvorPEIWRDawVo-HUvwBAAan_zAJveah7eOh0KO5addpHbHncll6S07oywtkhEvGcrt3vNN9l5FHc2BxssNOv_0ojCf2bCv61EdAQwfNvMzxZ7YD4s4EvYj_3C0A/w280-h400/IMG_7492.jpg" width="280" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This Mammoth edition is <br />not the greatest.</td></tr></tbody></table><br />The book had its origins in a series of short stories that Doherty was asked to write for BBC Radio Sheffield and it was inspired by William Rothenstein's painting <a href="https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/buffer-girls-72155" target="_blank">Buffer Girls</a> in Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield. These stories were then later reworked into a novel.<p></p><p>It's a short novel which begins as Jess, the central character and sometimes the narrator, is about to leave home for a year in France as part of her university course. Her family have gathered to celebrate the life of her brother, Danny. Danny has died some years earlier, at more or less the same age Jess is at the start of the book, though at first we're told very little about him. It's only later that we learn of his life confined to a wheelchair and dependent on others. We never learn the exact nature of his medical condition.</p><p>At this family party Jess's grandparents and parents tell stories of their own first romantic encounters. The stories are short and it struck me that each of them could easily be expanded into a much longer piece, or form the basis of a much longer novel. But that, in a way, is the point. Family stories are often like that—I mean the stories told within families. They're simple on the surface, like the chance meeting at a tram stop between a Catholic girl and a Protestant boy that leads to a secret marriage which is later accepted by their parents. That's Jack and Bridie. But you just know that there must be a whole lot more behind that simple story.</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjALkRMxR3hjdSAQ82-CzTHTLra7ZzxsLxKEX-p4p0zvAM5f_3zGy6eu1MrKY3EdlDqwZW44w7xwzbs_YVkTdYMaM1nP1nxi77iuH4QBiNzAo_ASvJx1iVjLTE0knSrPhjJxEqig1wKsefIuW18n7YbRRYDfpna2wulOP1CoqYyVdQ8IXM24FxEZA/s3856/IMG_7514.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3856" data-original-width="2568" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjALkRMxR3hjdSAQ82-CzTHTLra7ZzxsLxKEX-p4p0zvAM5f_3zGy6eu1MrKY3EdlDqwZW44w7xwzbs_YVkTdYMaM1nP1nxi77iuH4QBiNzAo_ASvJx1iVjLTE0knSrPhjJxEqig1wKsefIuW18n7YbRRYDfpna2wulOP1CoqYyVdQ8IXM24FxEZA/w265-h400/IMG_7514.jpg" width="265" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> I bought this first edition online. <br />It's a great cover and much nicer to read.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSUfsio6fGYtZG1dyHagAZM9LHclBiMWJRvbb-yqLzDThlf_GSTZ-5Hzjc0StwepgnBXKeIMQAHLIbS7ZuahkW7JQD3vSsgyORyIakQ0y0SDGQorMx5CUAFFXjlaXdMHhBHO4cDXGyD0RcRg6Fg57Iaty5SpF4Fsk2DVpzf1o7XhdCK67oDkm_2Q/s3780/7238DEE4-D254-4130-B322-A2799E858899.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3780" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSUfsio6fGYtZG1dyHagAZM9LHclBiMWJRvbb-yqLzDThlf_GSTZ-5Hzjc0StwepgnBXKeIMQAHLIbS7ZuahkW7JQD3vSsgyORyIakQ0y0SDGQorMx5CUAFFXjlaXdMHhBHO4cDXGyD0RcRg6Fg57Iaty5SpF4Fsk2DVpzf1o7XhdCK67oDkm_2Q/w320-h400/7238DEE4-D254-4130-B322-A2799E858899.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">What's more, it arrived in an <br />envelope with these stamps on it! A <br />45 year old stamp seems to get the package <br />delivered at top speed!</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Themes of being trapped and of searching for freedom run through all of the stories and especially through that of Danny, which is referenced but not elaborated on in the first chapter, and then not returned to until we are halfway through the book. On the eve of leaving home Jess says: "I wanted to tell Mum something that I'd never been able to say to her before. If I left it till I came back home I might never be able to say it. I might be a different person."<p></p><p>We don't find out at this point what was the terrible thing Jess said to Danny, and neither do we find out what was the terrible thing Jess's mum said to Danny. Waiting to find out about Danny provides a lot of the book's suspense and Danny's situation provides a kind of symbol for the whole book. He is trapped—in his body, in a wheelchair, but he loves life (and especially Jess) and makes the most of the short time he has. In fact Jess owes her own life specifically to Danny's request for a baby sister, a request which he makes immediately after his mum and dad have been discussing whether to put him in a home (Mum's terrible thing is to wish he'd never been born). There's a family conference after this at which various important themes of the novel are stated. 'Seventeen years of life that's full and loving is every bit as good as seventy years of life that's cold and wasted." (Bridie) "I was a girl then," says Dorothy, thinking back, 'What's life done with me?" "'There's nothing more worth having than a mother's love,' Jack said softly. 'And a father's,' said Mike."</p><p>It's perhaps not surprising that, having known all her life that she was born because of Danny's wish, Jess should blame herself for his death. And, although the family make a point of celebrating lives rather than commemorating deaths, Danny's death <i>is </i>grim.</p><p>You might think that in a book offering four teen romances love would be the key to freedom, but it's not so, or never completely so anyway, and as Jess's grandad Albert tells her 'love's more than kissing and cuddling.' </p><p>This is not a sentimental book. There's Dorothy, the buffer girl of the title, who dances with the boss's son at the Firm's 'do' and thinks she's found love and an escape from poverty. Except that, in a kind of inverted Cinderella story, he fails to recognise her when she emerges filthy from the factory at the end of the day. So Dorothy marries the boy next door and later feels regret about the life she's lived. Or there's Dorothy's sister, Louie, who is trapped in a bad marriage to a brutish husband, and who sees freedom beckoning when the husband is paralysed by a stroke, only to have that freedom snatched away again when Jess claims to have read his mind through his eyes and says he wants to go home.</p><p>Jess's dad, Mike, who doesn't have much luck with girls as a teenager, meets Josie just as he's going off to do National Service and it looks like freedom (and happiness) will be his. But then Danny is born with his mysterious medical condition and their life is changed. They're trapped looking after their son. And Jess herself has her first romantic encounter at a disco and falls in love with a man who turns out to be married with a baby. So she settles for her best friend's brother, a bit like Albert and Dorothy all those years ago. Or maybe not, because what will happen to Jess in the end is left open at the end of the book. She just knows that she will never be a child again.</p><p>There's another image of freedom in the chapter which follows Danny's death. Jess's younger brother, John is a complete contrast to Danny and escapes to the Derbyshire moors at every opportunity on his bike. On one of these rides he finds a pigeon that can't fly and brings it home, where his dad insists he takes it back to where he found it. The symbolism of all this seems a bit obvious—Dad's just been freed from the burden of looking after Danny and he can't face going through it again—but when John brings the bird back again, having cycled miles and tried unsuccessfully to get it to fly, Dad relents and helps John to look after it. They end up keeping homing pigeons, birds which are free to fly but always come home.</p><p>The book's great strength is its refusal to make quick and easy judgements. Human relationships are always more complicated than we imagine, especially as self-obsessed teenagers. There's an awful lot of thought-provoking material packed into 126 pages and, as an adult reader, I would have loved to have more time to get to know the characters, and perhaps to have seen these dramas presented more subtly. Yet at the same time I can see how well it works as a book for younger readers.</p><p><i>Granny is a Buffer Girl</i> is also that rare thing among Carnegie winners, a book about real working class people in a real place, the place being Sheffield. There have been very few of these since Eve Garnett's <i>The Family from One End Street</i> won the second Carnegie in 1937. By my reckoning only Richard Armstrong's <i>Sea Change</i> (1948) and Robert Westall's <i>The Machine Gunners </i>fit the bill<i>. </i></p><p>There are one or two things about <i>Granny was a Buffer Girl </i>which feel a little uncomfortable to a modern reader. There is a chapter in which Jess goes for a walk with her Grandad along the bank of a heavily polluted canal overlooked by abandoned factory buildings. Berlie Doherty captures the surprising beauty of post-industrial landscape beautifully but like Danny's life it's grim at the same time. And on this path they often meet an old friend of Jess's grandad's called Davey: "an awkward, shambling, desperate sort of a man." Jess doesn't like him. There's this conversation between her grandad and Davey:</p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">'Bet you were dreaming about lasses, an' all,' Grandad would say . . . Davey would turn his sheepish sideways grin at him, and then at me, only I wouldn't show I'd seen it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">'Lasses? What did lasses want wi' me? I've never got on with lasses, Albert.'</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">'Nay. But it doesn't stop thee dreamin' on 'em.'</span></p><p>When Jess meets Davey alone on the canal path one day and he blocks the path and demands a kiss it is no surprise that she shoves him out of the way in horror. What is surprising is that the reader is asked to feel sympathy not for Jess but for Davey, who is distressed by the incident. Albert invites Jess to consider whether her best friend Katie (always loving) wouldn't have handled the situation differently perhaps by making a joke of it. I wasn't at all sure that this incident needed to be here, but its author clearly considered it important as it occupies an entire chapter, the chapter in which Albert talks about love not being all about kissing and cuddling.</p><p>The other thing that stood out for me was a moment when Katie's brother Steve is described as having a dance style that he's 'picked up from some of the black kids at school.' This is the first time in my Carnegie reading that I've seen children described as 'black' since Walter de la Mare's <i>Sambo and the Snow Mountains</i>, the story which was included in the 1947 <i>Collected Stories</i> but removed in later editions. I think perhaps that the reason this reference to 'black kids' drew my attention is because it made me realise just how invisible people of colour had been in Carnegie winners up to this point.</p><p><i>Granny was a Buffer Girl </i>is out of print at the moment, but is due to be republished this year (2023). Berlie Doherty has <a href="https://berliedoherty.com" target="_blank">a comprehensive and very active website</a> with much more information about this and many other books and all kinds of other aspects of her long career.</p><p>Finally a word for <a href="http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2019/06/badgers-and-other-beasts-books-of-janni.html">Janni Howker</a>, Highly Commended for the second year running for the brilliant <i>Isaac Campion. </i>I can't help feeling about Janni Howker's books that maybe they were just too good, so that maybe the judges thought that, as with Rosemary Sutcliff, they could afford to wait for the next one, because every book she wrote was fabulous. If so, they were mistaken. The extraordinary <i>Martin Farrell</i> followed in 1994 and the picture book <i>Walk with a Wolf</i> in 1997 but there has been nothing since.</p><div>Originally published on ABBA January 2023</div>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-23544765332353270202023-01-08T18:13:00.001+00:002023-01-09T17:51:17.051+00:00Everyday Magic<p>This Carnegie Medal reading project is starting to make me feel old. In 1982 Margaret Mahy won with <i>The Haunting</i>. I'd been thinking that now we were in the 1980s I'd be starting to read more books by authors who are still very familiar to readers today, and then I realised that this book was published 40 years ago. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGgLu6qL3ipdIp0Yl4FurXcBGhTeiREJKuuCDM0Jx7SEC-5Vs-K4HFxBd5CSC5wRBUwkVvoDAdi0lWFZGlheRBp1aAyYpUZxFDQcjtVhMoSd_SZFwfvmLgkeQUBEQX-2OoVHCSgn2PbtdVEshdlXFCNZi8PsrF2UNNhDU64wLEpuMNDVVXdWA85g/s4032/IMG_7437.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGgLu6qL3ipdIp0Yl4FurXcBGhTeiREJKuuCDM0Jx7SEC-5Vs-K4HFxBd5CSC5wRBUwkVvoDAdi0lWFZGlheRBp1aAyYpUZxFDQcjtVhMoSd_SZFwfvmLgkeQUBEQX-2OoVHCSgn2PbtdVEshdlXFCNZi8PsrF2UNNhDU64wLEpuMNDVVXdWA85g/w300-h400/IMG_7437.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><br />When I was a primary school teacher back in the 1980s Margaret Mahy's picture books, like <i>The Lion in the Meadow</i> and <i>The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate</i> were much-read fixtures in our classrooms, but I never read her books for older children and young adults at the time. I probably <i>would</i> have read them, but for my aversion to ghost stories, and that's a shame because Mahy writes about the supernatural like nobody else I know. Actually, Mahy <i>writes</i> like nobody else I know. I am an inveterate skipper and skimmer of text but I promise you I read every single word of this book because every single word is so brilliant. Look at how she describes what's going on inside the haunted Barney's head:<p></p><p>'Sometimes he thought that there was a mountain inside his head with many roads winding up and down around it. His thoughts were like different coloured cars zigzagging backwards and forwards, often unseen and then sometimes showing up on some clear corner. There went his worry about the ghost—there went his happy feeling about home. Sometimes a thought would suddenly appear from a gully or out of a forest and surprise him, because he hadn't known it was there.'</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGHE_5fYxobR2f_buThVsq4CZgIQb77j89b2f1goJPzgnMK20JV3LrZPQJunO0oSpLYt_N7ieXyClAOzr8BZqXGPSNfxQZy_wNQR6B0P53NMNY8eBTltICXT9du2jWc8Cxja4NKb027_5ncyORqSQ9zxODXe6-TN8wVDabiibXq0eQBSRYL_lT2Q/s4032/IMG_7438.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGHE_5fYxobR2f_buThVsq4CZgIQb77j89b2f1goJPzgnMK20JV3LrZPQJunO0oSpLYt_N7ieXyClAOzr8BZqXGPSNfxQZy_wNQR6B0P53NMNY8eBTltICXT9du2jWc8Cxja4NKb027_5ncyORqSQ9zxODXe6-TN8wVDabiibXq0eQBSRYL_lT2Q/w308-h400/IMG_7438.jpg" width="308" /></a></div><br />With Mahy you simply accept the magic and the magicians (who live ordinary lives in ordinary houses) as part of normal life and although magic is seamlessly integrated into the book's structure it is essentially about children coping with bereavement (their mother is dead) and learning to live with a new stepmother and the birth of a new sibling. Two years later Mahy won the Carnegie again with <i>The Changeover</i>, a novel for slightly older readers with a similar blend of magic and family life which is also a terrific read.<p></p><p>Foolishly I got carried away a few months back and read both of Margaret Mahy's winners, only to discover when I came to write about them this week that I could remember almost nothing about them beyond the fact that I loved them. I had to do a quick bit of rereading, and luckily they were just as good the second time around.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQVlagVN3ymggsPqFHWz9AqPHZmOvlmH-KBS5OEC3mhEVLICdCH8h72aTnjBnDOPlWhVS7iM2G_OCgPR8X6k8XxsZ1nwvmoBuMcPY6bpvxs8fgBHUdoFQGAJ_VlmOlqj3qBKBjZu_2V4loS4eUCvr9iXXC_9SaDKsOo1LnfPg82NlFLL2X2oMYzg/s4032/IMG_7439.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQVlagVN3ymggsPqFHWz9AqPHZmOvlmH-KBS5OEC3mhEVLICdCH8h72aTnjBnDOPlWhVS7iM2G_OCgPR8X6k8XxsZ1nwvmoBuMcPY6bpvxs8fgBHUdoFQGAJ_VlmOlqj3qBKBjZu_2V4loS4eUCvr9iXXC_9SaDKsOo1LnfPg82NlFLL2X2oMYzg/w300-h400/IMG_7439.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br />In between these two winners Jan Mark also won for a second time with <i>Handles</i>, a wonderful book about which <a href="http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2018/12/jan-marks-norfolk-by-paul-may.html" target="_blank">I wrote in a post on this blog a few years back</a>. It was a good few years for the Carnegie. Then, in 1985, the prize went to <i>Storm</i> by Kevin Crossley-Holland. This very short text is a ghost story about a little girl who has to go out in a storm and fetch the doctor when her mum is about to give birth. I have absolutely no idea why the committee considered <i>Storm</i> worthy of the Carnegie Medal. I know I've gone on before about the importance of these books for the very youngest independent readers, but it seems weird to me that this book should be the one to have won. <p></p><p>For a start, the plot is very similar to that of Jane Gardam's <i>Bridget and William</i>. It just has an added and not very convincing ghost rider to take the little girl to the doctor. It also contains this simile on the second page which I challenge anyone to explain: 'And since his stroke, her father was only able to walk with the help of two sticks. He had become quite mild and milky, <i>like grain softened by mist</i>.' What does that mean? Every time I read it I try to figure it out, but I can't. What a seven-year-old would make of it, I can't imagine.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1tnGdbCcjBJMj5dP_VIp4eV04vknM2zrSxs2CgpUUyaH22mlGljV5Z0ii8HsDhIAFYVaf9TD4Pdxg-mXlLo4AAIHUqSGqWIliudBxN-AypoQgg9fEzJdm1Xs4zOM0g-TCFM-lVwI1T1RiB4r4AQ_Lbyhp-9i2Dp-xf7HPD2xhpF1RXWD4PtWhig/s4032/IMG_7436.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1tnGdbCcjBJMj5dP_VIp4eV04vknM2zrSxs2CgpUUyaH22mlGljV5Z0ii8HsDhIAFYVaf9TD4Pdxg-mXlLo4AAIHUqSGqWIliudBxN-AypoQgg9fEzJdm1Xs4zOM0g-TCFM-lVwI1T1RiB4r4AQ_Lbyhp-9i2Dp-xf7HPD2xhpF1RXWD4PtWhig/w300-h400/IMG_7436.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><br />The only review of this book on Amazon says it's good to 'use' with Y2/3 children. I dare say that's true. It's full of the kind of writing some teachers long for their pupils to produce, and reviewers on Goodreads single out for praise things that make me shudder (and not in the intended way). eg 'Empty it looked and silent it seemed.' Anyway, you'll gather that I didn't like it. It feels slight, incomplete and over-written. More than that, I greatly regret that it was preferred to Janni Howker's <i>The Nature of the Beast.</i> Janni Howker was a perpetual runner-up for the Carnegie, <a href="http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2019/06/badgers-and-other-beasts-books-of-janni.html" target="_blank">about whom I have written elsewhere.</a> I should also say that I admire much of Kevin Crossley-Holland's other work, especially his version of <i>The Norse Myths</i>.<p></p><p>Finally this month I have to say something about a guide to the Carnegie winners that I found a reference to on a blog somewhere. The book is called <i>Outstanding books for children and young people: The LA guide to Carnegie/Greenaway winners 1937-1997 </i>and it was published in 1998 by the Library Association.<i> </i>'That looks useful,' I thought, so I had a look for it online only to discover that it was rare and very expensive—about £90. So I went into the British Library where I had learned that it was on open access on the shelves. I set about looking for what I assumed would be an enormous hardback and couldn't find it until I noticed a very slim, small paperback sandwiched between other books. </p><p>I sat down to read. There are some glaring inaccuracies in the book which I was going to write about until I realised that its author, Keith Barker, died suddenly just a year after the book was published. He was only 51. I don't know if he was ill at the time, but someone really should have noticed important errors in the descriptions of both <i>The Scarecrows</i> and <i>The Haunting</i>. I'd recommend that you don't splash out £90 on this.</p><p>And that's it for another month. Four Carnegie winners in one post! I might actually get to the end as long as I don't have to read all of them twice.</p><p>Originally published on ABBA December 2022</p>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-4215255811490705672023-01-08T18:11:00.002+00:002023-01-09T17:51:34.660+00:00Robert Westall's Scarecrows<p><i>The Scarecrows</i> by Robert Westall is a novel about sex, violence and masculinity. It won the Carnegie Medal in 1981 and it is very different from Westall's first winner, <i>The Machine Gunners</i>. It has taken me some time, and two readings, to figure out what is going on in the book: I started by feeling revolted by much of it, but while it's never going to be an easy read I have gradually realized that this complex story ventures into areas not often explored by fiction, whether intended for adults or children, and that the things that I disliked so much are there for a reason. Do I like the book now? No. Is there a lot to think about? Yes. </p><p>The book left a nasty taste in my mouth and despite many passages of very powerful writing, I don't think it achieves what it seems to be trying to achieve. It paints a vivid picture of a boy with a lot of problems who is in a difficult situation, but I can't see how it would help a child in the same kind of trouble. And, perhaps more importantly, I didn't think it was very scary.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie4yF6KOX5Sb3I48ePZzwTXZD8tfr5Ql5JaOEuVRGdYjEo7DGIuNjOWQ_O_E3QdsteT5uB03207EE6yC9_pQhTWDpZX92DEn7RZpZdyhjyLyj00vHsaKYLBAvXmUYRz_b6EyGVdVsNNN3vt3B9Z3Zv5atgHsZgW75jVFIWk3iCWjDg01Y-NtJmyQ/s4032/IMG_7398.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie4yF6KOX5Sb3I48ePZzwTXZD8tfr5Ql5JaOEuVRGdYjEo7DGIuNjOWQ_O_E3QdsteT5uB03207EE6yC9_pQhTWDpZX92DEn7RZpZdyhjyLyj00vHsaKYLBAvXmUYRz_b6EyGVdVsNNN3vt3B9Z3Zv5atgHsZgW75jVFIWk3iCWjDg01Y-NtJmyQ/w300-h400/IMG_7398.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>The story is told from the point-of-view of Simon. He is in his final year at a preparatory school, from where he is destined to go on to Wellington College, a Public School with strong military connections. Simon is a deeply disturbed boy. His father, a professional soldier, has been killed seven years before the story begins, fighting for the British army in Aden. Simon's younger sister, Jane, was born after their father's death. Simon's mother works in an art gallery and is the source of huge embarrassment to Simon, who is one of the least sympathetic protagonists of any book I've read, running <a href="http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2022/01/ivan-southall-carnegie-goes-global-by.html" target="_blank">Ivan Southall's <i>Josh</i></a> a close second.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMPaQc9sd7mmxbkN_s1tGlk9tNSvinRiaTTQ382bz0P1qVByO5Wo4_EXoK4aVcFfh_1ZfYMdX2TGPalhkKJTDxZclw4msLid50ZsxsPa-zlz_ESKsYb8CB9G_NVuuL1Ss82vHQ30SAlRY5Z86AEtzTz9-ZCrMilu4FZkihm7MoXzizprsAozDBAw/s4032/IMG_7402.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMPaQc9sd7mmxbkN_s1tGlk9tNSvinRiaTTQ382bz0P1qVByO5Wo4_EXoK4aVcFfh_1ZfYMdX2TGPalhkKJTDxZclw4msLid50ZsxsPa-zlz_ESKsYb8CB9G_NVuuL1Ss82vHQ30SAlRY5Z86AEtzTz9-ZCrMilu4FZkihm7MoXzizprsAozDBAw/w300-h400/IMG_7402.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p>The book's opening chapter provides a supremely unedifying snapshot of life in a boarding school dormitory. Bowden, the chief bully, specialises in smutty innuendo about other boys' mothers, and in vile anti-semitism. In flashback we learn that, during the previous year's Parents' Day, Simon's mother has embarrassed him by agreeing to play in a tennis match. Rather than being proud that his mum is a brilliant tennis player, Simon hates the fact that you can see her bottom when she bends to pick up a ball. But then, Simon knows how the other boys will see things. The taunting in the dormitory that night -'I think your mother took <i>service</i> rather well' ... 'She certainly knows how to handle a pair of balls', lets loose what Simon thinks of as the devils in his head. He loses control and beats Bowden to a pulp.</p><p>As the story begins Bowden is at it again, though he no longer picks on Simon. He's scared of him. It's the evening before the next annual Parents' Day and Simon is dreading it. The reality turns out to be far worse than he could have imagined. His mum turns up in a white Range Rover with a man, and Joe Moreton is, in Simon's snobbish eyes, 'a yob'. He has no tie. He smirks and he leers and he smells of Gauloises. Worse, he is rich and successful. He draws political cartoons 'in <i>The Observer</i> and <i>Private Eye'</i>, and, as we soon find out, he is going to marry Simon's mum.</p><p>Simon is the step-child from hell. Actually, he might be the child from hell. Because Simon idolised his dead father and sees his mother as betraying his dad with a man who couldn't be more different, a man who his mother actually loves, and who his little sister loves too. And they are all disgustingly physically affectionate with each other. One of the things I found hard to take when I first read the book was the way seven-year-old Jane is described as 'sexy', but I think this is because that's the way Simon sees her. Simon is filled with jealousy and obsessed with sex. He is disgusted and, as we discover, pruriently curious at the same time. I should add that I didn't find Jane a very believable seven-year-old, and I've met a lot of seven-year-old girls. That's the kind of false note that makes it hard to suspend disbelief in a story, and if you're going to believe in the evil scarecrows you really do need to believe in the more everyday characters.</p><p>At first I thought there was no humour in <i>The Scarecrows, </i>but that's not true. There <i>is</i> humour but it's a bitter, sarcastic humour. In fact, it the humour of the professional caricaturist—the humour of Joe Moreton—what Simon thinks of as 'the strange and hateful talent of Joe Moreton'. We first see this talent at the Parents' Day, where Joe is asked to draw a cartoon of the Headmaster to auction for the school funds. </p><p>'But slowly, out of the slashed scribbles, an image of the Head emerged. Bald head, spindle shanks, paunchy tum under grey waistcoat. The drawing made him look tiny, like an aggressive robin. So real you had to laugh. Except Moreton showed more than was there: the tension in the clenched hand on the wing of the car; the Head's desperation under the politeness he always showed to rude bullying parents. Moreton stripped the Head naked.'</p><p>When Simon goes to Joe's exhibition at the gallery where Mum works he realizes: 'All Joe Moreton's people looked scared underneath.' Joe's drawings are funny, but devastating and cruel, and the 'comic' characters in this book might have been drawn by Joe. There is Mercyfull, the repulsive old gardener who is as much of a snob as Simon about the upstart imposter Joe Moreton. There's Cosima in the village store who delights in crying out that she feels as if she's been '<i>raped</i>' when the press descend on her shop (the whole section about the national press descending on the village to try to preserve the old mill seems completely unnecessary to me), and there's Mrs Meegan, the woman who works for Joe as an artist's model, with her sagging breasts and painted face. Simon tries to see what's going on in the studio by climbing a tree and, when Joe spots him, Simon refuses to get down. Joe sends Mrs Meegan away and takes his revenge by drawing Simon. Simon is outraged and when he and Mum enter the studio the drawing is pinned to the wall: </p><p>'A hunched little figure of pure hate . . .</p><p>"That's <i>not</i> me. It's <i>not</i>, it's<i> not</i>, it's <i>not</i>!"</p><p>All the adults burst out laughing.</p><p>"The spitting image," said Mrs Meegan.'</p><p>But that's not the worst of it. When Simon rips the drawing to pieces Joe calmly starts drawing again. The drawing will never go away. Joe can recreate it any time he wants. 'If it's a lie,' said Joe, 'it won't hurt him. Lies don't hurt. And if it's the truth, it's about time he knew it.'</p><p>And then there are the scarecrows. You might think of them as the ultimate caricatures. Oddly, despite their title role, they don't show up for 100 pages. There is an old watermill near Joe Morton's house, on the other side of a turnip field. The mill is haunted by the ghosts of 'the young miller', his wife, and the wife's lover, whose name is Starkey. Starkey and the miller's wife murdered the miller, and were later executed for the crime. When Simon enters the mill it appears to be just as it was left on February 1, 1943, the date on a newspaper on the table. (WW2 is never far away with Robert Westall). But Simon summons their spirits and they appear later in the field as a trio of scarecrows who move slowly and threateningly closer to Joe Morton's house as the days pass. </p><p>I've spent a lot of time thinking about those scarecrows—about who and what they represent—and I'm still not entirely sure. Westall says somewhere that he uses the supernatural to symbolise what's happening inside his characters. When Simon pushes over two of the scarecrows they appear to fall into a sexual embrace, echoing the 'animal noises' that Simon has heard from his mum and Joe when he's been eavesdropping on them having sex (and, almost more excruciatingly, talking about him.) The third scarecrow, the really scary one who Simon thinks of as Starkey, is surely Simon himself. and Starkey is about to kill.</p><p>'He turned on the third scarecrow; advanced. But he still couldn't read the third scarecrow's look. The third scarecrow was far, far worse. The third scarecrow looked like he might fight back . . .'</p><p>So when Simon gets out his father's loaded revolver it does seem entirely possible that he might kill someone. We already know from Simon's eavesdropping that his mum's relationship with his father was deeply unsatisfactory, both emotionally and sexually. We already know that she thinks Simon is hard inside, just like his dad. But it's still shocking when she says, after the incident with the gun:</p><p>"'I saw you born; I saw you come out of my body. But I swear . . . you're no part of me. You're all Wood, Wood, Wood. You're just another one of a long line of . . .'</p><p>But it wasn't what she said. Its was the way she said it."</p><p>Even if you're angry it's an odd thing to say to a distressed 13-year-old. I think I've said enough to show that this is a very grim book indeed, and it feels at times more like a warning than a novel—a warning about how not to bring up a child. What's more I haven't managed to understand the ending, no matter how many times I've read it. It seems as if the scarecrows are about to kill Simon and his family and that Simon finally banishes them when he thinks happy thoughts of Mum, Jane, and, almost, of Joe, but I wasn't at all clear what it was that the scarecrows were about to do. I am reminded of Philippa Pearce's (unjustified) criticism of <i><a href="https://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2021/09/owls-or-flowers-re-reading-owl-service.html" target="_blank">The Owl Service</a></i> that it failed to 'make plain' what was happening. The thing about <i>The Owl Service</i>— which must surely have been an important influence on this book, dealing as it did with social class and step-families and with its supernatural scaffolding— is that, in its own terms, it makes sense. I'm not sure that <i>The Scarecrows</i> does.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWLrGS2dPAa6z2k89hVF5Xw2MEWZO5xlQsKz8TgCflLX9XO-HUPsmtkaFVOIXr0rLeDq6I62V-477hNrCnVnBYRfF0bcPWkp9DBEpZPY51U7MnFFRRbp4mYGhbs5Jftl6WNJ6R96qWxWdGeUH1qihQsqD8RpFGhczOOaeFNCfPZH2NzIV40cRU6Q/s4032/IMG_7401.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWLrGS2dPAa6z2k89hVF5Xw2MEWZO5xlQsKz8TgCflLX9XO-HUPsmtkaFVOIXr0rLeDq6I62V-477hNrCnVnBYRfF0bcPWkp9DBEpZPY51U7MnFFRRbp4mYGhbs5Jftl6WNJ6R96qWxWdGeUH1qihQsqD8RpFGhczOOaeFNCfPZH2NzIV40cRU6Q/s320/IMG_7401.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><p>Nor does it provide a great deal of hope. Westall says that a question he asks himself is 'How do I tell them the truth without destroying hope?' Is there hope for Simon? Simon has heard and seen a bit too much truth in this book, if you ask me. He has heard his mum tell Joe what she thinks his future will be; away at school, then into the army, coming to see her twice a year 'out of duty'. She thinks they'll be better off just the three of them, her and Joe and Jane. No Simon. He's heard her describe sex with his dad: ' . . . he just took me, like I was another fence, another parachute jump. Then he turned his back afterwards and lay and smoked in the dark. I could never touch him . . . ' And he's seen how Joe has seen through him. It's meant to help, isn't it, seeing yourself as others see you? But I don't think it helps Simon. When he thinks the scarecrows might kill Joe he thinks: 'Joe had a right to live too. Not, maybe, a right to Mum, Jane, Tris. But a right to live.' Hope is doled out in very small portions here.</p><p>As has often been the case with this Carnegie reading project, one book has led to another. Robert Westall was undoubtedly one of the most important writers for children and young adults in the latter years of the twentieth century, and not all of his books are as grim as <i>The Scarecrows.</i> I also think that many of them are <i>better </i>than <i>The Scarecrows</i>. For an excellent survey of Westall's work I'd recommend <i>Westall's kingdom</i>, an article by Peter Holindale in <i>Children's Literature in Education</i> Vol 25 Issue 3, 1994. It's available online and is behind a paywall but if you're in an academic institution or somewhere like the British Library you can access it there. In the meantime I have some recommendations. Firstly there is the excellent collection of autobiographical pieces in <i>The Making of Me</i>. This book is mainly about childhood and schooldays, and there's a fascinating piece at the end about <i>The Machine Gunners</i> and Westall's editor, Marni Hodgkin.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhM1pR9Eww4n_S1-Y1c6O9vHrPPYgUUbwTjWAlN2Bg_qhseWIYEF996aTis0txmQ2yT7eVg3vNC2-a4Gbu8zHv4xXEc5doQutVwXd1_bUMUXur6OriWqg0TsWWhV4JdOyhZ9PWRNVJTUg4JHSxIlYsy9DZxMlialXkn3k-8wT_q3g_8rvDELp8S4g/s4032/IMG_7397.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhM1pR9Eww4n_S1-Y1c6O9vHrPPYgUUbwTjWAlN2Bg_qhseWIYEF996aTis0txmQ2yT7eVg3vNC2-a4Gbu8zHv4xXEc5doQutVwXd1_bUMUXur6OriWqg0TsWWhV4JdOyhZ9PWRNVJTUg4JHSxIlYsy9DZxMlialXkn3k-8wT_q3g_8rvDELp8S4g/w300-h400/IMG_7397.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><p>My second recommendation is the short novel <i>Gulf,</i> published in 1992 and shortlisted for the Carnegie that year. In this book Westall blends realism and the supernatural (or perhaps inexplicable is a better word) seamlessly. Tom, the narrator, has a little brother who he calls Figgis because, before his brother was born he had an imaginary friend called Figgis. Figgis turns out to have a gift for what might be called extreme empathy, and when the Gulf War breaks out he enters the mind of a boy soldier in Saddam Hussein's army. This brilliant novel incorporates ideas from much of Westall's earlier work into a taut, moving and entirely convincing story which has lost none of its relevance today.</p><p>And then there is <i>The Kingdom by the Sea</i>. This novel about a 12-year-old boy who survives the bombing of his house on Tyneside in WW2 and takes off on a journey up the Northumberland coast is as life-affirming as The Scarecrows is not. Published in 1990 it won the Guardian Children's Fiction Award and was commended for the Carnegie. I'm not sure it's a children's book, any more than is Claire Keegan's <i>Foster</i>, which I read recently and which has some parallels with Westall's book, but it is definitely wonderful.</p><p>Finally, you might like to know that in 1981, the year of <i>The Scarecrows</i>, Jane Gardam's <i>The Hollow Land</i> was highly commended for the Carnegie, and her <i>Bridget and William</i>, as I mentioned last month, was also commended, as was Michelle Magorian's <i>Goodnight Mr Tom</i>. I'd say that either of the Jane Gardam books would have been more worthy winners than <i>The Scarecrows</i>, and <i>Goodnight Mr Tom</i> doesn't seem to have suffered too much from not being selected either. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPGe4EywtstuwVAuhFb-PQ-hCwBHEsgjueCh1adTU_ugU9b13MA2XaCtwRKyVkSuiWrWw0awVBruKS3hGx8i1mU23vMGdcLfl6dX5x4B3Gr06xRgKs3qkJgjqRd29X9ls_VOLd6srRAui4UdLv6WZmD0V_ECRJlGkk9Zh5PHECP04OQ5xV4MHKbg/s4032/IMG_7400.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPGe4EywtstuwVAuhFb-PQ-hCwBHEsgjueCh1adTU_ugU9b13MA2XaCtwRKyVkSuiWrWw0awVBruKS3hGx8i1mU23vMGdcLfl6dX5x4B3Gr06xRgKs3qkJgjqRd29X9ls_VOLd6srRAui4UdLv6WZmD0V_ECRJlGkk9Zh5PHECP04OQ5xV4MHKbg/s320/IMG_7400.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br />In my brief search for other sex-obsessed adolescents to rival Simon as unsympathetic protagonists I pulled Alan Garner's <i>Red Shift</i> from the shelf. I felt devastated for all three of the couples whose stories are told across time, but especially for the modern day couple, Tom and Jan. Tom is a tortured character, and he's made a mess of things, but I can relate to his misery in a way that I can't to Simon's. It's baffling to me that <i>Red Shift</i> wasn't even on the shortlist in 1973 when a few years later they were prepared to give the award to a far lesser book in <i>The Scarecrows</i>. Mind you, two of the commended titles in 1973 were Nina Bawden's <i>Carries's War</i> and Susan Cooper's <i>The Dark is Rising, </i>so 1973 was a pretty good year. <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH8DI0oQfjpQRz5ilz2ONIaL_MzltRGb8DGwAAR8Xe4lIU8JdKMjPlpA_V4fkspQ5k7p7gksY2m7re5trmJF0xP29KKMDNv4-sQydTQdpOuP0-r5ENezhGPTddOie5qWMWKy-jKpf1Kc5BrL6JsNbTXVi18-nQh5opcKf15gdHCbUsULV-as1HTw/s4032/IMG_7396.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="2719" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH8DI0oQfjpQRz5ilz2ONIaL_MzltRGb8DGwAAR8Xe4lIU8JdKMjPlpA_V4fkspQ5k7p7gksY2m7re5trmJF0xP29KKMDNv4-sQydTQdpOuP0-r5ENezhGPTddOie5qWMWKy-jKpf1Kc5BrL6JsNbTXVi18-nQh5opcKf15gdHCbUsULV-as1HTw/s320/IMG_7396.jpg" width="216" /></a></div><br /><p>And, in case you've missed the news, there is a new radio dramatisation of <i>The Dark is Rising</i> by Robert Macfarlane <a href="https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2022/the-dark-is-rising-bbc-world-service" target="_blank">coming to the BBC in December.</a> Now that <i>is</i> something to look forward to!</p><p>Originally published on ABBA November 2022</p>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-42221884092338179242023-01-08T18:07:00.006+00:002023-01-09T17:52:10.390+00:00Half Way There<p>It was on the 6th March 2020 that I started posting about my plan to read my way through the Carnegie Medal-winning books, starting at the beginning. It's strange to think that it was two and a half years ago, and before the first lock-down. It's starting to feel like a long time, but at last I've reached the half-way point—42 down and 42 to go. So I think it's a good time to take stock and see what, if anything, I've learned from the experience.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEkMtf3rk-wkFDdsxDDKU62CjKCMVMPhU0qlOffn5snL784S7x_mJuYiy_1Z99p-BFRBibPQJzJoLDoxakMn7pkuCQmBqNjbiqHUfyBF964uczr2ZzaeRuB8oE5VogVHQKuzhHXe2-XCzpLElWGHhR-BO5UYUrEbeJH8lzJJMJS7ABQUgMtn5IXA/s4032/IMG_7349.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEkMtf3rk-wkFDdsxDDKU62CjKCMVMPhU0qlOffn5snL784S7x_mJuYiy_1Z99p-BFRBibPQJzJoLDoxakMn7pkuCQmBqNjbiqHUfyBF964uczr2ZzaeRuB8oE5VogVHQKuzhHXe2-XCzpLElWGHhR-BO5UYUrEbeJH8lzJJMJS7ABQUgMtn5IXA/w300-h400/IMG_7349.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><br />The 42nd winner of the Carnegie was Peter Dickinson's retelling of Old Testament stories in <i>City of Gold</i>. Dickinson was remarkably down to earth in his assessments of his work. Of <i>City of Gold</i> he said: 'I was happy with the result, but at the same time flabbergasted when the book won the Carnegie Medal. When I'm asked what sort of books I write I say the sort that adults think children ought to read. That isn't my purpose. I intend them to be enjoyed, but I admit that a lot of my reviews contain the dreaded word "demanding". <i>City of Gold</i> is an extreme example, so there was a good deal of grumbling about it winning the medal, which I had some sympathy with, but not enough to refuse the medal.'<p></p><p>Those words—'the sort that adults think children ought to read'—sum up neatly the way Carnegie winners were selected. The winner was to be 'an outstanding book for children', but here's Alec Ellis writing in <i>Written for Children</i> in 1977: '... the Carnegie Medal has become widely recognised among parents, publishers, teachers, writers, as well as librarians, as a hallmark of quality.' Whether having the hallmark of quality bestowed upon your books was much help to most authors must be doubted. I related Lucy Boston's experience of receiving her award in <a href="https://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/search?q=green+knowe" target="_blank">an earlier post</a>, and I keep thinking of something Annie Dalton said to me many years ago—her book <i>The Real Tilly Beany</i> was Commended in 1991. She said her books used to be 'beloved by sensitive librarians,' but now her <i>Angels</i> series was on sale in WH Smith with glitter on the covers and free T-shirts with a sparkly angel logo. The books the librarians loved didn't sell very well. The glittery <i>Angels</i> did. </p><p>The Carnegie was all about adults choosing books for children, and perhaps that's why reading all those Carnegie winners felt at times like reading my way through a parallel universe that only occasionally intersected with the real one. A visitor from outer space who used the list of Carnegie winners to inform them about the books children read in the second half of the 20th century would know nothing about Richmal Crompton, or Enid Blyton, or Malcolm Saville, or Roald Dahl, or J K Rowling or Jacqueline Wilson. They wouldn't know about <i>Horrible Histories</i>, or <i>Point Horror</i> either. </p><p>Because my childhood took place during a part this period I can report that the Carnegie Medal had no impact whatsoever on my reading habits, unless it was in the influence of the Carnegie on the choices of the librarian at my local library. But my library, fortunately, was well-stocked with pulp fiction and that was what I read. This probably explains why so many of the authors of those first 42 books were new to me. As is the way of these things, some books led on to other books and I think it's those leads I'm most grateful for. For example, without this project to spur me on I doubt if I would have read Walter de la Mare's <i>Memoir of a Midget</i>, or<i> The Three Mulla-Mulgars</i>, both of which are extraordinary books. I'd never read anything by Mollie Hunter before either, and while her winner, <i>The Stronghold</i> is a remarkable book, her semi-autobiographical novel <i>A Sound of Chariots</i> is a truly exceptional depiction of grief that manages at the same time to be funny and uplifting.</p><p>So there have been many good things, but at the same time I have found myself full of admiration for those people who read books professionally, whether they like them or not. Reviewers, that's to say, or librarians, or teachers. Though in my experience teachers don't read that much. I was lucky because I mainly taught four- and five-year-olds and so my reading consisted largely of picture books. I've spent most of my life giving up on books after a couple of pages if I don't like them and quite a few of these Carnegie winners have demanded a degree of perseverence! <i>City of Gold</i> is one such. It's very good, very well written, but I would be very surprised if more than a handful of children had ever read it from cover to cover.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvPL-cYjT7CysGoEflmpToDw3Pg6XQDBDC_Qp49kYl9IgnBg8j0GhmjcGTVBizyQLxU_afKJUNpTGvXyUcBgCUnXhu0KOTq8xCXQRJHUpP8SopRqUHRqCI_3w8zyMBzixgfDpiQChGOlN-k6QwUukTwTzvyZCqDQOn8YDBls385AGhVro6HuLRuw/s4032/IMG_7350.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvPL-cYjT7CysGoEflmpToDw3Pg6XQDBDC_Qp49kYl9IgnBg8j0GhmjcGTVBizyQLxU_afKJUNpTGvXyUcBgCUnXhu0KOTq8xCXQRJHUpP8SopRqUHRqCI_3w8zyMBzixgfDpiQChGOlN-k6QwUukTwTzvyZCqDQOn8YDBls385AGhVro6HuLRuw/w300-h400/IMG_7350.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><br />You'd need to be a pretty good, pretty sophisticated reader to read most of Carnegie winners independently and it seems a shame to me that the Carnegie has never been awarded to a book designed for newly independent readers. The committee had a great opportunity to do this in 1981, the year after <i>City of Gold</i>, when the award went to <i>The Scarecrows </i>by Robert Westall. That year Jane Gardam's <i>The Hollow Land</i> was highly commended, and at the same time she received a commendation for <i>Bridget and William</i>. <i>Bridget and William</i> is a miniature marvel—a complete novel in six short chapters, moving, warm-hearted, full of rich characters and set high in the Yorkshire Dales. Books like this do an incredibly valuable job in helping children make the transition from being taught to read to being independent readers, and they are not easy to write! This is literary fiction of the highest quality which an eight-year-old can read easily and with pleasure. Books like this don't appear to be on the radar of the Carnegie committee, even today.<p></p><p>Peter Dickinson died in 2015 but <a href="https://www.peterdickinson.com/defenseofrubbish/" target="_blank">his website</a> is still active and is a mine of interesting articles and information about his books. I'd especially recommend <i>A Defence of Rubbish</i>. Among the things he says in the piece is this: 'I know very few adults who do not have some secret cultural vice, and they are all the better for it. I would instantly suspect an adult all of whose cultural activities were high, remote and perfect.'</p><p> Well, so would I. </p><p>Originally published on ABBA October 2022</p><div><br /></div>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-42080750605147232262023-01-08T18:06:00.002+00:002023-01-09T17:52:31.120+00:00Wild Places<p>I was in a second-hand bookshop in Lavenham in Suffolk in 1989 when I picked up a copy of <i>Scott's Last Expedition, </i>abridged for children. I was on a cycling tour of East Anglia with my wife and daughter and the book made for perfect evening reading. And it was a gateway book for me into the vast and freezing realms of polar literature. I collected many books by members of Scott's expeditions, and soon moved on to Shackleton. I'll mention a few of my favourites, but before I do it occurred to me earlier that I couldn't think of any children's fiction concerning polar exploration. Then I thought, well, it would be a bit hard to convincingly get children to the Poles without adult supervision. And then I realised that I'd just finished a book that did so, in its way. That book is Arthur Ransome's <i>Winter Holiday, </i>and though the North Pole that is the object of the adventure is not the real Pole, the adventure on the frozen lake is almost as tense and frightening as some of the books below.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSndzZDaOrSQQCQXxxY9p_2F1SWUQBn-jBY6_6vfO8Z2Qm4U3-vDUpOBLKnvwBH25Ch8PlrZN9-iobYpahbrDPmXbiaGFxnEQLv5vFoQCmj-rc3EyttRBqM5lnbkcc5L6hrgtIvp3E4m2atcR0eY7sHAZOsAUvtOIZ3MjWzyUA6R-ucFOXZQvSJA/s1280/IMG_7197.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSndzZDaOrSQQCQXxxY9p_2F1SWUQBn-jBY6_6vfO8Z2Qm4U3-vDUpOBLKnvwBH25Ch8PlrZN9-iobYpahbrDPmXbiaGFxnEQLv5vFoQCmj-rc3EyttRBqM5lnbkcc5L6hrgtIvp3E4m2atcR0eY7sHAZOsAUvtOIZ3MjWzyUA6R-ucFOXZQvSJA/w300-h400/IMG_7197.jpeg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_EoW6BvzGzvM7pRnRygj0O33H2G10OFAp0-WECdYcMhgazP9vv1QR8brrqbPM6XXNJyrOlauJfhlJEUtS9WdAh6jnfH3Kb68FYJyKR33MdeuE8wLp-TUPzzoycjLdOSXwBupUvmWxOdEJ7mnAHqIa3KwZOpRgiLk4xEIiT2UYw_-t8nHI4pOU5A/s1280/IMG_7198.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_EoW6BvzGzvM7pRnRygj0O33H2G10OFAp0-WECdYcMhgazP9vv1QR8brrqbPM6XXNJyrOlauJfhlJEUtS9WdAh6jnfH3Kb68FYJyKR33MdeuE8wLp-TUPzzoycjLdOSXwBupUvmWxOdEJ7mnAHqIa3KwZOpRgiLk4xEIiT2UYw_-t8nHI4pOU5A/w300-h400/IMG_7198.jpeg" width="300" /></a></div><br />Scott's diaries are essential reading, as is Shackleton's <i>South</i>, but best of all is Apsley Cherry-Garrard's <i>The Worst Journey in the World</i>, which is a perfect pick-me-up in the middle of a long, cold winter if you're feeling a bit sorry for yourself. There is always someone worse off than you are, unless your tent has blown away in the middle of a blizzard, miles from any chance of help in the depths of the Polar winter. <div><br /></div><div>Also terrific is Frank Worsley's <i>Shackleton's Boat Journey</i>, a wonderfully self-deprecating account of an unbelievable feat of navigation and endurance. Finally, I recommend <i>South with Scott </i>by Admiral Lord Mountevans KCB, DSO, LL.D (AKA Teddy Evans). Teddy Evans was the subject of not a few uncomplimentary remarks in Scott's diaries and felt the need to justify himself. According to the jacket notes 'we owe a debt of gratitude to Admiral Lord Mountevans for giving to English literature a book which rightly ranks as a classic.' I think you get the idea. I suspect Teddy Evans wrote that himself.<p></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGV7P2osq5kZllDLLByutRp-0OePfoE4wFDIpeY2JyTZv7KdsIaO0JdVs8cfCBhasgblSGOz5G-85hh58anhNENzxQO2vo6j5YX_lY3Q8xsufVrmctGWKiUe2TDcsXv1MawW_B6-yfquJehg3UZMSf-jhS6rTLszq0qSnd1RxciiXTx9LbNO4RCw/s1280/IMG_7195.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGV7P2osq5kZllDLLByutRp-0OePfoE4wFDIpeY2JyTZv7KdsIaO0JdVs8cfCBhasgblSGOz5G-85hh58anhNENzxQO2vo6j5YX_lY3Q8xsufVrmctGWKiUe2TDcsXv1MawW_B6-yfquJehg3UZMSf-jhS6rTLszq0qSnd1RxciiXTx9LbNO4RCw/s320/IMG_7195.jpeg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNDGR0ibntdZxFY8elzOmgtcqqvjXqkBY6uO5vUrsEWRlgAFEdvasjP5gzKfMDyDH39gPDQ5p7QtgzQO6Twspgz55yK7GZDVXcSUU9nN471o8h44HilJ3nH4JoTBDRuKg1CqkP7y87qQYQk4yo6cwRwNaryU5406vSpqwHzX9jYeb20ZZmfRG2Mg/s1280/IMG_7196.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNDGR0ibntdZxFY8elzOmgtcqqvjXqkBY6uO5vUrsEWRlgAFEdvasjP5gzKfMDyDH39gPDQ5p7QtgzQO6Twspgz55yK7GZDVXcSUU9nN471o8h44HilJ3nH4JoTBDRuKg1CqkP7y87qQYQk4yo6cwRwNaryU5406vSpqwHzX9jYeb20ZZmfRG2Mg/s320/IMG_7196.jpeg" width="240" /></a></div><br />Directly below the shelves of Polar books for many years were books about Tibet and the Himalayas. I am betting that Peter Dickinson had a shelf of these, too, because his Carnegie winner, <i>Tulku</i>, seems to be partly inspired by that literature. I only read <i>Tulku</i> recently but I thought it was a terrific read with a fantastic sense of place and some great characters. With a lot of these Carnegie winners I've read them with a slight sense of detachment, but with <i>Tulku</i> I was completely involved, just as if I was reading Dick Francis, and I'm really grateful because the book sent me back to those other accounts of Tibet and central Asia which I hadn't looked at for years. <p></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAWIJ14HpJ3ktfWu7i3TSAfZx4dnLpDMg7nUnRL-yZUNYNLgvlzo12lzVes7NSyPiK9-KrPwp-RHKKU_v_tyfVId-dnJ_5K3UIUkhK1Hia0qbNj-y-ielg9jeo24cKirTK6AIKY1xeBihP_OXJ0Yfj0DdPnzh8G10TDrW9HRstfON4eyFjsGGJ5A/s1280/IMG_7201.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAWIJ14HpJ3ktfWu7i3TSAfZx4dnLpDMg7nUnRL-yZUNYNLgvlzo12lzVes7NSyPiK9-KrPwp-RHKKU_v_tyfVId-dnJ_5K3UIUkhK1Hia0qbNj-y-ielg9jeo24cKirTK6AIKY1xeBihP_OXJ0Yfj0DdPnzh8G10TDrW9HRstfON4eyFjsGGJ5A/w300-h400/IMG_7201.jpeg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>All I'll say about<i> Tulku</i> itself (I wouldn't want to spoil it for you) is that it's set in China and Tibet at the time of the Boxer rising in the late nineteenth century and contains bandits, battles and Tibetan lamas. And all of these, as well as wonderfully evocative descriptions of landscapes and people, can be found in two of my favourite books from that Tibetan shelf I mentioned. The first of these is <i>Tibetan Venture</i> by André Guibaut. Guibaut set out in May 1940 with his companion, Louis Victor Liotard to 'explore the territory of the Ngolo-Setas and the upper basin of the Tong.'</p><p>Guibaut idolised Liotard, but from the very first page we know that Liotard was killed by Tibetan bandits on September 10, 1940. The entire book is doom-laden in an extraordinary way. The two explorers don't quite trust their porters and as the expedition proceeds various sinister strangers are encountered, sinister horsemen are seen at dusk on hilltops, sinister villagers refuse them hospitality, and their saddlebags, as seems well known to the entire population of the region, are heavily loaded with the money they need to pay their way. Not only that, but Paris has fallen. This is appalling, especially as they are mapping these remote regions for the glory of France.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6URuH4_iar1gTpoKeEi-fcZnxADwHLD-xK2OhfqdG_Dz1c_bo_1MPpX2rmyJ8nvJP6mMteQGmSlNb5aiRF6vAithLj4_E9c2PDmUtoF6uLxp9VH4WwUarqAXzmFW9VtT3cBOOAcfJfNFuuTjc6EG_oP1d0l71vcfuTvvZebNK7ybKOeBDw9f1jQ/s1280/IMG_7200.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6URuH4_iar1gTpoKeEi-fcZnxADwHLD-xK2OhfqdG_Dz1c_bo_1MPpX2rmyJ8nvJP6mMteQGmSlNb5aiRF6vAithLj4_E9c2PDmUtoF6uLxp9VH4WwUarqAXzmFW9VtT3cBOOAcfJfNFuuTjc6EG_oP1d0l71vcfuTvvZebNK7ybKOeBDw9f1jQ/s320/IMG_7200.jpeg" width="240" /></a></div><br />It is almost a relief, after pages of 'little did Liotard know that this was the last sunset he would ever see/the last word he would ever write/the last observation he would ever take/the last word he would ever speak . . .' when the bandits finally attack. And when they do their poor quality gunpowder and the thin air make the bullets fizz slowly in a surreal way. Liotard is killed, and Guibaut breaks down. He eventually makes his way to safety but ends the book with this reflection on the 'priests or scientists, peasants or aristocrats' who contributed to this French imperial adventure in Asia. 'All these Frenchmen have given their lives for an ideal, and the apparent uselessness of their endeavour makes the very greatness of these men and of the nation who bore them.' This would serve almost as well for an epitaph on the British polar expeditions.<p></p><p>All those men! All that failure! When Peter Dickinson started writing <i>Tulku</i> this happened: '...the book changed course almost as soon as I'd started. The plant-hunter was just about to appear on the scene. Theodore was standing on the edge of the ravine, looking back at the smoking ruins of the settlement. He heard the plod of hooves on the road behind him. At that point I said "This guy's going to be a snore- I think I'll make him a woman."'</p><p>And so to one of the most wonderful books I know, <i>The Gobi Desert</i> by Mildred Cable with Francesca French. 'After living for more than twenty years in the province of Shanxi in North China, I took the old trade-route and, with my companions Eva and Francesca French, trekked north-west past the Barrier of the Great Wall and into the country beyond. For many years we travelled over the Desert of the Gobi and among its oases as itinerant missionaries, and we came to know the country and its people intimately.' So begins the book. Eva French had been the first of the three to travel to China. She was a wild and free spirit. Growing up in Geneva she loved to party and devoured Russian literature. She pronounced herself to have been 'the fervid nihilist, the incipient Communist, the embryonic Bolshevist.' But she experienced a moment of religious enlightenment in a small country church after the family had returned to England, and in 1893 travelled to China to become a missionary.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlAsP2ZXbGdTYw2Ad_0lHHrW0v2hUJOs1ws_jYQBrGf5rzJ5mbw-fgFdYlao7HK6tlMwNL-8MbvgDpZsf58R6_KFs9qS_B9FM6GhGZoiJvJ536GYYJamqdBtSJbHm91hxdHF2bG-HgLhqZt-WwD8OvomssEPEaHMx3d_FvSsHeLL9FdgGM-EfTJA/s500/cable-mildred-and-misses-french-option-2.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="419" data-original-width="500" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlAsP2ZXbGdTYw2Ad_0lHHrW0v2hUJOs1ws_jYQBrGf5rzJ5mbw-fgFdYlao7HK6tlMwNL-8MbvgDpZsf58R6_KFs9qS_B9FM6GhGZoiJvJ536GYYJamqdBtSJbHm91hxdHF2bG-HgLhqZt-WwD8OvomssEPEaHMx3d_FvSsHeLL9FdgGM-EfTJA/s320/cable-mildred-and-misses-french-option-2.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>Eva was caught up in the Boxer rebellion and feared dead, but in 1901, when Mildred Cable arrived in China, it was Eva who greeted her. Many years later Eva's sister Francesca joined them, and thereafter the three were inseparable. They were also the absolute antithesis of those male explorers, travelling simply with few possessions and with a profound respect for all they met. I like to think that something of their spirit found its way into Peter Dickinson's Mrs Jones, the plant-collector. Here's the conclusion of the Prologue to <i>The Gobi Desert</i>:</p><p>'Once the spirit of the desert had caught us it lured us on and we became learners in its severe school. The solitudes provoked reflection, the wide space gave us the right sense of proportion and the silences forbade triviality. The following record of what we saw and found in the Desert of Gobi may help others to appreciate its unique charm.'</p><p>Originally published on ABBA September 2022</p></div>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-65189481574796910092023-01-08T18:03:00.005+00:002023-01-09T17:52:45.170+00:00Can a City be the Central Character in a Novel?<p>Several times now I've read that the real central character in the 1978 Carnegie winner, <i>The Exeter Blitz</i> by David Rees, is the city of Exeter. The novel describes the experiences of the fictional Lockwood family on the night of the 3rd-4th of May 1942 when a massive German bombing raid destroyed much of the city. This bombing raid was part of a German retaliation for the Allied fire-bombing of Lubeck earlier that year. The Baedeker Raids, as they were called, targeted English cities of particular cultural importance and took place mainly in April and May 1942. David Rees's book reminded me of a TV drama-documentary where, to give a bit more focus to the recycled archive footage and add human interest some invented scenes are recreated by actors in the studio. The book also slightly alters history. David Rees says in his introduction: 'The story is not intended to be an exact reconstruction of the events in Exeter of the night of May 3rd-4th . . . The magnitude of the disaster, is, however, meant to be historically accurate.'</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3iDsYwWA-RHwBVy7PCKmGWjJtQ8Alm5p-_ecWy5GFXINKrNoqRRUdBl1RcLnF_dTywuCQvI7k19x6uvagB5LmSrmUGE5OugS1jAlwHBo9Z_o4Z6HMwdkwUr-zcYqby4ab-cTuGfdYtNu1eXjL0I6muh-p0rfV2wIEnBZNkdXYppvwoeGTtLHdng/s4032/IMG_7093.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3iDsYwWA-RHwBVy7PCKmGWjJtQ8Alm5p-_ecWy5GFXINKrNoqRRUdBl1RcLnF_dTywuCQvI7k19x6uvagB5LmSrmUGE5OugS1jAlwHBo9Z_o4Z6HMwdkwUr-zcYqby4ab-cTuGfdYtNu1eXjL0I6muh-p0rfV2wIEnBZNkdXYppvwoeGTtLHdng/w300-h400/IMG_7093.JPG" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p>I had problems with this book, a book which has its strong advocates, especially in Exeter, where David Rees lived and worked for most of his life. I think the reason that people say that Exeter itself is the central character is that the documentary parts of the book feel real, while the fictional characters are unconvincing. The central (human) character is Colin Lockwood. He's trouble at school and trouble at home and he stands improbably on the cathedral tower watching the bombers come in and the bombs fall. Colin, like the city and the rest of his family, survives the night but is much changed. During the course of the night he discovers that the teacher he hates is an ordinary, decent person and the evacuee boy who is his mortal enemy is also an ordinary, decent person. The teacher is killed, along with his wife, but the evacuee survives and the boys become friends. These might be thought to be spoilers, but you can guess what's going to happen from the beginning. This is not a story which is full of surprises, though there are one or two.</p><p>Taken on its own the coming-of-age story about Colin didn't really engage me, though I did have some sympathy for his long-suffering family, But the description of the bombing raid and its aftermath is powerful and gripping. The device of using this fictional family and placing the various family members in different locations in the city works well, in the same way that a movie like <i> Saving Private Ryan</i>, for example, makes sense of large events by focussing on a few individuals. But I couldn't help comparing this book to that earlier Carnegie winner, <i>The Machine Gunners</i> and it seems to me that while Robert Westall took real-life experience and used it as the<i> inspiration</i> for a work of fiction, David Rees created what feels like a piece of journalism <i>disguised</i> as fiction. I could be wrong, but I don't think David Rees was actually in Exeter when the bombs fell, and even if he was, much of this account would have had to be stitched together from accounts in newspapers and elsewhere. That's not necessarily a bad thing but, for me, when the research starts to show through, a novel becomes less effective. And novels are about people, not about cities. Even Ulysses, that most famous example of a book where a city is sometimes held to be a character, is essentially about Dublin's people, and the city's <i>people </i>and places are realised through one of fiction's most minutely described and inhabited characters.</p><p>The final lines of <i>The Exeter Blitz </i>are the most ill-judged of any of the Carnegie winners I've read so far. Any sensible editor would have just said 'NO!'</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIdtj7hZff_K4_MPgPz_MwxYqXw6UkNoiyYinGFdlXLhY9g448eC4zx8f0MhtT0XieIz9Hmn9pTqNJ1CKtyMCU6OcFUJfmymc-sn2u8GnF5UZrx2kn_MtcqtTfFc6wFcQw6Baq3bTne4cLxbI36b81RyaGp-HZSLsYgWwbjN4N-pwKM7zBIhcwkA/s1259/mix%207%202.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1259" data-original-width="844" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIdtj7hZff_K4_MPgPz_MwxYqXw6UkNoiyYinGFdlXLhY9g448eC4zx8f0MhtT0XieIz9Hmn9pTqNJ1CKtyMCU6OcFUJfmymc-sn2u8GnF5UZrx2kn_MtcqtTfFc6wFcQw6Baq3bTne4cLxbI36b81RyaGp-HZSLsYgWwbjN4N-pwKM7zBIhcwkA/w269-h400/mix%207%202.jpg" width="269" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My grandmother in the back garden<br />of the house that was bombed in the early 1950s</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>As it happens, my mother, now 95 years old, experienced one of the Baedeker raids first-hand. She had just turned 15 and was living in a council house on Colman Road in Norwich (now part of the city's ring-road) when her dad burst into the house and yelled at the family to get into the Anderson shelter because the Germans were 'machine-gunning all along Colman Road'. Some people's shelters, my mum told me yesterday, were 'like little palaces inside', but theirs was just bare earth and possibly something to sit on. While they were in the shelter an incendiary bomb came through the roof of the house, went through the bed in my grandparents' bedroom and through the floor to the room below. The bomb didn't explode properly but the ARP wardens threw the feather mattress out onto the tiny lawn in the back garden where it exploded in a cloud of feathers which my mum says she can still picture as if it was yesterday. Although yesterday is not something my mum remembers too well these days - or indeed what happened ten minutes ago. But on the events of eighty years ago she's still pretty good!</p><p>The family were able to stay in the house despite the holes in roof, ceiling and floor but many Norwich residents, like those in Exeter and York and Coventry, were not so lucky. The Baedeker raids received this nickname because it was said that the German commanders used the famous guides to select targets with cultural significance - and they had useful maps too! The two raids on Norwich in April and May 1942 killed 229 people and a further 1000 were injured. And apart from the major damage inflicted on the city centre more than 2000 domestic properties were destroyed and an incredible 27,000 suffered some damage - that's out of a total of 35,000. It's hard to believe that my mother lived through being machine-gunned and bombed in a quiet provincial city.</p><p>In fact, my mother's recollections of the war are more about excitement than fear. War ultimately represented an opportunity for her to escape from Norwich by joining up as soon as she was old enough. She was able to travel, meet my father, and learn to drive. The army gave her freedom.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPZCxxpXaWE9pL2-MRhw0Uyz4TF15H_e16GAxgKmqExTBvUIJ48Ymc-kiCKsRzc3BnJsm2dSkSRYaB0wOjD1__x-OKSHv8wcG_kpCH-a6YqruvFG1_bZBYkmqM0VKkJdJu5HY2slpHoDYDFVmSKH8uWvrySohTUjah72JPGGe-Ja0_zVdnlS9oqg/s4032/IMG_7094.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPZCxxpXaWE9pL2-MRhw0Uyz4TF15H_e16GAxgKmqExTBvUIJ48Ymc-kiCKsRzc3BnJsm2dSkSRYaB0wOjD1__x-OKSHv8wcG_kpCH-a6YqruvFG1_bZBYkmqM0VKkJdJu5HY2slpHoDYDFVmSKH8uWvrySohTUjah72JPGGe-Ja0_zVdnlS9oqg/w300-h400/IMG_7094.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p><i>The Exeter Blitz</i> feels like a very old-fashioned kind of a book, and if someone had told me it had been written in the 1950s I'd have happily believed them. There is something slightly <i>teachery</i> about it and I hadn't really noticed that kind of thing in a Carnegie winner since reading Edward Osmond's <i>A Valley Grows Up</i> back in 1953. If you want information about the Exeter blitz it's a good resource. If you want novels that say something powerful about the experience of living through WW2 then I'd go for Susan Cooper's <i>Dawn of Fear</i>, or <i>The Machine Gunners</i>. </p><p>It is astonishing to me that Susan Cooper has never won the Carnegie, and good to know that her adopted home, the USA, rewarded her with the Newbery Medal in 1976 for <i>The Grey King</i>.</p><p>Originally published on ABBA August 2022</p>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-84274642601208976812023-01-08T18:00:00.005+00:002023-01-09T17:53:00.349+00:00First Person<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvaHTLfObjsfox_ffDPYY5pCIvIzGqI7sloC8JZ8jZ1X0VvLbOqUMOwLxTHkjkgVLxYtJz60UvnZ9LAwbLQYBgILGRMqBfK445bFjizSd8pR4sV1nDXD2sz771QDgEbgGiyesliQ6tmHF_q1JLyfr68pMIBbLdrLmflFysHa_FqmPtU2kNt1PGRQ/s4032/IMG_6980.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvaHTLfObjsfox_ffDPYY5pCIvIzGqI7sloC8JZ8jZ1X0VvLbOqUMOwLxTHkjkgVLxYtJz60UvnZ9LAwbLQYBgILGRMqBfK445bFjizSd8pR4sV1nDXD2sz771QDgEbgGiyesliQ6tmHF_q1JLyfr68pMIBbLdrLmflFysHa_FqmPtU2kNt1PGRQ/w300-h400/IMG_6980.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><p> <i style="text-align: center;"></i></p><i>The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler</i> by Gene Kemp is this month's Carnegie Medal winner and it is the first winner to be written in the first person. It's not the first children's book to be written that way, but I don't think that before 1977 there had been all that many. I'd be interested to see what readers can come up with, but I immediately thought of Oswald Bastable, narrator of E. Nesbit's books about <i>The Treasure Seekers</i>. Here is Oswald at the start of <i>The Wouldbegoods</i>:<p></p><p><i>'My father said, "Perhaps they had better go to boarding school." And that was awful because we know Father disapproves of boarding-schools. And he looked at us and said, "I am ashamed of them, sir!"</i></p><p><i>Your lot is indeed a dark and terrible one when your father is ashamed of you. And we all knew this, so that we felt in our chests just as if we had swallowed a hard-boiled egg whole. At least, this is what Oswald felt . . . so, of course, the others felt the same.'</i></p><p><i><br /></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigJSfNt3eNxGIawlDI5oSXTdUhgan6mkGCrxJjLIABmZ0zDZHhm5aaV0OWrgv37U6KZPTYI7jM4zd6R8qA0DK9rUUvelqVRigET6ZZc3bFS58oguKW923SF3owYboBLbAXUiPmp77elvOjXq9NjpzYHF8ONXpy3zuDriYVP3ZpoFD8uF4zSFUuRA/s4032/IMG_6981.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigJSfNt3eNxGIawlDI5oSXTdUhgan6mkGCrxJjLIABmZ0zDZHhm5aaV0OWrgv37U6KZPTYI7jM4zd6R8qA0DK9rUUvelqVRigET6ZZc3bFS58oguKW923SF3owYboBLbAXUiPmp77elvOjXq9NjpzYHF8ONXpy3zuDriYVP3ZpoFD8uF4zSFUuRA/w300-h400/IMG_6981.jpg" width="300" /></a></i></div><i><br /></i><p></p><p>If you've never read E. Nesbit's books you should do so as soon as possible. I'm sure Gene Kemp had read them, and there's even a little thing about names in <i>The Wouldbegoods</i> which Gene Kemp used for her own reasons and I used myself in one of my books. It would be nice to think that E. Nesbit started it. Here's Oswald again, at the end of the book:</p><p><i>'And do try to forget that Oswald has another name besides Bastable. The one beginning with C, I mean. Perhaps you have not noticed what it was. If so, don't look back for it.'</i></p><p>It's interesting, too, to see Nesbit's little dig about boarding-schools. In <i>The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler</i> boarding schools also have a presence, as places where neither of the two main characters wish to go. Like Mr Bastable, Tyke's socialist father disapproves of boarding schools. It was only in the 1970s, when <i>The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler</i> was written, that it became common to see books set in ordinary state schools. Robert Leeson had some things to say about this in an essay published in 1994:</p><p><i>'Let me take the most striking—even grotesque—example of a literary assumption—that 95% of schools and pupils did not exist ("In England, all boys go to public school," said Tom Brown).</i></p><p><i>In the 1960s I was often told by publishers that day school pupils liked boarding school stories and that was it. Well, the assumption collapsed because of external pressure, from teachers, librarians and some writers with social inclinations, and because of television and its audience.'</i></p><p><i>The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler</i> was part of this new wave of school stories, and when I first read it, back in the early 1980s, I enjoyed it simply for what it was —a good story with great characters, a realistic setting and entertaining writing. Of course, the plot twist (spoiler alert!) was amusing, but the fact that Tyke turned out to be a girl didn't seem that extraordinary to me at the time. She's no more feisty than Ransome's Nancy Blackett or Enid Blyton's George in the Famous Five. So this is all about playing a little trick on the reader and pointing out the reader's lazy assumptions. And in order to play that trick the first person narrative was pretty much essential, enabling the author to avoid all those tricky pronouns.</p><p>This is, however, much more than an 'issue book', though if you look at the (lengthy) Wikipedia entry you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. It's a book about friendship and loyalty and although it's funny it's serious at its heart. I thought Tyke's friendship with Danny, who has a speech impediment so severe that only Tyke can understand him, was beautifully observed, and I know it's true to life because I witnessed a very similar friendship when I was teaching. I also, as it happens, once taught a boy, call him Christopher, with a very similar speech impediment to Danny's. It was almost impossible to understand him at the best of times, but when he was under stress of any kind he became completely incomprehensible. So it was only natural that when an OFSTED inspector picked on a child to talk to it had to be him.</p><p>Sometimes good things happen, even during OFSTED inspections. I heard the beginning of the conversation:</p><p>'So, you've been learning about the three bears?'</p><p>Christopher launched into an explanation. I made myself scarce. My class of four-year-olds didn't boast an interpreter with the skill of Tyke Tyler and so it was that an utterly baffled inspector approached me a few minutes later, shaking her head. She moved past me into an open area where a boy named Peter was struggling with the challenge of making three chairs for the three bears out of large wooden blocks. The inspector's eyes lit up. 'Are you making chairs for the three bears?' she asked.</p><p>'No,' said Peter firmly, and carried on with what he was doing.</p><p>Even the inspector had to laugh.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-HAeQdNABb1aCEOAtwrvZpw5TEdBFN--GxGqOAub0NwrL9lZTXgmtTIoj05_TGiS_KCTI72d90DSd0civU-JIsyPVmV_JUOdEVa2thOp2Ht7JCJp5s5phRnYSAt_JgsOzNgYwMeJBrVnfvf-Gp3PVg6boJB4qfcuu9ZTuzVXXnXI1eiqP-Dg67Q/s4032/IMG_6978.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-HAeQdNABb1aCEOAtwrvZpw5TEdBFN--GxGqOAub0NwrL9lZTXgmtTIoj05_TGiS_KCTI72d90DSd0civU-JIsyPVmV_JUOdEVa2thOp2Ht7JCJp5s5phRnYSAt_JgsOzNgYwMeJBrVnfvf-Gp3PVg6boJB4qfcuu9ZTuzVXXnXI1eiqP-Dg67Q/w300-h400/IMG_6978.JPG" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I wrote it in the first person then <br />rewrote the whole thing!</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><p>I've always enjoyed writing in the first person, and I sometimes do it just to get to know who a character is. On one occasion I got carried away and wrote almost a complete 50,000 word novel that way before realising that it just wouldn't do because there were things I wanted said that the character couldn't say. Gene Kemp, in this case, solves that problem by tacking on a postscript written by one of the teachers. This neatly accounts for any inconsistencies of language or tone because it tells us that the teacher has transcribed what Tyke has told him, no doubt using his own words from time to time.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI1LR-ynac4j7WaijU-EgfKG9YK5uzoQXnpBHtlhHWoS5CJEdmpePqBpp3vNeKzk8F8DmnHBo4-7kda1gCy3hMQj-Wwzq5TrKG2bA_yTmYpK9n2XuhVSi7SImupW3ucymwWuxqmREpjEi5HpOmC37rMnhT-voP7rnQm4Shq9y3tnzAa8RTWIrYMA/s500/51HWYFP10RL._SS500_.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="500" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI1LR-ynac4j7WaijU-EgfKG9YK5uzoQXnpBHtlhHWoS5CJEdmpePqBpp3vNeKzk8F8DmnHBo4-7kda1gCy3hMQj-Wwzq5TrKG2bA_yTmYpK9n2XuhVSi7SImupW3ucymwWuxqmREpjEi5HpOmC37rMnhT-voP7rnQm4Shq9y3tnzAa8RTWIrYMA/w400-h400/51HWYFP10RL._SS500_.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A first person narrative with a narrator who <br />doesn't like her own name. Probably<br />influenced by both E. Nesbit and Gene Kemp</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>A dozen years after that remarkable OFSTED inspection I ran into Christopher again. He was standing, six feet tall now and towering over his mum, in the small front garden of their terraced house. 'I bet you didn't recognise Christopher, did you?' his mum said.</p><p>'Hallo, Mr May,' said Christopher, and all trace of that speech impediment was completely gone.</p><p style="text-align: center;">***</p><p>Robert Leeson's piece <i>'It's Only a Story, Isn't It?' Creativity and Commitment in Writing for Children</i> is in <i>The Prose and the Passion</i>, Morag Styles, Eve Bearne and Victor Watson eds, Cassell, London , 1994</p><p>Originally published on ABBA July 2022</p>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-32031409262790467152023-01-08T17:55:00.011+00:002024-03-06T09:17:13.385+00:00Welcome!<p>Here on this blog you can find posts about Carnegie Medal winning books, starting in 1936 with Arthur Ransome's Pigeon Post. Older posts deal with education and all sorts of other things.</p><p>You can also find pages about the children's books I've written, and a little bit about me. All the illustrations on the Books pages are by Emily May.</p><p>I have another blog about my bike trip around the North Sea in 2015. There's a link in the sidebar.</p><p>Enjoy your visit!</p>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-44787606058862372972022-12-08T18:36:00.002+00:002023-01-09T17:53:17.090+00:00A Deceptively Simple Story - Thunder and Lightnings by Jan Mark<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZAUNQxfIlMI09WDfsKVYREKULC9nmSZXMwt6DWB3UZY6BTTxzdTF5ZT9Y9iG4YQrAclpnGWBuzazfXrt2tRUzqe5zO8LY8OrYCZAcxDResWerljCKdsFvO-JNqMvE6RfxYCbx37Ak0eGFwxb_eeebJUhb22hJarzegj5QUvmup1mudV0ZnAZw7g/s4032/IMG_6922.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZAUNQxfIlMI09WDfsKVYREKULC9nmSZXMwt6DWB3UZY6BTTxzdTF5ZT9Y9iG4YQrAclpnGWBuzazfXrt2tRUzqe5zO8LY8OrYCZAcxDResWerljCKdsFvO-JNqMvE6RfxYCbx37Ak0eGFwxb_eeebJUhb22hJarzegj5QUvmup1mudV0ZnAZw7g/w300-h400/IMG_6922.JPG" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jacket by Jim Russell</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Jan Mark's first novel, <i>Thunder and Lightnings</i>, was published in 1976 and won the Carnegie Medal in 1977. It is, for several reasons, one of my favourite children's books. It's not perfect—Jan's scorn for certain idiocies of the English education system occasionally bursts out a little too obviously—but it is a condensed, often funny, and quietly moving study of an encounter between two boys from very different backgrounds: Andrew the child of middle-class, educated professionals, an incomer to the Norfolk countryside, and Victor, a Norfolk farm-worker's son.<p></p><p>I lived in the Norfolk countryside for forty years, and my mother lives there still. In fact, until recently she had her hair done every week in Coltishall, the village that gives its name to RAF Coltishall where the Lightning aircraft in the story are based. Generations of my mother's family come from Norfolk and I am still amazed that after such short acquaintance Jan Mark got Norfolk so right. She got it even more right in <i>Handles</i>, her second Carnegie winner a few years later.</p><p>In <i>Thunder and Lightnings</i> we see Norfolk and its inhabitants mainly through the eyes of Andrew, the incomer. More especially, we see Victor and his family through Andrew's eyes, and Andrew gets things more than a little wrong. Andrew's distorted perception is symbolised by Victor's clothing. When Andrew first sees Victor at school his 'appearance worried Andrew because he was sure there was something wrong with him. He was hideously swollen about the body but very thin in the face . . . the boy's spindly legs seemed hardly strong enough to support the rest of him.'</p><p>Victor's clothes are a kind of disguise. Victor and school don't get on. He has trouble reading and spelling but when it comes to aircraft he knows all there is to know. Andrew, astonished that he knows so much, says: 'I thought you didn't like learning things.'</p><p>'I didn't learn them,' said Victor. 'I can't learn things, but anything I want to know sticks.'</p><p>Andrew attempts to help Victor; he feels sorry for him. Victor's parents seem to Andrew to treat him very badly. Andrew thinks Victor needs help, but Victor has already started to find his own strategies for survival. Andrew's mother can see this, just as she is perceptive about Andrew's own feelings, and through her comments we realize that Victor is growing up rather faster than Andrew. </p><p>This encounter between middle-class incomers and natives is potentially uncomfortable territory, and there is no doubt that Andrew is almost condescending to Victor at times, assuming that because he doesn't read or write very well that he can't possibly know as much as he does about aeroplanes. Andrew's parents are not so quick to judge Victor's family though, and his mother understands Victor a lot better than Andrew does. </p><p>Andrew himself has had a tough time at school in the city and been bullied for 'talking posh', and it seems as though he hasn't had a real friend before, so that his anxiety that he might be losing his friend when he puts his foot in it repeatedly is painfully real, but there's something else being lost here, and I think it's childhood.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisEtIENihChD4G0RaE7z1GnJaxN_Ml2bKlPSIke97DcRsqLfCJD-MKkEEEhLVKZr7_sA5eYnzGjRb4ugy7QGA7WNc8OQB8a1y35wpGwPMyixR4ZkTMWqNqTvHoowxGNbkRtMWsWfvrLlc-9Sr0NwEcy7FH3OSywgemSpVDekxCNrC7ORu25Kki6A/s4032/IMG_6923.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisEtIENihChD4G0RaE7z1GnJaxN_Ml2bKlPSIke97DcRsqLfCJD-MKkEEEhLVKZr7_sA5eYnzGjRb4ugy7QGA7WNc8OQB8a1y35wpGwPMyixR4ZkTMWqNqTvHoowxGNbkRtMWsWfvrLlc-9Sr0NwEcy7FH3OSywgemSpVDekxCNrC7ORu25Kki6A/w300-h400/IMG_6923.JPG" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Illustration by Jim Russell</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><p>Lots of children have obsessions. Andrew's is with racing cars, and Victor's is with military aircraft, and in particular with the English Electric Lighting. My grandson has a particular interest in trains, and as we know from people like Rod Stewart and Neil Young (both, in case you didn't know, life-long model railway enthusiasts) these childhood obsessions can last a lifetime. But if there's one central message in this book it's that all things pass. The Lightnings are about to be replaced by newer aircraft and Victor is very upset about it—so upset that Andrew fears he may not want his company any more. In this he is wrong as usual, and Andrew's mum is correct when she says: 'Why shouldn't you see him. He'll be around when he feels like it. Strange though it may seem, he'll get used to the idea of the Jaguars.You'll be going to Coltishall to see them instead. It's no good telling him that now, though. He wouldn't believe you.'</p><p>The Lightning was an interceptor, designed to protect NATO airspace from intruders and capable of flying at twice the speed of sound. In a way the action of this book takes place at the heart of the cold war, where military planes fly from airfields all around East Anglia, but as Andrew and Victor read the comics Victor hoards beneath his bed, with their stories of Mitch Mulligan, the ace mechanic of 999 squadron and Steve Stone, the ace pilot of 777 squadron, there is little sense of the reality of war. Victor says he likes graveyards, and there's a scene where describes how 'When I was a littl'un I used to play in Pallingham churchyard. I used to pretend the gravestones were little houses.'</p><p>A few chapters later, after a depressing visit to the airfield where hardly any planes seem to be flying, they visit another graveyard where British and German airmen are buried. There is a memorial to '<i>Ein Deutscher Soldat</i>.' Andrew says: 'Steve Stone ought to be here somewhere.'</p><p>'Steve Stone? Him in the comic? What's he got to do with it?'</p><p>'Nothing,' said Andrew. 'That's the point. Steve Stone and Mitch Mulligan, they're all explosions and crashes and people getting blown up, but you never see anybody dead. There are never any pictures like this. <i>Ein Deutscher Soldat</i>. In all those stories he's just the Hun and serve him right.'</p><p>'Perhaps they don't want people to think what really happened,' said Victor. 'War's supposed to be fun.'</p><p>'It's only fun in comics,' said Andrew. 'But in real life it hurts just as much whichever side you die on. And you're just as dead afterwards.'</p><p>'Let's go back to the road,' said Victor. 'I don't like that, here. It's sad.'</p><p>There's a lot going on in <i>Thunder and Lightnings</i> in a short, easy-to-read book with short chapters. It's often very funny, and while it <i>is</i> about the loss of innocence it's also about finding friendship. Ultimately it's an optimistic book, though I can't quite figure out whether the reason I like it so much is because it takes me back to my own time in Norfolk when my children were growing up.</p><p>Highly recommended!</p><p>Originally published on ABBA June 6th 2022</p><p><br /></p>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-31945655694147353292022-12-08T18:33:00.001+00:002023-01-09T17:53:33.081+00:00A Cautionary Tale - Robert Westall's The Machine Gunners<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw-LikjToOptFxP6tCJXVe6Db-AmfGKjzbC6D39WzSlqswGVrIC4r1dV4cnh1meDcLWBv3BmMBPcX92N_S4RlIgrVJtEMjdaTe-Ytajo60DKXxTzf5mrbBpBvDh45kVQZK69JbyM9qO0kdlpnyTqKg4O5xSo3eFfzM-CjG-uKFRf0ctYHb-t9yZg/s1280/IMG_6644.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw-LikjToOptFxP6tCJXVe6Db-AmfGKjzbC6D39WzSlqswGVrIC4r1dV4cnh1meDcLWBv3BmMBPcX92N_S4RlIgrVJtEMjdaTe-Ytajo60DKXxTzf5mrbBpBvDh45kVQZK69JbyM9qO0kdlpnyTqKg4O5xSo3eFfzM-CjG-uKFRf0ctYHb-t9yZg/w300-h400/IMG_6644.jpeg" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><br />It was 1986 and I was in my first year of teaching when Robert Westall's novel, <i>The Machine Gunners</i>, got me into a bit of trouble. I'd trained as a teacher in the mid-1970s, at about the same time as Westall won the Carnegie Medal (in 1975) with his first published novel, and I may well have come across the book at that time. I didn't go into teaching after I qualified, partly because of the extraordinary careers advice session at the end of our course when the visiting speaker told us that most, probably all, of us had no chance of getting a job when we left, not because we were terrible teachers, but because there were no jobs.<p></p><p>Shortly after that I found myself busy being a dad, and I scraped a living for a few years as a silversmith and part-time playgroup supervisor, so it wasn't until 1986 that I started teaching. And by that time <i>The Machine Gunners</i> had been made into a BBC TV series which was first shown in 1983. So there I was, teaching a class of 30 children in Reception and Year 1 in a small First School with children up to Year 3. Of course it was before the National Curriculum so we didn't refer to Year 1 etc, but I find, worryingly, that I can't remember what we did call the year groups back then. Oh well . . .</p><p>One breaktime I wandered through the library where a Year 3 boy, let's call him Mark, was trying to choose a book. He held up a copy of <i>The Machine Gunners</i> and said, 'Do you think I'll like this?'. Thinking, no doubt, of the TV series, which had, after all, been broadcast during the children's TV slot at about 5.00 PM, and remembering how I'd enjoyed the book myself, I said yes, I'm sure you will, and thought no more about it.</p><p>Until, that is, the morning a few weeks later when I was summoned to the headteacher's office. Mark's parents had written a letter of complaint, not to the headteacher, not to the school governors, but to the County Education Officer himself. And what was the problem? The problem was knickers. Knickers were referred to in the book, not once, but several times and Mark had already been taking what his parents felt was an unhealthy interest in such matters, before a teacher, who should have known better, had recommended this appalling book to him.</p><p>Funnily enough they made no mention of the fact that on the very first page we learn that the girl from the greengrocer's shop has been blown to pieces in an air raid. As Chas McGill's father says, 'They found half of her in the front garden and the other half right across the house.' They didn't put that bit in the TV adaptation.</p><p>The County Education Officer delegated the task of dealing with the complaint to the County English Adviser who referred it back to my headteacher. After some discussion (and an apology to the parents - usually the best course of action in these situations) the book was removed from the library shelves as being not suitable for most eight and nine year olds. I think, having just re-read it, that this is probably right, but because of the horrors of war and not because of the knickers. </p><p>I find it hard to believe that <i>The Machine Gunners </i>is Robert Westall's first book, because it is so accomplished and so brilliant and breaks new ground in so many ways. It made me feel the way I felt when I got my first pair of varifocal glasses. Suddenly everything was clear again. The characters are real people, not book people, or even book versions of real people. They talk like real people do. They swear (who would have thought it), they argue, they bully and they fight. They go to the outside lav and when the air raid siren goes they hobble desperately to the shelter with their knickers around their ankles. Better that than be blown to pieces like the greengrocer's girl. You don't need to be told that this novel is autobiographical. This is stuff you couldn't make up. It's real.</p><p>The book was a result of Westall's desire to share his wartime experiences on Tyneside with his son, Christopher. The machine gun element came from a newspaper cutting about a group of Dutch boys who had removed a gun turret from a crashed Allied bomber. In this book Chas McGill finds a crashed German bomber and removes the machine gun from the plane, then, with the help of a group of friends, builds a gun emplacement in the garden of a bombed-out house. </p><p>The house is the home of Nicky, whose father, a ship's captain, has been killed. Nicky's mother has turned to drink in her grief and to the companionship of another naval officer. Before the house is bombed the whole neighbourhood has been talking about the family and not in a good way. All the children are told not to go to the house and Nicky has become the victim of a gang of bullies. Alec Ellis, writing in <i>Chosen For Children</i> refers to Nicky's mother as 'a drunken whore' which seemed a bizarre comment to me, given that Westall certainly doesn't use those words and the mother is clearly one more victim of the war. It is weird reading Ellis's commentary which is written in pompous and high-flown prose about a book which is exactly the opposite, and it makes me wonder if it conveys a flavour of the Committee's meetings:</p><p>'The author has undertaken a faithful portrayal of the early 1940s, showing the courage, fears and deprivations of War, when sirens wailed, food was scarce, and death stalked the towns and cities of the land. The free-flowing dialogue is in the voice of the people; and if course language and swearing has not been manifest in previous Medal-winning books, that is only because the authors were observing a convention which may cast doubts on their sense of reality, but not that of Robert Westall.'</p><p>Coarse language, eh! 'Death stalked the land'(!!) Those are words that Robert Westall would certainly not have written. His sirens <i>went,</i> they didn't wail.</p><p>So now we have swearing in a Carnegie winner, and sex, and violence. OK, there's been violence before, but not like this. Even amid the terrible destruction of the incessant bombing raids it is the violence of boy on boy which is truly startling, in an utterly convincing bullying incident near the beginning and in a vicious fight near the end. In between, Chas McGill (who stands in for the author here) gets in bad trouble for hitting a bully with his gas mask case, putting him in hospital. The bully Chas hit may have been bigger than him but the Sister at the hospital has no doubt about the rights and wrongs of the situation. 'You might have killed him,' she says.</p><p> 'He was bigger than me!' Chas replies. </p><p>'That's no excuse,' says the Sister. 'British boys fight with their fists.'</p><p>Chas's dad says the same thing, and so does his headmaster. There is, of course, no condemnation of the fighting itself, and I'm reminded of the Opies observing children in a school playground where fighting was just a normal part of everyday life to be watched with detached interest. </p><p>I'll be returning to Robert Westall later this year because, in 1981, he became the first writer to win a second Carnegie. For now, for more information about Robert Westall and his work I recommend the <a href="http://www.robertwestall.com/robert_westall_biography.html" target="_blank">website</a> maintained by his estate where, among other things, you can find a short biography and a couple of obituaries. Money from Robert Westall's estate helped kickstart Seven Stories, the national centre for children's books, after his too early death in 1993 at the age of 63. Seven Stories hold Westall's archive and there's some great stuff viewable on line if, like me, you're a long way from Newcastle.</p><p>In her biography of Robert Westall Lindy Mckinnel quotes from a piece by Peter Hollindale, who quotes from an article in the periodical <i>Signal </i>which<i> </i>said of <i>The Machine Gunners</i> 'No children's book about the War so vividly depicts the truth of that time as this one. Westall has it all; the inner and outer tensions, the pressures and acts of courage and comradeship.' But, as Hollindale points out, not everyone liked <i>The Machine Gunners</i>. Some disliked its violence and profanity 'and, as other sensitivities grew sharper in the years that followed, it was attacked for its sexism and racism.' </p><p>Westall's defence was always that his book was a true depiction of war. He said later: 'It is evil to rewrite history. The demands of anti-sexism and anti-racism are great upon me, but the demand of truth is greater than either. How can we know how far we have come, if we can't look back and see truly where we have been?' He must have got something right because the book is still in print.</p><p>But anyone watching the war unfold in Ukraine might reasonably think that we don't seem to have come very far at all. </p><div>Originally published on ABBA May 6th 2022</div>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-13184170594875138442022-12-08T18:29:00.005+00:002023-01-09T17:53:53.296+00:00The Stronghold - Mollie Hunter and the Walls of Charles Keeping<p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGW4mrOnIQOdkAj1x8cE6K94pl3LRizdtz4uEjsh5oQNEx-yPGm4qOT8v50WEd9N3lsQagW4BD6n4q4eyilUU48jMUzAjBvhJWfE0ID83PmISry1V-effEv4DFpK5zebQmt88uYJKkfLTDTGLNup50uzL1N-6noY6bBHir5s0q7jcrSKXG7rOmlQ/s1280/IMG_6539.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGW4mrOnIQOdkAj1x8cE6K94pl3LRizdtz4uEjsh5oQNEx-yPGm4qOT8v50WEd9N3lsQagW4BD6n4q4eyilUU48jMUzAjBvhJWfE0ID83PmISry1V-effEv4DFpK5zebQmt88uYJKkfLTDTGLNup50uzL1N-6noY6bBHir5s0q7jcrSKXG7rOmlQ/w400-h300/IMG_6539.jpeg" width="400" /></span></a></p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br />One of Charles Keeping's many fine walls graces the cover of the 1974 winner of the Carnegie Medal, Mollie Hunter's <i>The Stronghold</i>. The wall in question is the wall of a <i>broch</i>, and the invention and purpose of these still somewhat mysterious structures, which are found only in the highlands and islands of Scotland, is the subject of Mollie Hunter's novel. </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">A <i>broch</i> is a tall, tapering tower, built using drystone walling techniques with galleries and staircases built into the massive walls. Any account you read of the opinions and suppositions of archaeologists about <i>brochs</i> is peppered with the words <i>perhaps</i> and <i>possibly. Possibly </i>there were hundreds of these structures and <i>probably</i> they were all built between 100BCE and 100CE. Anything Mollie Hunter could imagine could possibly be true, but in order to write her book she had to create a complete, complex society with its religion, its power-struggles and its vividly realized setting. I found <i>The Stronghold</i> completely compelling, both gripping and moving. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I'm ashamed to say that I had never read any of Mollie Hunter's books before I read this one, which is the first by a Scottish author to win the Carnegie, and I suspect that she remains better known in both Scotland and in the USA than she does in England. For almost the last time in this series about Carnegie winners I'm able to turn to <i>Chosen for Children</i>, the Library Association's review of winners from the beginning until 1975. This book has been especially invaluable for the insights it often gives into the creative processes of the authors. So, here is Mollie Hunter on <i>The Stronghold</i>:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">"Everyone has some capacity for atavism; and to stand alone in a deserted place where once was centred all the superstitions belief and custom of an early people can bring fearful awareness of this. The dead heart of that place may revive suddenly loud in one's own pulses, and to startle to those pulse-beats is momentarily to have acute perception of the force created by the intersection of superstition with all the other features of that people's life. This, one lonely night at the centre of the island's huge ring of standing stones, was the experience which finally gave me the insight needed to present my characters credibly in written form; but even so, in the year of writing that followed, there was many a time when I almost gave up on the task."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3072" data-original-width="4608" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVnBP9A29AEYjflreooPu2IER0s3U2E1i_t4l2WnKcYb6JLmfe93v_LbxLdBZ--GyMAeLZEzibjFmVhrF_JmcnhqOGoj8f-judJ-9Vl6W-RAzJjyottJow0k4pIaevLhcn2uD0DP3dQ2BTX-FwxxsJEiz5YAQbLDJSyWWdk7mt_ps_LxRGZzdtvA/w400-h266/P9240601.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Ring of Brodgar, Orkney, 2015</td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVnBP9A29AEYjflreooPu2IER0s3U2E1i_t4l2WnKcYb6JLmfe93v_LbxLdBZ--GyMAeLZEzibjFmVhrF_JmcnhqOGoj8f-judJ-9Vl6W-RAzJjyottJow0k4pIaevLhcn2uD0DP3dQ2BTX-FwxxsJEiz5YAQbLDJSyWWdk7mt_ps_LxRGZzdtvA/s4608/P9240601.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"></span></a></div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The book's central character is Coll, a young man who was lamed as a child during an attack by the Roman slave traders he has grown to hate and fear. Hunter says: </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">"For him I had evoked the dream of building the defence tower he called the stronghold. This was his obsession; and to realise the dream would be his victory over all the odds stacked against him. We built together, keeping faith with that first impulse of imagination through stone stubbornly set on stone, word as stubbornly set on word until a book was made, and for both of us at last, the dream became reality."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The action never lets up in this book, the suspense is constant, right to the end, and it's all supported by the brilliant realisation of everyday Iron Age life in Orkney. This is yet another Carnegie winner that should really never have been allowed to go out of print. What's more it is a beautifully produced book with that very fine cover by Charles Keeping.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: times;">And speaking of beautifully produced books, I can't help envying Mollie Hunter for the way that her very first novel was handled by her publisher. </span><i style="font-family: times;"><span>Patrick Kentigern Keenan</span></i><span style="font-family: times;"> was published by Blackie in 1963 with a cover in five colours and 20 line illustrations by Charles Keeping. I could hardly believe my eyes when my copy arrived in the post the other day, the edges of the pages only very slightly browning and the cover as bright and clean as the day it was placed on the shelves of Manchester High School for Girls. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzTJybMkeYwy0syQx5gfnJez8Q0JfZVDSKgguzD9ld34LE9XY7jVDB8LKsbnS-UfRJ4Tt0e_oRDCPmuv7FEw2iIO-lQ4epnL7EmTrNvICUQjyisQUSRP06h76BXKzuOr7qoCiMiTVYJX62w96N22_6uymuywSdhB24Z5X9oI_jlZ3PRDjYVDH2AA/s1280/IMG_6540.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzTJybMkeYwy0syQx5gfnJez8Q0JfZVDSKgguzD9ld34LE9XY7jVDB8LKsbnS-UfRJ4Tt0e_oRDCPmuv7FEw2iIO-lQ4epnL7EmTrNvICUQjyisQUSRP06h76BXKzuOr7qoCiMiTVYJX62w96N22_6uymuywSdhB24Z5X9oI_jlZ3PRDjYVDH2AA/w400-h300/IMG_6540.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXcMqVw5pyuUSew_FblrOpSeZQmGPnO8QacBW2EBqbDPFpcw9oK2qERLnai39iHmtjkwFd0g7QCUwCYKVO56DJ-7EHB-nBDZh3kU0xAU8ELc52xQ2Gr7XuMDreQUVvZx6NOcfCSCWmQeE6iiozSr-9_OlJamRJWheNbzwgeV6DL913-2tTK51IAg/s1280/IMG_6542.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXcMqVw5pyuUSew_FblrOpSeZQmGPnO8QacBW2EBqbDPFpcw9oK2qERLnai39iHmtjkwFd0g7QCUwCYKVO56DJ-7EHB-nBDZh3kU0xAU8ELc52xQ2Gr7XuMDreQUVvZx6NOcfCSCWmQeE6iiozSr-9_OlJamRJWheNbzwgeV6DL913-2tTK51IAg/w400-h300/IMG_6542.jpeg" width="400" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br />But Mollie Hunter deserved these great illustrations because she was a writer of genius. Patrick Kentigern Keenan claims to be 'the smartest man in Ireland' and despite a series of reverses in his adventures with the leprechauns his good heart and irrepressible nature bring him through. It's a very different book to <i>The Stronghold</i> but in one respect at least it's the same: it's beautifully written and is without a doubt a tribute to her Irish father.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1Ph1-wJCcnmiuNgR3AnZPuRuaLX4vEc48mcsX0obLaZ5qRB0T4d5qVgudDz-fLmYRFg54LFzdpwfg2LMFsKBQ7FADnu4TlT1AVZX8wHbXxCHtjmt9zN8-_R6gfF8DP9pmo6GstLr-n0kLUGzBYn-8m0bIlh0rDLl6JkzNoCbb5kWPJDqzVP6nCw/w400-h300/IMG_6541.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Illustration by Charles Keeping</span></td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1Ph1-wJCcnmiuNgR3AnZPuRuaLX4vEc48mcsX0obLaZ5qRB0T4d5qVgudDz-fLmYRFg54LFzdpwfg2LMFsKBQ7FADnu4TlT1AVZX8wHbXxCHtjmt9zN8-_R6gfF8DP9pmo6GstLr-n0kLUGzBYn-8m0bIlh0rDLl6JkzNoCbb5kWPJDqzVP6nCw/s1280/IMG_6541.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: x-small;"></span></a></div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I'm not sure Mollie Hunter is much read nowadays, south of the border at least. Certainly almost all her work is out of print and that's a great shame. Also published in 1963 was the first of her many historical novels, The Spanish Letters. Although the plot of this early work might be criticised for being slightly over-complicated, and despite the fact that the reader sometimes longs to be allowed to pause for breath for a moment, there are many really tremendous action sequences amid a vivid recreation of Edinburgh at the end of the sixteenth century. It is always clear that we are in the hands of a very fine writer, who went on to produce, the year before <i>The Stronghold </i>won the Carnegie<i>, </i>another truly remarkable book<i>.</i> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Mollie Hunter's semi-autobiographical novel <i>A Sound of Chariots</i> was published in 1973, but it wasn't until 1992 that it won the Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association. This award is given to a book published twenty years earlier which didn't win any of the major prizes for an English language children's book. Set in a village near Edinburgh in the 1920s <i>A Sound of Chariots</i> contains some of the most harrowing, moving and realistic descriptions of the effects of war that I've ever read. The depiction of the grief of a child at the death of her father, and of a mother losing her husband, is detailed, truthful and poetic. I really can't praise it highly enough. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The book is also a wonderful evocation of working-class life in Scotland in the period, and a portrait of the writer as a young girl. At one point the young Bridie has her carefully and passionately written essay about the sea defaced by her teacher with a forest of red ink. The teacher has the effrontery to correct the order of the words in her sentences, but Bridie isn't putting up with that, and after a violent confrontation with the teacher she's called upon by the headteacher to explain herself:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">"And the waves like green broken glass fell jaggedly down." (the headteacher says)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">She looked up. "That is what you wrote, Bridie," she said quietly. "I see the phrase "green broken glass" has been changed to read "Broken green glass." Is there any difference? And if so can you tell me where it lies?"</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">She could see it all right, but it was hard to explain. She tried, haltingly. "Broken green glass, it's just ordinary, just what it says. "Broken green glass. A bottle, a dish, anything ordinary.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">"Go on." . . .</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">"Well, the other way," she tried again, "It's not ordinary any more because the sound has a sort of pattern to it. You know, like the words of a song, rising and falling."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">This reminded me very much of something James Joyce said in conversation with Frank Budgen as reported in Budgen's book <i>James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses:</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">I enquired about <i>Ulysses</i>. Was it progressing?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">"I have been working hard on it all day," said Joyce.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">"Does that mean that you have written a great deal?" I said.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">"Two sentences," said Joyce.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">I looked sideways, but Joyce was not smiling. I thought of Flaubert.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">"You have been seeking the <i>mot juste</i>?" I said.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">"No," said Joyce. "I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence.There is an order in every way appropriate. I think I have it."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Who knows if Mollie Hunter knew this story? Maybe the events happened to her just as she described them. Either way, <i>A Sound of Chariots</i> is yet another book that should never be out of print. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Mollie Hunter wrote a great many books, largely historical and fantasy, and also wrote about writing for children in </span><i><span style="font-size: medium;">Talent is Not Enough</span></i><span style="font-size: medium;">. According to her obituary in The Scotsman she 'spent a great deal of her time touring schools and libraries and was made particularly welcome in the United States.' I have a 1995 publication from the USA called </span><i><span style="font-size: medium;">Children's Books and their Creators</span></i><span style="font-size: medium;">, edited by Anita Silvey which devotes most of a double page spread to Mollie Hunter. In the </span><i><span style="font-size: medium;">Oxford Companion to Children's Literature</span></i><span style="font-size: medium;">, Hunter merits only one short paragraph. It seems odd to me. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: times;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaifRmzjLIMD_A43-spSO61w80A74h-TyPANl7dqY99EBq9zOmFpogWvxg7EoIORUybJAi_b5kIiCe-RS9cJJ71mwuAVgr1KFk5_mALCJvBBn2TbTar4bIeLkKWA2_JRo0IKmdLQw0cco0i4-5XWXi-rI9S-u_efegnyj55uuTxCXnJfO_K9KzVg/s1280/IMG_6549.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaifRmzjLIMD_A43-spSO61w80A74h-TyPANl7dqY99EBq9zOmFpogWvxg7EoIORUybJAi_b5kIiCe-RS9cJJ71mwuAVgr1KFk5_mALCJvBBn2TbTar4bIeLkKWA2_JRo0IKmdLQw0cco0i4-5XWXi-rI9S-u_efegnyj55uuTxCXnJfO_K9KzVg/s320/IMG_6549.jpeg" width="240" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Oxford Companion 15 lines</span></td></tr></tbody></table><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHDnWFq5lk4i1WfAoGLV8WazI3dT1-T11kWMHHm7KLUTJcK6jCBdgyDiDcpsK_Lk1Kn8qKsmbyRZMdIJUDVuu-kBH65uaJwVlGyKnP2oFeBMjTEaBj1zpB71IYkB5Loam5TTLFi9uqWzBs1RBQGQpqtzu9KFk3rIWOWuYkriACeS-LlAKuyWumPQ/s1280/IMG_6548.jpeg" style="font-size: large; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHDnWFq5lk4i1WfAoGLV8WazI3dT1-T11kWMHHm7KLUTJcK6jCBdgyDiDcpsK_Lk1Kn8qKsmbyRZMdIJUDVuu-kBH65uaJwVlGyKnP2oFeBMjTEaBj1zpB71IYkB5Loam5TTLFi9uqWzBs1RBQGQpqtzu9KFk3rIWOWuYkriACeS-LlAKuyWumPQ/s320/IMG_6548.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Children's Books and their Creators 2 pages<br /><div><span style="font-size: large; text-align: left;"><br /></span></div></span><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div></span></blockquote></td></tr></tbody></table></div><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: times;">And so, back to Charles Keeping. He was the perfect choice to draw the </span><i style="font-family: times;">broch</i><span style="font-family: times;"> in </span><i style="font-family: times;">The Stronghold</i><span style="font-family: times;"> and I have a few more of his walls to show you. First there is this unpublished lithograph which forms the endpapers of </span><i style="font-family: times;">Charles Keeping, An Illustrator's Life</i><span style="font-family: times;"> by Douglas Martin. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEDztJ1EO4RpTJyGclqDC1Aw5jJcGnqGT-QFFkCxf_h59mDmUZnsEE8tfQcQqU0GIQCJySO_4Qra0xQP82Djvmnt2e8IYbkW9nM5At_BM82xPzClp5DqbV_U3ZeB8J_y9RY0P0K_TOE-QaqlMuD_E1HfrL10jann6IaNx2EFg0A6XVUbHTqvKegw/s1280/IMG_6545.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEDztJ1EO4RpTJyGclqDC1Aw5jJcGnqGT-QFFkCxf_h59mDmUZnsEE8tfQcQqU0GIQCJySO_4Qra0xQP82Djvmnt2e8IYbkW9nM5At_BM82xPzClp5DqbV_U3ZeB8J_y9RY0P0K_TOE-QaqlMuD_E1HfrL10jann6IaNx2EFg0A6XVUbHTqvKegw/w400-h300/IMG_6545.jpeg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: x-small;">Unpublished and undated lithograph used as <br />endpapers in Charles Keeping, an Illustrator's Life</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">This lithograph was also featured in the Keeping exhibition a couple of years ago at the Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner and it reminded me of a story a friend of mine used to tell about his uncle, a bricklayer. Whenever this uncle walked past a truly vast wall of bricks he sank into gloom at the though of 'the poor b**** who had to lay them all.' Well, Keeping <i>drew</i> them all, but he seems to have enjoyed it because he drew a lot of walls. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The next one comes from a book called <i>Reflections - an English Course for students aged 14-18</i>. This was published in 1963 by OUP and is a great example of the cutting-edge curriculum materials produced during this period - I'm thinking of the <i>Voices</i> and <i>Young Voices</i> anthologies, the <i>Penguin English Project</i> and the <i>Jackdaw</i> folders of facsimile historical documents. <i>Reflections</i> was produced by teachers from Walworth Comprehensive School and as well as the Keeping illustrations it featured many photographs by Roger Mayne who had become well known for his photographs of Southam Street in London in the early 1960s. Both Keeping and Mayne were adventurous choices which worked perfectly with the extracts from a wide range of written material.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRvRyXFdE5WYE7UYmD_hC0gXHUxrSzP-YV-SyOt2oAVaLOK6TZI2-jxFS2CHIYCQ5aJzr8EpO7ci6LCXfMhqSCyR6lwbgrp2Ra3T40CfKHxu-gG2mlfTtIr1eRzNOKyuShiXrn5diTCSZ87bCNfLzgsHUnrgpmMD4LAV-S-_y-rUdb2dsqWzqKEQ/s1280/IMG_6543.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRvRyXFdE5WYE7UYmD_hC0gXHUxrSzP-YV-SyOt2oAVaLOK6TZI2-jxFS2CHIYCQ5aJzr8EpO7ci6LCXfMhqSCyR6lwbgrp2Ra3T40CfKHxu-gG2mlfTtIr1eRzNOKyuShiXrn5diTCSZ87bCNfLzgsHUnrgpmMD4LAV-S-_y-rUdb2dsqWzqKEQ/w400-h300/IMG_6543.jpeg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times;">From <i>Reflections</i></span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Keeping was also the perfect illustrator for Dickens. Between 1978 and 1986 he re-illustrated 16 volumes of Dickens' novels for the Folio Society. Here are some walls from Nicholas Nickleby.</span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxVm1za58mS405iucGm8Yced8nG34GHr1RqX0pXfO6pb-omOvznp7Y1I28CyhC3h4_uiJhRDdLHr8kcsCwJG7MRoG49Y6LjHm95ixsIrhIMiHyimw1dQrb6QPaHLFk3-wrDsSqzXy4tErPcG7aXY-iL35OFimcFGL2rpxw27xIZYJ2En4SppYC7w/s1280/IMG_6544.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxVm1za58mS405iucGm8Yced8nG34GHr1RqX0pXfO6pb-omOvznp7Y1I28CyhC3h4_uiJhRDdLHr8kcsCwJG7MRoG49Y6LjHm95ixsIrhIMiHyimw1dQrb6QPaHLFk3-wrDsSqzXy4tErPcG7aXY-iL35OFimcFGL2rpxw27xIZYJ2En4SppYC7w/w400-h300/IMG_6544.jpeg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times;">From Nicholas Nickleby (Folio Society)<br /><div><br /></div></span><span style="font-family: times; text-align: left;"><div><span style="font-size: medium;">And here, just because I can, is one of the earliest Keeping illustrations I have. It's from a publication called 'The Commonwealth and Empire Annual' and this 1955 edition contains three stories illustrated by Keeping at a time when he was doing a wide variety of commercial work and had yet to begin his long association with Oxford University Press. The stories are not memorable, but the illustrations are.</span></div><br /></span></td></tr></tbody></table><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheh_bESu4Zz96vjpHtI8Mw6C8w6M6aS6z4OOSy2jDaRYOHojGzOxwly-v89cbprNeCwLlCdTIb35sN1pQ9wAkiPnjEo6uQXaqtbKVEl7pSvGSc6QiNV-8KIkguJwBp0V7xSHgJygqHS1qFdyPIfMmrZ9k3ArNRbwhP-0bNvYudXa2U9qn61HRLEg/s1280/IMG_6547.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheh_bESu4Zz96vjpHtI8Mw6C8w6M6aS6z4OOSy2jDaRYOHojGzOxwly-v89cbprNeCwLlCdTIb35sN1pQ9wAkiPnjEo6uQXaqtbKVEl7pSvGSc6QiNV-8KIkguJwBp0V7xSHgJygqHS1qFdyPIfMmrZ9k3ArNRbwhP-0bNvYudXa2U9qn61HRLEg/w300-h400/IMG_6547.jpeg" width="300" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times;">From the Commonwealth and Empire Annual 1955<br /><br /></span></td></tr></tbody></table>Originally published on ABBA 6th April 2022Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263650204609669989.post-76559469567924421052022-12-08T18:19:00.002+00:002023-01-09T17:54:08.653+00:00What We Have Been: about Penelope Lively and the rural settings of children's books<p> <span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">'We are all of us,' says Penelope Lively, 'not just what we are now but what we have been.' She was writing about the origins of her 1973 Carnegie Medal winning novel</span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span><i style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Ghost of Thomas Kempe</span></i><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"> I live in London now, and I have done for nearly a decade, but before that I lived for forty years in the countryside, in Yorkshire for a bit but mostly in Norfolk. In a sense I've come full-circle because I was born in a hospital in Islington and lived for the first four years of my life in a top-floor flat in Hendon, 200 metres from the A406 North Circular Road, and a half-hour bike ride from where I live today. Here's a photo of the block of flats that I took yesterday. It's almost unchanged by nearly seventy intervening years, though the cars passing by look very different. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhbdIusKkGVfAKJoqwe4z_YzHc7BsYVyirpkaYXe1XerRejIplcLn3nJd0xS1YtCiyiYsA7cOZ2tBH60V4kF8kt6n2tsrR-S6wJxWQEQbTomZgtRN1c355tuJ9GnoPzDMSqAXFQrq33yVHMXt-7p7QxHqNZUGjRnBuRFOraleLQPledPobM1PzX9Q=s1280" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="989" data-original-width="1280" height="309" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhbdIusKkGVfAKJoqwe4z_YzHc7BsYVyirpkaYXe1XerRejIplcLn3nJd0xS1YtCiyiYsA7cOZ2tBH60V4kF8kt6n2tsrR-S6wJxWQEQbTomZgtRN1c355tuJ9GnoPzDMSqAXFQrq33yVHMXt-7p7QxHqNZUGjRnBuRFOraleLQPledPobM1PzX9Q=w400-h309" width="400" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">It was here that I looked out of a window, the third from the right on the top floor in the photo, to watch for my dad arriving home in the car he'd acquired in his new role as a travelling knitwear salesman. And I saw, in the street outside, just by where I stood yesterday to take the photo, a car on fire. My mum had to calm me down and assure me that it wasn't my dad's car, but even though he walked through the door a few minutes later quite unharmed, the image of those flames melded with images of nuclear explosions that we saw all the time on TV in the 1950s and 60s to form the climax of the terrible nightmares I had for a few years. I can still picture it now. I'd thought we'd done with the nightmare of a possible nuclear war, but it seems not.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Driving along that section of the A406 today doesn't make you think of countryside. A narrow, grimy, litter-strewn pavement creeps along beside the six lanes of heavy traffic. It wasn't like this in 1955, and my childhood, even here in London, was surprisingly rural in feel. It was peaceful and safe. On a patch of grass behind that hedge near the front door my mum would leave me sleeping in my pram for an hour at a time. When I was older we would walk beside the North Circular, my mum pushing my sister in the same pram, and I remember trees and a grassy verge and just the occasional car passing. I played with a large gang of children of all ages in the wilderness of a bomb-site beside the flats. And, remarkably, as it does all over London, the countryside still manages to keep a foothold today, especially beside the rivers. I doubt whether many of the thousands of drivers who pass along this bit of road realise that the River Brent flows through a narrow strip of woodland right beside the road; that a heron often sits beside the river; that wild garlic grows in profusion on the river banks.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg7oNuztNPD160Jev63s2R29-dq2vf42Fj16ZCI2xofPMM-pNQjlN2eFZkIdZ7XOFG6GQoLb8JoEyKxw4N94Ff44QmTja-fOpLGIt5imS3kaYc7Ly99WXIiiThCTW_dbmGw8RvN3Q3TINNl9LLgBcxSy5FaZqjglm4JLEKbQs8K2XkMz3OQ0FSfKQ=s1280" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg7oNuztNPD160Jev63s2R29-dq2vf42Fj16ZCI2xofPMM-pNQjlN2eFZkIdZ7XOFG6GQoLb8JoEyKxw4N94Ff44QmTja-fOpLGIt5imS3kaYc7Ly99WXIiiThCTW_dbmGw8RvN3Q3TINNl9LLgBcxSy5FaZqjglm4JLEKbQs8K2XkMz3OQ0FSfKQ=w300-h400" width="300" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Wild garlic by the River Brent</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I've now read the first 35 Carnegie Medal winners and almost all of them have rural settings. I'll even step out on a limb here and suggest that most <i>fiction</i> written for children before the late 1970s was predominantly rural in character, whether high-brow and beloved by librarians or low-brow and beloved by children. Boarding-school stories were always set in schools in the countryside and even when Geoffrey Trease, in response to a plea from young fans, started writing his <i>Bannermere</i> series about ordinary kids in a ordinary day school he set them in the Lake District countryside. British society since the first world war has been overwhelmingly urban in character and yet children's fiction before the 1980s rarely reflected that reality. Neither did it reflect the reality of war.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I've mentioned before on this blog what a huge influence WW2 has been on children's fiction and especially on Carnegie Medal winners, but, looking down the list of winners I've read, I think it's only in <i>The Borrowers</i> and in <i>The Lantern Bearers</i> that children are given a real, visceral experience of what it might be like to the helpless victims of forces greater than themselves. In the two books written during WW2 about that war, <i>We Couldn't Leave Dinah </i>turned the war into a kind of adventure thriller with ponies and, <i>Visitors From London </i>concerned evacuees adapting to life in the countryside. For most of the period I'm talking about the Cold War continued inexorably, alongside the Suez crisis, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Cuban missile crisis.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">So it's interesting that the spectre of nuclear apocalypse didn't, as far as I can recall, appear in children's fiction until the Cold War was almost over. I'm thinking of Robert Swindells' <i>Brother in the Land </i>(1984). Even later, in 2011, there came Mal Peet's <i>Life an Exploded Diagram</i>, a book which directly, and brilliantly, addressed the impact of the far-away crisis over Cuban missiles on the life of a boy growing up in rural Norfolk. It reminded me forcibly of the way I felt back then, and reminded me that the places I wanted to go in books were Enid Blyton's Kirrin Island or Arthur Ransome's Lake District and emphatically not the horror of a nuclear war. Robert Swindells and Mal Peet were both Carnegie winners with other books, and Mal Peet's Tamar is yet another WW2 novel.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjcv4n5DqMsZA2Jh5zTYBXCTR5q3jaX-1K0wUIAxDR7SygnCB2w5ScTDDRMeYFVIlDgE-z9q22bZikodAwKP0hr6GL-EQYiD8WajVQxHRGL6k9vzr3rcTkqHKEVHhsqe2FWDT0amOlKF4UNlKGweqd2LT3BykloWahqldzxHrrP-IarAjH80u6UeA=s1280" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="828" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjcv4n5DqMsZA2Jh5zTYBXCTR5q3jaX-1K0wUIAxDR7SygnCB2w5ScTDDRMeYFVIlDgE-z9q22bZikodAwKP0hr6GL-EQYiD8WajVQxHRGL6k9vzr3rcTkqHKEVHhsqe2FWDT0amOlKF4UNlKGweqd2LT3BykloWahqldzxHrrP-IarAjH80u6UeA=w259-h400" width="259" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><i>The Ghost of Thomas Kempe</i> is not about war and it has a comfortably familiar old-fashioned feel in some ways, but although it's set in an Oxfordshire village where the Harrison family have recently moved to an ancient cottage, the village is changing: '(Ledsham) was a very old place, half way between a village and a small town, and had, somehow, the air of being dwarfed by the present. New housing estates were mushrooming now on two sides of it, but the centre remained as it must always have been with the houses and streets a size smaller than the houses and streets of a modern town.'</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Thomas Kempe is the extremely troublesome ghost of a seventeenth century 'cunning man or sorcerer'. He is out of tune with modern times, his spirit having been awakened by builders renovating the Harrisons' cottage, and he co-opts the unwilling young James Harrison to be his apprentice. He does not intend to be, like the town, 'dwarfed by the present.' Thomas Kempe communicates by writing and by throwing things around. Among the modern practices he deplores is learning about the weather from the TV. Here's a sample of his communications:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">"There is much business for us in this town: I fancy many doe practise witchery. Tell thy family they shall know what the weather will be from me and not from that eville machine or I will break more pots."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The problem for James, of course, is that he gets the blame for everything. Thinking about his mother he concludes, 'I'm the sort of boy who might do that sort of thing. And she knows that. Because it's the sort of thing I do sometimes.' James, in fact, appears to have a mild form of what we might today call ADHD. The dialogue in the book, especially between the children, is an interesting mixture of convincingly naturalistic and slightly old-fashioned, so that, rather like the village/town we often seem poised between the 1950s and the 1970s. James has a tendency to say things like 'gosh!' and 'Crumbs'. It's a funny and interesting story, but it's more than that, and Penelope Lively intended it to be so. She puts it more succinctly than I ever could, so here's what she said about it in <i>Written for Children</i>:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">"Thomas Kempe, and his background of a place—house and village—which have lasted considerably longer than the people who live there now, is a device for me to explore a personal preoccupation with memory. The curious business that we are all of us not just what we are now but what we have been. To grown-ups this is—or ought to be—self-evident. We know that we are sustained by our memories. Children, on the other hand, it seems to me, are barely aware of this, but at the same time they are fascinated by the implications of it all. No child seriously believes that it is going to grow up, and yet here are parents and others claiming once to have been children . . . The point at which children extend this unimaginable truth towards other people, and recognise the layers of time and memory in adults, seems to me to be an important moment in the growing-up process."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Towards the end of the book these themes rise closer to the surface and are articulated most clearly by James's elderly neighbour, Mrs Verity "You think back. And often it seems more real than now. I mean, here I am, like this, but in my mind it's like I was different. Young, you see. You never really believe you're not any more." James has come to realise that people have "layers, like an onion," but I'm not sure any child will be ready to understand Mrs Verity's truth. (I only just noticed the significance of her name!!) That's a thing you only really understand once you've piled on a few years yourself.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgX-FqrUiZIsZf3rOBR5A43_-2MheSW9EVjfafQz4wqjeToVPXVXnqgkViAL_1ZX3U3sxQcNfgav3NynP78kwlTH5mr7Cse5ZaN1Gx3Ijs-a_cHEqpI2D_AcCQ3jze2MibaHX2IGfhR8fjDVXCwk6WUnP5ub6gCx8EVXIQ6DcmBsUfJti3rh8T8cQ=s1280" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="824" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgX-FqrUiZIsZf3rOBR5A43_-2MheSW9EVjfafQz4wqjeToVPXVXnqgkViAL_1ZX3U3sxQcNfgav3NynP78kwlTH5mr7Cse5ZaN1Gx3Ijs-a_cHEqpI2D_AcCQ3jze2MibaHX2IGfhR8fjDVXCwk6WUnP5ub6gCx8EVXIQ6DcmBsUfJti3rh8T8cQ=w258-h400" width="258" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">These themes of time, change, memory and age were also at the heart of Philippa Pearce's <i>Tom's Midnight Garden</i>, and I'd be very surprised if that book wasn't an influence on Penelope Lively, as it opened up the possibility of addressing these kind of things in a children's book. Those same themes were the ones that powered Penelope Lively's career as a novelist for adults and helped her to gain the distinction of being the only writer to date to win both the Carnegie Medal and the Booker Prize. And having written <i>The Ghost of Thomas Kempe</i> she did in fact go on to write about war in a children's book, <i>Going Back (1975)</i>, which was subsequently reissued on the adult list. Naturally those other themes are there too, as a middle-aged woman revisits the scene of her war-time childhood in the Devon countryside, but the book deals directly, through the children's soldier father and a conscientious objector called Mike, with some difficult moral issues.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgHuNLssXiha8jUAEzcCbEgkrm4chHwY0eDugiDs_qyGuMJm8M8V9hn23FdB_4a5ZgpoIVd6FR0t5exGBtFgl8pr34L2WWKlOp82yZ81ULWvqLHRBH-9Wsqhj6zYZl0K6XSt9rPoclEom97rrNgwlibnnEoyXWedWpxH5n3IDW-6ehvQzBjHTfHRQ=s1280" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="813" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgHuNLssXiha8jUAEzcCbEgkrm4chHwY0eDugiDs_qyGuMJm8M8V9hn23FdB_4a5ZgpoIVd6FR0t5exGBtFgl8pr34L2WWKlOp82yZ81ULWvqLHRBH-9Wsqhj6zYZl0K6XSt9rPoclEom97rrNgwlibnnEoyXWedWpxH5n3IDW-6ehvQzBjHTfHRQ=w254-h400" width="254" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">So, why are all those children's books set in the countryside? When I was a child, even though I lived in towns and cities, most of my time was spent outside, away from my parents, exploring neighbourhoods with my friends. The freedom was real. We weren't tethered to playgrounds, constantly supervised and/or constantly available on a mobile phone. And the places we sought out were the wild, secret places, like the bombsite I'd explore with that random bunch of kids of all ages when I was only three or four years old. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Maybe experiences like that make you want to be a children's writer, and then those experiences shape what you write. Maybe, even though we are now so urban, there is always a part of us dreaming of the natural world. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I don't know, but one random and slightly unconnected thought does occur to me. There's this difference between being an older person writing for children and a young person writing for adults about older people. The children's author has been there. That young novelist straight out of university trying to win the Booker Prize has it all yet to come.</span></p><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Originally published on ABBA March 6th 2022</span></div>Paul Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09499442738041701791noreply@blogger.com0