Books for Children and Young Adults
Shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.
Other awards and nominations.
Novels for Older Children
The Changes Trilogy:
The Weathermonger (1968)
Heartsease (1969)
The Devil's Children (1970)
These comprise The Changes trilogy, SF, set in a near-future England in which use of machines is equated with witchcraft. (1970)
I have mixed feelings about these first three books. In the UK four out of five adults who know anything about the field mention them to me first, implying — no doubt unintentionally — that everything since then has been downhill all the way. Many authors, my wife among them, experience the same vexation about successful first books. Harper Collins are about to re-issue my three in the UK with considerable hoop-la. So it goes. On the other hand I recognise that if I were writing them now, with the rest of my work already done, there would be no possibility of my recapturing that well-spring freshness, the writerly innocence, that must have been part of that first appeal, giving readers the impression that here was a new voice.
The Weathermonger sprang from a nightmare (the first chapter is a tidied-up version.) I had lain awake retelling the dream, putting myself in charge of it, outwitting or defeating its monsters, in order to get back to sleep, but instead had spent the rest of the night finishing the story in my head. I then wrote a draft, largely hoping to unblock my first adult book, with which I was then stuck. I did a draft, tidied it and sent it to Collins. I don't recall why I chose them. Julia McCrae replied with a long and detailed letter — professional editing at its ideal best — telling me what was wrong with the book. I took this to be outright trejection, but meanwhile I'd started again on my adult book and didn't get back to The Weathermonger till I'd finished a draft. Meanwhile one of my daughters had told her best friend that I was writing a book, and she'd told her father, Robin Denniston, whom I knew as a fellow-parent at the girls' school. But I wasn't aware that he had recently become managing editor at Hodder and Stoughton and was thinking of starting a children's list. He asked to see my book, so I sent it to him after revising it in the light of Julia's letter. He didn't feel he could launch his list with a book in which Merlin was a morphine addict, and suggested I sent it to Gollancz, who were tolerant of weird stuff. Livia Gollancz accepted it.
It also went the rounds in the US, until Emilie McLeod read it and wrote to me saying she liked it, apart from the morphine, and could I think of something different? I then came up with a solution which I still consider much more satisfactory (though Harper Collins have decided to stick to the morphine for their new edition.) I don't think that either solution, though adequate for The Weathermonger itself, is sturdy enough to carry the full expectations of resolution built up over the trilogy of The Changes.
It's interesting to me that though throughout the series the good guys are those who are trying to counter the anti-machine madness, The Weathermonger, and therefore the series, ends on a highly ambivalent note, questioning whether the heroics have in fact been for the good. I've since done this sort of undercutting, more or less deliberately, again and again. Apparently that's how I think.
A lesser persistent quirk is foreshadowed by the plot hingeing in part on Sally's ability to speak Latin. I've never been much good at learning foreign languages, but I must have a hang-up about them, as the theme recurs one way or another in getting on half my books. It was years before I realised this.
I'd no expectation of continuing the series, or even writing another children's book, but I'd greatly enjoyed the straightforward story-telling, and the change of voice from that of my adult book, and I felt there was more to be done with my invented England. My original notion concerned a gang of kids getting an old trawler going, somewhere like Hull, in order to escape, but the technicalities would have been way beyond me, and anyway I wanted to write about the landscape round Painswick, in the West Cotswolds, which had long been my own personal Great Good Place, so I set Heartsease there, simplified the trawler down to a tug and gave myself an adult American, immune (very questionably) from the Changes effect, to understand the technicalities. The adventures work OK, I hope, but I imagine that the real energies of the book derive from my love of that area.
Having dealt with the end and middle of the Changes, it seemed logical to complete the job by writing about the start in The Devil's Children. To spark the necessary conflicts I provided a band of Sikhs, immune to the anti-machine effect. (Obviously they had to be good guys, but I was aware even then that there was something a bit iffy about suggesting that that sort of racial difference was a possibility Let's hope the surface good intentions make up.) Felpham is Crondall, on the Hampshire/Surrey borders — again a place where I had been happy. Nicky's spiritual journey, from defensive hardness after the trauma of separation from her family to the rediscovery of love and trust, now seems central to the book but was in fact a last-minute add-on, prompted by a suggestion from Emilie McLeod. This is a more willed book than its predecessors, which had come flooding out of my unconscious like a mountain spring.
There are minor incoherences between the three books (surely weathermongers would have been mentioned, at least in Heartsease) caused largely by the order in which they were written. When Gollancz published an omnibus edition to coincide with a TV adaptation, I did my best to account for these in linking passages between the three episodes.
The Changes Trilogy
Reissue: March 2003
Collins Voyager
The Weathermonger
Paperback (UK)
ISBN: 0007140312
Heartsease
Paperback (UK)
ISBN: 0007140347
The Devil's Children
Paperback (UK)
ISBN: 0007140355
The Changes Original Publication:
Dell Books
December 1991
Paperback (US) ISBN: 0440504139
Excerpt
Emma Tupper's Diary
Sensible Emma Tupper stays with her wild Scots cousins, in whose private loch there is rumoured to be a monster. They also own the duplicate of one of the earliest submarines, in which they discover the reality behind the rumours, and then have to decide whether to exploit their find or conceal it and protect its precarious existence. (1970)
For some reason this was great fun to write, and I'm told that comes through. It continues the ecological themes of The Changes, and its climax is not the final derring-do exploit but the family debate about what should now be done with the discovery.
The Dancing Bear
Historical. Byzantine slave boy journeys into Hun territory to rescue captured daughter of the house, taking the trained household bear with him to act as a kind of passport (everyone would welcome the entertainment provided bt a dancing bear) as he moves from the dangerous complexities of the city into the equally dangerous simplicities of the nomad Huns. (1972)
This was the first of my books to evolve from a story I'd told my sons to stop them squabbling in the back seat during our weekly commute to and from Hampshire. They'd asked for "a new story, with a big battle in it," and the basic plot evolved itself in about twenty minutes from the start of the journey. I chose the period of the great Emperor Justinian because one year when I was at Eton a last-minute emergency teacher had had to be found to teach us ancient history, and he announced on arrival that the only period he could teach was that of Justinian — five hundred years later than the time of the great classic writers that was all we were supposed to take an interest in. The first we knew of it was when a Humpty-Dumpty-shaped little man waddled in to the classroom, perched himself on the edge of the desk and started telling us in a deep, velvety voice about riots in Byzantium between two religious factions which resulted in a bear-keeper changing sides, so that his daughter, the future Empress Theodosia, became a prostitute in an Aryan brothel and not an Orthodox one. Not the sort of history we'd previously been taught, but enough to make it stick in my mind when Pompey ands Cicero were long forgotten. The teacher was a Belisarius nut — one of Justinian's generals, the greatest soldier ever, his admirers claim — so that that was where the battle came in — though it pretty well dropped out again by the time I wrote the book, because the history didn't fit - though it turned out there had been a Hun raid on Byzantium at exactly the time I'd dreamed one up. (That's a great feeling, inventing something that turns out to be true.)
Excerpt
The Gift
A boy with erratic telepathic powers finds himself in touch with the mind of violent criminal, with whom his irresponsible father is also somehow involved. (1973)
This also evolved out of my schooldays. I read a fair amount of SF, and I'm usually impatient with the stories involving telepathy, because they make it sound useful and controllable, whereas my only probable telepathic experience convinces me that it's neither. This was when were some of us were hanging around, waiting out some delay and playing a numbers game to pass the time. Being show-offs we were using large numbers, but for three or four goes we all knew the chosen number as soon as the chooser said he was ready. Then we got excited and lost it. I think telepathy is like that. It's a knack we mostly suppress, because it's liable to betray our thoughts, but in moments when the conscious mind is distracted it's liable to emerge. But it will always let you down if you try to make use of it.
The Blue Hawk
Set in an imaginary priest-ruled kingdom. A boy priest saves the hawk that is about to be sacrificed to renew the soul of the king, and by that one act brings the whole theocratic structure down. Guardian Award. (1975)
Another told-in-the-car story - yes, there's a battle at the end. I'd already been thinking in a very vague way about those great stacks of special-offer cans you sometimes see in supermarkets, and the impulse to nudge one out and bring the whole pyramid down. Could you do that with a whole society? It would need to be a very rule-dominated one, in which not even the smallest detail could be allowed to change. The obvious thing was an all-powerful priesthood, and something breaking one of its rituals. A boy-priest, therefore, a dramatic ritual, a sacrifice... I don't remember why I chose the hawk. A lot of readers assume it's set in the past, in a sort of imaginary ancient Egypt, but I meant it as Science Fiction, set in the far future, after space travellers have discovered strange powers somewhere out there and trapped them and brought them back to earth to harness them for human uses. If you choose you can read it as a parable about the discovery of nuclear energy.
Excerpt
Annerton Pit
A blind boy journeys north with his elder brother to search for their grandfather who has disappeared on a ghost-hunting trip. (1977)
This arose from a wish to write about a strong relationship between a child and someone old. (Making this list I see I've done the same thing several times since, but this was when I was only fifty, so it isn't something that started bugging me when I myself got old.) It had to be an adventure, of course, with the adult knowing what to do but too feeble to do it, so that the child has to. I felt the child must have some sort of disability, and chose blindness, and then became interested in the stylistic problem of writing a whole book without using any visual images, except when the boy himself is speaking. E.g. he can say "I'll be seeing you," but I can't say "He had a bright idea." I tried to do it so that no one would notice - the opposite, for instance, of Henry Green's Blindness, where he uses phrases like "The purring mahogany table," and so draws attention to the business of non-seeing. Jake's never known anything else, and so takes it for granted. But I now think I made him a a good deal too capable, too much of a Superblindboy.
Tulku
Set at the time of the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1900. Theodore, the son of American missionaries, escapes when the rebels destroy his father's settlement and falls in with a foul-mouthed female ex-music-hall star, now a plant-hunter. They flee together into Tibet, and reach a major Tibetan temple. With his strict Calvinistic upbringing Theodore is at first repelled and horrified by lamaistic Buddhism, but eventually comes to terms with it. Whitbread Prize; Carnegie Medal. (1979)
This was yet another car story, again arising from a demand for a new one, with a battle in it. I wondered what on earth new kind of battle I could come up with, and then I remembered that in Rudyard Kipling's Kim the old lama carries a scar on his forehead, that he'd got as a young man when he and his comrades had gone out to fight the monks of a neighbouring monastery over a bit of land, using their long iron pen-cases as swords. OK, a battle with pen-cases. So how do we get Our Hero into the forbidden territory of Tibet? I remembered that there'd been a major uprising in China against foreign influence around 1900, called the Boxer Rebellion, in which a lot of Christians had been killed. So Our Hero escapes from them and falls in with a with a plant-hunter — I'd just got seriously interested in gardening and knew that there were some of them in South West China at the time - and the Boxers chase them into Tibet. I don't remember what happened after that, because the book changed course almost as soon as I'd started. The plant-hunter was just about to appear on the scene. Theodore was standing on the edge of the ravine looking back at the smoking ruins of the settlement. He heard the plod of hooves on the road behind him. A that point I said "This guy's going to be a snore — I think I'll make him a woman." So Theodore turned, and there was Mrs Jones, ready to gallop away with the book, and win the Carnegie Medal for me.
The Seventh Raven
Posh children's opera group is held hostage by South American guerrillas in West London. 2001 Phoenix Award (1981). Acceptance speech.
This was based upon our local children's opera, in the bit of London where I used to live, just west of the location of Notting Hill, for anyone who's seen the film, and much like that. They roped me in to direct the operas for a couple of years, but I was hopeless at it so they demoted me to stage manager. I had a terrific time. It was immensely hard work. I used to lose several pounds each time, and I don't have a lot to spare. Major hijackings were just beginning, and it struck me what a worthwhile target a churchload of kids — a lot of them with influential parents — might make. Despite that I wanted my story light-hearted, and full of the excitement and gusto of our operas. I was totally thrilled when twenty years later my story won the Phoenix Award, which is given each year to a book which didn't win any major prizes when it first came out, but the committee thinks is still worth something.
Healer
Teen-age boy rescues younger girl with apparent healing powers from exploitative stepfather. (1983)
Though I'm a sceptic about most such things, I think there's enough evidence to persuade me that "healing", by laying on of hands or whatever, exists as a phenomenon. But at the same time I think that any attempt to use this as evidence for any systematised form of religion or more general belief is likely to be nonsense, and also likely to be exploited by charlatans or semi-charlatans for profit, and that's what I wanted to write about here. Pinkie's stepfather is a semi-charlatan — I wouldn't have been interested in an out-and-out charlatan. He wants to use her to get money and power and admiration, but at the same time he hopes that if pushes her far enough he can discover the innermost secrets of the spiritual world. There's a similar figure and set-up in one of my crime novels, Sleep and his Brother.
Eva
Future world, grossly overpopulated. A girl, horrendously injured in a road accident, is given the body of chimpanzee to replace her human body and let her continue living. But her new body brings with it elements of the chimpanzee nature to which she then has to adjust, and at the same time cope with the attempts of powerful commercial interests to exploit her unique status. (1988)
Eva is the winner of the 2008 Phoenix Award.
80% of my mail, almost all of it from the USA, is about this one book. This baffles me.
I had no intention of writing Eva when I fed the first blank sheet into my typewriter. After my failure to do what I'd originally intended with Merlin Dreams (see below), I still wanted to explore the development of one of our major myths, and thought I'd try and do something with the various First Women that people have imagined at different times — Eve of course, and the shadowy figures of classical myth, and as many of the other cultural traditions I could find and work in, as well as "African Eve", the single unknown ancestress whom mitochondrial research suggests must have existed in Africa a few hundred thousand years ago. (This was news at the time, and the papers were full of her, though of course they got a lot of the science wrong.)
I set my framework story in the future, when the Eve myth would have dwindled to a cheap TV cartoon. My heroine was going to have to time-travel to meet these women, (one woman, really, repeated and repeated) but I didn't want a time machine because they tend to take over. Dreams are unsatisfying, so the best I could think of was a coma. A scientist talked me out of the bit of fake genetics I'd dreamed up, about the human genome starting to break down. I now wish I'd stuck with it, but perhaps the car crash was simpler to handle. My heroine needed to be familiar with apes, so that she could relate to the proto-ancestress she was going to call on, millions of years back. And so on.
I had very little by way of plot, so to start myself thinking about it I settled down to get the set-up written, this kid waking up from her coma...
I'd done about half a dozen pages, messing around, waiting for something to suggest itself, when my body gave a violent physical twitch, and my hair seemed to stand on end. My God, I thought, I know what they've done to her! And from then on I was writing Eva.
After that my whole attention went into getting the story and idea to work. The stuff about animal rights, for instance, is there because it is necessary to the story and so has to be honestly dealt with, because it's a subject of serious moral importance. I agree with the line I took, though I'd like to have given the other side a bit more of a say, but it isn't why I wrote the book.
Excerpt
AK
Peace is declared after a long civil war in a Central African country. Paul, a boy soldier attached to one of the guerrilla bands, is told to bury his beloved AK rifle so that he can go to school and start to live a normal life. His group commander joins the new government, but soon there is a military coup and he is thrown into prison. Paul digs up his gun and travels to the capital to try to get him out. Whitbread Children's Award. (1990)
No such choice makes sense, but if I were forced to choose I would say this is probably my best book — though I still know what's wrong with it. I was listening to a programme on the BBC World Service about the children who were being recruited or kidnapped to join guerrilla groups in central Africa. I heard someone say "Even a hardened government soldier may hesitate a fatal half second before he guns down a child." As with Eva, the hair on my nape stood on end. I knew I had to write about that.
I wasn't trying to tell readers what ought to be done about child guerrillas, or the tragic mess that parts of Africa were, and still are, in. That isn't fiction's job. Fiction is a gateway for the imagination. I was trying to help people understand what it might feel like to be a child like that in the middle of a mess like that. Without that kind of imaginative understanding, nothing that anyone can do to help will be any use, however wonderful their intentions, however great their generosity.
My original idea was that the boy should smuggle the gun in to his leader who would then shoot his way out while the boy and his allies created a diversion. But more and more as I wrote I realised that the nature of the African tragedy was such that I couldn't write yet another book in which the cure for violence is yet more violence, so I was forced to find a different solution. It depends on a set of lucky coincidences, but it's time Africa had some luck.
The alternative endings are no kind of literary trick. Again, they are a response to what has been happening in Africa over the past thirty years. There is more than enough to despair about, but there has to be room for hope.
Excerpt
A Bone from a Dry Sea
Alternate chapters tell the linked stories of a young female humanoid who is a remote ancestress of modern humans, and a contemporary British girl who visits her father on an archaeological dig in East Africa. (1992)
Years ago, some time in the '60s, I imagine, when I was still writing topical verse for Punch, I read a short newspaper article about a scientist who had noticed strange similarities between humans and some of the sea-mammals, otters and seals and so on. This wasn't his field, but he'd given a lecture suggesting that our own early ancestry might have included a semi-aquatic phase, and evolved traits some of which we still inherit. I wrote as sonnet about this in the magazine. The theory was ridiculed by the professional palaeontologists, but the feminist writer Elaine Morgan was intrigued by aspects of the theory that bore on her interests, and published a very successful book, The Descent of Woman, using the theory for her cause but at the same time explaining and developing it. She has since written several others with most of the explicit feminism left out, to rather less ridicule and the occasional grudging admission that she has at least raised points that need to be seriously answered.
Thirty-odd years after I'd written my sonnet I must have read a review of one of Morgan's books and decided to try writing a novel about it. I started straight in, setting the thing up with a bit of derring-do adventure involving the young female sea-person, half way between ape and human, who was going to be my heroine. I then realised that since this was long before the development of language there weren't going to be any conversations, which was going to make the book difficult both to write and to read. The obvious answer was to alternate the long-ago chapters with modern ones about a girl who goes on a dig with her palaeontologist father, and they eventually discover what the reader realises are fossils from the long-ago chapters.
Then, as I wrote, the chapters began to link with and illuminate each other, so that it now looks as if this was what I'd intended from the start. I think it works a dream, but it was pure accident.
Shadow of a Hero
A British girl whose parents have emigrated from a minor Balkan racial group returns to her homeland and is caught up in turmoil following collapse of communism. (1993)
This book belongs with AK, in that it's an attempt to help people understand what it might feel like to be involved in a particular kind of dangerous and possibly murderous political mess, in this case the mayhem in the Balkans that followed the break-up of communism. How could ordinary people, Europeans, apparently much more similar to ourselves than the Africans of AK, nurture such hatreds and fears that they were prepared to go out and massacre complete villages of neighbours they'd lived alongside in apparent peace for a whole generation? This was going to involve me in a lot of political exposition, so (as with A Bone from a Dry Sea, but the other way round) I inserted a set of legends about a national hero between the main chapters to provide a bit of derring-do action. I've just been re-reading it, looking for a bit to excerpt, and was pleased to find that it doesn't yet read like ancient history.
The Kin
The adventures of four early human children, just after the development of spoken language. The group to which they belong has been driven from its ancestral lands and has to travel through unfamiliar terrain in search of somewhere else to live. (Illustrated by Ian Andrew. Originally published in the US as four linked novels, Suth, Noli, Po, and Mana, but in the UK as a single volume, The Kin, and later as four separate paperbacks.) (1998)
Though I now think of the single-volume edition as one of my more satisfactory books, I almost didn't write it at all. Judy Donnelly, a New York editor who I'd never worked for, had enjoyed A Bone from a Dry Sea, so when she happened to meet my London agent she asked him if I'd write three shorter books for younger kids on the same kind of theme. I wasn't keen - I felt I'd already done as much as I wanted about that. I didn't want to get labelled as a chimp-and-early-human specialist. But my previous adult novel had gone irretrievably off the rails, and much the same happened to Robin, and though I was now working on another one money was suddenly short. My agent said "What about Judy's offer? I think I can talk her up." The talking-up turned the three books into four with a generous advance, but I said I didn't want the money or a contract till I'd done enough to show Judy a brick, so that she could see what the finished house might be like, and also to persuade myself that the thing was possible. My brick became the first draft of Suth.
Meanwhile my long-time London publisher, Gollancz, having been swallowed some years earlier by a larger firm, found themselves merged with a yet larger one who weren't interested in doing kidbooks. Without consulting any of the authors they sold their list, lock, stock and barrel, to a fourth publisher. I was miffed, to say the least, so my agent said "No thanks" for me and sent my brick to Marion Lloyd at Macmillan.
Marion, with very little to go on as far as I could see, decided that she had something special on her hands, which, if it was handled right, might win the Carnegie Medal. She wanted to start with a single big blockbuster volume, lavishly produced, and only later come out with the four separate sections as paperbacks. I was dead against this. It wasn't what I had in mind, I'd no idea what was going to happen in the remaining three sections, my confidence had been badly shaken by what had happened with my earlier adult novel, and I wanted to get on with my new one. Besides, I wasn't even sure that I could finish the project, and as for winning the Carnegie, that was cloud-cuckooland. But in the end I gave in, and my goodness, did Marion turn out to be right!
I'd begun Suth, bluntly, as a pot-boiler, but after the first three or four chapters I'd become interested in what I was doing for its own sake. I rewrote it with increasing excitement about the possibilities that lay ahead, though I still had very little idea about what was actually going to happen. There were already five main characters. Four of them would in turn be the viewpoint figure of each of the books. Suth had already emerged as the practical one, and Noli the visionary, so Po was going to be the boy with dreams of glory, which left Mana to be the homebody. Tinu, the fifth, was the shy and inarticulate genius.
(Po, by the way, became Ko in England, to avoid confusion with the Teletubby. Dumb, I thought, but I decided I preferred Ko anyway.)
My only other briefing from Judy had been "Short sentences and lots of adventures." With five stock central characters this doesn't sound like the recipe for a novel of much depth or richness, but almost at once fascinating possibilities emerged. I didn't want to repeat what I'd done in A Bone from a Dry Sea, so I chose a period early in the development of language. There were a variety of non-speaking but otherwise human-like creatures around at this time. In the very first chapter, solely to get the story going, Noli had had a dream in which the group's totemic spirit had appeared to her and told her to leave the others and go back and rescue some children who'd been left behind.
Again, just to deal with the obvious question of what this totem represents, I'd interspersed the people's own Creation-and-fall myth between the chapters of adventures. I wanted to know how my characters thought and felt and believed. I became aware that though they seem to us to come almost at the beginning of human history, they are in their own minds the inheritors of a rich oral tradition going back unknown generations. As they move into new territory (which I had them do primarily to increase adventure-possibilities) they meet some of the non-speakers and, since for them speech is what distinguishes people from animals, they have to face the question of whether these creatures are indeed fellow humans.
All this — the nature of language, the early stirrings of religion, the structure of societies, our separateness from other animals, and so on — may seem more than enough for an adventure novel to digest, but I didn't have to work it in. Almost all my attention was engaged in getting my characters from one adventure to the next, and then making the adventures work, but with little effort on my part these themes threaded tactfully in, providing a kind of moral girderwork to support the surface excitements. And at the same time what I continued to think of as four separate books (which they were still going to be in the US) somehow developed a coherent drive and architecture. This, together with my own unawareness that it was happening, is epitomised for me in the last four words of the book, which seem to sum the whole thing up, and be the point for which I had been aiming all along. I thought of them only five or six pages before I reached them.
Half way through, though we were all anxious for me to get on with the job, I decided that my appetite for short sentences had become jaded, so I took three months off to rewrite the novel that became Some Deaths before Dying, and then came back The Kin with renewed energy. This was just as well because Marion had discovered that the book wouldn't be eligible for the Carnegie if any part of it had been published abroad more than three months before it was available here. The Americans were still aiming to publish the four sections separately and were almost ready to go with Suth. Generously, they delayed their publication date for a month to help. Marion advanced hers by a year. I decided I could just about cope with that, and in fact finished with time to spare. It was all there, waiting to come. (In the fifty-odd books I've written this has only happened to me once before, towards the end of Heartsease. Normally I'm a steady accumulator, not a streamer-out.) I wrote the Mana section in six weeks, some of the chapters on holiday with the family. They went exploring, while I sat in our room all morning, tapping away on my little Olivetti.
Well, we made it. The book looked marvellous, with wonderful illustrations by Ian Andrew. It had great reviews, sold well, and got on the Carnegie short list, though it didn't win. (I've had nine books on the short list over the years, and this was the only time I truly minded not winning.)
Its fate in the US couldn't have been more different. A few ago I was sent proofs of my entry for one of the Gale Research reference books about Children's Literature. It included a supposedly complete bibliography and a several-page essay on my work. Neither even mentioned The Kin. Almost from the moment of their publication the books had virtually disappeared. I suppose the four-volume format was mainly to blame for this, combined with the less-than-striking appearance of the books themselves. And the fact that Judy Donnelly had lost her job in yet another of those publishing upheavals (I had four separate publishers shot under me in the space of a few years) cannot have helped. Though she stayed on in an advisory role and did a marvellous job editing the book (by the end of the process both Marion and Judy seemed to know it far better than I did) it had always been very much her book, and maybe she no longer had the kind of leverage inside the organisation to help it along.
And then a wonderful thing happened. I was at the American Library Association conference in Atlanta, because The Ropemaker was a runner-up for the Prinz Prize. Nancy Paulsen of Penguin Putnam had recently published Water (see below) and I did a signing session for her. I'd forgotten that Penguin Putnam were the firm that had swallowed my original publishers, so I told her with no ulterior motive about my disappointment over the US version of The Kin. It turned out that she'd already been thinking about having another go at it, and then several librarians showed up at my table with copies of the Macmillan edition for me to sign, bought on Amazon UK. By the end of the session it seemed almost settled that Nancy was going to re-issue it in that form, and put an effort behind it so that it didn't seem merely a re-issue. And now, lo and behold, it happened. I'm as pleased as Punch.
Touch and Go
The Lion Tamer's Daughter
Two novellas and two short stories with modern supernatural themes. (1999)
Published as two volumes in the UK, with Lion-tamer separate, but all four together in the US. It's strange to me that considering how recently I wrote them I remember so little about the process. The Spring came several years ago, in response to a commission for a creepy story. I'd already had a very vague idea about the old tale of the Green Children, and doppelgangers had come into it, but it changed a lot in the writing. The other three I did to give myself a break when I was stuck in a longer book. Touch and Go is set in a house that had been in my family for nearly three hundred years. I lived there for part of the war, and remember the problems of black-out on those enormous windows. I think I started Checkers as something to pass the time on a long flight — hence the claustrophobic effect, perhaps. Lion-tamer began from a loose rottweiler coming stalking towards us, head lowered, hackles bristling, while we were crossing a field with our dogs. It was fun to write.
The Ropemaker
High fantasy novel about people from a simple and unmagical valley journeying through an all-controlling and magic-riddled empire to find the magician who can renew the spells that keep their valley safe. Michael L. Printz honor book (2001); Carnegie medal shortlist.
This was, effectively, another car story, though I told it on foot. For several of our daily walks with the dogs Robin had been brooding about something that had been bothering her, and eventually she asked me to tell her a story to take her mind off it. I thought for a bit and came up with one about a couple of kids getting back into the middle ages and rescuing a woman from being drowned as a witch - standard run-of-the-mill fantasy, OK for what it was, but no more. It didn't stop the brooding, so I began on another. I thought I'd have a go at Robin's own genre, high fantasy. Unicorns are an obvious prop, so that's where I started (Robin told me later that she detests the unicorn myth, with its utterly passive female unquestioningly abetting the male destroy this marvellous creature.)
This lasted a number of walks, and acquired a book-like dynamic of its own, so much so that I found myself at other times in the day thinking about the expanding possibilities of what might happen next, and discovering places where I could re-use as functioning machinery some of the standard magical props I'd thrown in earlier as decoration. Original elements occurred to me along with the stock stuff, and when I finished Robin told me she thought I had a book there. I thought so too, but I put the writing off, knowing from the first that it wasn't going to be easy. I'd been there before with my other car stories.
There are two main problems with car stories. First, you already know most of what is going to happen and you no longer have the excitement of discovery to spur you on. Few surprises wait for you round the next bend. (Mrs Jones in Tulku is very much the exception, and it's significant that she, for most readers, provides the central energies of the book.)
Secondly, you find that in telling the story aloud you've got away with all sorts of stuff that won't stand up in print. You are dealing with a construction kit some of whose parts are missing while many of the rest don't fit, and when you attempt to adapt one to do so, it distorts its fit with something else, while the whole thing seems to lack any internal girderwork to support the structure. I remember the struggle I had with The Blue Hawk, and how late in the rewriting I was able to explain satisfactorily to myself what the Gods actually were and hence how social structure of the Kingdom had come into being and was now breaking down. I don't have to explain such things in detail, but the reader has to believe that I could, if asked - I wish I thought Tolkien had a coherent idea of the economics of Middle-earth.
I had this second problem with Ropemaker, and in spades, because in high fantasy you have two sets of coherence to get right.
"The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same,"
And second, the equally demanding world of magic, which may at first glance seem totally liberating, but in fact is just as constricting in its own way as realism. And then these two worlds have to mesh at the places where they touch. Between these two demands there seems to be less and less space for the story to work itself out, though of course it can be even more satisfying for the reader when it does so with apparently effortless ease. I'm still too conscious of the problems I had to be able to tell whether I got that right. Robin likes this story a lot, she says.
The Tears of the Salamander
Historical fantasy. Set in 18th Century Italy. A young chorister, orphaned by a fire in his parents' bakery, is rescued from the cathedral authorities by his mysterious uncle and taken to live in their ancestral home in Sicily, on the slopes of the great volcano, Etna. There he finds that his uncle is Master of the Mountain, with magical powers that he too has inherited and must now learn to use if he is to survive. (UK May 2003, US August 2003)
A spin-off from Elementals. It was intended for the Fire volume, but kept getting longer. A good example of the story taking control, and it doesn't just happen to me. Robin's first attempt at a fire story exploded into a full-length adult fantasy, Sunshine.
Excerpt
The Gift Boat
US Title: Inside Grandad
Set in a small Scottish harbour. Grandad is putting the finishing touches to the model fishing boat he is making for Gavin's birthday, and Gavin has just decided to call it Selkie, when the old man has a serious stroke. Before he can recover he must understand what has happened to him... But how to get through to him? Gavin doesn't really believe in the Selkies, the mischievous seal people who are said to be able to pass for human, but in desperation he calls to them for help. Perhaps he has offended them by using their name without their permission...
Rather an intense little story, but not as grim as it sounds, and with a good weepy happy ending. (Robin read the first draft and suggested I lighten it up a bit. Made a lot of difference.) Two of my grandsons live in Stonehaven, just south of Aberdeen. I wanted a real-world setting, as real as I could make it, because I wanted Gavin actually to experience, or think he was experiencing, what Grandad was going through inside his comatose body, and for this I needed the Selkies, or at least the possibility of the Selkies — even Gavin isn't sure — to provide a sort-of seepage of fantasy into the real world. In this way it harks back to some of my earlier books, such as Healer and The Gift
Excerpt
Angel Isle
(Published in UK November 2006; USA October 2007)
Sequel to The Ropemaker, which finishes with an epilogue set twenty generations after the main story, describing runaway Saranja returning to Woodbourne, only to find it gutted by fire after a raid by the northern horsemen, because the magic that protected the Valley has now collapsed. The prologue to Angel Isle is identical, and the story is again a quest, but one which turns out very differently.
From the Author:
I'm a much slower writer than I used to be, and I cursed myself many times for tackling something of this size at my age, but I'm glad I did. The Ropemaker doesn't seem to me to have much by way of a central moral spine, but this story seemed to grow one as it went along. It is about the corruption of power, both in the symbolic form of the magical power that once again has total control of the Empire, and also as political domination, the Empire itself being under attack by an aggressive, scientifically advanced mercantile confederation from overseas. The war in Iraq was just getting under way when I started, and there are some deliberate parallels with that, in the mutual incomprehension of the two sides, but that's not all the book is about. Despite the effort it was in the end fun to write, and I hope it's a fun read.
— Peter Dickinson
Reviews
"In this sequel to Printz Honor Book The Ropemaker (2001), Dickinson returns to his beautifully created, four-dimensional universe for another perilous adventure. ... Perhaps most compelling of all, however, is 12-year-old Maja, whose tribulations as she matures and learns to use her sensitivity to magic are thoroughly believable. The characters are as well developed as those in the first book, and the complex, multilayered story includes more heady explorations of time and magic, joined here by thoughts on the meaning of true love. This is sure to be a hit with fans of the earlier book."
— Sally Estes
Booklist
October 15, 2007
"In a land dominated by the Watchers, magicians who have joined themselves into one soulless will, young Maja undertakes a quest.... Dickinson keeps readers engaged with his original variation on how magic works; political complications,... and Maja's own developing romantic attraction to the much-older Ribek. Throughout, the author's command of language treats the reader to robust descriptions and rolling narration, making the whole a bravura performance of created worlds and rock-solid plotting sure to please fantasy lovers."
— anita l. burkam
Horn Book Magazine
November/December 2007
Read an Excerpt
Wendy Lamb Books
October 9, 2007
ISBN-10: 0385746903
ISBN-13: 978-0385746908
Collaboration
Water: Tales of the Elemental Spirits
A collaboration with Robin McKinley, each of us writing three stories about mythical water-creatures, mermaids, sea-serpents, etc. Intended as the first of four, or possibly five volumes, earth, air, fire and time being the remaining elements. (2002: published in the UK as Elementals: Water.)
These were great fun to do, so much so that I've already got several of the ones for the rest of the series done, a couple of them originally drafted in my utterly illegible scrawl. (Even I have to keep guessing at words. From the first moment they started to teach me the alphabet I detested the process of handwriting.) And together with Robin's they bring out how utterly different we are as writers -- narrative methods, prose style, attitude to plot and character, everything. For more about this, see the excerpts on Robin's site.
Books for Younger Children
Picture Books
The Iron Lion
Persian-style fairy story. Originally illustrated by Marc Brown, later by Pauline Baynes. (1973)
This was the first of my own told-in-the-car stories — previously I'd told the kids versions of Snow White, Rapunzel, and so on. They now tell some of mine to their own children on long journeys. The Skating Boy and Brave Eric are particular favourites, but nobody can now remember how some of the others went.
Hepzibah
Nonsense fantasy about modern witch. Illustrated by Sue Porter. (1978)
This comes from even earlier as a means of coaxing small children through their meals. I wouldn't go on till they'd eaten another spoonful. It gave me plenty of time to think about the next surreal twist. I found that great fun, but not at all easy to reproduce the same kind of spontaneous zest in print.
Giant Cold
Fairy story about child's search for father. Experimental style. Illustrated by Alan Cober. (1984)
Again this began as a straight fairy-story for car journeys, but for some reason I didn't want to write it like that. I still have somewhere a few verses trying to tell it in Spenserian stanzas ( a great form for fancy decoration, but rotten for moving a story along.) Then I had the idea of doing it as a vicarious dream being dreamed by the reader, all in the present tense and second personal singular. Extremely interesting to do, but weird, and it was very gallant of my publishers to take it on. Not everyone's idea of a good read, but for me it has a kind of creepy intensity still.
A Box of Nothing
Modern fantasy. Adventures on animated rubbish dump. Big Bang theory as magic. (1985)
Most of this group are intended for younger readers because that's how the story needed to be told. This was the only one that I began deliberately writing for that age, with the story evolving later. It stems from a building we used to pass almost every day when we were living with my grandparents in Gloucestershire, a grey stone cottage, like its neighbours, except that instead of a parlour window it had a shop window, displaying only bare and dusty shelves, with darkness beyond. We asked our nanny what was sold there (we had that sort of childhood — our walks were taken at set times in stiff tweed overcoats, my youngest brother in an immense, huge-wheeled pram, sprung like a horse-carriage) and she said "Nothing now." She probably also explained that used to be a cobbler's, or something, but the cobbler was dead. Anyway, we called it The Nothing Shop. I suppose it's as good a place to start as any if you want to get to unexpected places.
Mole Hole
Trick Picture Book, with a hole right through the middle, performing a different function on every page. (1987)
Well that was the theory, but I now think I wasn't ingenious enough to make it work properly. I'd been digging by our front gate when our neighbours' small daughter came past, fingering excitedly at a brown paper-package — from the bran-tub at a Village Hall fete, I guessed. I asked her what she'd got. "I don't know yet," she said. "But it isn't a book — it's got a hole in it." She sounded pleased about it. It felt like another good place to start, but this time it wasn't.
Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera
Old man repairing fantastic town hall clock discovers it is inhabited by telepathic mice. Illustrated by Jane Chichester Clark (1993)
Of all my books this and Chuck and Danielle were the purest fun to write, irresponsible larky time-off from serious work. Of course, this doesn't guarantee the book is any good — it may be merely irritatingly self-indulgent. Maybe there's a bit of that about this book, with its improbable series-of-essays format, but people tell me the fun comes through. I wrote it because I'd just finished a novel, and my son in the Ministry of Defence asked what I was going to do next. I told him I hadn't thought about it and he said "What about a lot of telepathic mice living in a clock?" he said. Gives one some hope for the world that someone in his job should come up with an idea like that. He's now written his own book The Cup of the World — high fantasy, original, fascinating, nothing like my stuff — due out May 2003. Furthermore my daughter published Chuck and asked Jane to do the illustrations, which I think are spot on
Chuck and Danielle
Comic short stories about ultra-timid whippet. (1996)
As I've just said, pure fun. All three of our whippets were small for the breed, but Hazel was a runt of runts, an almost ludicrously pretty little dog with a pedigree going back to the Dark Ages. (Don't write to me if you want to argue about whippets first having been bred only 150 years ago. There's greyhound blood in there, and they've been around since Charlemagne, at least.) The other two were more plebeian, and not much nuttier than most dogs, but Hazel had a hundred generations of nuttiness inbred into her. We could, as it were, read the craziness of the other two, but Hazel was crazy in Etruscan. Mostly we had no idea where she was coming from. One bit of this that we could get somewhere near was that in any group situation she was in her own mind bottom of the heap. If ever she had got on social terms with a beetle she'd have assumed the beetle was boss. Presumably in her first formative weeks, being the runt of the litter, her siblings and mother always shoved her away from the teat. And though she was physically brave, and much more of a stoic than the other two, inexplicable things terrified her. A Harley Davidson thundering up from behind one could understand, but dock leaf fluttering by the path was just as bad, or a rusty old farm implement lying in the corner of a field.
With the Harley and the dock leaf she'd shoot sideways, like as not between your legs. With the bit of rusty junk she'd slink round behind you as you passed, hoping it won't see her, and go on doing that every time we passed, years after the menace has been removed by the farmer.
She did her Harley trick and had me over into the traffic once, which was so scary that Robin didn't even have the heart to swear at her, and a couple of days later she did the dock-leaf trick and had me over again, though this time it was only into the mud, so Robin could swear herself blue in the face, finishing by saying that when we got home she was going to turn her into a hearth-rug. I told Robin no, because one day Hazel was going to save the universe. Robin made rude noises, but I started fantasising about how it could be made to happen. That same evening a friend called Robin from the States for one of their marathon transatlantic chats, and for something to do I settled down and began to write what turned out to be the first story in a book about Chuck saving the universe. It went so well that I began to think I'd get it done before the call was over, but I didn't quite make it. The rest followed over several months.
We called Hazel Chuck when we didn't want her to know we were talking about her, but she was pretty bright and I think she sussed it out. I was astonished by the intensity of my feelings when she died three years ago of a wasting disease resulting, we think, from over-vaccination in puppyhood. (For some reason you need to be careful with whippets.) The loss of a loved human is an immense and complicated network of sorrow. The loss of a dear pet is a narrow, focussed beam of pure grief. The other two died within a fortnight of each other three years later.
Other
Chance, Luck and Destiny
Collection of original material, prose and verse, fact and fiction, on the themes of the title. Boston Globe-Hornbook Prize for Non-fiction. (1975)
My UK editor, Joanna Goldsworthy, asked if I'd like to do a short non-fiction book about chance and luck. I'm very interested in the subject, but not enough of a coherent thinker to do a straight treatise. A sort of scrap-book was an obvious solution, and since I'm also hopeless at research it was much easier for me to use fiction and verse to illustrate some of the points. I threw in Destiny, which is the opposite of chance, to make a more resonant title; and magic, because that's an attempt to defy the randomness of chance and luck; and to give the whole thing some kind of structure I threaded a re-telling of the Oedipus legend through it. It's still a bit scrappy, and parts of it work better than others, but there's a fair amount there that I'm still pleased with.
Excerpt: "Poor Unlucky Lucy"
The Flight of Dragons
Pseudo-scientific paper on dragons as nature's only attempt to evolve lighter-than-air flight. Illustrated by Wayne Andersen. (1979)
I was on a train, looking at a dragon on the cover of an omnibus edition of Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy (as it then was). This one had a bulky body and rather stubby wings, which obviously would never get it airborne, let alone with the two people it was carrying on its back, and all its own weight of muscle and bone. Obviously any lift had to come from the body itself. Its very shape suggested some kind of gas-bag. I thought about it in a dreamy kind of way, and on and off for a couple of days after, and at the end of that time had managed too slot in everything I knew about dragons — why they laired in caves, around which nothing would grow and where hoards of gold could be found, why they had a preferred diet of princesses, how and why they breathed fire, why they had only one vulnerable spot and their blood melted the blade of the sword that killed them, and so on — into a coherent theory that explained why these things were necessary accompaniments to the evolution of lighter-than-air flight. The result was as pleasing as a completed jigsaw, so I wrote it down, thinking I might end up with the sort of small comic pamphlet people give each other at Christmas as a stocking-filler.
My agent, however, sent it to an ambitious young publisher-packager who had other ideas. He commissioned some juicy great dragon illustrations from Wayne Andersen and travelled the world selling the concept for amazing sums to a number of big-time publishers. Alas, he over-reached himself in a number of ways. He'd promised the buyers a book a great deal longer than Wayne and I had provided, so that I had to invent a dozen extra pages with only a week to do it in, and the designer had to stretch Wayne's pictures by ingenious re-use of details. And, alas, our publisher also began to overstretch himself financially, and eventually went bankrupt owing a lot of people, including Wayne and me, substantial sums.
But in the meanwhile he had also sold the concept to a company making animated cartoons for TV. They bought it sight unseen, without apparently realising that there was no kind of a story or plot in what I'd written. Undeterred they went ahead and bought the entire plot of The Dragon and the George from its author, Gordon Dickson. The film seems to get shown pretty well every Christmas. Scraps of my theory crop up here and there, and the hero is named Sir Peter Dickinson (nobody asked me, of course) but that's all I have to do with it. I don't even make any money out of these repeats, but I bear no grudge. I'd still earned more from my silly little pamphlet, before the crash, than I'd done till then from any of my other books. OK, life is unfair, but not always to one's own disadvantage.
It's still in print, in paperback (Paper Tiger UK, Overlook Press USA) but if you've got a copy of the original edition anywhere, hang on to it. It's one of those mad cult classics.
City of Gold
Retelling of Old Testament stories in voices of imagined original narrators. Carnegie Medal, German Catholic Bishops' Prize. Illustrated by Michael Forman. (1980)
My UK editor, Joanna Goldsworthy, called me and explained that Gollancz were running a series of stories and legends illustrated by Michael Forman. They'd done Grimm and Hans Andersen, and wondered if I'd be interested in doing the Old Testament stories. I told her she was mad (a) because there wasn't any longer a voice in which you could do this — you had a choice between fake high-style and utterly inappropriate modern, and (b) they weren't that kind of story, to be told for amusement with glossy illustrations. They had power still. They were part of many people's deeply held convictions. I wasn't going to do it, and she wasn't to ask anyone else, I told Joanna. Twenty minutes later I called her back and asked her if she'd tried anyone else. No, she said — she'd been too scared. I told her I'd thought of a way of doing it.
What I'd thought of was not a voice, but voices. I would go back to the oral tradition and tell the stories as they'd been told generation after generation before they were ever written down, in the imagined voices of people who had passionately believed in them. Which I did, to the best of my ability. I had a great time. The book owes a lot to Rudyard Kipling (a man with unpleasant opinions but a terrific writer) who used the technique again and again.
Merlin Dreams
Linked stories on Arthurian themes, related by framework to their Celtic mythic origins. Illustrated by Alan Lee. (1988)
Joanna tried again, this time with the King Arthur stories. I said I'd give it a go. I thought I'd do much the same as in City of Gold and go back to the original Celtic roots and tell the stories from that end, progressing up the tree through trunk and branches to the final astonishing flowering in Malory and the romancers. I couldn't do it. The tree wasn't there - nothing between the vaguely perceived roots and those flowers. You can still trace a few of the connections - the frequent jousts at wells or fords going back to the priests of the holy springs whose successors must kill them in order too take over the priesthood - but there wasn't anything from which to make the stories as we now have them.
So the best I could do with my idea was to build my own stories round a series of Arthurian themes, and set them in a framework of Merlin drowsing the centuries away under his rock, waking from time to time and recalling some item from the Celtic past, and then dreaming a story suggested by it. It was fun.
One of the many ways I've been lucky as a writer is having Michael Foreman, Alan Lee, Wayne Andersen and Jane Chichester Clark illustrate my books, with generous amounts of colour. These are all really lovely books.
Excerpt
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