You don't necessarily consciously write from the standpoint of certain political whatever, but you're working perhaps within those frames of reference you've read in your own reading or you're interested in in your own life. Is that just organic, does it all come together in it's own way?
I think it is a bit organic, I think that actually what Calvino says in
his very good introduction to Italian Fairytales, is that those
sorts of organic tales are often, when they're about kings and things
like that, they're really the tales of fairly simple people, that they're
tales that dignify the simple and the good, tales of hope in that way.
There are quite a number of folk tales with sad endings but a lot of them
are tales in which the simple and good person manages to triumph, and
they triumph through being good, through being kind.
That goes back to Memory.
Y es, that's right. And that represents, I suppose, the hope of a lot
of communities, that some sort of goodness and kindness will triumph,
even when it simultaneously ... I think it's Eric Hogard in a book called
The Little Fishes, that was written a long time ago, it's a rather
sad war story, it sends up saying something like "There the children
go and we hope they live happily ever after, but a kind wish is like a
shower of rain and brings little relief to the parched earth", something
like that it says. And you get something like John Marsden's book Letters
from the Inside or Cormier's The Chocolate War, you do get
those books that acknowledge that for some people experience is hopeless,
but I think the tendency is for a community to produce books, to embrace
stories that do reinforce hope.
If you're looking at the oral tradition of the folktale, that is a passing
on of that hope.
They're not accounts of the realities of their lives, they're accounts
of the hope that life will end happily for them.
And if not for them, then for their children, or their children's children.
And that people will win through to some sort of happy state, and that's
a pretty good hope, and one that's worth asserting. Most experiences end
in a sort of mixed way, and people say, "oh, that story ends by saying
they all lived happily ever after, and we know that's not true",
and they're right of course. But then on the other hand for a lot of people
a sad end to a story isn't the end either. They live through that sadness
and go on to have a mixed life like practically everybody else, so that
statistically I think the mixture rather than the assertion of one thing
or the other is probably the truest sort of assertion. But it doesn't
alter that every now and then somebody probably does more or less live
happily ever after and of course for some people, some sorts of story
have very terrible endings which really are endings. I mean in the case
of one of the girls in Letters from the Inside one imagines she's been
killed, and that's why she's not writing any more.
I think that people like John Marsden are quite entitled to write that
sort of book. I don't think they're entitled to regard it as somehow more
real than say a different sort of story, something funnier. I don't know
that you're entitled to regard the hero of The Chocolate War
as any more real than Adrian Mole. Both those things can in individual
lives be true.
I think that argument is suggesting that there's only one reality, and
also that there's also only one type of thing that children should be
reading. A lot of people seem to feel very strongly that there's things
that kids should read and things that kids shouldn't read and they don't
acknowledge that like adults kids read across and up and down and all
over the place.
There's also a bit of a tendency when people talk about realism, when
you read a book where very hard events have occurred, the fairly happy
middle class family of the stories of the 1940s and 50s, there are people
nowadays who would say "oh, it's not very realistic, they're too
nice a family", because our reality has shifted a bit, our literary
reality, and has come to encompass the damaged or the fractured family.
And of course, most families are damaged or fractured to some degree.
They vary a great deal in how destructive they are with their products.
Some stagger on and some keep going fairly nicely and others of course
fall to pieces. But I think that to speak as if one is more realistic
than another... well, there are certain sorts of fashions in realism,
and there's a way of seeing reality as a statistical thing, and I think
that's what you've got to be a bit careful about, because it's not necessarily
true.
And it's not treating books as literature, as fictitious expressions.
You were just talking about humour. You seem to use perhaps less, or certainly
a different kind of humour in your teenage novels than you do in many
of your picture books and your fiction for junior readers. For example,
I found passages in The Tricksters very funny, but on a very sophisticated
level. It was the word games between the family, their relationships were
also quite humorous, but not in the uproarious way that some of your other
fiction is.
I use elements of farce, and slapstick a lot more in stories for little
children, and ridiculousness a lot more. Now it's not that I don't think
ridiculousness has a part in everyday life, and sometimes absolutely going
along with tragedy in everyday life. But the form that it takes alters
and tends to be something that's said or perceived rather than event,
as in books for little children. I don't mean that there aren't ridiculous
events but it's a different sort of event. There's all sorts of astonishing
things. Say in a book like The Three Legged Cat, where the man
goes to pick up his hat and picks up the cat, obviously in real life it
would be very unlikely to happen, although I got the idea because a friend
of mine had a big Russian hat which his step-children had given him and
he said that sometimes if he wasn't looking he'd go to pick it up and
he'd find that he was trying to pick up the cat, which was the same colour
as this particular hat. I got the idea for the story, and obviously I
exaggerated and developed to the point where somebody did pick the cat
up and put it on and then I had to centre events around this and it turned
out that it suited everybody. Then in books like The Greatest Show
Off Earth, you smudge some of those ridiculous events, and those
books stand between the two and by the time you get to the y.a. books
the ridiculousness has taken on a more domestic and realistic form, and
is often much more subjective and it does express itself in terms of what
people have to say about things. But it seems to me to be part of the
thing that you have to acknowledge when you're describing the real world.
It's not extraneous to it, but is part of the texture of realism.
The past seems to play an important role in a lot of the books, and the
past impacts very actively on the present and the future that the adolescents
are moving towards, and the symbol of that is often the ghost, and it's
frequently the ghost of a child.
I think that when I was a child from about 10 onwards and I suppose still
to the present day, though less than I did in the past I enjoyed reading
ghost stories, they give you a very mysterious feeling about the world.
I've never believed in them except as ways in which the mysteriousness
was acknowledged. I do think that there's all sorts of odd things about
time, not just time as a scientific idea, but as the way in which you...
when I go into the town I was born in it's my own ghost that I expect
to see, that I feel close to me. I feel that if I could walk out in the
twilight sometimes I'd see this child wandering around on the opposite
side. I never have, but in a way I suppose by even summoning its presence
as a possibility into my mind I acknowledge that it's there, that one
has made some sort of psychic impression upon this landscape.
Is that more powerful when it is a child, because of the unnaturalness
of a child dying?
I think it's partly to do with that and it's partly to do with the, not
so much in The Changeover the child doesn't die, he's saved,
he's rescued. There's one or two stories about sisters saving brothers
from an evil spell, there's folktale...
The Wild Swans.
Yes, and there's one called "Little Brother, Little Sister"
in Grimm's Fairytales and one or two others. So there's the fairytale
precursors for this. In Dangerous Spaces I think I'm using one
or two of those stories, I think I'm using a fairly traditional idea which
is the ghost as a presence which hasn't moved on and dissolved and become
part of the universe, but is actually arrested at a certain point and
because of this has set up a sort of a distortion. I don't think that's
an original idea, I think that's a fairly traditional ghost idea.
Say in The Tricksters the past is represented by the triplets
and Teddy Carnival's death which has never fully been explained or resolved,
and in the immediate past in Harry's family there is something that has
not been explained or resolved, and so they kind of reflect of each other.
And Harry herself can't take her place in the family and move on until
that happens.
At one stage someone says to her, I think it's Oliver, that she has locked
them too, her storytelling and imagination has locked them into a sort
of mode, where the ghost has separated out into three phases as it were
and in the end becomes united again. The death of the child, of the young
person, because their lives... I remember once when I was doing philosophy
this was talked about, that if somebody died when they were young, you
always felt that they died without their potentiality being fulfilled.
I suppose that haunts our ideas of most deaths of young people, that they
have more that they could have done. Whereas when people are old, you
have a much more philosophical feeling about it, even if you are very
sad, that they have completed something. The extent to which this is true
is sometimes difficult to tell.
The image or motif of space, often a physical space, the underrunners,
and the space in Dangerous Spaces and Harry's got her attic, her physical
space and is looking for her place in the family, it seems to recur with
you. Is it just the nature of adolescence that you're looking for your
own place?
No, I don't think it is just that. I haven't thought about that very much,
partly because nobody's asked me about it before, but just off the cuff,
I think one of the ideas that children explore in a number of ways is
the idea of the way in which they fit into space, and there's ways in
which they do this. they write their names, they write their street, they
write their town, they write their city, they write, I remember having
great huge long addresses; the solar system, and all that sort of thing.
But also they make little spaces for themselves. They make little play
houses. I think it's Sally's Secret, Shirley Hughes, where a
little girl makes houses for herself, but there's a lot of stories —
clubhouses, places like that, children make specific spaces for themselves.
I think it's a very human and a very important thing to do.
People at the CBC Conference talked a lot about the question of privacy
and children needing their privacy, I guess this is part of it too.
It is to do with privacy. I think that once you make a space your own,
no matter how humble it is, or the moment you create a space that's just
a really important human activity and there's all sorts of ways in which
this can be acknowledged. I've been writing a book where a child does
something I used to do when I was a child. We had a lot of trees in our
yard and I used to climb one tree and work my way, because they were close
together, right along this line of trees. I could go along on that level
and see bird's nests and things like that, and that was a very significant
space to me when I was a child. It was up above the world.
There's a few books about kids in trees...
I've written another story about a child climbing a tree called "The
Highest Tray Cloth in the World". It's in a collection somewhere.
It's written out of the memory of doing all this tree climbing. We used
to make houses, there's a lot of children who have tree houses. Ideas
of spaces of that kind have no beginning and no end, and I'm sure that
they flow on into the ways that people interpret their homes. Peter Pan
and Wendy, they had a tree house, didn't they.
I’ve talked a little bit about the characters finding their place
in the family; Angela (The Catalogue of the Universe) is finding
about her family and who she is...
I write a lot about families...
Yes, I think you do, and what strikes me is often the fallibility of the
parents, and part of the resolution of the story is often the child coming
to understand and forgive the parent for some sort of failing. In The
Tricksters, there’s the father’s infidelity, and Dido’s
"mistruths" in The Catalogue of the Universe.
Well, I think that that’s fairly true, I think that because young
people growing up have a pure and sometimes simple view of the world they
don’t think of their own fallibility, and they haven’t had
as much time to be fallible. They’re more ruthless about their parents
failings. And so of course, being a parent implies that you’re going
to have to try that much harder to be perfect because you’ve got
to try and do better on somebody else’s behalf as well as your own.
It’s not that I think adolescents aren’t highly fallible too,
but one of the great encounters of growing up is an awareness of your
parent as a human being and not just as a parent. So it becomes quite
hard when you’re growing up suddenly to look at your mother or your
father and think that they are a man and a woman, and not just that they’re
your parents and that that’s been the apotheosis of their lives,
to be your parents. Their lives are going to go on, and going to go on
in different ways, and of course it’s just as well, because somehow
or other a lot of children go away. I think one of the great problems
for women in the past was they were encouraged to invest so much of their
identity in their children that when their children left home, quite a
number of them actually had nothing they could go on to. Until they had
grandchildren.And even then they might sometimes want to take them over
and all sorts of things. On the other hand, if you’re a busy career
grandmother, it’s hard to find time to look after your grandchildren,
and that’s a quite important thing to do, too.
In your books there is often an almost irresistible attraction to death
that the characters have to struggle against, and I think that’s
very true for Anthea (Dangerous Spaces).
I think that’s a theme that comes a bit in Underrunners,
it’s certainly comes in quite strongly in Dangerous Spaces,
I think that that’s true. I think that quite a lot of adolescents
become rather fascinated suddenly with their own mortality, and they are
fascinated by it without quite believing in it, which is probably one
of the reasons we get quite a lot of teenage suicides. They test themselves
against this ultimate reality. I don’t really want to encourage
anyone to do that, but it is part of our imaginative apprehension of the
world. There’s a story, I haven’t written this book yet, and
may never write it, but it certainly plays quite an important part, because
at the end of the story which I envisage writing one day, the hero is
a young man who is very much in love with a beautiful girl, and she tells
him towards the end that she works in a funeral parlour, and that during
the day she’s been laying out somebody that he knows. We all have
this very peculiar attitude to... this actually causes him to slip back
in every sense of the word. It’s a bit of a test that she’s
put him through, so that when he says "it doesn’t matter",
she says "too late!" It’s an interesting thing.
