Dystopia in a dystopian world by Holly Race

On a recent Zoom meeting with someone who works in television drama, I found myself discussing the mood of the nation, and realised that the book I am writing doesn't fit in at all.

There was a definite sense that the dark, gritty crime shows and thrillers that have been keeping us hooked for years were not necessarily what people wanted to see right now; that people would be looking for more uplifting stories. And who can blame them? In a time when so many are frightened and lonely, sometimes ill or angry, we just want to cuddle up with the hot water bottles of literature and TV and film. I can relate - I signed up to Disney+ with the intention of watching The Mandelorian and have instead imbibed the endlessly optimistic Diary of a Future President. I've resorted to comfort reading the stories of my childhood - Carbonel, Charlotte's Web and The Snow Spider.

'But where does that leave me and my semi-dystopian novel featuring an angry heroine?!' I wailed to the TV person.

And then I thought about that fact that some of the most powerful moments in my favourite books are those glimmers of light in the darkest moments. The salute of District 12 in response to Katniss volunteering as tribute; Isabelle's silent, relieved acceptance - her hand placed over another's - in Jennifer Donnelly's Stepsister; the warming hug of a little girl in Philip Pullman's exquisite Clockwork.

As Anne wrote below in 'Hope in a Scary World', there are moments of light in this crisis - and humans have the incredible ability to generate such moments. It's a yin and yang. We create buoys for ourselves proportionate to the strength of the current trying to drag us under. Feeling powerless and lonely? Go into the street and clap. Worried about running out of food? Start growing fruits and herbs on the windowsill.

Closer to home, one friend sent me a handwritten letter, and in return I sent him a DVD of a film we'd meant to watch together at my home. Instead we watched it apart but at the same time, connected by Whatsapp and Frances O'Connor's brilliant interpretation of the much-maligned Fanny in Mansfield Park. Neighbouring friends have set up a socially distanced cake run, to spread a little sugary love (while our stocks of flour last).

Humans are brilliant, aren't they?

So I went to work. My first book is being published in June, and I'm deep in the middle of drafting the second in the trilogy now. It's a darker book anyway - I don't think it will be a huge spoiler to say that the villain's forces are growing stronger. It's all too easy for me, in my own moments of anxiety and depression, to lean in to my heroine's anger and fear.

But with all of those fresh memories of our ability to find light in the darkest of times, I have been trying to allow my characters to do the same. Those flashes of light may only be momentary, but they're enough to illuminate the path forward - whether that's a shared moment of connection with a love interest or friend, saving a frenemy from certain death in a battle, or the simple act of sharing their last cup of self-raising.

Holly Race worked for many years as a script editor in film and television, before becoming a writer.

Her debut novel, Midnight's Twins, is published by Hot Key Books on 11th June 2020. She also selectively undertakes freelance script editing and story consultant work.

www.hollyrace.com

www.patreon.com/hollyracewriting

The Importance of Books by Vanessa Harbour

We all know how important books are. We know what a vital role they play. Sometimes though it really helps to be reminded why. Some of you may have seen a tweet I posted earlier this week about an experience I had when lecturing. In discussion with a group of students about character I asked them who their favourite characters were. The answers were diverse and eclectic but often what accompanied their answer was an explanation. This explanation nearly always included how the characters and/or the book had helped them and why. For some it had been through a darkest moment, for others, it had been to deal with difficult situations and overwhelmingly, it was how they had helped them get through adolescence. Sorry, I’m not listing the books here as I don’t want any student feeling they are being talked about.  Here I am talking in generalities. The majority of these books were young adult fiction. Another reminder of how important young adult fiction is and how vital it is that publishers continue to produce amazing YA by the incredible YA authors from the UK. I picked up one the other day at the mass book launch and publisher launch for Guppy Publishing. Gloves Off by Louisa Reid, is brilliant and so powerful. A must read.

But as I said, we know books do this. We know books can provide an escape and support when needed. Maybe that metaphoric hug just when craved. No character in a book will judge. Books are places where you can tell the characters your deepest darkest secret. A book can be whatever you need it to be. Between those pages is a safe place to be and that is what we, as writers, create.

Books do so much more. They can open a dialogue, providing a chance to discuss difficult and/or sensitive subjects. The reader can ask questions of the text, of themselves and, when they are ready, of others – whether that is parents, teachers, siblings or friends. Again, this is not news. Windows and mirrors, a chance to see someone experiencing the same issues as them or a chance to try and understand what it is like to experience those issues, walking in their shoes.

Back in 2011 in my PhD, the research I did highlighted how important it was that young adult fiction continued to cover challenging subjects. The thesis looked at the representation of sex, drugs and alcohol in young adult fiction, but I believe it is so much more, covering many more difficult and sensitive subjects, and not restricted to young adult fiction. Philip Pullman has previously stated that there are some themes too large for adult fiction and can only be dealt with adequately in children’s fiction while Melvin Burgess also suggests that children can cope with anything as long as it is in context. Both of these have helped me understand so much for many years now.

Melvin Burgess

Philip Pullman

The important phrase there is ‘in context’. I do have an issue when contentious subjects are used for shock value or the scene is just gratuitous. It needs to serve a purpose and be part of the narrative. I have been a little concerned in some areas of Twitter to see a call for some issues to be ‘white-washed out’ and never ever included.  This for me is a problem. The moment you exclude something and refuse to talk about it, there is a risk it will become mysterious and exciting. This creates the exact problem those who wish to 'white-wash' them out have been trying to avoid. The issue suddenly becomes something intriguing. If you include issues in a piece fiction, ensuring it is not sensationalised or glamorised, then it provides an opportunity for dialogue. A chance to discuss these issues in a meaningful way. I personally believe this is important.

More than anything I want to say to people and, in particular, young adult writers, keep writing. Your books make a real difference.

Dr Vanessa Harbour

@VanessaHarbour

www.vanessaharbour.co.uk

http://chaosmos-outofchaoscomesorder.blogspot.com

FEBRUARY'S AUTHOR by Sharon Tregenza

JACOB GRIMM

I need to start this post with a disclaimer because as you all know, Jacob and his brother Wilhelm, weren't the authors of the famous GRIMMS FAIRY TALES, they were the compilers. I thought they were interesting though, so...


Jacob Grimm was born on January 4th, 1785, in Hanau, Germany. He and his younger brother Wilhelm were academics who studied the folklore of their region. The stories were an amalgamation of oral and previously printed fairy tales. 

Jacob (on the right) and Wilhelm Grimm 

The Grimms' Fairy Tales was originally known as the Children's and Household Tales. The stories, which include, 'Sleeping Beauty', 'Snow White' and 'Little Red Riding Hood' have been retold in many different formats over the decades.

Originally the tales weren't meant for children at all. They often contained, sex, incest and violence. 

In 1830, King Ernest Augustus demanded oaths of allegiance from all professors in Gottingen. This included Jacob and Wilhelm who taught Germanic studies.
The brothers refused and they were made to leave the city and branded as political dissidents. They were forced to borrow money from friends to complete their story collection.

The brothers Grimm were buried next to each other in Berlin-Schoneberg, Germany. Two of Wilhelm's sons, were buried next to them.

Five interesting facts about Grimms' Fairy Tales:

1. The first story to be eliminated after the first edition was Hans Dumm, about a man who had the power to make women pregnant just by looking at them.

2. In some early versions Rumpelstiltskin "in his fury seized his left foot with both hands and tore himself in two."

3. In the first Cinderella, the sisters cut off bits of their feet to fit into the slipper and doves peck out their eyes.

4. The Frog King was originally transformed by being thrown against the wall, not kissed.

5. The newest version is 'Philip Pullman's, Grimm Tales for Young and Old.' He also includes some background for each story.

Email: sharontregenza@gmail.com

www. sharontregenza.com

The Trick in the Tale by Steve Gladwin

Part One - The Cannibal Who Didn't Know Any Better

I'm reading Philip Pullman's fascinating essay collection, Daemonic Voices. He has a lot to say about storytelling and the oral tradition and as an ex-teacher who spent years actually telling stories just to entertain his classes, (something which he points out is no longer encouraged by successive governments), he's in a good position to comment on this. I don't agree with absolutely everything he says about the art of storytelling but it got me thinking about advice I would offer any potential storyteller who wants to tell their first stories either just for fun or with a view to making it professionally. I've been a storyteller for over twenty years now and obviously I've learnt a lot, some of which I will pass on in these two blogs. 

So how do you tell stories? Perhaps the reason why nearly all the books about telling stories concentrate on ways of using the stories themselves rather than methods for telling them is because more than most professions the phrase ‘each to their own’ applies. It’s really up to you, but whether or not you want to just entertain a group of friends or your children, or are thinking to seriously think about it as a potential profession, over the next couple of blogs I'm going to run through a few of the ideas I’ve picked up in twenty years of being a storyteller.

But in this first blog I'm actually going to concentrate mainly on learning to tell one story - the all singing, all chomping classic of the title. Before I do however here are some general points

Before you make any kind of start, decide that however and whatever you decide to tell, you’re going to enjoy it. Worthy storytelling done halfheartedly and parrot fashion is no good to anyone. Tell a story because you want to and that means finding the right story for you, especially the right one to start with. Take your time looking through books etc to find the right story. Any storyteller will tell you that the first story you find to tell, (or if you attend a workshop or something similar, which you might be given to tell), can be important to you for the rest of your life, especially if you do choose to go into it professionally. The first story I was given was  The Juniper Tree, and although it’s one of the darkest of all tales, I still tell it and continue to find the light in it as well as the dark.

The other reason for spending time looking through stories is that not only do you get some idea of the range available, (something which can also be a bit daunting), but next time you go back to that book it will hopefully not just be as someone who’s told one story, but feeling like a storyteller.

It's best to choose something neither too long or too short. About ten minutes is fine, but you don’t want it too unwieldy for a first attempt or almost told before you’ve started it.

Read it through no more than a couple of times, and read it as you’d read anything else rather than thinking you have to remember it.

Now when you’ve done that there comes the most important part. You need to remember the basic sequence of the story and feel increasingly confident that it’s in the right order. Don’t focus on detail yet because if you look at your average folk or fairy-tale, you’ll find there’s hardly any. That’s because the story is everything and all most people want to hear. You can embellish all you like later but for now make sure you know the sequence.

The way storytellers often practice doing this is through a method called the 'bones.' For example say your story has twelve things happen in it and you’ve memorised them.

So for the purposes of this exercise let's take a story and demonstrate how it's bones, which in this case is the one below,

A Fisherman makes a man out of clay.

His Wife warns him that the Clay Man will eat them.

The Clay Man eats the fisherman and his wife and their fishing nets.

The Clay Man meets and eats two girls on the lane, carrying milk  

The Clay Man meets and eats two old ladies gathering blackberries.

The Clay Man meets and eats old man at the river repairing canoe.

The Clay Man meets and eats two lumberjacks and their fallen trees.

The Clay Man sees a little elk at the top of a hill.

The Clay Man tells the little elk he will eat him too.

The Little elk tells the Clay Man to open his mouth wide so he can jump in.

The Little elk runs down the hill, butts the Clay Man in the stomach and he shatters.

Out of the Clay Man’s stomach come –

the fisherman and his wife and their nets, the two girls and their milk, the two old ladies with their baskets of blackberries, the old man and his canoe, and the two lumberjacks and their fallen trees.

As a reward the people make the elk a pair of special golden antlers. 

This is the story of the Sami people called The Clay Man and the Golden Antlered Elk and you can find it in, among other places, a wonderful collection called 'The Sun Maiden and the Crescent Moon, Siberian Folk-Tales by James Riordan. I used the basic bones method above but I actually prefer to think of a story more like a washing line. This is because on your average washing line you're likely to find articles of all shapes and sizes, so I like to think of big incidents like a sheet or a shirt with small socks and pants the not so important bits in between. 

Image From The Rutland Reader

This is because your average story has a lot of run-on or repetition, of which this story is a classic example There are also say countless stories in which there are ‘magical three’. You don’t want to be that detailed all three times or your audience will lose focus, so usually you spend more time on the first task or peril, not as much on the second and hardly anything on the third, (or you might, if you prefer, put the latter two the other way round).

Anyway here’s our Clay Man story in washing line form.

A Fisherman makes a man out of clay.

His Wife warns him of the danger.

The Clay Man eats the fisherman and his wife and their fishing nets.

He goes on to the lane.

The Clay Man meets and eats two girls carrying milk on the lane, and eats them.

He goes out into the country.  

The Clay Man meets and eats two old ladies gathering blackberries.

He goes down by the river.

The Clay Man meets and eats an old man at the river who is repairing his canoe and smoking his pipe.

He goes into the woods.

The Clay Man meets and eats two lumberjacks and their fallen trees.

He goes to the bottom of the hill.

The Clay Man sees a little elk at the top of hill.

The Clay Man tells the little elk he will eat him too.

The Little elk tells the Clay Man to open his mouth wide so he can jump in.

The Little elk runs down the hill, butts the Clay Man in the stomach and he shatters.

Out of the Clay Man’s stomach come –

the fisherman and his wife and their nets, the two girls and their milk, the two old ladies with their baskets of blackberries, the old man and his pipe and canoe, and the two lumberjacks and their fallen trees.

As a reward the people make the elk a pair of special golden antlers.

 

Of course you’ll notice that this almost doubles the ‘bones’ count and you may even be out of pegs! Also as you get closer to the end there’s less run-off.

Thanks to Wikipedia

With this story I also encourage a lot of audience participation, so I’ll need some help with the noises the Clay Man makes like so –

Slurp. Pop. Slurp. Pop. Slurp. Pop.

The slurp speaks for itself but the pops use that mouth popping sound I’ve never been able to do, so I have to get the audience to do it for me!

I also get them to join in with the following after the Clay Man has helped himself each time.

‘But it wasn’t his fault, because he’d only been created to do one thing and that was to eat. BUT HE WAS STILL HUNGRY.

So here’s the story frame as it stands now.

A Fisherman makes man out of clay.

His Wife warns him of danger.

Slurp. Pop x 3

The Clay Man eats the fisherman and his wife and their fishing nets. Yum. Yum.

‘But it wasn’t his fault, because he’d only been created to do one thing and that was to eat. BUT HE WAS STILL HUNGRY.

Clay Man meets two girls on the lane, carrying milk

Slurp. Pop x 3.

He gobbles them up. Yum Yum.

‘But it wasn’t his fault, because he’d only been created to do one thing and that was to eat. BUT HE WAS STILL HUNGRY.

The Clay Man meets two old ladies each carrying a basket and gathering blackberries.

Slurp. Pop x 3.

He gobbles them up.Yum Yum.

‘But it wasn’t his fault, because he’d only been created to do one thing and that was to eat. BUT HE WAS STILL HUNGRY.

The Clay Man meets an old man at the river repairing his canoe with pine tar while smoking his pipe.

Slurp. Pop x 3

He gobbles him up, and his pipe, and his canoe. Yum Yum.

‘But it wasn’t his fault, because he’d only been created to do one thing and that was to eat. BUT HE WAS STILL HUNGRY.

The Clay Man meets two lumberjacks eating lunch in the forest, by their fallen trees. One has peanut butter sandwiches and lemonade and the other cheese and pickle and coffee.

Slurp. Pop x 3

He gobbles up both of them, both the fallen trees and their sandwiches and drinks. Yum Yum.

‘But it wasn’t his fault, because he’d only been created to do one thing and that was to eat. BUT HE WAS STILL HUNGRY.

The Clay Man sees a Little Elk at the top of the hill. The Little Elk is embarrassed because he hardly has any antlers yet.

Slurp. Pop x 3

The Clay Man tells the little elk he will eat him too.

The Little Elk tells the Clay Man that he’s only young and he wants to do it right, so if the Clay man could please open his mouth wide so he can jump in.

The Little Elk runs down the hill towards the Clay Man's open mouth.Yum. Yum.

But at the last minute he lowers his new little antlers. He butts Clay Man in the stomach, whereupon he shatters.

Out of the Clay Man’s stomach come –

the fisherman and his wife and their nets, the two girls and their milk, with not a drop spilt, the two old ladies with their baskets still full of blackberries, the old man with his pipe and his canoe, and the two lumberjacks and their fallen trees and their uneaten sandwiches and drinks with not a drop spilled.

As a reward the people make the elk a pair of special golden antlers. 

Ever after he will be known as ‘The Golden Antlered Elk, slayer of The Clay Man.

The Golden Antlered Elk by Rose Foran

You’ll see from that final frame that I’ve added the embellishments that make the story more my version, like the slurping noises for audience participation and the drinks and sandwiches which I'd usually get two volunteers to choose. If you should find the James Riordan version or the original Siberian tale, you’ll notice an absence of some of this stuff! You’ll also see here important details like the fact that the little elk is not only very young but rather challenged antler wise!

Having got your tale frame you now need to learn it and there are of course lots of methods for doing that too, but all you need, as with everything else, to do is to follow this very useful piece of advice – ‘if it works for you, it works.’

My preferred method is to learn the first bit of a story and then add a second and then go back to the first bit and add as you go until you have the whole thing, stringing it together also like building a washing line I suppose, which is maybe why the other version works for me.

Even with a story as simple and ‘shaggy-doglike’ as this one you can still add colour, but that colour can come in less obvious forms than the purple of the old ladies blackberries. One of these is the use of a voice for each character; the fisherman’s wife might be quavery, the Clay Man making the very most of his Yum Yums and slurping, (try stopping me!) and the little elk sounding all naive innocence, but with a crafty heart. These are the sort of things a storyteller needs to use to draw up the heart and soul of a story or even dredge up its guts. You might also give the characters lines to speak like the Clay Man might say, 'Little Elk, Little Elk. I'm, going to eat you' etc etc.

And somewhere in the learning process there comes a time when the sense of the learnt and mechanical stops and the natural sense of wearing your new story makes itself apparent. As you become more confident so your story suit begins to come more and more comfortable with you, and more and more you. Now you can stretch your arms out in your story suit, or adjust the trousers and make them looser. Eventually you might even be ready to put a big sweeping cloak over the top of it and go out and kick ass.

Of course before any half successful ass kicking can commence you need to have tried out your story on someone or thing a couple of times, so whether it’s a partner or spouse or pet, or an innocent soft toy who lacks the power to make a swift exit, you need to have a go. You could also record it, but only if you’re comfortable with the sound of your own voice, which many people aren’t, and of course that’s the last thing you want.

But may I push the glories of the great outdoors, especially if you’re lucky enough to live in the country like I do. Within ten minutes I can be beside the river with only a few passing ducks and the odd dog-walker to question my mutterings. If there’s no-one for miles around there’s no place better to exercise your new story suit.

If you don’t have such access it works just as well pacing round whichever convenient room has the stronger floorboards, although it may be best done when your long-suffering nearest and dearest is out.

I could tell you an awful lot more, but I need to leave some for next time I’ll tackle beginnings and endings, building an atmosphere and peopling your own universe and use as my example a far more serious tale. In the meantime my tale-frame should give you all you need to tell someone my own version of that Siberian cannibal classic, The Clay Man and the Golden Antlered Elk, or adapt your own from the same frame. Have fun with your washing line.

My own journey as a storyteller has been enhanced and enriched by the Order of Bards,Ovates and Druids Iona retreat of 1995, the storytelling retreats at Ty Newydd Writing Centre between 2000-2008 with Eric Maddern and Hugh Lupton and multiple storytelling friends, the 'Juniper Tree' storytelling workshop at Bridgwater Arts Centre with Ben Haggerty in 1994, TIr Coch Magical Weekends with Ana Adnan and Professor Ronald Hutton, and the many places and audience with whom I have shared the Clayman.

I'd also like to mention (again!) Channel 4's The Storyteller, if you still haven't seen it and Jane Yolen's Favourite Folk Tales from round the World, the book and series which started it all.  

​

Steve Gladwin - 'Grove of Seven' and 'The Year in Mind'

Writer, Performer and Teacher

Author of 'The Seven' and 'The Raven's Call'

9

SECONDS

ARE YOU UP TO DATE WITH THE MOST AMAZING iissMUSICFACTS?

   

Babies in fiction for children - Clémentine Beauvais

Has everyone read The Book of Dust now?

OK. (Very-minimal-spoiler alert.)

Who else was struck by this beautiful passage?

Not only is this description of a baby extremely beautiful (not to mention the fact that we get to see a baby's daemon for the first time), it is also a very rare instance of a sincerely lovely, unironic description of babies I've ever seen in fiction for children.

I'm talking here of human babies, not animal babies. And note that I say 'for children' rather than 'for teenagers' - there are a number of teenage novels that do show babies with some degree of wonder, especially books about teenage pregnancies. But off the top of my head I can't think of many instances in younger fiction and MG (and I would argue Pullman is older end of MG) where a child protagonist marvels, especially for so long, at the sight of a little baby.

I myself have contributed to the huge literature for young children featuring horrible, disgusting, chaotic, hilarious babies:

Babies are an easy target for children's fiction. It's fairly likely that most young readers will have strong opinions about babies. Many have baby siblings. Many others are often in contact with their friends' baby siblings. Babies are cute, objectively - even, I'd venture to say, to children themselves - but they are also objectively abject in many ways; they monopolise adult attention; they are loud; they do stink sometimes - and any book that confirms that to children, using all the required forbidden vocabulary, is bound to be a winner.

And children, of course - especially young children - have little power over other people. Babies are the only human people who are objectively beneath them in strength, size, articulacy and decision-making power. They can be made fun of quite safely. Again, any book that pokes fun at that crowd will reinforce the sentiment that babies really are extremely inferior to children, and therefore might have a good chance of making children happy.

However, it wouldn't be fair to say that babies in MG or young children's fiction are mostly stupid or silly - often, they're much more ambivalent than that; they're semi-malevolent entities, much too clever for their own good, unpredictable and sassy.

The Rugrats

They know some tricks and can come in handy - the baby, in the first two or three books of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, pretty much exists only in order to bite things:

 But babies are always weird by default; in fiction for young readers, they are shrouded in mystery - the mystery, of course, of their origins.

from Babette Cole's Mummy Laid an Egg

That uncanny aspect of the baby - where the hell did it come from? - but also - what magic, what witchcraft, what otherworldly surrealism is that? - has inspired one of the most beautiful picturebooks in the whole history of the world:

But neither Browne nor Cole take much time over the baby itself. Certainly not to look at it closely - certainly not to admire it, in the kind of delicate, patient, marveling way that Pullman does.

Some books that do that are, rather paradoxically perhaps, books for babies:

In what remains the landmark article on the matter, Perry Nodelman discusses wonderfully the prevalence of images of babies in books for babies, calling their aesthetic of purity and joy 'an ideological statement about what should, in fact, be understood as utopian—about what a baby’s world ought ideally to be and what a baby ought ideally to be'. In many ways Pullman's description of Lyra as a baby - and later on, of the care lavished upon her by the two young heroes, even as they rather improbably have to shield her for days from some seriously angry rain - is almost baby-book-worthy in its Romantic adoration of the baby: it is fully loving, fully enamoured of the perfection of that little body that she has (plus mini-Pantalaimon, who's not bad either).

Other iconic babies, therefore, come to mind of course:

click here for more unprepossessing ones

But baby Jesus isn't exactly a common hero in contemporary MG fiction. Neither are Blake's numerous infants:

Yet it is more in that tradition, clearly, that baby Lyra is to be sought - unsurprisingly, of course, when we know Pullman's background and literary and cultural inspirations. I would say that baby Lyra, and the exquisite softness and loveliness of her descriptions, also hark back to another genre, that of books meant to teach young girls to care for babies. As a child myself, I half-died of proto-broodiness every time I read Martine, petite maman (Martine, little mother), a pretty terrifying example of the category, from 1968:

Just look at that child looking at the baby: an extremely intense example of child-on-infant scopophilia (pleasure of looking), which I would say is really quite rare in most fiction for children today.

Yet of course children today, like all children, ever, do have those moments of absorbed contemplation when they encounter babies, those incomprehensibly small beings. The fascination for babies, for their tiny bodies and impenetrable minds, is not just an adult fantasy. Pullman's text is remarkable, I think, in its sincerity in dealing with that fact - its absolute refusal of ironic detachment when describing an infant through the eyes of a child. He is unafraid of the baby-Jesus connotations, or any of the others I've mentioned here. His choice to make baby Lyra so central and to have Malcolm so earnestly obsessed with her is remarkably uncool. It is also fascinating in itself, and I'd be curious to hear what you think of it.

--------------------------------
Clémentine Beauvais is a children's and young adult author in French and English, as well as a literary translator. Her latest YA novel, Piglettes, is out with Pushkin Press. 

OCTOBER'S AUTHOR by Sharon Tregenza

PHILIP PULLMAN

Philip Pullman was born on October 19th, 1946 in Norwich, England. His father, Alfred Pullman, an RAF pilot was killed in a plane crash in Kenya when Pullman was only seven.

His mother remarried and when they moved to Australia he discovered his love of comic books including Superman and Batman.

From 1957 Pullman was educated in Harlech, North Wales but spent time in Norwich with his grandfather, a clergyman. Here he discovered Milton's "Paradise Lost" which would become such a strong influence for own work "His Dark Materials".

Philip Pullman graduated from Oxford and taught middle school children at Bishop Kirk Middle school in North Oxford. Along with his teaching, he began working on his real love - writing. 

He's been writing full-time now since 1996 and won several prestigious awards for his children's  novels.  His most popular books - the His Dark Materials Trilogy consisting of 'Northern Lights', 'The Subtle Knife' and 'The Amber Spyglass' have between them won the Carnegie Medal, The Whitbread Prize and The Whitbread Book Of The Year Prize.

                         

Philip Pullan's upcoming three-part book series 'The Book of Dust' will be available on his birthday later this month. The first volume is set 10 years before The Northern Lights and again centres on Lyra Belacqua.

Interesting facts about 'His Dark Materials' Trilogy:

1. Pullman was inspired to create the daemons after seeing Leonardo da Vinci's painting Lady With an Ermine.

2. The stage production of his entire Dark Materials had two parts and was 6 hours long.

3. He based the series on the 17th-century poem Paradise Lost. He decided to turn the story on its head when he created his trilogy.

www.sharontregenza.com

What's In A World by Steve Gladwin?

I really feel sorry for people when they say that they either don’t enjoy reading, or find it painful. As someone who has loved reading like the very blood or breath of life for as long as I can remember, the idea of not having it would be a torment. I have been thinking recently about which of three loves – TV and film, music and reading – I could least give up and the answer is obvious. Yes I’d miss music, but I’d always have it in my head, whereas without reading I’d have to create the stories for myself. So OK, as both a writer and a storyteller I should be able to do this, but despite my own recent attempts within the fantasy genre, I could never be Tolkien or Lewis, Susan Cooper or Catherine Fisher, Guy Gavriel Kay or William Horwood. Nor could I write like Philip Pullman, and it is my recent decision to re-read the His Dark Materials books that has led to this blog.

Like most books, a good fantasy can be experienced either through discovering it retrospectively – responding to a recommendation or just not wanting to be left out - or as a brand new sparkling entity. The two feelings you get are similarly thrilling, even if they are at one remove from each other. In the first you can barely contain your enthusiasm at being party to all the secrets and thrills that everyone else has told you about. You might almost call this the ‘it’s all true’ factor. In the second it’s more likely to be a ‘oh this is so wonderful and I have to tell everyone about it.’ I’ve met a number of those in fantasy in my life, of which more in a minute.

Back to the Gladwin household in the early seventies, and much to everyone’s surprise, my father took himself into our front room for three weeks running, stuck on the gas fire and meticulously ploughed through all 1076 pages of The Lord of the Rings. I remember him saying how much he enjoyed it too.

The book  club edition my dad read

What was maybe more unusual was that I decided to read it straight after him, and I was only maybe thirteen. OK, I had read the Hobbit, but apart from that my only experience of fantasy must have been the Narnia books and Alan Garner. I too enjoyed it, and also remember meticulously copying out the entire map of middle earth which was in the above edition. It would however be many years before I repeated the experience.

A couple of years later I tried to write my own fantasy novel which I called ‘The Chronicles of Action’ (pronounced ac-tee-on). It wasn’t a bad premise, the discovery after a dust storm that a desert race had once been a great civilisation. I wrote quite a bit of it, but is was usual with these things soon gave it up as hard work. What I did realise years later was that it was partly a rip-off of an absolutely wonderful series called The Trigan Empire which my sister and I used to read in a children’s magazine called ‘Look and Learn’. My sister Chris and I were riveted by this intergalactic story of men in loin cloths fighting over an empire and couldn’t wait for the next installment. I’ve just checked and apparently you can get the whole thing now as a free download, which is a good job as you should see the prices of the originals on Amazon!

But the LOTR experience must have triggered something, because it was in  my teens that I completely embraced fantasy writing and what was then called Sword and Sorcery in particular. For a good few years my bookshelf was crammed with Corum and Conan, Dorian Hawkmoon and Fafhyd and the Gray Mouser, The Witch World and The Worm Ouroborus, Thongor and Elric. I couldn’t get enough of the stuff. Just recently I re-read Michael Moorcock’s second series about Corum, his Celtic myth inspired hero. It must have been a series I had at the time, but didn’t read, but boy had I missed out! With twenty odd years of Celtic myth loving behind me I now positively reveled in this particular world.

My fantasy reading after that splurge was patchy at best, but I’ll always remember the series of books which reignited it and has remained my favourite set of books of any genre. It was in my early twenties that I discovered Guy Gavriel Kay’s magisterial and haunting trilogy, The Fionavar Tapestry.

I’ve talked about it in previous blogs of course, but for me the series had all the things which no other fantasy novel I have read before or since has quite had. Not the least of these is that it has the sort of depth that less empathetic writers like Robert E. Howard - who created Conan the Barbarian, but who was after all paid to write magazine pulp fiction in the same way Conan Doyle was - or Michael Moorcock, who dreams so well ,but doesn’t always seem to care very much about his characters, can only aspire to. After a rather clunky beginning involving our five heroes and heroines actually getting to Fionavar, the world building itself, its geography, myths and customs, is both carefully and lovingly done.

Guy Gavriel Kay had spent a year helping Christopher Tolkien to prepare The Silmarillion, so it’s hardly surprising that some of this rubbed off so beautifully. In the series Celtic and Norse mix effortlessly, but unlike say CS Lewis, who seemed to take shiny bits of myth from here and there like some out of control literary magpie, (and much to the frustration of his more meticulous friend Tolkien), the mix works and adds to the depth of the whole.

Flash forward a good few years and a friend tells me about this set of children’s books which really aren’t like children’s books at all. I order The Dark Is Rising sequence on his recommendation alone and halfway through Over Sea, Under Stone I am roundly cursing him for getting me to read something which seems so juvenile and with such irritating kids in it. Still I’m nearly forty and maybe they’re not meant for me.

Then I read the second book, The Dark is Rising itself and the whole world changes. It changes so much that I wonder if some other writer hasn’t elbowed the writer of the first book out of the way, and is showing her what she really wanted to write.

In The Dark is Rising in particular there is a sense of the ancient and often uncompromising that seems to permeate the whole book with an ominous foreshadowing which just gets darker and darker as the forces of the Dark themselves close in. In the chapter on children’s writing in his recent wonderful book ‘Landscapes’, Robert Macfarlane calls The Dark is Rising the most eerie book he has ever read and I have to agree, for never before had I felt such a sense of what I can only call book claustrophobia. It seems to be not just the walls that are closing in around the reader, but the whole world.

The sequence which Robert Macfarlane regards as the most memorable is Will’s awakening to his inheritance as an Old One on solstice morning. Here he realises that he has been transported deep into the past where everything is older and more intense and the snowbound landscape far more threatening.. Susan Cooper is expert at taking us in and out of Will’s familiar world and almost dipping us into another one, so that, like a wandering pen nib, we pick up some of the story’s mythic ink and add it to our knowledge. Unlike Lewis, where the story passes back to our own many narnian years later, or Tolkien, where there is no passing into other worlds or tricks with time, Susan Cooper renders time fluid, which has the result of making it all the more unsettling.

Again I could spend a whole blog talking just about that series of books, but I have to move on. My most recent discovery is the Hyddenworld books of William Horwood and like The Dark Is Rising, His Dark Materials and The Fionavar Tapestry, they have had an effect on me as a writer as well as an intermittent reader of fantasy.

In Hyddenworld the smaller race called the Hydden live alongside - and for the most part unnoticed - our own, in much the same way as the Muggles co-exist with the magic folk in Harry Potter. The centre of their version of Englalond is Birmingham which is re-christened Brum and it is that area where the myth that underpins the four books, the smith Beornamund and his making of the gems for his lost love, takes place. But like Middle Earth and Fionavar, the southern counties and Wales of Will Stanton in The Dark is Rising series and the adjusted version of our world in His Dark Materials, William Horwood’s books are about landscape and traveling, as much as anyone else. And as in Philip Pullman’s trilogy, the journey to get there and the reason for going is everything.

Robert E Howard’s great warrior barbarian Conan too bestrode the glittering and always deadly world of the Hyborian age, fighting and wenching and rescuing, overturning plots by a combination of brute force and native cunning and by making the right alliances. Conan is no milk sop of a hero folks. When in the story A Witch Shall be Born, he is crucified by his enemies, he bites the head off the first vulture to dare to go for his eyes, before he is rescued by a former ally. One of the many great disservices done to fantasy by modern cinema was that Big Arnie’s versions made him into little more than a one dimensional pile of muscles. The real Conan has a great deal more to him over and above the muscles and head lopping. He gets to be King of Aquilonia after all, and despite all the usual plots, a good and successful one who holds his throne.

I set out in this blog to try and understand what makes a great fantasy novel for both adults and children. I soon became aware however that all I could write about was the fantasy I myself had loved and experienced.

Then something clicked, and for the first time I was able to see why I have loved most of the fantasy books and series I have read in my life and what they had in common. For there is something that unites Will Stanton, Will Parry and Lyra Belaqua, Conan and Corum, Jack, Catherine and Bedwyn Stort in Hyddenworld, The Fellowship of the Ring on their long road to Mordor, the four Pevensea children in the Narnia Books and the five travelers in the Fionavar Tapestry. I will try to pace out what it is.

Clearly all of them have a destiny, which they are both at first unaware of. and later refuse to accept. Having finally given into that destiny, they gather companions for their quest and they set out through various trials and disappointments, taking and rejecting advice and friendship as they go, until they enter the belly of the beast, fight their battles, suffer their dreadful losses, win - but often at a cost both personal and spiritual - until in the time to come they must decide whether they can live with those memories or not. Having made that decision they may then either symbolically die, or leave the world in which they have journeyed for somewhere calmer.

In other words they are all of them undergoing the Hero’s Journey, as related by Joseph Campbell in his seminal book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. So far so predictable I suppose, because one presumes we authors had that in our DNA long before it became someone’s life's work.

But in my case one of the things my favourites have in common is landscape. Now I love landscape, but I can't pretend to have walked a great deal of it, with the exception of a 49 mile pilgrimage walk on the Pembrokeshire Coast Path. However it does seem that what the fantasy books I have read and loved - from Conan to Corum, Will Stanton to Will Parry, and Bedwyn Stort to the little hobbitses and never forgetting Kim, Jennifer, Dave, Paul and Kevin - have in common is not just the journey, (or more often journeys) themselves, but the lands in which they travel. Whether it be Middle Earth or Brum, the Hyborian Age or Citigazze, the lands and spaces always have thrills and experiences to offer in their own right independent of the characters themselves.

As I was finishing this blog, my partner and I were reflecting on the last, for the most part, very difficult year when an idea lit up like a flame in my mind. 
It is the tradition in a fairy or folk tale to end a story with the phrase 'and they all lived happily ever after'. It's a nice, neat, sealing off device isn't it and we come to expect it. For the most part and even after such horrendous events in something like say The Juniper Tree, with all its child abuse, dismemberment and cannibalism, all can become well just like that.

Of course it can't, because how on earth could a family live with the legacy of those circumstances outside of a fairy tale? There are far too many other examples to mention, but to take just one how, in the story of Tam Lin, after Janet has rescued her husband to be from the Queen of Elf Land, do they then go about living together - the man who has been under enchantment in an enchanted land for seven years and a day and this spoiled if now wiser daughter of an earl who is pregnant with his child. One is after all recovering from years of potential trauma and the other from third degree burns!

Of course the easy answer may be just to say that these are all just fairy stories and therefore make-believe, so how can we expect them to make sense? But equally that isn't good enough.

Surely the people who told these tales - which were after all traditional tales, handed down from mouth to mouth before they were ever collected, published or filmed - were canny enough to understand that some things can never be got over and - as a late friend of mine so wisely said - can only be come to terms with, Perhaps then that neat little ending is in many cases little better than a ' coming to terms'.

'So the little boy, (who had been killed, eaten, resurrected as a magical avenging bird and then brought back to life as himself again), and their father, went back into the their sweet little cottage under the Juniper Tree leaving the smashed corpse of their awful stepmother under the giant mill wheel and they all --- somehow learned to come to terms with it.   

It doesn't quite have the same neat little bow ring to it, does it?

And so in conclusion it's no surprise for me to find that apart from the hero's journey, the landscape and the quest element and the rest of it, the vast majority of the books I've mentioned have a sense of profound loss at the end of them and little choice but for the characters to have to come to terms with all they have endured. Friends, innocence and sometimes a whole way of life have gone, and Jack and Catherine, Will and Lyra, Frodo and Sam, and Kim and Dave now have to adjust to a different kind of life, where memory will always be bitter sweet and the pain of those things they have lost a mere heartbeat away.

Is this why we read these books then, knowing that they will offer us something more mature and searching than fairy stories, knowing as we do that life very rarely is all 'happy ever after'?   

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Steve Gladwin - 'Grove of Seven' and 'The Year in Mind'

Writer, Performer and Teacher

Author of 'The Seven' and 'The Raven's Call'

www.stevegladwin.co.uk