The 2023 Carnegie winner was The Blue Book of Nebo by Manon Steffan Ros. This novel was originally written in Welsh and then 'adapted from the Welsh' by its author. When it won the Carnegie I saw it described as the first 'novel in translation' to have won the award, but that's not really accurate because, when she came to create an English language version of her story, Manon Steffan Ros found herself compelled to change important parts of the book. In an interview with Gary Raymond for Wales Art Review she describes why she had to do this.
In the original, a mother and her son are isolated survivors in a post-apocalyptic world. Each of them records their thoughts on the blank pages of a book they find in an abandoned house, a book Dylan calls The Blue Book of Nebo. In the book Dylan, the son, records what he remembers of their life together since 'The End' and his mother, Rowenna, talks about the time before 'The End' and about her own experience since. They agree not to read each other's accounts.
Through these accounts we gradually piece together what has happened, how the bombs fell and how these two, and Rowenna's baby daughter Mona have survived, and in Mona's case how she came to be at all. I really wish I could read a direct translation from the Welsh, or indeed that I could read Welsh, and I'm a bit puzzled by the need for such radical changes, because if a different person had translated the work this wouldn't have happened. It's certainly a curious thing, but it's clearly the case that The Blue Book of Nebo, 'adapted from the Welsh' is not the same book as Llyfr Glas Nebo.
This is not a translation, then, and it's also not, as it has often been called, a dystopian novel. Post-apocalyptic, yes, but Rowenna and Dylan learn how to survive in their isolation. Dystopia implies a malfunctioning or unjust society, but here there is no society to be dystopian, just these two people and the baby Mona. It's a novel about survival and growth, about the things we really need and the things we can do without, and in this English version very much a book about language and identity. Here's Manon Steffan Ros:
'I felt, okay, naturally, these characters would be writing in Welsh, they will be communicating in Welsh. But now they're not I need to come up with the reason they're writing in English. And that sort of became a theme that they're doing that because if anyone was to find it down the line this testimony will be more useful to people who would understand it if it was written in English. And why was that? Taking that theme of finding the Welsh language and trying to make these characters own their own mother tongue, that's a completely different theme in the English translation that simply isn't there in the original.'
That wide-ranging and very interesting interview is here. Remarkably Ros says she feels more free when writing for Young Adults than she does when writing adult fiction, which is in complete contrast to the things I've seen both Elizabeth Acevedo and Jason Reynolds say, both of them suggesting they were more careful of their younger readers. For a much more in-depth review of this book I refer you to Berlie Doherty's website.
And so to the most recent Carnegie winner, The Boy Lost in the Maze by Joseph Coelho. Way back in 1967 Alan Garner won the Carnegie with The Owl Service, a book in which a series of events from a story in The Mabinogion is lived out by successive generations in a remote Welsh valley. The Mabinogion makes its appearance in The Blue Book of Nebo, too, and Alan Garner felt the need to learn Welsh in order to write The Owl Service, but that's not why I mention him here. I think Joseph Coelho is probably the first winner since Garner to use myth in this way to structure and amplify a modern-day story, though Coelho's technique is very different from Garner's. As time went by Garner buried the mythic basis of his stories ever deeper, so that it would take a very switched-on reader indeed to notice that the story of Tam Lin is the basis to Red Shift, the novel that eventually followed The Owl Service.
In The Boy Lost in the Maze we have a modern-day teenager searching for his absent father through the mazes of the Internet and the streets of London, while at the same time creating a series of poems for a school project exploring the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. So the book is about how Theo relates to the myth, how the myth acts as a metaphor for his own search and how it helps him to understand himself.
I remember reading how, on being asked to illustrate The God Beneath the Sea, the 1970 Carnegie winner, Charles Keeping, was initially reluctant because he found the myths 'completely disgusting at first. Completely devoid of any love. This is all lust, rape, revenge and violence . . .' Keeping came around to the idea that there were some 'basic human passions' he could work with, and the illustrations he came up with were truly terrifying, but I've always felt the same way as he did about those Greek myths.
But Joseph Coelho changes the story of Theseus. Instead of simply slaying the bandits who are in his way Theseus, as Coelho says in his afterword, 'goes on a journey and changes and is changed by it. The bandits are not just targets to be mown down, they are flawed humans with their own histories and their own labyrinths to weave.'
There are other changes, too, that address that deficit which Keeping observed in the myths—the lack of love. But even so this novel is fairly dark in tone. Theo has a hard time, and though he is persistent in his search for his father and he is a terrific and totally believable character, I never quite felt for him the same buzz I felt with Elizabeth Acevedo's poet, Xiomara. Also, I found that I did need to refer to Robert Graves's The Greek Myths a few times, just to keep track of what was going on.
Carnegie winners with mythic structure are rare, but Carnegie winning novels written in verse seem to be becoming common. This is the third verse novel in recent years to win the Carnegie and I've enjoyed all of them.
I notice that the covers of these two most recent winners are very quiet. I was in Foyles bookshop the other day and I felt I needed dark glasses on when I walked into the children's book section. On the display tables every book cover seemed to be a dazzling confusion of primary colours. I couldn't help wondering, looking at these two latest Carnegie winners, whether their downbeat, low-key covers are meant to mark them out as 'serious' fiction for young people.
And that's it. I've read them all now. Have I learnt anything? Well, maybe. I’ll let you know next time.
