A Poet and a Lark - Two Great Carnegie winners - by Paul May

Elizabeth Acevedo has a story she tells about rats. And a poem. The story concerns a creative writing professor (and poet) who tells her that rats are not noble enough creatures to be the subject of an ode, and she needs to get more experience. You can watch Acevedo tell the story and deliver the poem on YouTube, but here's a few lines from Rat Ode.

Because you may be inelegant, simple,
a mammal bottom-feeder, always fricking famished,
little ugly thing that feasts on what crumbs fall
from the corner of our mouths, but you live
uncuddled, uncoddled, can’t be bought at Petco
and fed to fat snakes because you’re not the maze-rat
of labs: pale, pretty-eyed, trained.

Elizabeth Acevedo is not going to be told what it is OK to write about. Her novel, The Poet X, which won the Carnegie medal in 2019 is the story, told in a series of poems, of 15 year old Xiomara, a Dominican American growing up in New York City. Xiomara has a troubled relationship with her very religious mother and is very close to her twin brother Xavier. She's learnt to defend herself from the unwanted attentions of men. She can use her fists, and she does. She is also a poet who is shy about revealing that part of herself. 

This book has one of the most completely convincing first-person voices that I've come across.  If you want your novel to be about a young person who is a poet you need to be a poet to write the novel. Acevedo is that poet, so the voice is right and the poetry is right and this makes for a powerful and moving book. What's more the book is tightly plotted, the different strands of the story moving towards a climax where poetry, religion, Xiomara's relationship with her mother, her boyfriend, her twin, all come together in a satisfying way.

Maybe, though, just a teeny bit too satisfying for an adult reader. I watched an interview with Elizabeth Acevedo on the publication of her first adult novel Family Lore. It's on an American show called Let's Get Lit, and she said something I found interesting because, as you will know if you've read many of my Carnegie posts, I'm a bit puzzled by the idea of YA fiction and how it differs from A fiction. Here's what she said, talking about that adult novel:

'I think this adult book let me be really expansive in terms of language, in terms of the big questions I wanted to ask. Not that my Young Adult books don't do that, but I think I hold young people more tenderly in a way that—I think I was unflinchingly honest with this book and the things that I was asking.'

You know from the first few pages of The Poet X that, whatever happens, Xiomara is going to be OK. For me, that's a good thing. I like my detectives to be implacable, I like to turn to the end of a tense book to make sure that the protagonist comes out OK. And, to be fair, this isn't all tied up neatly like the end of one of those Shakespeare comedies where everyone gets married. The future here seems likely to have rocky patches, but you kind of know they'll all navigate them safely, and I think this is what Elizabeth Acevedo means when she says she 'holds young people tenderly.' It's not to do with the subject matter or the language, but maybe that 'unflinching honesty' in her adult fiction means that there aren't always going to be happy endings there.

I loved this book, which is unlike anything I've read before, full of memorable images, full of rhythm and life. It may have helped me that I went to a Catholic primary school and was an altar boy for years, so I get all the Catholicism, but the writing is so vivid that I don't think anyone could fail to understand what's going on. 

You can see plenty of Elizabeth Acevedo on YouTube reading her work, and also as a wonderful bonus, she reads the Audible version of the book herself. In any case, once you've heard her performing her poetry you will hear her voice constantly as you read The Poet X.

And so from New York to Yorkshire and the 2020 winner, Lark, by Anthony McGowan. This is, at the moment anyway, my favourite of all the 80-odd Carnegie winners. Lark is the final instalment of the four-part series entitled The Truth of Things but it works just fine as a standalone story. This is another utterly convincing first person voice. Nicky is a teenage boy with an older brother Kenny, who has a learning disability. The relationship between the two boys is at the heart of the book and is beautifully described in direct and simple language and cracking dialogue.

The way Anthony McGowan gives the reader almost the whole of the family's back story in just a couple of pages at the start of the book is masterful. The book opens with a short prologue. Nicky, Kenny and their terrier, Tina, are lost on a moor in the snow, so you know from the start what kind of thing you're in for, and by drawing the reader into the action at once McGowan creates the space for Nicky to explain how they've ended up in this situation, including that all-important family background. 'It wasn't supposed to be like this,' says Nicky. 'It was meant to be a stroll, a laugh. A lark.'

It's not a lark, of course, though the skylark is a central poetic symbol in the story. Anthony McGowan says, in an interview with Peters when the book was shortlisted for the Carnegie, that Nicky is 'a normal kid from a one-horse town in the West Yorkshire Badlands,' and one of the many things I love about this book (and the others in the series), is the way the characters stumble though life, making mistakes, taking wrong turnings (literally in this case) but somehow making it through because they care about, and look after each other. In this story Nicky makes every mistake that someone going out for a walk in the hills could possibly make. The boys set out late with an inadequate map, they ignore the falling snow, hoping for the best. They haven't checked a weather forecast. They have useless clothing and not enough food and drink. Then they try to take a shortcut over a hilltop in terrible visibility.

This is a genuinely terrifying story and it's remarkable that something so gripping and with so many layers is told in such clear, direct language. I kept thinking, this is so great, an eight year old could read it easily. And actually there is so much in it that an eight year old would love, like the discussion about bad language that opens the book:

"I don't bloody like it."

   "Language, Kenny," I said to my brother. "You don't have to bloody well say bloody all the bloody time. It's not clever and it's not funny."

    I copied the whining voice of Mr Kimble, our English teacher. But it was wasted on Kenny, as he didn't go to my school."

    "But it is bloody cold," Kenny said.

Forty-odd years ago we were staying with my parents at Christmas and our four year old daughter went downstairs to the kitchen where my notoriously strait-laced and irascible father was making tea. Her little voice floated up to us as we lay in bed. "Grandad, I'm BLOODY hungry." We'd never heard her say anything like that before, and I'm sure my dad's blood pressure went through the roof. But back to Lark . . .

Passages like the one I just quoted made me realise, firstly, how rare it is to hear people in books for younger children talking in natural language (ie with swearing included) and, secondly, how rare it is in YA fiction to hear the essential childishness of the young adults in question. Kenny, of course, is going to remain childish all his life in many ways, but we can also see that, for all that Nicky takes his responsibility for looking after Kenny seriously, in his playfulness and vulnerability he is still very much a child himself.

Anthony McGowan has commented on the effect that writing for Barrington Stoke had on his writing. On Barrington Stoke's website they say 'Our award-winning short novels are designed to ensure an accessible read for those who struggle and a quick win for more confident readers.' McGowan said about this: 'writing for Barrington Stoke made me focus on the bare bones of what makes us want to read: on character (above all), on the story, on the setting.'

This is the kind of writing I most admire, but the narrative is not entirely unadorned. Anthony McGowan has a great line in similes, the kind of similes that actually tell you how things are, not the clever, showy-off kind. There's the bus driver 'whose face was all screwed up as if he'd just bitten into a bad pie.' Or this: 'Our feet crunched over the snow, making a sound like you were eating biscuits.' The great thing about these images is that, as well as giving you an exact picture of what's happening they also tell you more about the character who's making the comparison.

Lark owes a lot to Barry Hines's famous book, A Kestrel for a Knave, which Ken Loach made into the even more famous film, Kes. Anthony McGowan dedicated Pike to Barry Hines 'who showed us how this might be done.' In Barry Hines's afterword to the 1999 edition of his book he talks about 'the dramatic juxtaposition of industry and nature' to be found in the mining towns of the Midlands and the North. He was often asked (presumably by southerners) how he knew so much about the countryside, coming from a place like Barnsley. Anthony McGowan's books are set in just that kind of place, though today the mines have gone. 

And that reminds me to mention that, in a way, The Truth of Things is a set of historical novels, because the stories are set 'forty years ago.' I guess that's a spoiler because you don't find that out until the end of Lark, and it must say something about the way things still are today that I never wondered when the novels were set until I read the ending.

I'd better go now as I have a lot of Olympics to watch. The Carnegie seems to have passed successfully through its grim period and moved on to something very much more hopeful. I hope that continues.