Thomas Bloor

2012-01-11T02:03:00.000-08:00

MAGIC BEAN COUNTER

Melvyn Bragg’s recent radio series on the story of writing (In Our Time on R4) explained that writing was, in its earliest origins, an accountancy tool. As the new technology of its day, this complex invention was perhaps even more revolutionary than recent transformations wrought by the development of the internet and the arrival of digital formatting. I lack the knowledge to do more than guess at the impact early writing made on the daily lives of the accountants, store-keepers, farmers, royal treasury assistants etc. of the ancient world. The economics of the publishing industry over the past thirty years however have shifted and transmogrified before my eyes. Change has been so rapid that even to the casual observer this has been quite easy to track. When I was a youth, back in the 1970s, bookshops were not that common. There was only one that I knew of in the London borough where I grew up, and that was a bus ride away from my home. If I wanted any kind of serious browsing at all I had to go in to central London, to Foyles, which, with its multiple floors packed with shelves, all groaning with books on every conceivable subject, seemed then to be quite unique. There was also the Net Book Agreement, which meant that all retailers agreed to sell books at the recommended retail price. The abandonment of this agreement, plus the rise of the giant bookstore chains such as Borders, Hammicks, Waterstones etc. led the way for a new world of three-for-two offers, heavy discounting and, eventually to stories of beleaguered independent bookshop owners stocking their shelves by popping in to Tesco to buy up copies of the new Harry Potter, which they could get cheaper in the supermarket than from their usual supplier. The changes didn’t end there. Of the chains mentioned above, now only Waterstones remains. The publishing world, having released perhaps too many books, has now drawn in its horns. A worldwide financial crisis, coupled with huge uncertainty over the possible effects of the seemingly inevitable digitization of the printed word, has made the current climate an uncomfortable one for many publishers, authors and agents. And more change is on its way that much is clear. The one constant, as far as I can see, is that people’s appetite for reading matter, for the stories, information and knowledge contained within what was once a tool for creating a tally of jars of grain, remains undiminished.

2011-09-08T08:44:00.000-07:00

THE ARTIST JOSEPH BEUYS

I’ve admired the work of Joseph Beuys for many years, ever since seeing an exhibition of his drawings at the Whitechapel Gallery in the early 80s. An art student at the time, I found these works on paper enthralling; scratchy pencil marks, dense, organic forms in brown ink, curious signs and notations scribbled over the paper surface, with titles like Nights in the Rafters and The Shaman’s Hat. I always find I stop and look whenever I come across one of his pieces, be that a felt suit, a battery filled with fat, or video footage of the artist sharing a cage with a wary-looking coyote.

Beuys is widely admired as an artist. I remember seeing a television programme in which Arthur Scargil, fiery leader of the miner’s union during the disputes of the 1980s, spoke in hushed, reverent tones about visiting one of Beuys’ installations.

Beuys cut a charismatic figure. He was known for his wide-brimmed hats and cadaverous features, for his reputation-making performance, ‘Telling Stories to a Dead Hare’ (in which he did just that), and for the tale he told of his wartime experience as a Luftwaffe pilot on the Eastern front. Shot down and left for dead in sub-zero temperatures he was rescued by wandering Tarter tribesmen, who saved him from exposure by coating his body in fat and wrapping him in felt, materials he came to see as having life-giving properties.

I was at the Tate Modern a few weeks ago and there I saw a vast room-sized installation by Beuys, called ‘Lightening with Stag in its Glare’. The piece includes a huge triangle of puckered bronze suspended from a beam, an ironing board cast in aluminium, hanks of turd-like brown metal scattered about the floor, and, on top of a box on a tall stand, a small compass.

2011-08-16T04:01:00.000-07:00

Hmm. I've been unable to post anything here for a while due to computer crashes, password forgetfulness and general muddle. Now I'm back - but the text size seems a bit wilful, pale and /or uncomfortably tiny in places. My efforts to remedy this have met with limited success. My apologies. Blame a lack of positive thinking if you like...

2011-08-16T03:28:00.000-07:00

DOWN WITH POSITIVE THINKING! (Part 1)

I watched a television documentary about Thin Lizzy, the legendary 70s Irish rock band. Hidden amongst the bombast and excess relived by the various survivors came my favourite moment. Midge Ure (now more comfortably proportioned than in his cool, stick-thin youth) rather bizarrely perhaps once toured America with Thin Lizzy late on in their career. Here he was cheerfully describing himself as ‘the worst guitarist Lizzy ever had.’ He went on to demonstrate this by fluffing the twin guitar harmony line on ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’.

This reminded me of one of the curses of our time; the cult of positive thinking. Positivism, applied generally, for instance to inform policy or direction in governments and organisations etc, may well make fine practical sense. And cheery good-humour can be pleasant enough in the right context. But all too often the insistence on positive thinking goes far beyond cheerfulness, and is used as a whip to crack over the backs of individuals, forcing onto them a harsh, relentless sense of perpetual external judgement. I fear for anyone I hear saying something like ‘I know I can win/do/achieve this, all I have to do is believe!’ If they really mean that, then what happens to their world if they don’t succeed?

I prefer to take the advice of Quentin Crisp, who said, rather wonderfully, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.’ What’s wrong with understanding your own limitations - we all have them, after all - and then choosing to make a strength of them? There’s a sort of relaxed kindness in that approach that seems much more humane. Midge Ure certainly seemed to be one of the happier individuals featured in that Thin Lizzy documentary.

2011-02-09T09:26:00.000-08:00

ICE MAIDEN by Sally Prue

Sally Prue’s Ice Maiden begins with the terrors of a nightmare and ends in the fierce grip of excitement and dismay, a point of balance that may perhaps signal the beginnings of love. By then the reader has been on a journey into the heart of darkness, from the wilds of the Common among the pitiless and terrifying Tribe, to the nests of mistle thrushes and on into bracken-filled demon-pits and down to the ooze of a cold riverbed.

The Common is a piece of open land bordering the city. But it is depicted here in such close and raw detail that its borders melt away and we could be in the trackless wastes of a primeval wilderness. This is no idyll, however. Here is nature blood-red in tooth and claw. The reader is given ample opportunity to contemplate the bestial, merciless side both of humanity and of the animal kingdom as represented by the Tribe; a band of elfin creatures whose behaviour, despite having some supernatural aspects, is still more reminiscent of wildlife documentaries than of anything found in Tolkien. Darwinism is present, but so too is evolutionary theory in its most perverted form, as the book’s central character remembers what he has witnessed on the streets of 1930s Berlin; the Nazi efforts to ‘purify’ the population by eliminating the disabled and those with special needs, along with Jews, Gypsies and other minorities.

Set just prior to the beginning of the Second World War, the book tells the story of Franz, a refugee boy who doesn’t know he’s a refugee. Franz is a victim of over-protective parenting. But his parents’ thoughtless efforts to keep Franz isolated from the realities of their life, both in Berlin and in England, have misfired badly. A sense of mistrust and of constant danger pervades Franz’s world, and this atmosphere of mortal dread informs the story as a whole. At first Franz sees only selfishness and savagery all around him, but as the narrative moves towards its conclusion he comes to see that there are antidotes to horror, in simple kindness, compassion, love.

The fragility, but also the resilience of love in the face of ever-present danger is a recurrent theme. Instinct, far from forcing all creatures into endless violent competition, can also lead to acts of selflessness and generosity. And yet a constant tension exists between these opposites. Perhaps Ice Maiden can be said to highlight that unnerving point of balance, that moment of excitement and dismay that lies at the heart of life; the risk that must be taken.

Ice Maiden is published by Oxford University Press, as is Cold Tom, Sally Prue’s other story of the Tribe.

2011-01-12T06:39:00.000-08:00

This is a front cover design for NIGHT OF THE CROCODILES. Barrington Stoke produced it a little while ago for the print version of the book, the publication of which, unfortunately, has had to be delayed. I don't know whether they will use any of this design for the forthcoming app version - or indeed, whether an app will need a virtual front cover at all - but I look forward to finding out.

(Also, should an app have one or two P's? And should P's have a hyphen? And is "hyphen" the right word for ' ? But this could go on forever... )

2010-11-24T01:28:00.000-08:00

NIGHT OF THE CROCODILES APP STILL ON ITS WAY

The appearance of the Night of the Crocodiles app draws a little closer, following the signing of an addition to the original contract with Barrington Stoke. 'There's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip' and all that, but hopefully it won't be too long now. I should probably get an ipad, then I'll be able to see what it looks like for myself. A complete lack of any spare money at the moment could present a problem there, however...

2010-11-09T00:37:00.000-08:00

OVID'S METAMORPHOSES

I have just finished reading Metamorphoses by Ovid - the Penguin Classic version translated by Mary M. Innes. Given my interest in this sort of story (see my WORM IN THE BLOOD trilogy) I feel a little embarrassed that I haven't read it before. Perhaps I was put off by the fact that Ovid was born in 43 B.C. and I'd wrongly assumed a Roman writer would be hard-going. But in fact I found Metamophoses surprisingly readable, though some of the extreme violence requires a strong stomach! It's a collection of many stories all woven together, moving from the creation of the universe to what was then contemporary times, with the death of Julius Caesar. A kind of history of the world, then, based around the theme of transformation. People are changed into all manner of gods and monsters, fish and fowl, frogs and wolves, bears and birds, stars, stones, trees, flowers, rivers, pools, even a type of sound (Echo). Quite a few of the tales are familiar. It can feel a bit relentless at times, both the gods and the mortals are often cruel and generally bloodthirsty (apart from Pythagoras, who makes a surprise appearance near the end to endorse vegetarianism and reincarnation in a way that somehow feels very modern). But for anyone with an interest in tales of the Ancient Greek and Roman gods and the culture of those times, it's certainly worth a read.

2010-09-07T03:30:00.000-07:00

APP DELAY

The release of the NIGHT OF THE CROCODILES app has been delayed, unfortunately. When it does come out, however, it'll be available via iTunes and can be used with iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad.

2010-06-08T03:10:00.000-07:00

NIGHT OF THE CROCODILES TO BE PUBLISHED AS AN EBOOK

The print publication of NIGHT OF THE CROCODILES, my next book for Barrington Stoke, specialists in short and snappy novels aimed at dyslexic or reluctant readers, but always good reads in their own right – has been moved back and won’t now happen before 2011. However, Barrington Stoke do plan to release NIGHT OF THE CROCODILES in a new format this summer, as an ebook application for the iPod Touch, downloadable from the Apple Store for a cost of £1.19. (at least, this was the price quoted in December 09, anyway, so I imagine it’ll be around that, if not exactly that amount). The plan was to release the ebook version in August, and as far as I know that is still the aim.

This is certainly a technological first for me. It’s an intriguing prospect, for my work to be involved in a new format at this early stage. Is this the future of publication? It looks like it might well be part of it, though it’s hard to see electronic books replacing physical print completely. A book is such a simple invention after all, and works perfectly well. You might argue that ebooks are a better bet from a resources/green perspective (actually, this is an assumption on my part. I could be wrong – but I’m guessing that if all books were ebooks there’d be less paper used up, so less trees cut down, and less lorries, using less fuel, to deliver the books to the shops etc. etc.). In an ebook-only world I fear there would be no need for libraries, which seems a great shame - I’ve always loved libraries, though of course, not everybody feels that way. Another downside of epublishing could be how vulnerable books would then become. One blown fuse could destroy the entire British Library catalogue. Or if, say, I kept all my books on an ebook reader which I then accidentally dropped into the bath (as has occasionally happened to the odd print book of mine, resulting in crinkly pages that all come unglued – but I can’t imagine how that could ever happen to all of them at once – they wouldn’t all fit in the bath, for one thing.) then my entire collection would be lost. Tyrants and despots and zealots would have no need of book burnings in this print-free world. All they would need to do is access your ereader system remotely and press delete. And then send the secret police round to kick in your door and take you away. (Actually, I suspect some tyrants would miss the ceremonial aspect of the book burning. A book deletion just doesn’t have the same ring to it). There are a good many arguments both for and against. And although I see no sign that people are losing their appetite for reading, it does seem as if the pressure for change in the manner and form in which books are both produced and sold is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

2010-02-08T01:32:00.000-08:00

WORM IN THE BLOOD TRILOGY IN PORTUGUESE

I’ve now seen the Portuguese translations of the Worm in the Blood trilogy. They look rather marvellous. They differ from the originals in a number of ways. The titles have been changed a bit, and the whole set is very definitely a series, with volume numbers on the spine and so on. But the overall look is still close to the original Faber and Faber cover designs, which were rather beautifully done, I think. And they’ve kept my ink drawings as the chapter heads too, which I was pleased about. I’ve never had a book translated into a different language before. Above is the cover of the third and final book in the series.

2009-12-03T06:30:00.000-08:00

Book Log
THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY

December. Deep and dark. The decade enters its final month. My first book, The Memory Prisoner, came out in 2000, nearly ten years ago now...

I read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby recently. He composed this book with an extraordinary lightness of touch given the subject matter. It's an account of his experiences suffering from "locked-in syndrome". Following a stroke, Bauby was left paralysed, able to move one eyelid - but that's all. He dictated his book by blinking to indicate which letter of the alphabet he required. This is moving and inspiring stuff. The dignified nonchalance of the last words, 'I'll be off now', struck me, in particular.

2009-07-14T02:51:00.000-07:00

WORM IN THE BLOOD, BEAST BENEATH THE SKIN & HEART OF THE SERPENT…IN PORTUGUESE

A little while ago, I received the welcome news that my WORM IN THE BLOOD trilogy has been sold to a Portuguese publisher. I assume this means it will be translated into Portuguese and published there in a new edition, which I’m looking forward to seeing. Using Google Analytics, I’m able to keep a track of how many people visit this website (usually around 200 – 400 visits a month) and where in the world these web visitors are based. The majority are from the UK, as you’d expect. But there’s usually one or two visits to the site from people in all sorts of other countries, some of whom may well have surfed onto my site by mistake. But recently I’ve noticed a significant number of visits from web users in Portugal, and a few more than usual from Brazil, too. So Olá to all Portuguese speakers everywhere.

2009-07-02T06:29:00.000-07:00

SLOW READER

Time has passed and the summer is here. I was working full-time for a while, as an exam invigilator, so I couldn’t do much writing. Then I got ill. Some kind of throat infection. The only good thing about being laid up in bed for a few days was that I read quite a lot. Waking up in the night, unable to get back to sleep, reading a few paragraphs of a book, falling asleep, dreaming that I’m reading the next bit - that sort of thing. No children’s fiction, but I read a lot of enjoyable novels. Amongst others, I read The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen, The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick. A varied crop, but all good stuff, in my opinion. I’d like to read more, but I’m quite a slow reader. At the moment I’m chipping away at Dickens’ Little Dorrit. Some people, whose opinions I value, are in fact rather against Dickens. And I remember when I was a boy at school we would often be given comprehension exercises, which I hated, and the passage we were required to answer a list of inane questions on was invariably from Dickens, or perhaps Walter Scott. I therefore grew up viewing these writers with a certain amount of resentment. However, I have since revised my opinion, as far as Dickens is concerned at least. I suppose he has his flaws, but for me the teeming urban patchwork of his novels is hard to resist. Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner? There are still a lot of his novels that I haven’t read. They can’t be rushed, however. At least, not by me. Like I say, I’m a slow reader...

2009-03-03T06:08:00.000-08:00

BOMBER BOYS AVAILABLE AS AN AUDIO-BOOK - MARCH 2009!

BOMBER BOYS is released as an unabridged audio-book this month. It’s available online from Whole Story Audio Books (WSAB) at www.wholestoryaudio.co.uk. At their website you can also hear an extract from the audio-book – read by the actor Daniel Coonan – and see the cover design, which features a very dramatic composition based on a photograph of the front section of a Lancaster bomber.

2009-02-26T09:45:00.000-08:00

TWO TEENAGE WRITERS

I read WAYWALKERS recently, an enjoyable fantasy about a war between various gods, a war that spills over onto earth. WAYWALKERS was written when its author, Catherine Webb, was studying for her A’ levels. And that wasn’t her first book, either. In fact it was her third published novel, I think, the first having been MIRROR DREAMS written when she was fourteen. She’s at University now, a prolific producer of fiction, both for young adults and adults (under a different name). That’s quite an achievement for anyone. I couldn’t even finish anything I wrote until I was well into my thirties, let alone get it published! But authors who start young have the chance to write a great many books, if their fortunes and inclinations continue to run that way.

Quite some years ago I happened to read a book that I’d found when clearing out a cupboard at work. It was by a teenage writer from an earlier generation, though I didn’t know that until after I’d read it. Marjorie Bowen’s first book, THE VIPER OF MILAN: A ROMANCE OF LOMBARDY, was written when she was fifteen, I believe – though it wasn’t published until 1906, when the author was twenty-one. It’s an extraordinary story, if only for the almost sadistic level of troubles Bowen comes up with to heap upon the head of her principled, honourable hero. She sends him on a journey into personal damnation, in the course of which everything he values is ripped away until finally, hopeless, broken, insane, he lurches into the final scenes of the tale, intent on revenge…and even then the storyteller will not grant him even this small shred of resolution! I can still hardly believe it, even now, twenty years later!

Marjorie Bowen went on to write historical romances, supernatural horror stories, popular history and biography, over 150 volumes in total.

2009-01-14T07:11:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the BOOK LOG… It’s a log of books, amongst other things.

WITCH CHILD

I’m reading Witch Child by Celia Rees. It’s another book about a girl with supernatural abilities at peril among those most unpleasant of historical sects, the blood-thirsty, witch-hating, self-righteous, grotesquely intolerant Puritans of Seventeenth Century England. But this story’s a particularly good one, being fast-paced, exciting and with a keen eye for the rancid squalor of past times. It takes its heroine Mary all the way from the lawless country roads of England just after the Civil War, out across the ocean and on to the vast forests of the New World. And always she’s in danger from the cold-eyed Puritan preachers amongst whom she must live, those pious, self-appointed prophets whose word is taken as law. And yet she is not entirely alone. There’s a mysterious presence that seems to be keeping watch over Mary. A strange hare is spotted at the edge of the settlement…

2008-12-04T01:23:00.000-08:00

WHERE AUTHOR’S LIVE
The daytime, term-time, mid-morning streets are peopled by old ladies with their small, disgruntled-looking dogs, which are often dressed in little tartan coats. There’s the occasional furtive youth, embarrassed and shiftless, choked by the numbing boredom that comes with truancy and dreary weather. Magpies stalk the branches of the roadside trees, crazy-eyed, shrieking insults. People with debilitating illnesses make their painful way about whatever business they can muster. Squirrels leap and scurry. Cats yawn or look disgusted. A tiny child stands beside a wall, pointing a finger at the pattern of shadows on the brickwork while its mother waits beside the buggy, the breeze blowing her hair across her face. The check-out woman stands on the pavement outside the supermarket, shivering, shifting from foot to foot, smoking a cigarette. The road sweeper leans against his cart. Circulars are delivered. Leaves tremble. The sun comes out. The sun goes in. This is where we live…

2008-11-24T11:37:00.000-08:00

AN AUTHOR VISIT TO ST. MICHAEL’S PRIMARY SCHOOL IN HIGHGATE

On November 17th I paid an author’s visit to a school packed with very fine story-inventing minds - in the two Year 5 classes I met, certainly, if not the entire school. As I often do, I brought along a bag of real shoes, together with my fake silver-topped cane and fake pearl. On the way home, thinking to make a short cut back to the Underground Station, I became hopelessly lost, and spent some while wandering the hilly streets of Highgate. I finally staggered out onto the Archway, starving hungry and with the strap on my shoe bag having worn a deep groove in my shoulder. But I got home before the light started to drain from the sky, which it does these days at around 4 o’clock. We move towards the winter solstice, the shortest, darkest day of the year. Let it come, I say…

2008-10-19T11:41:00.000-07:00

WOW 366

I have two short (very short) stories in an anthology published in the summer to celebrate the International Year of Reading, 2008. It’s a collection consisting of 366 stories, all of them exactly 366 words long (366 being the number of days in 2008 – a leap year). It was an intriguing project to be involved in. The book, called WOW 366, is published by Scholastic, priced at £6.99. £1 from every copy sold goes to the charity Childline. My stories are PROMISE on page 343 and BOY KING REX on page 431.

I’ve not added anything to these Book Log blog pages for several months. Some authors make great bloggers, regularly uploading entries detailing their busy lives and exciting writing careers. Others are like me. However, had I been keeping this blog up to date I might have mentioned a number of library visits I made, some in Waltham Forest, and some in Chelsea, two rather different parts of London but both with equally pleasant and welcoming library services and both with no shortage of thoughtful and intelligent young library users. I was also a guest at the opening of a new school library, at Woodside Primary School in Walthamstow, where I once worked as a Special Needs Assistant. More recently I also realised, rather belatedly, that The Happy Ending Society (see an earlier entry) is just an invention of the Lemony Snicket publicity people, after all (as, I suppose, is Lemony himself – or at least his name, surely?). Well, that’s a relief, I must say! Such is the way of the world nowadays that a society of that kind did seem all too plausible. Or am I just a gullible old sap?

2008-07-23T06:27:00.000-07:00

THE DRAGON AND THE WARLORD AND ITS ILLUSTRATIONS

I have just seen a copy of my most recent book, THE DRAGON AND THE WARLORD.
The illustrations, by Daniel Atanasov, are every bit as good as I’d thought they’d be. They’re all great, but my favourite is perhaps the drawing on page 51, which shows the dragon on the wing, silhouetted by the full moon, while beneath him the cliff-top fortress collapses into ruin. I also like the grim scene on page 5, where Sheng’s father lies dying, his body pierced by arrows, carrion birds circling above him in the darkening sky.

THE DRAGON AND THE WARLORD is from Barrington Stoke, a publisher that specialises in books for reluctant, struggling and dyslexic readers, but don’t be put off if you’re not any of those things. I’ve read quite a few barrington Stoke books and they’re really good, well worth reading by anyone who likes a good story. If you don’t find them on the shelves at your nearest bookshop then they should be able to order you in a copy - or you can buy them online.

2008-07-04T07:30:00.000-07:00

THE DRAGON AND THE WARLORD OUT ON 22ND JULY!

I am looking forward to seeing this book, particularly the illustrations, which are by Bulgarian Manga artist Daniel Atanasov. So far I’ve only seen the front cover and the early, rough versions of the black and white drawings inside, but they all look excellent. THE DRAGON AND THE WARLORD is published by Barrington Stoke. If you prefer shorter books with fast-moving storylines, and you also like retellings of old folk tales and legends, then this could be for you. Amazon will be selling it, or you can get your local bookshop to order you a copy.

2008-06-13T01:10:00.000-07:00

The Book Log. What exactly is it?....

NORWICH AND A FORTHCOMING PUBLICATION

I was in Norwich recently, for an author event at the Waterstones in Castle Street. This is an excellent shop if you’re looking for children’s fiction, with lots going on and the stock very well displayed. And as the name of the road suggests, the back of the shop (or is it the front?) is overlooked by the ramparts of a hilltop castle. Many thanks to the students and staff I met there for making me so welcome.

THE DRAGON AND THE WARLORD is published next month, the second of my two Barrington Stoke books to come out this year. I must get this website updated soon. I’ll include a new page for my Barrington Stoke publications and, I think, a new home page (there isn’t really a home page at present). And I think I’ll rename this Book Log. Not sure what to call it yet however.

2008-06-03T14:21:00.000-07:00

By THEIF I, of course, mean THIEF. Annoying how spell-check doesn't work with capital letters.

2008-06-03T06:45:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the book log. It contains various things.

BOOKS I’VE READ RECENTLY
Well, I haven’t read much in the way of children’s fiction lately. But I’ve read a lot of other books that I felt were very good for one reason or another. These include DRESDEN by Frederick Taylor, a pice of non-fiction about the terrible firestorm created there by allied bombers in February 1945, ANANSI BOYS, a hugely enjoyable fantasy with deep mythic roots by Neil Gaiman, and two Tim O’Brien books, his auto-biographical first book, IF I DIE IN A COMBAT ZONE, about his time as a conscript in Vietnam in 1969, and the surreal war story GOING AFTER CACCIATO, one of a number of his books that grew from his war experience. O’Brien is that rare sort of writer – and the concentration camp survivor and chemist Primo Levi is another good example - who can take a terrible personal experience and somehow use it to reflect on the nature of humanity, as opposed to inhumanity. The results are therefore ultimately life affirming, somehow, rather than simply depressing.

ON AGE RANGING
I also read THE BOOK THEIF by Markus Zusak, which I note is now being marketed as cross-over fiction, with an edition published for young people. As these editions tend to, it has a different front cover (not as good, I think). A sticker warns that the book is unsuitable for younger readers. This is probably true, in most cases. Perhaps not all, though. How can you generalise? The age-ranging of books has become something of an issue recently. Some publishers have decided to introduce an age suitability guide on the back of all children’s books. These publishers have put forward many arguments in favour of this move, backed up by market research aimed at parents and other adults who buy books for children. I don’t like the idea though. There’s something disappointing about saying that this book is for certain people only, those of this age or that, even if it’s only meant as a guide. It seems to deflate the idea of a book, by emphasising the fact that it’s a commodity to be codified and marketed. Some might say, yes, Tom, don’t be so soft, that’s all published books are. Book selling is a business and stories are just units to be shifted from a shelf. But somehow I can’t quite believe that. They seem to be more than that. There’s a website about this issue if you’re interested.
( www.notoagebanding.org )

By the way - Thanks to the commentator who wrote a note on my Cormack McCarthy review. I quite agree with you.

2008-05-06T12:29:00.000-07:00

the book log...what is it?...it's this and that...

THE INCREDIBLE CHANGING SURNAME

My daughter was glancing through the first pages of BOMBER BOYS and immediately spotted an embarrassing mistake that has somehow slipped through the net to appear in the finished book. I can’t think how I missed it! This particular error involves the name of a character, discussed in the opening paragraphs, which changes miraculously from Smith to Jones within the space of a few lines! I fear my daughter won’t be the only one to notice this…

I do find myself changing characters’ names from time to time, for one reason or another. But it is a practise fraught with difficulty, as the above example illustrates. It is very hard to “see” where the old name persists in the text. The “Find” and “Replace” commands on my PC are helpful. But that didn’t seem to help me with BOMBER BOYS. The character in question is already dead at the beginning of the story, and he plays no part in the subsequent action. I wasn’t expecting any trouble from him. Yet now his name(s) will haunt me. I'll probably suffer a faint flush of embarrassment every time I think about the error. This is one of the reasons I avoid reading my books after they’ve been published. It’s too late to change anything by then.

2008-04-02T07:18:00.000-07:00

The book log. More of an occasional on-line journal really...

THE ZEITGEIST, AMAZONS, A TESTAMENT TO YOUTH AND THE FORESHADOWING...

I recently read THE FORESHADOWING by Marcus Sedgewick. The story rather surprised me because, completely by coincidence, some elements of the plot are quite similar to a screenplay I wrote quite a few years ago, long before I'd read this book. Like many others, my screenplay hasn’t made it to the screen (one can only imagine the vast numbers of un-produced film scripts that lie gathering dust in drawers, in folders and computer files the world over!) and has been read by only a small handful of people, so this is in no way meant to hint at any suggestion of plagiarism by either party – rather to muse on the curious nature of the zeitgeist; that collective consciousness that hovers somewhere at the back of all our minds and sometimes leads to coincidences such as this one – and indeed others where the similarities are even greater. I suppose it’s possible, though unlikely, that both Mr Sedgewick and I were prompted by exactly the same initial influences. In my case these were firstly, the front cover of a non-fiction book called AMAZONS, about women throughout history who have fought in wars while disguised as men (and on this point, I think there's also an old song, something to do with a Sweet Polly Oliver, possibly?). The cover of this fascinating non-fiction book, the authors of which I'm sorry to say I have forgotten, showed a well-known female music hall artist, whose act was as a male-impersonator. She was dressed in the uniform of a First World War Tommy performing a routine called HOME ON LEAVE. And the second trigger was the cinema trailer for the film TITANIC, part of which showed one character firing a pistol at another on the tilting decks of the stricken liner. I hadn’t seen the film, so at that time I knew no more of the actual story than that on board fight. A ship ill-equipped with lifeboats and sinking in icy waters struck me as an extraordinary setting for a fight to the death. I imagined another life-or-death hand-to-hand struggle between two characters – both of them British soldiers, though later they became a man, and a woman disguised as a man – taking place in a similarly unlikely time and place; a shell hole in No Man’s Land, in the midst of an attack during that infamous slaughter known as the Battle of the Somme.

Marcus Sedgewick acknowledges Vera Britain’s extraordinary book TESTAMENT TO YOUTH as a book that helped him recreate the life of a VAD nurse in France during the First World War and I would add my recommendations of the same source to anyone interested in the subject. Rich in detail and filled with incident, I was astonished at how Vera Britain was able to write passages filled with tension, skilfully structured, but which actually dealt in great detail with the most tragic of personal circumstances - the deaths of her fiancé and her brother, who were both killed in the war. I can only imagine the circumstances surrounding these terrible moments were so strongly etched on her memory that to write them down was no worse than to simply live with them, and it might also perhaps have afforded her some small vestige of therapeutic relief. If not, producing parts of this memoir must have been unbearable.

2008-03-02T14:13:00.000-08:00

THE NIGHT WATCH

I’ve started reading THE NIGHT WATCH, by Sergei Lukyanenko, which was brought to my attention by a reader called Sheana Campbell. I’d seen the film but not read the books, which I’m enjoying, particularly for the sub-zero, post-Soviet, gritty, urban Russian setting. It’s like a noir police procedural, or a spy story maybe, complete with angst-ridden, morally compromised protagonist. But the story centres on a version of reality where the supernatural and the gothic exist alongside the human world. A quote on the front cover describes THE NIGHT WATCH as “J.K. Rowling, Russian style.” This could be misleading. It’s true that, like Rowling’s work, Lukyanenko’s books have become something of a phenomenon, and have sold in their millions, especially in his native Russia. Stylistically, however, the two writers are poles apart. Lukyanenko seems to take crime fiction and cold war thrillers as a starting point, and writes with what is – to Western eyes at least– a unique geographic perspective. By contrast, the Harry Potter books spring from the tradition of British boarding school stories written for children in the first half of the twentieth century. Where they do have common ground – in the notion of a supernatural world existing in tandem with the natural – it’s already such a broad arena that it is easily capable of including a great variety of completely different stories within its bounds.

2008-02-21T00:31:00.000-08:00

BOMBER BOYS by Thomas Bloor – OUT NOW!

There are a number of books out there with the same title, but all of them, apart from mine, are non-fiction accounts of Second World War bomber crews. The setting is the same for my book, but mine is fiction, a slim 9,000 word novella. It tells the story of the young crew (average age around 19) of Lancaster bomber M for Mother, before and during a raid on Berlin in 1944. It’s published by Barrington Stoke, a publisher that specialises in books for young people who have a thirst for good stories, well-told, but who can have difficulty reading them. The books are edited with the help of a group of readers, a sample of the children and young adults the books are aimed at, which means there’s no talking down or unnecessary simplification. There are some great writers published by Barrington Stoke. Their website is www.barringtonstoke.co.uk

I had a lot of help with the research for BOMBER BOYS from my uncle, who was in RAF Bomber Command, where he served in the famous dam buster squadron as part of the ground crew. He joined up just after the war finished and got to go on a goodwill tour of America. He once told me a story of flying which has always stuck in my mind. Touring America by plane, my uncle and his friends were admiring a beautiful sunset through the Perspex canopy of the cockpit. When the last red rays of the sun disappeared behind the mountains the pilot announced over the intercom, “That was a fantastic sunset, lads. Shall we see it again?” And so he climbed several thousand feet and there was the sunset all over again! I imagine that’s not something you could easily do in these days of flight paths and crowded skies...

2008-01-17T06:25:00.000-08:00

Hello. This is the book log. It goes like this...

THE WRONG WORDS

I haven’t written any entry here for almost two months. Why not? Pure idleness? No. Not entirely, anyway. I have in fact been putting a lot of time into the writing (and rewriting) of what is for me an unusually long story. I finished this lengthy tome at the end of November, having started work on it over a year earlier (the idea itself being one I’ve had kicking around for years, and have already started – and then abandoned – several times before in various other forms - for instance, as a radio play, for some mad reason!)

So. I tried writing it as a novel and eventually finished it. 80,000 words long, which is, for me, really pretty long, the longest thing I’ve written by some way. (Well yes, I know that plenty of authors write much longer books – I can only admire their stamina!). But then, to my great horror, at the very moment I typed the final sentence I suddenly realised without a shadow of a doubt that at least 40,000 of those 80,000 words were in fact THE WRONG WORDS! By which I mean there was something terribly amiss with the plot and some important aspects of the characterisation which could only be tackled by making major cuts and rewriting huge sections of the book from scratch. What a nightmare! Why couldn’t I have made that discovery earlier? I don’t really know, except that plans and synopses and plot points are all very well, but they go only get you so far. You can never really anticipate how a story is actually going to fit together (or not, as the case may be) until you get down to it and write the thing. At least, I can’t anyway.

Now, this book is a book I’ve been writing on spec. In other words, no publisher has said they want it yet. So it might well turn out to have been a great deal of hard work for nothing (apart from the perverse satisfaction of having finished the thing at last). As a published author there’s no guarantee that anything you write will get into print, particularly if your sales figures tend to be a bit on the modest side. So I faced the prospect of spending another couple of months rewriting a book that might never see the light of day, nor ever earn me a single penny. A sensible man may have decided to cut his losses here, and consign the failed manuscript to the bottom drawer so as to get on with something else. But I found I couldn’t leave the story alone! I didn’t want to write anything else at all until I’d finally got to a place where I could call the story finished, at least as a first draft. So that’s why I’ve not written anything in the book log for so long.

At last, I’ve finally finished the first draft and I can put the manuscript to one side for a while. This time round, just as I rewrote the last words the skies outside darkened and there was a rumble of thunder. Then a storm of hailstones the size of marbles pelted the earth, rattling at the windows and clattering onto the garden path. Whether that burst of freakish precipitation was an omen, and, if it was, whether it augured well or ill, remains to be seen…

2007-11-17T07:09:00.000-08:00

The Book Log. News. Thoughts. Books. That sort of thing….

To The North, a Book Read on the Train, Other Books Read Twenty Years Ago.

The Northern Children’s Book Festival brings authors from around the country and sends them into libraries and schools in the north east to meet groups of children and young people, run workshops and give talks or performances. This year I was invited to take part. Going up on an evening train from London I watched the occasional firework bursting, seemingly in silence, out in the pitch darkness beyond the carriage windows. I was reading Garth Nix’s Shade’s Children, a book for young adults. The Sci-Fi setting suited his writing very well, I thought, and the story was a gripping and ultimately a moving one.

As part of the Festival I visited Outer West Library and Fenham Library in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Billingham Campus School, Billingham, which is outside Stockton-upon-Tees. There were some great displays based around my book jackets. That reminded me of when I worked for a year in the library at Sidney Chaplin School, Walthamstow – now long since closed down - back in the late 1980s. I used to make my own posters to advertise the books on the shelves. It was there that I first came across books by Peter Dickenson (The Gift) and Susan Cooper (The Dark is Rising) and Annabel Farjeon’s book The Siege of Trapp’s Mill, parts of which have stuck in my mind quite vividly.

I had an hour to kill in Newcastle before my train home. I walked up to the Earl Grey Monument. A statue of the Earl himself stands atop a large stone column and gazes out over the rooftops of the town. In the street below I bought myself something to eat on the train, in a shop called Bagel of the North. Although I was in the middle of a city, everything at that time seemed still and strangely peaceful.

2007-11-08T03:47:00.000-08:00

Welcome to THE BOOK LOG - Originally a series of book reviews, maybe I should rename this section NEWS? It now contains updates on publications and events plus occasional thoughts on writing. But there's still reviews of stuff I've read and enjoyed. Such as...

JUST IN CASE by Meg Rosoff

Meg Rosoff’s JUST IN CASE is an extraordinary book. Her writing knows no inhibitions and the story she tells here is variously wise, bold, beautiful, gripping, playful, brutal, frightening, delightful and more. This book made me wish I owned a greyhound, even though the greyhound it features isn’t even a real one. It made me want to own a large rabbit. Again. (Strangely, JUST IN CASE features a male rabbit called Alice. We once had a female rabbit called Luke). My wife and teenage daughter both hated Agnes. For myself, I have to confess I was every bit as beguiled as, Justin, the story’s main character, is. Through her writing, Meg Rosoff seems able to make the imaginary feel startlingly corporal. Every character, even peripheral ones, possesses a weight of their own, and they inhabit their place in the narrative with an almost physical authority. How she does this I am not entirely sure. Perhaps it’s that she succeeds in evoking tangible details of description that are at once startlingly familiar and yet remarkably fresh. A genuinely original voice in young adult fiction.

2007-10-25T02:42:00.000-07:00

Welcome to The Book Log. News. Reviews. Notes. Asides…

THE BLOOMSBURY FESTIVAL
PLUS THE INSPIRATION BEHIND DRAGONS VERSUS HELICOPTERS

Thanks to those who were there for the reading/talk I gave at the Art Worker’s Guild as part of the Bloomsbury Festival on Saturday 20th October. The event was filmed too, for use by Great Ormond Street Hospital TV, so I suppose more people may eventually get to see me talking about my dragon-boy trilogy, Worm in the Blood, Beast Beneath the Skin and Heart of the Serpent. As part of my talk, I read an extract from Heart of the Serpent, a chapter near the end of the book, which describes a dragon (Fen) attacking and destroying a helicopter in flight. This reminds me of a film that came out some ten years ago I think, called Reign of Fire. It was in the Sci-Fi post-apocalyptic tradition. In Reign of Fire, huge fire-breathing dragons had laid waste to modern Britain. The poster advertising the film showed dragons on the wing and, in one corner, a flight of helicopters homing in, as if to confront the giant beasts in aerial combat. This never actually happened in the film, a fact that was noted with disappointment in a review I read somewhere. Remembering this, and with the cost of special effects not being an issue when you’re writing a novel, I resolved to make sure there was a dragon versus helicopter encounter somewhere in my book if at all possible.

2007-10-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

Hello. This blog contains some book reviews, and some random thoughts on how I go about my writing. Such as….

THE NOTEBOOK FILES

I keep a notebook. I always ask for notebooks for my birthday, and usually get given two or three, which is great because they last me the year. My notebooks are part diary, part shopping-list, part sounding-board, part scribble-pad, part scrap-book, part note-pad, part address-book, part sketch-book, part mole-rat. No, not that last one. In my previous entry on the subject I referred to some notes made on a pigeon I encountered at a bus stop in North Woolwich back in 1982. I said I hadn’t made use of those notes directly in any writing. But my daughter recently pointed out that, in fact, there is a scene in one of my books (THE HOUSE OF EYES, winner of the Stockton Children’s Book of the Year Award, 1998) which features a pigeon and a boy named Keith. What’s more, it’s a scene that apparently made her cry when she first read it. (This makes me feel pleased that she found my story moving, but also a bit guilty that it upset her). Thinking about it now, I'm sure the Woolwich pigeon was a major influence behind the writing of that particular scene.

2007-10-08T08:31:00.000-07:00

THEY ALL LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER…AND THEN THEY DIED

When I first heard The Happy Ending Foundation mentioned, in a brief aside saying they were planning an airport protest at the arrival of Lemony Snicket for an “Unfortunate Events…” book tour of the UK, I took them to be an invention of the Snicket camp, a piece of promotional American-gothic tomfoolery to go with the neatly designed books and the fanciful pen name. The notion that such a group could actually exist seemed preposterous. But unless Lemony’s publicist has persuaded a considerable slice of the British media, not to mention former children’s laureate Michael Morpurgo, to play along with the wheeze, it seems the group are real. And they really do want to ban children’s books with unhappy endings. Not only that, but they are apparently planning a series of “Bad Book Bonfires” for the offending volumes later this month. It must be true, I read about it in one of those free papers you find littered about the London Underground. The newspaper named Marcus Pfister’s Milo and the Magical Stones as an example of a book the Foundation want banned (I don’t know this book, but presumably all does not end well for the protagonist). The next day I heard Peter Allan interviewing Michael Morpurgo on the subject on Radio 5. Morpurgo delivered a thoughtful riposte to the Foundation, saying he understood their aim, that children should be happy, but countered that this could not be achieved by lying to them about the true nature of the world. As for me, I’m still not entirely sure that this isn’t all one big and rather subversive advertising campaign. After all, it’s brought the works of at least three authors to my attention over the last couple of days. And it’s hard to believe any group would organise something as offensive as a book burning heedless of the parallels with Nazi Germany and the like, which such activities always conjure up. The title of this entry, by the way, is apparently what used to go through the mind of Radio 5 presenter Peter Allan as a child, whenever he encountered the classic fairy tale ending “happily ever after”!

2007-09-29T01:26:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Book Log, where you'll find my comments on books I've enjoyed, some notes on current projects and author events I've been involved in, some thoughts on how I write, that sort of thing...

This book log entry was written in early September but somehow I haven’t got round to putting it on the blog until now.

BOOK-BUYING FRENZY

My daughter is doing her A-levels at Sixth Form College. The college gave all their students £50 worth of Waterstones book vouchers. Whether this act of generosity springs from the college itself, or from Waterstones, or from elsewhere I do not know. Nevertheless we were pleased at the prospect of fifty pounds worth of free books, which seemed like a lot. Woo-hoo! - we thought - we’ll be able to go into a book-buying frenzy! Of course, you can only buy six or seven paperbacks for £50, which, though generous, is not quite the cornucopia of reading our excited but mathematically-challenged minds had imagined it out to be. Nevertheless, we paid a visit to the large Waterstones in Piccadilly, with its low stair-rail preserved for historic reasons (I forget what those reasons are precisely – something to do with the shop’s original use. As a hotel, possibly, or a department store?). There I saw a book that filled me with apprehension. The Road. I knew I had to read it.

The intention of this Book Log is to talk about children’s fiction. Cormack McCarthy is definitely not writing for children – dear me, no - but his books have had such a powerful effect on me as a reader that is seems foolish not to mention them. So here goes.

THE ROAD by Cormack McCarthy.
I’d read the reviews when it first came out. The premise is chilling. One man and his young son on the road to nowhere, with the whole world in ruins all around them. And I knew from reading books like Blood Meridian and Inner Darkness, Westerns peopled with humans and demons and humans behaving like demons, books of a biblical intensity, filled with searing poetry, from those books I knew that McCarthy is a writer well-equipped to describe the last days of life on the Earth. The Road is set in a post-apocalyptic America inhabited by a benighted human race in the final throws of extinction. I was afraid to read it, knowing it would upset me. But once I’d turned the first page, sitting in the Underground on our way home from Waterstones, I couldn’t stop reading until I’d finished it. Though agonisingly bleak, and often utterly horrifying (some gangs of survivors have turned to a life of predatory cannibalism) The Road is also infused with a deep sympathy for these last frail humans crawling on their dying rock, in spite of the hideous depths some have sunk to in order to survive. It coveys a sense of yearning tenderness for the world we still have, which highlights how vulnerable it is, and what an appalling thing it would be to lose.

The titles mentioned above all have their share of disturbing scenes and haunting images. However McCarthy is also author of All The Pretty Horses, and The Crossing, among other books, and these are both a little easier to take (though they too have their occasional moments of gut-wrenching violence, if I remember rightly!). The way he writes about people and animals and landscape and wilderness I find both gripping and moving. In all of his books that I've read, he seems to be writing about the mystery of the human condition. The atmosphere, the feelings and the images he manages to evoke, once read, are unlikely to be forgotten.

2007-09-03T06:40:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Book Log where you will now find, amongst other things:
Reviews of Books I have enjoyed
Notes on My Current Ideas and Projects
Some thoughts on How I Write, influences, inspiration etc.

MORE CURRENT PROJECTS – THE DRAGON AND THE WARLORD

This is a retelling of a Chinese folk story called The Dragon’s Pearl, which I’ve expanded and altered a little from the original. I’ve written it for the publisher Barrington Stoke (see also the blog entry entitled BOMBER BOYS, below). They suggested the new title, which I think suits the way I’ve retold the story very well. I came across The Dragon’s Pearl just after I’d finished writing the first draft of WORM IN THE BLOOD. I was astonished. I’d just written a book about a boy who turns into a dragon and here was a folk tale on the very same subject! WORM IN THE BLOOD ends with a flashback that shows Sam, the main character, in his early childhood. It’s a scene where his mum is telling him a story. It didn’t take much to change things so that the story she is telling Sam is the story of the Dragon’s Pearl. It was great to be able to write my own version of the tale. I’ve completed the first draft and sent it in to the publisher. Now the editing has to be done, which, with Barrington Stoke, can be quite a lengthy process (again, see BOMBER BOYS entry below for more details). The story will be published as part of a series called “Re-booted”, sometime next year, I think.

2007-08-23T01:23:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Book Log where you will now find, amongst other things:
Reviews of Books I have enjoyed
Notes on My Current Ideas and Projects
Some thoughts on How I Write, influences, inspiration etc.

EDINBURGH BOOK FESTIVAL and ANOTHER ME by Catherine MacPhail

My appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday, as part of the School’s Programme, seemed to go well. I was rather nervous about it beforehand, never having done an event quite of that sort before. The audience were from schools as nearby as Edinburgh itself and from as far away as Inverness-shire. The latter group had assembled for their coach journey at five in the morning in order to arrive on time. That shows remarkable dedication to the cause. My audience all seemed very alert and attentive, despite the early start some of them had made, and I was asked some intriguing questions at the end of the talk.

Most of the school groups who saw my talk were also intending to see Catherine MacPhail’s, later in the afternoon. Catherine MacPhail writes lean, hard-hitting thrillers for young people. Like me, her first novel for children was a Fidler Award winner, the snappily titled RUN ZAN RUN, which won the award in 1993. She has written many more books since then. One of my favourites is ANOTHER ME, a mystery story containing a strong element of the supernatural. Set among echoing, fog-filled streets and alleyways and empty school corridors chiming with ghostly footsteps, the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty is built up unrelentingly, as a girl finds herself stalked by an uncomfortably familiar figure. ANOTHER ME is based on the legend of the doppelganger. The term comes from the German, it literally translates as “double-goer”, and it describes the spirit or ghost of a living person, which has somehow manifested in physical form, usually with the intention of haunting its original. Although not as well known as Gothic staples such as werewolves and vampires, the legend of the doppelganger is nonetheless a tenacious one. The influence of the tale seems to have found its way into one of the plot lines of the current American TV series HEROES, for instance. The legend is rich is in psychological implications, and stories such as the silent German expressionist horror film, THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE, based on the doppelganger legend, end with an inevitable showdown between the central character and their malevolent double. ANOTHER ME is no exception to this rule, and the conclusion to MacPhail’s story is chilling indeed.

2007-08-16T03:34:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Book Log where you will find, amongst other things:
Reviews of Books I have enjoyed
Notes on My Current Ideas and Projects
Some thoughts on How I Write, influences, inspiration etc.

HOME FROM IRELAND AND A VISIT TO EDINBURGH

We have just returned from a holiday in Ireland. We visited Rostellen Woods again, after a ten year absence. These woods, in East Cork, were the influence behind one of the Irish settings in Beast Beneath The Skin (when Sam flees the mob after his disastrous visit to the Cullithin village fete, he seeks sanctuary in a forest based on Rostellen Woods.) The ruined stone buildings are still there, but they are now fenced off, with DANGER – KEEP OUT- signs all over them. But the woods around are as atmospheric as ever, with the tree-trunks covered in ivy and a dense canopy of leaves high above, blocking out the light of day.

I shall be in Edinburgh on Monday, giving a talk on my WORM IN THE BLOOD trilogy as part of the Edinburgh Book Festival’s Schools’ Week. To anyone who’s going along, firstly, commiserations on your return to school (in Scotland, autumn term starts in mid-August) and secondly, I look forward to seeing you at the Book Festival event.

2007-08-06T01:52:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Book Log where you will now find, amongst other things:
Reviews of Books I have enjoyed
Notes on My Current Ideas and Projects
Some thoughts on How I Write

As prompted by suggestions from students at schools I have visited recently, here’s the first in another occasional series that will appear here, amongst the peace and quiet of the Book Log…

How I Write: 1. Keeping a Notebook

After I left school I took an art foundation course and then a degree in fine art. I got into the habit of keeping a sketchbook and carrying it with me wherever I went. I soon extended that to a notebook too, so I could write down thoughts and ideas wherever I happened to be – on the bus, the train, in art galleries, sitting in the park etc. I remember once waiting for the 69 bus, which at that time used to begin its route in North Woolwich by the entrance to the foot tunnel that runs under the Thames, where the free ferry used to cross the river (and perhaps still does). There was a man with a cardboard suitcase in his hand. His face was covered in tiny cuts. Fresh wounds, small but deep. He was in a terrible rage, muttering furiously to himself. The muttering broke out into full-throated angry bellowing every now and then. The focus of his fury was unclear. He paced around with his suitcase in his hand and I kept my eyes on the pavement. I watched a pigeon picking at a mush of squashed chips that had been dumped in the gutter then run over by several buses. It wasn’t a pleasant wait. The man with the suitcase was frightening. The pigeon was disgusting. But writing it all down, when I eventually got to the relative safety of the bus, seemed like the best way to capture the strange edgy spirit of that brief moment in North Woolwich in 1982. I haven’t used the incident directly in any fiction I’ve written. But noting it down, trying to find the best words to describe the essence of waiting for the bus that morning, felt strangely significant, as if I’d taken a small step towards something interesting. As for the man with the suitcase, I never saw him again. His story is not mine to know. The pigeon, however, was a regular at the 69 bus stop.

2007-08-02T23:59:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Book Log where you will now find, amongst other things:
Reviews of Books I have enjoyed
Notes on My Current Ideas and Projects
Some thoughts on How I Write

A FAVOURITE BOOKSHOP OF MINE (WHERE I ORDERED BURMA BOY BY BIYI BANDELE) AND A LIBRARY THAT NO LONGER EXISTS (WHERE I ONCE READ A BOOK CALLED THE WAR)

Ever since my first book, THE MEMORY PRISONER, was published in 2000, The Bargain Bookshop in Station Road has played host to a signing to help launch each of my titles. North Chingford is where I grew up, though the Bargain Bookshop hadn’t yet opened when I left home. My parents, however, became regular customers. Beverly Tankard, who runs the shop, has been very supportive over the years, and all the staff members are knowledgeable, pleasant and always helpful. The shop is small and packed with books from floor to ceiling. Any book they don’t have on the shelves they will order for you, and it usually arrives within a week.

I bought a book there a couple of weeks ago. BURMA BOY by Biyi Bandele. Although the main character is a fourteen-year-old boy, BURMA BOY is not written as a children’s book (that’s not to say that young people wouldn’t be interested in it, of course). It’s about a group of West African volunteers fighting with the Chindits – an elite long-range jungle penetration force – against the Japanese army in Burma during the Second World War. It follows the trail of an underage volunteer as he is swept into the heart of the action and faces the brutality of jungle warfare. As well as exploring a somewhat neglected area of Second World War history, BURMA BOY is also a story rich in the details of spoken language. The Chindits were very much an international force, including allied soldiers from Europe, America, Australia, Africa and Asia. The cross-mingling of different languages was an inevitable result. Amongst the Africans, there was a form of modified English that was used by the troops as a common military language. For instance, a soldier is called a sojar, while a general is referred to as a janar. In the case of Wingate, the charismatic leader of the Chindits, he was known as the janar. A lieutenant is called a laftanam, a captain a kyaftin, and so on. A sergeant-major is called a samanja, as indeed is an ordinary sergeant. When asked why they make no distinction between these two ranks the sojars say “All sarmanjas are sarmanjas!” This reply typifies the combination of respect and benign disregard generally shown towards the nuances of British military hierarchy. The ending of the book is hard-hitting; the narrative structure is modelled on the random qualities of real events. Nobody in the story gets an ending you could predict.

As I mentioned in the blog entry below, entitled BOMBER BOYS, I have long been fascinated with reading histories and first hand accounts of the World Wars. I have often felt rather guilty about this. There’s something a bit odd about seeking out and reading stories of these terrible events. I’ve never been able to work out exactly why I have this fascination. Now I just have to shrug my shoulders and admit to it. It’s been with me from an early age, that I do know. When I moved from my primary school to the much larger secondary school, I found it, as many people do, a much harsher environment. But one of the good things about Chingford Junior High School (a school that no longer exists - or at least, not in the same form or location) was the fantastic library. I spent many a lunchtime there, reading through their vast collection of folk tales from around the world, or the many books on the Second World War that were housed there. There was one volume I remember in particular, though I’ve never seen it anywhere since. It was a huge book, thick as a dictionary, and was simply called THE WAR. It consisted of hundreds of exerts from other books, all first hand accounts of the conflict of 1939 - 1945, written by the servicemen and civilians that had been involved in or witnessed the events. They were arranged chronologically, and thus mapped out an eye-witness account of the conflict from start to finish. I recall the stark and moving dedication at the front of the book, “To the 37,600,000 who died.” It was here that I first read a description of African soldiers fighting in the jungles of Asia against the Japanese (which is why the title and content of Biyi Bandele’s book caught my eye). It stuck in my mind so deeply that, many years later, I had Adda-Leigh, a character in WORM IN THE BLOOD, relate a story of her African grandfather fighting in the war. I based this snippet partly on the reading I did in the school library when I was twelve.

2007-08-01T12:24:00.000-07:00

THE BLOG MUST GO ON

Since the entry (far) below, entitled “THE SILENCE OF THE BLOGS” (an entry that drew from the ether that rarest of events, a comment on this blog) I have made the phrase “Blogs,-what-are-they-good-for?” into something of a recurring theme here. Today I attended a talk by Mark Thorton, of Mostly Books in Abingdon. I’ve never been to that book shop, but it sounds good – Comfy chairs, coffee available, a large children’s book section, plus an unusually extensive bookshelf of poetry books – up to 50 different poets - (this would have suited me around the age of 15, when I very keen on poetry reading, and indeed poetry writing. My own verse, as I recall, was mainly on the theme of bitter self-pity, with occasional cod-biblical references). During Mark's talk – which was aimed at promoting better understanding between authors and independent book sellers – he mentioned blogs. In his view they’re worth the effort. It’s all down to key words, apparently. The way I see it is like this. If I was keen to promote, say, parsnips, I could write a blog in which I mention parsnip-related facts on a regular basis. Parsnip-fanciers the world over, all busily googling the word “parsnip”, would be directed to my site in their hundreds. Soon an on-line community would develop, leading, eventually, to the overthrow of governments and a world ruled by the all-conquering parsnip. That’s the theory anyway. There are, I fear some flaws. Of course, this wasn’t the way Mark Thorton described it. He made it sound quite sensible in fact. So I shall continue with the Book Log. The blog must go on!

2007-07-28T01:25:00.000-07:00

MY TOP TEN METAMORPHOSIS STORIES ON GUARDIAN WEBSITE

This can now be seen on the Guardian Unlimited Books website: http://books.guardian.co.uk/top10s

The list was also mentioned on a blog called Book Shelves of Doom (www.bookshelvesofdoom.blogs.com) which is worth a look. Reviews of books, suggestions of what to read now for people that have only ever read Harry Potter(it seems there are those who have quite literally read no books other than the Potter series, my daughter tells me she knows quite a few people who fall into that category!), pictures of bags with book covers printed on them (possibly made by the author of the blog?), an impressive paper model of Howl’s Moving Castle, etc.

2007-07-20T03:08:00.000-07:00

IDEAS AND PROJECTS I’VE BEEN WORKING ON LATELY #1

BOMBER BOYS

This is the story of an RAF bomber crew – average age of just 19 years – and follows them as they prepare for an ill-fated mission to attack Berlin, towards the end of the Second World War. It’s due to be published in the new year (Jan 2008) by Barrington Stoke. Barrington Stoke are a small publishing house set up to produce books suitable for teenagers with reading difficulties, though the stories on their list are so good they can be enjoyed by anyone. Authors such as Kevin Brooks, Alison Prince, Keith Gray, Nigel Hinton, Vivian French, Alan Gibbons and many other great writers have produced books for Barrington Stoke. The main difference between Barrington Stoke books and novels produced by mainstream publishers is the word length. Barrington Stoke books are comparatively short in length – Bomber Boys, for instance, is 9,000 words. But some stories are meant to be short, and there are actually very few outlets for short stories for young people these days. When my idea for a Second World War story was accepted, I was told to write it in just the way I’d write any other book. The manuscript was then sent out to a team of teenage readers and their response to the text was used as a guide for the final edit, which was done over the phone – in my case, two phone calls of 2 ½ hours each! All the readers have their names printed in the book, since they’ve all contributed to the final version of the text. I was surprised at how often this technique actually resulted in not just clearer meaning, but a stronger, more robust feel to the language.

There was only the occasional need for compromise. For instance, an operational RAF airfield was always referred to as a “station”, but in the edit we used the word “base” (which was what the American Army Air Force would have called their military airfields). We did that to avoid confusion, because these days, of course, the word “station” implies a railway terminus more than anything else. It was my Uncle Pete who told me a lot about the RAF. He joined up in 1946, just after the war finished, and served with the ground crew on a bomber station. He has maintained a keen interest in aeroplanes ever since – he has thousands of model planes that he’s made over the years – and has some excellent books on the subject. He lent me a series about the Lancaster bomber aircraft, called Lancaster at War by Mike Garbett and Brain Goulding, which was very useful. I must drop them back to him.

I’ve read a lot about the Second World War myself, and also heard a good deal from my dad. He was ground crew – like Pete, his younger brother - but he was in the Fleet Air Arm (the Royal Navy’s air section) and he joined during the war. However, he was seconded to the RAF, where he worked both on Lancasters and on Spitfires, the famous fighter plane. The stations he was based at were maintenance depots, where worn out aircraft were sent to be repaired. Some of the things he said about that time filtered into the writing of Bomber Boys.

I’ve always had a great interest in the history of both World Wars. My grandfather was in the First World War, as an infantryman in the trenches on the Western front, where he was badly wounded. And my parents both grew up during the Second World War, living through the London Blitz. Dad joined up and was eventually sent out to fight the Japanese (but luckily for him the war ended before he got there and he spent a year in Egypt instead). I consider myself very privileged in that I have never had to serve in the armed forces (something I would hate – I would make a very poor soldier) or fight in a war.

2007-07-13T01:19:00.000-07:00

MORE IDEAS FOR AN AUTHOR’S BLOG
(And what I think of HOW I LIVE NOW)

On an author visit to Dame Alice Owen’s School last Wednesday, I again asked the question “What would you like to see on an author’s website and blog?” And once again I was pleased to hear the many intriguing and intelligent suggestions offered up by the students from Year 7 and Year 8 that I met there. These included an idea for a section with hints and tips for aspiring writers, competitions, the posting up of lists of the author’s likes and dislikes, book reviews by the author together with an invitation for any comments from readers, and details of current ideas and projects. The importance of regularly updating the blog was also pointed out, so that there would always be something new to read.

I’m determined to have a go at including some of these suggestions, as well as keeping the book log/ book review side of things going (see below). I should point out that all my reviews will be positive, since I always try to avoid reading books I don’t like. If you want to look back at any of my previous book logs, please see the list of titles and blog entry dates in the posting before this one. Or you might want to post a comment if you’ve also read the book reviewed below, or indeed, any of the others.

So here are my thoughts on a book I read recently, which was…

HOW I LIVE NOW by Meg Rosoff

Set in an alternative present, this gripping story is narrated by Daisy, a teenage anorexic from New York, who finds herself pitched headlong into a Britain on the brink of a devastating war. And it’s going to change her life forever.

She arrives as damaged goods. Packed off to stay with relatives, she is met at the airport by her chain-smoking, underage driving, younger cousin Edmund. He combines a certain irresistible charm with a supernatural ability to empathise. He can, it seems, read her mind. Despite the difference in age, and the awkward fact that he’s a blood relative, Daisy is utterly smitten. So it is love that sets her on the road to recovery. But it’s a route that is to prove desperately painful to travel.

The plot deliberately subverts expectations, breaking up the narrative, just as the initially idyllic pattern of Daisy’s life in the English countryside is shattered by the events of the war. Characters are strewn to the four winds and Daisy is eventually brought face to face with the full horrors of war. But this is no story of campaign and command. Daisy has no interest in observing history in the making. She just wants to survive with something of the inner peace she thought she’d found still left intact. With painful irony, we learn that Daisy has finally beaten her eating disorder just as the country is gripped by famine.

As the story reaches its conclusion, it’s clear that Daisy has shifted from the powerless neurotic of the opening chapters to a determined and self-possessed individual who has discovered that “fighting back is what I do best.” Though brimming with tragedy, the ending is not entirely bleak. Amongst the ruins of places and people there remains the promise of recovery, through the renewing properties of love, and through the unquenchable optimism of growing things.

2007-06-30T23:51:00.000-07:00

HEART OF THE SERPENT published July 2007

My new book Heart of the Serpent, published this week (on 5th July, though it’s already available in some shops) is the third and final part of the sequence that began with Worm in the Blood and continued with Beast Beneath the Skin. When I wrote the first of these stories I had no idea it would turn out to be the opening volume of a trilogy. I still think I could have stopped after either of the first two books, if I’d had to, and the series wouldn’t have seemed unfinished. Neither book ended on a cliff-hanger, for instance, in the way Pullmans’ Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife do. Having said that, I did feel, once I’d finished Beast Beneath the Skin, that I really wanted to write the third book. I felt it would give me the chance to take the story as far as it would go. I guess trilogies might be a natural length for a series, equating to the notion of a beginning, middle, and end. I hope all three books work as complete tales in their own right. And for those with a continuing interest in what lies ahead for Sam Lim-Evans, his friends and his family, Heart of the Serpent will tell all that’s left for me to tell.

I dedicated the book to the memory of my dad, who died on the day I finished writing the first draft (12th May 2006). Dad was always very interested in my writing. His last birthday present to me was a copy of Peter Dickinson’s book The Flight of Dragons. This book is a piece of scientific fantasy that sets out to explain how fire-breathing, winged dragons, as illustrated in antiquated paintings, might reasonably be supposed to have existed as real, physical creatures. With a straight face scrupulously maintained throughout, the author makes a very convincing job of it. For instance, he goes so far as to write out the chemical reaction responsible for creating hydrogen within the body of the dragon (thereby making them lighter than air and able to fly on their unfeasibly small wings!). My father, a man with a practical eye who also loved a good story, was mightily impressed by this book.

2007-06-28T23:54:00.000-07:00

AUTHOR VISIT TO WATERSTONES IN PUTNEY

On a recent author visit to Waterstones in Putney I spoke to a very articulate and intelligent group of Year 7 and 8 students from nearby Elliott School. I took the opportunity to ask them what sort of information they’d like to see posted up on an author’s blog. They gave me a wide range of suggestions that included the following.

New ideas – details of what the author is working on now and how it’s going.

Biographical details and information about the author’s influences etc.

Details of when the author’s next book is to be published, and so on.

Details of the author’s private life. - I’m not too sure about this one! It might be entertaining to read about some authors, but I fear my own day-to-day diaries would make very dull reading indeed! For instance – Monday: Sat at computer – got up and walked around a bit, thinking – fed cat – sat down again, typed a couple of sentences. Then deleted them. Stood up. Fed cat again…and so on.

Contact details. - I have this already. I can be contacted via the Contacts page on my website.

Ways for readers to contribute ideas of their own to the website. - This too, is already set up. Comments can be pasted onto the Book Log (this blog) against any entry.

I’ll see if I can address some of these suggestions in future as a regular element of the Book Log pages. And I’ll keep up with the book reviews too. If anyone is interested in looking at the archives, then here’s a list of books I’ve written about so far and where to find the entries.

Mondays are Red by Nicola Morgan – June 16th 2007
Arthur and George by Julian Barnes and The Final Solution by Michael Chabon – 6th June 2007
Strange Meeting by Susan Hill – February 2007
A Darkling Plain by Philip Reeve – November 2006
The Merrybegot by Julie Hearn and I, Coriander by Sally Gardner - October 2006
Candy by Kevin Brooks – May 2006
The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean – March 2006
Martin Pig, Lucas and Kissing the Rain, all by Kevin Brooks – November 2005
Ambergate by Patricia Elliott – June 2005
Ryland’s Footsteps by Sally Prue – May 2005
The Demon Headmaster by Gillian Cross – April 2005
Grandpa by John Burningham – March 2005
The Thief of Always by Clive Barker – January 2005

2007-06-20T11:13:00.000-07:00

WEREWOLVES OF CLAPTON

A couple of months ago I visited a school in Clapton. Clapton is the part of North East London that influenced me most when I was writing the Worm in the Blood trilogy. The marsh where Sam undergoes the first stages of his metamorphosis, and where the final book, Heart of the Serpent, ends up, is based on a stretch of urban wilderness bordering the River Lea between Walthamstow and Clapton. The Marshside of the books is based on this area, mixed with some other parts of the city I have known over the years (a flyover in 1980s Silvertown, for instance, close to the Thames in East London). Many of the Year 6 students I met at Benthal Primary School are enthusiastic authors in their own right. They’ve been sending me examples of metamorphosis stories, based on the well-known legend of the werewolf, which they wrote after my visit. They’ve all been greatly enjoyable to read. Below is the first of these stories to be sent to me, printed here with the author’s permission.

LETHAL CHANGE by Siraj Patel

Chapter 1: Mysterious Blackout

James O’Brien is angry, his P.E teacher had blamed him for causing the mayhem, or the chaos as the P.E teacher had said, however James did not remember a thing! He had walked in to the gym and the next thing he knew was that he was lying face down on the hard gym floor.
James is a tall, muscular boy and was not used to being told off for he was very clever – a genius. As he got up from the floor his friends had shrank away from him as if he was a demon. He did not understand at all but he tried smiling at them, however, they only shrank back more. Then the P.E teacher had come in and bellowed at James saying, “WHO ARE YOU? WHAT ARE YOU? WHY ARE YOU CAUSING ABSOLUTE CHAOS?!!!”
James lay down on his bed and put his head on the frame. It cooled his boiling head. There was no one in the house except for James so he made up his mind that he will go and watch the football match Manchester united vs Liverpool but as he stood up and looked out of the window he saw a full moon.
A sudden wave of anger washed over him and he punched the wall in frustration, however, to his astonishment his hand was black and he had huge claws on his hand. Then everything blacked out.
When he came to, he cringed at the mess in his room. His bed was ripped apart, his wardrobe was broken and his door was smashed into two pieces. “WHAT HAPPENED?!” exclaimed his mother and once again James didn’t know.

Chapter 2: Confused

James looked at his new room and smiled, at least the mysterious blackout did some good! He thought. He had a brand new bed, a new wardrobe and a new door made out of steel. The mystery still remains, he thought to himself.
James walked over to his computer and switched it on. He searched the net to find out the score of yesterdays football match and was delighted that it was 1-0 to Manchester United. Suddenly the door slammed open and in came his father, Tony O’Brien; he was red in the face and looked madder than a bull! “WHAT THE HECK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?! SMASHING UP THE HOUSE LIKE A WEREWOLF! EXPLAIN NOW!!” He bellowed. “I don’t know what happened” said James with a shrug of his shoulders. “WHAT DO YOU MEAN!? Shouted Tony.
“I just don’t know!” Screamed James in reply. Then suddenly he didn’t feel like telling his father anymore so he ran out of the room and out of the house into the awaiting night.

Chapter 3: Blackout is bigger and Deadlier

James ran down the street and turned left into the funfair, the lights were dazzling and the place was full of people. He spotted his friends Michael and John and waved to them but as soon as they saw him they turned around and ran away without a backward glance.
James felt cold, his own friends had abandoned him and STILL he didn’t know why. No one he knew was here so he walked over to the dodgems queue and stood there with a packet of popcorn. After 10 minutes the queue was finished and he was allowed to go on when without warning, a loud cry from the sky startled him, making him look up. He caught sight of the moon – a FULL MOON- when another wave of anger washed over him and he fell down unconscious.
James woke up with his face in the ground, already he knew what awaited him but he didn’t know that this time it was much worse. He sat up and looked around; he was dumbfounded by the sight of what he saw. Out of the blue appeared dozens of police cars, they surrounded him and police officers jumped out of them, some drew their weapons. “Put your hands above your head and don’t dare to move a muscle!!” came a voice from a loudspeaker. James was so shocked that he didn’t even speak, he just did what the voice
had told him. “Now don’t get angry sir”, continued the voice, “just surrender and don’t turn into a werewolf again! It was too much for James, his mind couldn’t take it and he passed out.

Chapter 4: Doomed

James felt someone dabbing at his eyes with a wet cloth, he pushed it away and sat up rubbing his eyes. He was in a small box room with no windows and no furniture. Its floor, ceiling and walls are made of steel. The person in the room is a tall, stern looking lady who had a sub-machine gun in her hand for no reason James saw fit. He wasn’t a demon; he wasn’t a criminal so why are they keeping him in a small room with a lady who has a sub-machine gun? He thought to himself. He was just thinking about his parents when the door opened and two men came in holding a rifle apiece, followed by them were his mum and dad. They stood in front of him, hands on their hips with a stern disappointed look in their eyes. “We are ashamed” Tony spoke “We never thought you would do that”. “Do what?” James snapped. “What do you mean by that!?” His dad’s voice had risen to a shout “Do you know what you’ve done!?” His father bawled then carried on without waiting for an answer “You ripped the dodgems apart, you killed 3 people and that cost us 3 million pounds!! Now you’re in jail and you’re going to court today but you’re most likely to be imprisoned for life!” James was so stunned that he only managed to utter a few words, “what…how…I don’t know anything….” He couldn’t speak anymore and he sat there as still as a statue.
An hour later a police officer put his head around the door “Come on, time to see what awaits your life” James didn’t feel like joking so he didn’t say anything, he just walked over to the door but was pulled back by the lady in the room. “Where do you think you’re going? And she handcuffed James’s arm to hers even though James’s hand were already handcuffed. They walked down a corridor then turned left into a large hall which was the court room where there were 100’s of rows of seats, most of them were occupied. James was led to a seat at the front of the court room where he saw his mum and dad, he waved to them, looking for reassurance from them but they ignored him. So he sat down feeling angry and sad that nobody in his life cared for him. The judge called for silence and everyone became quiet. Then the trial began, the judge called for witnesses after witnesses but James didn’t pay much attention. All they kept on saying was that they saw him as a werewolf and that he was a danger to the public. Then the judge called for James to defend himself, he stood up and said one sentence I AM NOT A WEREWOLF!! – It was a full moon and he saw it- and that is when he turned into a WEREWOLF

Chapter 5: The Curse

James lay on a bed, his hands were chained to a metal bar and his legs were tied together with a metal chain. There was a small man in a chair in the room who smiled when he saw James open his eyes. “Who are you?” James asked “what happened? How did you come in here? Am I in…” The man held up a hand “Wait, not too fast! Ill answer your questions one by one”, he said, “Firstly I am a man by the name of Howard king and I come from china. Secondly, in the court room you turned into a werewolf and killed 5 people!” “But..” James spluttered. “Wait” said the man quietly “There other things I need to tell you. To answer your third question ill simply say I came in through the door, I am a human being like you, well not exactly like you seeing as you’re a werewolf anyway I have come to tell you how you came to be a werewolf.” The man paused letting the information sink in then he continued “A long time ago a man by the name of Juan O’Brien insulted a Werewolf, in those days werewolves were very common and they were well respected. The worse a mistake a person can do was insult a Werewolf. Now, Werewolves don’t have much power as there isn’t much left today. Anyway, Juan O’Brien made that mistake! So the Werewolf cursed his descendants that 1 in every generation will be a werewolf and I am sad to say that you are one of them”. “But I don’t even know what happens when I am a Werewolf and is there anyway I can stop this?” James asked. “You are still in the growing stages, a thing which is called a LETHAL CHANGE, once you become fully grown you will be able to experience it and there is no way you can stop this curse but you can try and stop yourself from becoming a werewolf by not looking at the moon when it is a full moon. Now you are in jail for life, but you might come out of jail sooner then you think”. He added with a mysterious smile. I am sorry to say my time is up and I have to go.” With that he stood up and walked out of the door. “WAIT” called James but the man was gone leaving James in his ETERNAL DARKNESS.

By Siraj Patel, age 11

2007-06-16T02:14:00.000-07:00

MONDAYS ARE RED by Nicola Morgan

Luke wakes up in hospital to find he has nearly died. And now he can smell colours and see sound. He has developed synaesthesia, a condition where the senses are muddled and mixed. Luke’s world is now a feast of wild sensation and imagination. But there’s something else. Inside his mind, Luke is no longer alone. A smooth-tongued, shape-shifting tempter has arrived and he’s out to steal Luke’s soul. Thus begins a tense and compelling tale in which different layers of reality merge together into an anxiety-wracked psychological horror story. Set in the midst of a brain-numbing heat wave, the reader is taken on a rollercoaster ride through Luke’s mindscape, as he veers from vivid, hallucinatory wish-fulfilment to furious loathing, and a disturbingly fierce disgust levelled at his older sister. All concludes in fire. Peace is restored in the end, but some mysteries still hang in the air. Who exactly was the devilish tempter inside Luke’s head? It seems the answer is that he was Luke himself, not a particularly comforting thought. Luke’s wise grandfather appears to sort out the facts from the tricks of the mind, but I was still left musing on the possibility that the entire story, grandpa included, might be being played out inside Luke’s head. In which case Hannah, the girl he meets at the end, had better watch out!

2007-06-06T14:16:00.000-07:00

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND RELATED MATTERS

I haven’t read any children’s fiction for a while, for one reason or another. My daughter has just lent me MONDAYS ARE RED by Nicola Morgan, however, which I’m looking forward to reading.

I did read ARTHUR AND GEORGE by Julian Barnes, which is essentially a fictionalised biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji, two men, both famous but for very different reasons, whose paths crossed under intriguing circumstances during the early years of the twentieth century. The story is full of anxiety and tension (George was wrongfully arrested - for mutilating farm animals!), though it also has elements of humour and some particularly touching moments. I enjoyed the way the book was constructed, with the story of the two men’s lives related side by side, despite the difference in their dates of birth (George was considerably younger than Arthur).

I have an interest in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle because I am a fan of Sherlock Holmes (a fact that would doubtless have irked Sir Arthur himself – he found the success of his fictional detective to be something of an albatross around the neck). I read a Sherlock Holmes story, written not by Doyle the Edwardian writer but by Michael Chabon in 2003. It's a short(ish) novella called THE FINAL SOLUTION. Using the chilling new resonance that the title of Doyle’s last Holmes story has since acquired, following its use by the Nazis as code for their attempted extermination of the Jewish race, Chabon creates a truly ancient Holmes, 89 years old, and already touched by the shadow of Alzheimer’s disease. It is the aged Holmes takes on one last case in an effort to help a young concentration camp survivor - and his parrot.

2007-02-01T07:08:00.000-08:00

STRANGE MEETING by Susan Hill

Not written as a children’s book, STRANGE MEETING nonetheless appears in The Ultimate Teen Book Guide (Edited by Daniel Hahn and Leonie Flynn, the follow up to the equally good Ultimate Book Guide for 8-12s) and so perhaps qualifies to be discussed here. I wanted to talk about it, firstly because I think it’s a very good book, the sort of book that stays with you, lodged somewhere in the mind forever. But also for the more simple-minded reason that in my last book log entry I happened to mention Susan Hill’s author blog.

This book has at its heart an intense friendship, the sort of all-encompassing bond that occurs most commonly when you’re young. In this instance, the intensity is ratcheted up considerably by the fact that the two young men concerned are junior officers in a British army battalion on the Western Front in 1916. It could be argued that junior officers had the worst job of any soldier in the trenches. They were required to keep the soldiers in their charge on task, leading patrols into No Man’s Land, repairing the trench system and so on. They had to lead from the front at all times and would have to watch their men die before their eyes. And yet they had no power to influence the tactics and decisions made by their superiors back behind the lines.

STRANGE MEETING follows John Hilliard as he returns from convalescence to a much altered battalion. And there he meets one of the newcomers, David Barton. Summer comes and, while the two men bond, the calendar starts to turn down the days through May and June, heading towards the fatal date of July 1st. This was the opening day of the Battle of the Somme, when more British soldiers were killed than on any other day before or since. This story reveals the individual human lives, the hearts and the minds that were doomed to be wasted away in the chalky mud of the Somme valley.
The title is borrowed from Wilfred Owen’s poem of the same name. Owen’s verses exert a power distinct from some of his other realism-soaked works, because the subject is an unsettling wartime dream. In Owen’s poem, the narrator meets the shade of a man he killed. They are united, at last, in the peace of oblivion. But in Susan Hill’s book the strangeness of the meeting is that, although it ends in heart-wrenching tragedy, the story is also somehow filled with a distinctly positive charge. It concludes, not in endless sleep, but in the possibility, at least, of an awakening of sorts for one of the main characters sometime in the future.

My last entry, in which I mused on the lack of comment this blog attracts, has, in fact, attracted a comment! Most gratifying. For all that I enjoy a bit of silence, it's possible to have too much of a good thing. Of course, I will be delighted if more people visit this site. I can claim little credit for its excellent user qualities however. That is down to its creator, my friend and former fellow guitarist in The Rare Bones, Mr Leeroy Lugg. His approach to web design is just as I'd imagine a zen master craftsman's to be, as he goes about carving a block of cherry wood into, say, a stand for bamboo ink brushes.

2007-01-18T03:28:00.000-08:00

THE SILENCE OF THE BLOG

I seem to have got this blogging business all wrong. In the Guardian on Saturday there was a small piece about author’s blogs which mentioned several of them. I had a look. They are rather good (e.g. www.blog,susanhill.com) But most of the author’s concerned seem to write their blogs every day! Perhaps I’m just too slow or too idle to make a success of it. Once a month is all I manage. Less than that, often. Another difference is that their blogs attract acres of comment. Genuine debate is stirred by their thoughts. For the most part, my blog attracts silence. It is like a quiet corner of a neglected public building. I imagine a place as vast and imposing as the old justice buildings in Brussels (which are so monumental as to give the impression of a craggy mountain, with stone facades like cliffs, complete with plant life growing in the gutters, like mountain flowers clinging to a rockface.) This great complex represents what I think (nay, fear) is sometimes referred to as the blogosphere. And within that building my blog is a small, enclosed courtyard where straws blow about in the wind. The more I think about it, the more I like it. Such places have a certain appeal, I always think. They are filled with a kind of cathartic peace. But to rejoice in the fact that my blog is, like the Hills of the North in the old hymn, unvisited and unblessed is perhaps a bit perverse and undermines the point of the whole thing, surely? All comments welcome. Or, alternatively, silence...

2006-12-11T02:36:00.000-08:00

CHRISTMAS IN FICTION

Christmas. Some love it, some hate it, some are indifferent. In fiction, Christmas is as likely to bring trouble as it is tidings of good will. The Christmas dinner scene in Dickens’ Great Expectations, for instance, is a masterful evocation of the terrors of a childhood spent surrounded by monstrous adults. This is in contrast to the cheery feast that concludes the same authors’ A Christmas Carol.
Some stories prefer to show both sides of the coin at once. I have an abiding memory of a film I saw as a boy, a western called Will Penny that I watched on the television somewhere back in the 1970s but haven’t seen since. The hero, a poorly educated cowboy, finds a moment of peace in the home of the film’s love interest, a young widow with small children. It’s Christmas time, and the family try to teach the cowboy to sing Tannenbaum (“Oh Christmas Tree” in German). But this wintry idyll is shattered when the villains, some lairy old-timer and his psycho-gang, come bursting into the cabin, upending the tree, firing their six-shooters in the air and bellowing “Merry Christmas” in a mocking tone of voice. If memory serves me right, this leads eventually to Will Penny crawling over snowy ground wearing just his cowboy issue long-johns, though quite why that happens, or how he survives, I no longer remember. Then there’s a scene in a film called The Sure Thing in which a youthful John Cussack (I think – again, it’s a while since I saw this film) attempts to sing Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas with a fuddled old drunk he’s just met in a motel bar, both of them trawling the lyrics up in broken fragments and piecing the song together as they go. This scene is there to show that Cussack’s character has a sentimental heart beating away beneath his cynical frat-boy jersey.
There are many possible meanings within the sublimely complex medieval tale Gawain and the Green Knight, by an unknown author. The story is set around Christmas and New Year over two adjacent years and combines the pagan and the Christian interpretations of the December festival, alongside related seasonal meditations, in a story filled with vexed questions of morality, honour and humanity. Gawain’s Christmas must certainly have been spoiled by the prospect of submitting to the Green Knight’s beheading axe come New Year. I can only hope that none who read this, whether pro-Christmas, anti-Christmas or utterly indifferent to the whole thing, will have anything of the sort hanging over them, at this or, indeed, any other time of year.

2006-11-13T02:45:00.000-08:00

A DARKLING PLAIN by Philip Reeve

What a book! This is the final volume in the MORTAL ENGINES quartet. Unlike some series, which can fade as they approach the finish line, A DARKLING PLAIN is, I think, the best of what was already one of my favourites among the many trilogies, quartets and septets published for young people in recent years. The book deals with matters as weighty as the end of civilisations, mutually assured destruction and apocalyptic environmentalism. Then there’s fanaticism and faith, war and peace, and love, above all else perhaps, love in all its forms. And alongside love comes a range of other emotions, from hatred and jealousy through to grief and despair. In short, the quartet could be seen as a rattling good adventure containing a series of meditations on the nature of human beings (What are any of us but a collection of memories?) and this last book brings all these various strands together and binds them into a truly satisfying conclusion.
Amidst the sprawling plots and subplots of A DARKLING PLAIN, a multiple narrative delivered with Dickensian panache, there is always a little time for humour. Throughout the quartet Philip Reeve displays a lightness of touch that allows for some highly enjoyable deadpanning. Julie Burchill crops up as a New Brighton place name, for instance, and the god of unfettered municipal Darwinism is known as The Thatcher. My favourite is probably Wolf Kobold’s innocent inquiry, when showing Wren around his armoured suburb, a mobile fortress designed to harvest other towns by force of arms, “Is this your first visit to a harvester?”
The final cathartic scenes include a stop-frame style sequence(possibly influenced by the ending of the John Boorman film Zardos?)in which a hundred years pass within the space of a paragraph, leading to a denouement in which the entire epic quartet turns out to have been a tale told by a storytelling machine. The book ends with the mechanical creature Shrike intoning the opening lines of the first book in the series, MORTAL ENGINES. This conclusion put me in mind of a Shakespearean closing couplet (“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little lives are rounded with a sleep.”) It is a metaphor as old as story itself - the course of a narrative as a parallel for human life. Memories are stories we tell ourselves about our lives. And what are any of us but a collection of memories?

2006-10-19T08:24:00.000-07:00

The Merrybegot by Julie Hearn and I, Corriander by Sally Gardner

Seventeenth Century midwifery and old magic. Hallucinogenic powders and piskies in the hedgerows. Fake demonic possession and a real visit to the realm of the fairy, deep within a magical hill. In The Merrybegot Julie Hearn treads the line dividing earthy, physical realities from wild fantasy, and is more than happy to leap back and forth across it. The vividly-drawn characters and urgent plotline make this a gripping read, particularly when the witch hunt is gathering its horrible momentum. There’s a twist in its tail too, as the counterplot snakes its way to the New World, and finally to Salem, famous for its witch trails.
In I, Coriander by Sally Gardner, the worlds of Fairy and of England in the mid-seventeenth century again provide the parallel settings for the story. Coriander finds herself struggling against oppression and fighting for her life in both of these worlds. As in The Merrybegot, Puritanism and religious extremism are shown as hypercritical and self-serving creeds, taken up by corrupt characters burning with a lust for power. While The Julie Hearn uses folklore and spell-craft as source material, Jane Gardiner makes good use of some dark fairy tales. The distracted, grieving father and the wicked stepmother are familiar from Cinderella and related tales and are fleshed out in unflinching detail here. The notion of the fairy bride is another traditional motif, and is found in the Arthurian legends and elsewhere. There is a hard, glittering quality to the fairy world as described by Gardiner, a cold, cruel beauty that lends the book an enjoyably unsettling atmosphere. By contrast, but just as effective, Julie Hearn’s piskies are portrayed as ditch-dwelling creatures who bite the ankles of unwary humans and show their contempt for all and sundry by baring their dirt-encrusted buttocks at passers-by!
Both these books are well worth a read, and could be seen to have laid the ground rules for a new sub-sub-genre within children’s fiction - fantasy stories with a Seventeenth Century English historical setting.

2006-10-02T01:29:00.000-07:00

BEING READ TO AS A CHILD

At the Highland Children’s Book of the Year Awards on September 29th ( Worm In The Blood was on the shortlist for the longer novels - the winner was Stuart Hill with Cry Of The Icemark) there was a panel discussion in which the authors present (who also included short novelists Heather Dyer and Sophie Smiley) were asked to discuss what books they’d read as children and what they were reading now. Thinking about what to say regarding the first part of this topic, it struck me that my parents were a huge influence on my early exposure to books and language. Listening to the other authors I found I wasn’t alone in this.
From my mum came mainly poetry and Shakespeare. I can’t think what the context can possibly have been, but I’m sure I first encountered fragments from T.S. Elliot and Phillip Larkin, the closing speech from The Tempest, the funeral oration from Cymbeline, and much more, while seated around the tea table eating toast and waiting for Doctor Who (Patrick Troughton in those days) to start on the (black and white) TV.
My dad would always read to us when he came home from work, usually the serialised book that appeared in Treasure or Tell Me Why, two children’s magazines that he bought for us. But there were other somewhat stranger occasions. As a boy I suffered from insomnia. I was afraid of silence and for a long time had to have a radio on low at my bedside to avert the night terrors brought on by too much stillness and quiet. Dad was something of a night owl himself. If he found me lying sleepless and afraid in the small hours, he would decamp to my room where he would read aloud, this time not from the slightly earnest and educational pages of Treasure, but from C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels, which he edited on the hoof, leaving out any romantic interludes (which were of no interest to me) and concentrating solely on the vivid descriptions of bloody Napoleonic naval battles. He also read me short stories by the American humorist James Thurber. Stories such as The Night The Ghost Got In, which despite its subject matter, proved to be the perfect antidote to night terrors. I can remember the two of us, father and son, convulsed with laughter, struggling to keep from waking the rest of the household with our howls of mirth.

My dad died in May. I owe him a lot.

2006-06-22T02:20:00.000-07:00

CALDERDALE CHILDRENS’ BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2006

This took place on Wednesday 14th June 2006 in Halifax. The short list was as follows:

THE WHITE DARKNESS by Geraldine McCaughrean. (see previous book log entry for my review of this brilliant book)
TIME BOMB by Nigel Hinton. An exciting and, at times, disturbing read, this story provides no easy answers to the muddied moral waters it stirs up. The story explores the appeal of fascism and racism as well as the damage and hurt they always cause, all set against an impeccable evocation of the bomb-damaged streets of post-war South London.
DRIFTWOOD by Cathy Cassidy. The author urges readers to look beyond the very pink front covers her publisher has chosen to give her book. Powerful studies of friendship and growing up, they are indeed far grittier than they might at first glance appear. Driftwood is set in a rural village on the Scottish coast and features characters inspired by the author’s daughter and by the author herself!
DIVIDED CITY by Theresa Breslin. Set in Glasgow, Divided City explores deep sectarian tensions through the uneasy alliance of two football mad boys who find themselves involved in the plight of an injured asylum seeker.
And WORM IN THE BLOOD…

The award winning book was chosen by the votes of students from the ten participating secondary schools. And the winner, much to my delight, was my book, WORM IN THE BLOOD!

2006-05-08T01:29:00.000-07:00

CANDY by Kevin Brooks

I found CANDY compulsive reading. Some of the location details, the feeling of place - the train track leading in to Liverpool Street Station, the disorientating effect of emerging from the Underground at King’s Cross - are so similar to my own experience that reading these passages was something akin to deja vu. Some of the characters are also painfully reminiscent of people I knew in the past. Thankfully, however, I’ve never met anyone like Iggy. His villainy is utterly convincing, and his self-aggrandisement, his sense of theatre (also an entirely believable characteristic) allows for some thrillingly gruesome dialogue. The scene where the main characters, Joe, the first-person narrator, and Candy, the object of his obsession, finally cross the line that divides their past from their future sees the monstrous Iggy, tied up but terribly conscious, yelling at them “...you better run…you meats now…you my little meats!”
An atmosphere of deep foreboding, masterfully built and sustained, hangs over proceedings from the outset. The story highlights the contrast between hopeless, obsessive love and addiction to heroin, an uncomfortable parallel more often explored in popular music than in novels for teenagers. But CANDY has its own scuzzy rock soundtrack built into the plot. Joe is a talented but unfocused member of a band called The Katies. One of the various twists in the storytelling resulted in this reader being more interested in The Katies success than the narrator is himself!
Although essentially non-judgemental, there is plenty of harsh reality on show - teenage prostitution, drug addiction, violence - and I was left with a considerable sense of desolation by the end of the novel. But this book is also a genuine thriller, tense and gripping throughout. The violent climax that builds from the very first page is finally resolved in a way that is at once shocking, surprising and satisfyingly right.
The final scene reminded me somehow of the conclusion to Orwell’s NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR. Orwell’s book ends with two former rebel lovers both having lost some essential part of themselves forever. In CANDY the ending is in some ways more open, but there’s also more than a little suggestion of clouds gathering overhead in this melancholy, minor-key last track.

2006-03-03T11:39:00.000-08:00

THE WHITE DARKNESS by Geraldine McCaughrean

A fearless piece of writing, here is a novel prepared somewhat like a banquet for a medieval king. Whereas the king might have a swan stuffed with a goose stuffed with a duck stuffed with a pigeon, in The White Darkness Geraldine McCaughrean offers a ghost story inside a love story inside a psychological thriller inside a rite of passage story, all wrapped up in a snow-bound adventure to rival anything by Hammond Innes. Surrounding the central character is a cast of villains that make you want to shout angrily at the page. But the head and the heart of the story lie with Sym, doughty teenaged heroine with a hearing aid, who learns bitter lessons of love betrayed as she heads further and further into seemingly inescapable, mortal danger. Even her most constant admirer, the imaginary shade of long dead polar explorer Captain Oats, eventually deserts her, though not, it turns out, for good. The fact that Sym’s eventual salvation is both satisfying and convincing is a tribute to Geraldine McCaughrean’s much praised skill as a writer. With this book she has created a rare feast of layers, twists and contrasts. And the essence of the story seems somehow contained within the lyrical contradiction of the title itself.

2005-11-30T04:53:00.000-08:00

After a three month hiatus.

I haven't written up a book log since July so here are three in one:

MARTYN PIG, LUCAS and KISSING THE RAIN by Kevin Brooks

As a fictional form, the first person narrative - written as if one of the characters is telling the story - is deceptively simple. In fact, itÂs very hard to do well. Kevin Brooks is very good at it. All three of these stories are told in the first person. Three very different characters take centre stage. Martyn, eponymous central character of MARTYN PIG, is an intelligent introvert. He is quite unlike the hard-boiled lone avenger Philip Marlow of Raymond Chandler's crime novels. And yet there is still something Chandleresque in this thriller. I think what links the two is the palpable sense of loneliness that hangs over both storytellers. And in Alex, Martyn's unrequited love, you have a classic film-noir femme fatale. And yet Brooks somehow manages to avoid any trace of the anti-female bias that often accompanies such conventions.

With Moo, the narrator at the heart of KISSING THE RAIN, Brooks achieves a seemingly impossible task. Moo is utterly convincing as a tongue-tied and inarticulate teenage outcast. Brooks doesn't compromise with Moo's relatively limited use of language. And yet the storytelling is as compelling as you could wish. He is able to describe the mindset of someone who has developed a complex inner life, quite hidden from the outside world. And that's where the story is told, inside Moo's head. The intimacy of the telling works wonderfully.

LUCAS differs from the other two books in its rural, summertime setting, and in the gender of its narrator, a girl named Caitlin. Although she is very much at the centre of the plot the focus of her story is on another character, Lucus. This is in contrast to Martyn and Moo, whose stories revolve around their own troubles. And thereÂs real mystery in Lucas, a character who emerges from the natural world like some kind of feral creature.

Where all three stories find common ground is in the sense of isolation experienced by Brooks' central characters. And this sensation is common to the experience of being a teenager. Brook's seems quite at home depicting his characters from the inside out and has a reconjuringf conjouring up the teenage pschye.

I've not yet read CANDY, though I'm looking forward to it. The title and subject matter suggests the songs of The Jesus and Mary Chain, whose music I've always found richly cinematic and full of narrative possibilities.

2005-07-24T05:30:00.000-07:00

WORM IN THE BLOOD – SOME DETAILS EXPLAINED

In a break from my usual book log entries I have decided to devote a few lines to some more or less obscure aspects of my new book, which is published this month.

THE BLACK & WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
The marvellous die-cut double cover design was put together at Faber and Faber, using the talents of designers Donna Payne, Philip Hood and Mark Edwards. Philip Hood’s dragon also appears on the title page. But all the other illustrations, the black and white pen drawings at the start of each chapter, and those on the title pages for Parts I, II and III, are by me. Inspired in part by Philip Pullman’s chapter code symbols in The Subtle Knife, which indicated the world that each particular chapter was set in, I devised five motifs; a dragonfly nymph, an oriental dragon, a horse, an eye and a panther. Observant readers will doubtless discover for themselves the significance of these devices, which may appear, to the casual observer, to have been randomly allocated.

The title page designs at the beginning of each of the three parts were an attempt to echo the elements and substances named in the titles themselves. The titles were, in their turn, a way of conjuring up the atmosphere of each section. The titles also allude to the cyclical nature of the story (begin with BLOOD, end with BLOOD). I always enjoy stories with a satisfying and intriguing shape to them, and so I was very pleased to be able to end the book with a chapter entitled THE STORY BEGINS!

THE DEDICATION
The dedication is to my older sister Pat, who died when I was halfway through writing Worm In The Blood. When I was about 14 years old I gave Pat a present of some little dragons, two adults and three babies, which I’d made out of papier-mâché. On my next birthday she painted me a green dragon with crimson wings. It stands on its hind legs, against a ground of sand-yellow beneath a lilac sky illuminated by a silver moon. My sister’s dragon is a slender, delicate and gentle-looking beast with a melancholy look in its eye. Pat was at that time a fine art student. She later became a tapestry weaver of some renown. On the back of the painting she wrote “A dragon for dragons”, which I quote in the Worm In The Blood dedication.

2005-06-14T11:21:00.000-07:00

AMBERGATE by Patricia Elliott

Ambergate is Patricia Elliott’s follow-up to her Gothic fantasy novel Murkmere. Not quite a sequel in the traditional sense, this story centres on one of the minor characters in the first book and continues an exploration of the rule of the decadent Protectorate, against which the story is set. The brutish Protector lords it over an alternative nineteenth century England. This is a theocratic state, and the religion that dominates the lives of the people is based around the Table of Significance, which defines wild birds as messengers of the gods. Birds as portents, as symbols of authority, and even as truly magical beings appear throughout Ambergate. This allows the author to reference iconography as diverse as the ballet Swan Lake and the emblems of Nazi Germany/Imperial Rome, and to work both rustic folk law and elaborate political intrigue into the telling.

Constructed around a series of reflections, the central characters form and reform their attachments in various unlikely configurations; Erland and Scuff, Nate and Leah, Leah and Erland, Nate and Scuff. "Home"- familiar but dull, is set against "the journey" - frightening but liberating. The capital city serves as a kind of "anti-home", claustrophobic and oppressive and yet still fraught with danger and insecurity.

Scuff's mission in part three of the novel, when she takes on the unlikely role of potential assassin, has shades of Hamlet in the prevarication she shows when faced with honouring a vow made under duress. This theme of the reluctant hunter is itself a reflection of Corporal Chance's pursuit of Scuff, which forms a running counterpoint to the first-person narration throughout. Chance is constantly on the point of having Scuff arrested, but always fails to act decisively for reasons he cannot understand. To the reader, however, it is clear that Chance sees himself in Scuff, a fellow orphan and street child, and he can no more bear to turn her in than he can ever abandon his pursuit of her. For ultimately Ambergate is a story about the search for self. As the nameless Scuff is told - “Everyone has a name...But some have to find it for themselves.”

2005-05-04T13:33:00.000-07:00

RYLAND'S FOOTSTEPS by Sally Prue

Books that defy categorisation often have a lot to recommend them. Sally Prue’s Ryland’s Footsteps is such a book. It’s setting, an island, cannot quite be placed, either geographically or historically. The characters that come to inhabit it are equally enigmatic in origin, and yet it all remains compellingly real throughout. The story won’t fit into any known genre, and, as with the author’s other novels, Cold Tom and The Devil’s Toenail, no easy moral platitudes are ever in evidence. Instead, the readers find themselves, like the colonists on the island, faced with discoveries and surprises, with wonders and terrors aplenty. The story is woven through with ideas on the nature of individuality and the bonds of family, on how much we owe to ourselves and how much we owe to the accident of our birth. Ryland’s Footsteps is exciting, thought provoking and moving. It’s the sort of book that stays with you long after you’ve finished reading it. Here is a story that refuses to remain within known boundaries.

2005-04-07T03:09:00.000-07:00

THE DEMON HEADMASTER by Gillian Cross

On the surface, the opening page of THE DEMON HEADMASTER contains a depiction of an argument between two boys. But what the reader actually gets is much more than this. For one thing, you get as much back-story as is required to set the scene and whet the appetite and pique the curiosity of the reader so they’re keen to read on. You also get essential information on the relationship between the two boys, and an introduction of sorts to a third character, Dinah, who they’re discussing. By the time you turn the first page you’re ready to plunge into the rest of the book, armed with all you need to know about the extraordinary circumstances that already exist at the school when the story begins. This is a master class in how to set up a plot with such subtlety and economy of means that the reader is never consciously aware of it; we’re too busy being entertained.

The origins of THE DEMON HEADMASTER are curious. Gillian Cross wrote a book called SAVE OUR SCHOOL in which there’s a mention of a story about a wicked headmaster written by one of the characters, a boy named Clipper. On reading this, Gillian Cross’ daughter, then aged 8, suggested that her mother try writing such a story herself, which she thought sounded better than all the books she’d written up to that point. The author took this advice on board and eventually the first in a highly successful series was born. But the idea itself was originally the creation of a character invented by Gillian Cross, and she is apparently still not sure if Clipper wouldn’t have made a better job of things if he’d written the whole book himself.

The Puffin Modern Classics edition of the book is worth getting hold of, because it also contains a thought-provoking afterword by Chris Powling (which is where I read about the origins of the story mentioned above).

2005-03-04T08:57:00.000-08:00

GRANDPA by John Burningham

A story about death for the under fives, this is the picture book at its most sophisticated. Burningham both writes and illustrates, and here he demonstrates the full potential of the combined form. Employing a range of visual codes to create layers of meaning, Grandpa tells the touching story of the friendship between grandchild and grandparent, two people at opposite ends of their lives, and the telling is achieved with a breathtaking economy of means. The decidedly non-linear plot unfolds via lines of parallel dialogue and meanders its way to its heartrending conclusion; a wordless page depicting the child solemnly contemplating Grandpa’s empty chair. To end here would be unbearably bleak. Catharsis is achieved on the last page, in a beautiful and mysterious final image. Through a pastoral landscape of green fields overlooking the sea, with the sun setting (or is it rising?) in the sky above, a child pushes an old fashioned pram containing a smiling baby. Is this a flashback to Grandpa’s infancy? An affirmation that life goes on? A suggestion of rebirth? The fact that this last page is open to so many interpretations only adds to its strength and provides a fine ending for a book of great subtlety and depth.

2005-02-09T03:34:00.000-08:00

LEGENDS OF KING ARTHUR

Below are some thoughts on the Arthurian legends. Kevin Crossley Holland’s Seeing Stone trilogy (The Seeing Stone, At the Crossing Places and King of the Middlemarch) is the retelling that has excited me most in recent years. These books are full of poetry and horror, optimism and despair. They are steeped in history but never lose sight of individual humanity.

The legends of King Arthur began as oral story telling. The King may or may not have actually existed, but his lifespan as a legendary leader seems unquenchable. Fourth Century bards began to develop the stories through verse and song, each teller taking up the tale, and adding something of their own. That process of telling and retelling continues to this day.

I have a battered copy of a book called The Adventures of King Arthur, by Eleanor C. Price. It is one of those old pre-war children’s books with cardboard covers and a canvas spine, the yellowing pages soft and thick as blotting paper. There are illustrations; six colour plates, printed on shiny white paper, which made it easier to pick them out when flicking through the book. The pictures show ruddy-faced knights in full armour, riding or battling across green fields and forests, typical British countryside, beneath a sky that threatens rain. They have titles such as “Sir Beaumains smote the other on the helm” and “‘Knight, thou hast done thyself great folly’”. On the frontispiece my grandmother has written “To David, with love from Mummie, Xmas 1933.” David is my dad. The book found its way onto my bookshelves when I was a boy, and I added my own name, in a vast, pencil scrawl, by way, I suppose, of cementing my claim to second-generation ownership. The text is dense and very far from an easy read. It contains passages such as “ ‘Alas,’ she said, ‘thou weenest thou hast done doughtily, but that is not so.’” I only ever looked at the pictures, which captivated me, utterly. I recently asked my dad about the book.
Me - “Did you ever actually read it, when you were a boy?”
Dad - “No, I just looked at the pictures.”

Nevertheless, he knew the stories well, and it was he who told me them first, extemporising the tale of the sword grasped by a ghostly hand emerging from the lake. He took me to see the Disney version of The Sword In The Stone, and the film of the King Arthur musical (!) Camelot, with Richard Harris in the role of the king. More retellings. As a teenager I read T. H.White’s The Once and Future King, at the recommendation of my older sister Pat, and, in the school library I was excited to discover a book called Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliff, which was the first time I encountered an attempt to tell the story of Arthur as if he were a real Fourth Century Romo-British war leader, putting the Saxons to flight at Baden Hill. This retelling is currently out of print but can be picked up second hand.

My interest in the King Arthur legends has continued into adulthood. The stories seem to stand infinite retellings. There is, of course, a troubling strand of medieval misogyny that runs through the tales (e.g. the innate passivity of female characters like Guinivere and Elaine, and the wickedness of Margawse and Morgan, and the way their infidelities are seen as tools of destruction, and how the men involved are exonerated of all blame etc.). But even this flaw can be seized upon and turned around, as in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Forest House series, an achievement that reveals such pernicious details as, to some extent, mere impostors.

Michael Morpugo makes a good job of distilling the mighty sweep of the legends into one book, Arthur, High King of Britain. If you can find it, a slim volume called Tales of Arthur by John Matthews and Bob Stewart is also very good, presenting versions of the stories as they might have first been told, sixteen hundred years ago.

2005-01-04T01:28:00.000-08:00

THE THIEF OF ALWAYS by Clive Barker.

Some books stick in the mind. There are quite a few examples of children’s fiction that I have enjoyed, but don’t have on my shelves, that I have read once only, out loud, in half-hour chunks over a long series of evenings to one or other of my children, when they were young enough to be read to sleep. These books were borrowed from our local library, which has since replenished its stock and thrown out or sold off most of the tattered paperbacks we enjoyed back in the Nineties. One such read was THE THIEF OF ALWAYS by Clive Barker. This book takes reversal as its theme, to dark and twisted effect. There’s a grinning villain who employs the desperate patter of a game show host. There’s a pond-full of huge fish, melancholy and ponderous and somehow utterly horrifying. Most disturbing of all, perhaps, the story demonstrates a galling truth; if your life becomes an endless round of thoughtless pleasure, and it’s springtime in the morning and Christmas every night, eventually even the most dedicated fun-seeker will come to the uncomfortable conclusion that something just isn’t right. And before reaching, at last, a genuinely happy resolution, the main character, 10-year old Harvey Swick, is put through the ultimate desolation. It’s what you might call a Rip Van Winkle moment, returning to a world that has moved on and left you far behind. This is a fear that I’m sure must have deep-seated roots in the human psyche. It sticks in the mind.

2004-12-16T18:44:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the Book Log

My day-to-day existence is, of course, of great importance to me. But I doubt any such detail will be of much interest to anyone else. Here then is my version of a web log, where I intend to post some thoughts about books and stories I’ve read and enjoyed. Since this site has been set up to help promote my fiction for children, I shall concentrate my comments on children’s fiction.