Clever girls and loving mothers

Image: en.wikipedia.org

Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me is the story of sixth grader Miranda, growing up in 1979 in New York City. The story specifically mentions Amsterdam Avenue, which I believe is Upper East Side- in the 1970s this was a working class neighbourhood. She lives in a shabby apartment with her single parent working mother, and her best friend Sal lives in the same building.

One day while walking home from school, Sal is punched in the stomach without any forewarning by a boy who is a stranger. He runs away from Miranda and locks himself in his apartment. Then Miranda and her mother's spare key goes missing, and Miranda starts to receive mysterious letters from someone who seems to be wanting to warn her of something coming in the future.

This is a wonderful book, cleverly wrong-footing expectations from elements of a realist family story (Miranda's shifting friendships, the relationship between her mother and mother's boyfriend Richard, her mother's determination to appear on a game show) by the mystery and Science Fiction elements, which are foreshadowed by Miranda's refusal to read anything but Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, which I wrote about here. In fact, many expectations are wrong-footed: the troubled boy who punches Sal in the stomach is the one who understands the time travel in A Wrinkle in Time, but the girl Miranda perceives as a stuck up airhead, Julia, is the one who explains it, albeit by the use of her diamond-chip ring!

Image: mrbsemporium.com

David Almond's My Name Is Mina is the prequel and companion book to the award-winning Skellig, which I wrote about here. In Skellig, Mina is Michael's friend, who is able to see the wonder in Skellig and explain it to Michael. This novel starts:

My name is Mina and I love the night. Anything seems possible in the night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep. It's dark and silent in the house, but if I listen close, I hear the beat beat beat of my heart. I hear the creak and crack of the house. I hear my mum breathing gently in her sleep  in her room next door.

12 year old Mina tells her own story (as does Miranda) but it is not a straightforward narrative. Miranda is addressing the person sending her the mysterious letters throughout When You Reach Me, but Mina is addressing herself through her diary, story writing and poetry. Mina is an intelligent and creative thinker and a gifted writer, through which Almond (a former teacher) makes some pointed comments about the rigidity of the school curriculum and the obsession with testing, targets and results in the English education system.

Like Miranda, Mina is growing up with a single mother, but unlike Miranda, remembers her father who has died. In a passage where Mina describes running out of school where she is being teased, she goes into a tunnel under a park, into the Underworld where she is planning to seek Hades and Persephone and ask for her father back. I am not ashamed to say that this passage (written in the third person as Mina seeks to distance herself from it) drove me to tears on a packed train to Brighton. However, five minutes later some word play made me laugh out loud. 

Throughout the novel Mina, from her vantage point in her favourite tree, notes the nesting, laying eggs and hatching of baby blackbirds, heralding the coming of spring after a long north of England winter. As Spring arrives, so does a boy and his family in a house opposite, and Mina feels ready to leave the safety of her tree and choose interaction with children of her own age. 

I read these wonderful novels one after the other, and noted in both a tender and loving relationship between the girls and their mothers. The relationships are not always perfect, and in both books there is a recognition that a strong relationship between mother and daughter is not enough for either mother or child. In both cases the girls recognise that their mothers need to be more than simply parents (important though this is) and both girls eventually seek out new friends, frightening though this is. In When You Reach Me, indeed, Miranda is beginning to think about boyfriends, although this is not a big part of the novel.

These are fantastic books. Although it would not be necessary to enjoy When You Reach Me to have read A Wrinkle in Time, or My Name is Mina to have read Skellig, I hope that readers will go on to seek out those marvellous books too. Both books are suitable for readers 10+ due to their complexity.

In My Name is Mina a teacher sings the Scottish miners' lullaby Corrie Doon, which I think is a beautiful expression of love of a father for a child and also linking the ideas of death, loss, underworld and rebirth. 

What is Martin Amis reading?

On the recent Faulks on Fiction BBC TV programme, Sebastian Faulks contended that since the First World War, literary fiction has turned its back on the traditional hero, leaving him or her to "genre" fiction and children's fiction. In an odd exchange, Martin Amis, interviewed on his anti-hero John Self, announced that when asked whether he would write a children's novel, he answers: "... 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable".

Understandably a number of children's novelists and academics were annoyed about these comments. As well as those quoted in the Guardian piece linked above, academic and children's novelist Charles Butler wrote in his blog that if he cannot envisage writing for an audience of children, presumably he is denying consciously writing for adults- and specifically an audience who enjoy reading about the marital and sexual foibles of middle aged men.

In a slightly cynical Twitter conversation with the good folks of SA4QE (fellow Russell Hoban fans), we wondered firstly how well Amis's latest tome had sold, and secondly whether the enthusiastic feuder (Julian Barnes, Anna Ford, Terry Eagleton) had recently fallen out with other lit-fic stalwarts Jeanette Winterson and Salman Rushdie, who have both produced critically acclaimed children's novels without any suggestion of pandering to lesser intellects.

I was fascinated to read recently about Canadian novelist Yann Martell's What Is Stephen Harper Reading? project, where he sent 100 books to the Prime Minister, one a fortnight, after being unimpressed by Harper's reception of Canadian artists at an event to mark 50 years of the Canadian Council for the Arts, and I started to wonder which of my favourite children/ Young Adults books I would send to Amis, to convince him that simple writing need not be simplistic; that writers for children habitually do so because of the freedom of imagination that such writing affords. And I came up with the following list:

1. The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban. I have already written about this book here, so I hope that it is obvious why I would choose this. Hoban is a widely acclaimed (although under-read) novelist who rates his children's fiction as no less important than his novels for adults, and his next novel will be a Young Adult novel, Soonchild.

2. Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve, the first in the Mortal Engines series, is a dystopian fantasy about the world far in the future, after a devastating war. Natural resources are at a premium, and cities have become scavengers. They are traction cities, swallowing smaller cities and taking their resources. The protagonists, Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw, are thrown together to survive. I admire this series, because there is a perception (even in this BBC Open Book programme) that children's books should have a happy ending. Hester must make a decision to ensure her's and Tom's survival. However, the consequences of this decision are far reaching, and the effects of it are terrible.

3. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. This is an example what I believe great children's books do so well- they convey a profound message in a simple way. In this novel, the message is about the importance of love in the development of children. Mary and Colin have been emotionally deprived, and this has had a dreadful effect on them; Mary is close to being completely emotionally stunted due to the neglectful behaviour of her parents. Colin is a hysterical hypochondriac, convinced that his father's inability to connect with him is because he (Colin) is about to die. The garden is both an embodiment of the children's emotional growth, and of the importance of children to connect with other children, to see the success of their own labours and follow their interests without undue interference from adults.

4. Skellig by David Almond. Again, I have written about it before. It is a rich, layered novel, written in simple, clear prose, drawing on a range of literary sources to tell a truly beautiful story.

5. Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer- a sort of ghost story, or a time switch novel about which I intend to write more fully in the future. It can be seen as the disintegration and re-integration of a personality, but it is much more than that. It rejects simple classifications. I would try to send Amis the pre-1980s edition, as the ending is far better! Edit: since posting this last night I've been hearing Charlotte Sometimes by The Cure in my head!

6. Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver, another that I have already written about. I would hope that Amis would be impressed by Paver's creation of an imaginary world; something that children's writers do so well. In my opinion, outside genre fiction many adult writers do this less than successfully; perhaps why many of them write about marital difficulties in North London or New York?

7. The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff, part of the Eagle of the Ninth series. This is a perennial favourite, from the 1950s/ 1960s era of children's fiction from which I could have chosen any number of fantastic authors- Phillipa Pearce, Alan Garner, Henry Treece, as well as Penelope Farmer above. This novel examines the invasion of Britannia by the Saxons, and the conflicts between duty, family loyalty and the bitterness, estrangement and a desire for revenge that Aquila, the protagonist of the novels, experiences when the two areas collide. Like Wolf Brother, Amis might be impressed by the recreation of a world, but the recognisable conflicts that Aquila experiences.

8. Northern Lights by Philip Pullman. I very nearly chose The Ruby in the Dust from Pullman's earlier quartet about Sally Lockhart, an unconventional nineteenth century orphaned 16 year old, who may be lacking in knowledge or art, music, languages and history, but is an excellent shot with a gun, expert military tactician and highly successful stockbroker, who gets involved with City corruption and the Opium trade, but instead I thought that there can be no other example of the incredible creativity, depth and breadth of vision and the richness of a masterpiece of children's fiction. The story of Lyra and her daemon (the physical embodiment of her soul) and their adventure to the North to rescue the children stolen by the General Oblation Board on behalf of the Magisterium, the theocratic government system of Lyra's world. Drawing on Milton, Blake and often seen as a rebuttal to CS Lewis' Narnia series, I can't believe that anyone could read this book and believe that good children's literature is lacking in serious intent.

9. Maus by Art Spiegelmann is arguably one of the greatest graphic novels ever written. It is the story of Spiegelmann's father's survival of the Holocaust, with the Jews portrayed as mice and the Nazis as cats (the Katzies). Vladek's survival is interwoven with his son coming to terms with his family's tragic story, and his family's survivor's guilt. It shows unflinchingly that suffering extreme trauma does not make us a better, more likeable person; in fact the direct opposite.

10. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. It has won the Hugo, Newbery and Carnegie awards. The story of Bod, the boy who survives the murder of his family and is brought up in a graveyard by the dead who live there. It is inspired by Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books, and to some extent is Gaiman's re-writing of them. Again, I hope to write on this novel at a later date. The book is illustrated by Dave McKean, the illustrator of Wolves in the Wall, which I wrote about here along with Coraline), and the illustrations are as worthwhile as the prose. Ultimately, it is a story about finding love, security and acceptance in a world where there are many dangers, but also the sad truth that to grow up, we must leave behind some of the security of childhood, however odd it must be.

I hope that on reading these books, Amis would have a little more respect for the power and creativity of good quality children's literature. Perhaps he and Jonathan Myerson could share the books?

Wild Boys

I feel slightly uncomfortable with the concept of "boys' books" and "girls' books". Now that marketing is such a huge part of the publishing world, it seems to me that there is a preponderance of texts aimed at girls (pink covers with pictures of cheerleaders, puppies or romantic vampires, depending on the age range- something else I'm uncomfortable with) or boys (blue, black or green covers featuring dinosaurs, footballers or gory vampires). The Boys into Books project (part of the 2008 Year of Reading) lists books that may be popular with boys- and lo and behold, they are in general simply good and exciting books that any reader would enjoy.

The cover of Jackdaw Summer (2008) by David Almond, whose Skellig I wrote about here, is a case in point.  The protagonist, and narrator, 14 year old Liam Lynch, is stranded between childhood and adolescence. His best friend, Max, is maturing: he has a girlfriend and is considering his future career, while Liam still fantasises about death and killing, and glories in dirt and savagery.

At the beginning of the novel the boys are walking in the countryside near their village in Northumbria. Max, who was born and brought up in the village, spots a jackdaw, and tells Liam of the theory that they can be imprinted by humans, if they see the human before they see their mother. They follow the jackdaw into a ruined building, where they find a recently abandoned baby.

The novel turned my expectations on their heads. This is not the search for the baby's identity and parentage that I expected- although Liam's dad creates his own narrative around it. The novel explores the violence and savagery that Almond seems to be suggesting is a part of the human condition. Liam's dad is anti-Iraq war; as the planes from the local army base fly overhead, he shouts that they should go and bomb Blair. His mother photographs the scabs, scars and bruises left by the untamed play of his last boyhood summer.  Liam's former friend Graham Natress is staging and filming mock executions. The village was formerly the home of the Reivers, involved in centuries of guerilla warfare between Scotland and England before James 1's accession to the throne united the countries. Violence is deep in the history of the place.

Into this environment comes Crystal, a self harming foster child, and Oliver, a refugee boy from Liberia, both of whom are troubled by their own violent pasts and imprinted, like the jackdaw, by their early childhood experiences. At the end of the unusually hot summer, modern warfare, Nattress' fascination with torture and executions, Oliver's childhood experiences in Liberia and Liam's own fascination with warfare, knives and violence all come together in the novel's denouement.

Like Skellig, the prose is lyrical, beautiful and deceptively simple. This is not the gadget- heavy, thrills and spills book that many publishers think boys want, and it lacks the fantastical element of Skellig, but I think it is a powerful and magical read.

Recording and images of jackdaws can be found at the RSPB website, and the School Library Association has pulled together information on boys and reading here.

A Fearful Symmetry: Skellig by David Almond

I am very ashamed that I haven't read David Almond's Skellig before. It is a book that I have known by repute for a long time, and I must confess that one of the things that put me off reading it was the fact that it is so widely read as a lower KS3 set text in Secondary schools. I imagined that it would be one of those tediously contemporary "issues" novels that we read at Secondary schools, all teenagers, scooters and youth clubs, that are embarrassingly out of date within 5 years. How wrong I was.

Skellig was first published in 1998, one year after JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and three years after Philip Pullman's Northern Lights, arguably two of the novels that ignited the current interest in children's literature. It was David Almond's debut novel, and was a remarkable success, winning the Carnegie Medal (also won by Philip Pullman in 1995 for Northern Lights). It was made into an opera at Sage Gateshead, with music by Todd Machover and libretto by David Almond (you can read reviews and listen to clips here) and dramatised by Sky 1 with Tim Roth as Skellig- see the trailer here.

Michael, his dad and pregnant mum have just moved house. They have bought a house in need of extensive renovation, expecting to be able to renovate it before the new baby comes, but she arrives prematurely and in need of a great deal of neo-natal care. Michael is missing his old house, his friends Leakey and Coot and is very worried about his mum and sister. In the garden of the house there is an old garage, which is falling down. The family had intended to demolish it and redesign the garden, but hadn't had time to do it. While exploring the garden, Michael opens the door and finds an old man in there, apparently dying.

Next door to Michael and his family lives Mina and her mum. Mina is home schooled. She challenges Michael's view of the world, with her rejection of many of Michael's values and assumptions; she and her mother believe, like William Blake, that institutions (such as school) and society crush our natural curiosity and imagination, and who assists Michael in recognising the wonder of Skellig, due to her knowledge of the anatomy of birds and the poetry of William Blake, which is a recurring trope throughout the novel.

Blake of course is (along with Milton) an inspiration for Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (in particular, the visions of heaven and hell, and the portrayal of religion's antipathy for sexuality, particularly female sexuality). The poem The Tyger (see an image of the original manuscript here) is quoted throughout. Mina's love of birds (and knowledge of owls) and night time are expressed through her repeated quotation of Night from Songs of Innocence. I was also forcibly reminded both of Blake's images of angels (Skellig's splendour once he is revived by Michael's ministration of pork char sui, spring rolls, brown ale, aspirin and cod liver oil capsules reminded me of the image above) but also the repetition of three sided relationships (both successul and unsuccessful) throughout the novel recalled Blake's portait of Newton.

Mina, Michael and Skellig's triangular relationship, exemplified first by their three sided dance and then by Michael's vision of Mina and his wings. There is a satisfying triangle with Mina, her mum and Michael, and between Leakey, Coot and Michael, which is threatened by his growing friendship with Mina. Coot's jealousy of Mina means that a triangle between him, Michael and Mina is unbalanced. The only close relationships that are not triangular in the novel are those between Mina and her mother, and Mum, Dad, Michael and the baby, although it could be argued that there is a relationship between Mina, her mum and Blake, and perhaps that there are triangles between Michael, his mum and dad and the baby, her mum and dad.

This was a wonderful read- I read it in two days because I simply couldn't stop. It is a rich and deep text, but still wears its learning lightly- it could be read as an allegory of the power of love and the imagination or belief, or it could be equally enjoyed as a magical story about a boy finding an angel in his garage. I was delighted to see that David Almond has written a prequel to Skellig, My Name Is Mina. I can't wait to read it. And now I'll maybe overcome my prejudice against Louis Sachar's Holes...