You brought them into the world. . .

We watched The Orphanage tonight. Here is the trailer, with the most ridiculous voice over you are ever likely to hear. It was a good film - though I'm not sure the story would bear too much analysis. There are so many horror movies in which children are the threat; so many in fact that it must surely point to some deep-seated fear of children.

The Innocents (based on the novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James) has creepy children in it, as does Village of the Damned (based on the Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham). The 1970s M R James adaptation, Lost Hearts, absolutely freaked me out when I saw it, with its blue-skinned ghost children. The Omen revolves around the sinister boy/Antichrist. The Shining has a sympathetic child (who is creepily gifted) but also has scary twin girl ghosts. The Ring has that terrifying boggle-eyed girl ghost.

As well as The Orphanage recently, there has been Let the Right One In with its girl vampire and I saw a trailer for a what looked like a spectacularly awful horror movie actually called The Children. It had the unintentionally hilarious tag line (adopt gravelly voice): You brought them into the world. . . .Now they will take you out.

Cripes!

It is all of interest to me, of course, because I have been writing so many creepy stories with child protagonists. It is different though. These movies seem to tap into an adult fear of children not behaving as children should. The children in the Tales of Terror books are often reprehensible, but they are usually victims of creepiness, rather than creepy in their own right - at least at first.

It is harder to sell a story to a child on the basis that children are inherently creepy, for some reason.

Rocking in the free world

I watched the film of Atonement yesterday. I am still not quite sure what I make of Ian McEwan as a writer, but I certainly enjoyed the novel when I read it. But watching the movie, I found myself wondering a lot of the time what someone would make of it had they not read the book. I'm not sure it stands entirely on its own merits.

That said, the tracking shot of the chaotic scenes on Dunkirk beach was great. My father was at Dunkirk, so I am always interested in trying to visualise that event. Ian McEwan wasn't there of course and neither was the director, so authenticity is a moot point. It felt right, is the best you can say. The film as a whole just seemed a bit rushed though, somehow. It is nearly always the case that a novel has too much going on (if it's any good) to be easily translated into a movie.

Not that I would want to put anyone off who is thinking of making a movie out of one of mine.

I caught a bit of Neil Young's set on the BBC's Glastonbury coverage. Neil Young's stage persona always reminds me of an orangutan who has just found an electric guitar and can't quite decide whether to eat it or mate with it.

I don't mean that in a bad way, you understand.

Blame it on the boogie

The news outlets did not seem to know what to do with the Michael Jackson story. Should they stick to celebration? Should they question the manner of his death? Should they bring up the allegations that dogged his later life? A biographer on Radio 4 bizarrely actually described the controversy surrounding Jackson as 'boring'.

Jackson was my exact contemporary, which in itself seems very weird. When I was twelve it seemed exciting that there was this hugely talented kid, the same age as me - and so much cooler (well, everything is relative) than that other talented twelve year, old, Donny Osmond.

He provided part of the soundtrack to my college life, both with the Jacksons and solo. His music would be played at every disco and party and he was held in enormous affection I remember. It was infectiously happy music.The Jacksons were not exactly Funkadelic (you could do the Charleston to Blame It On The Boogie) but everyone seemed to genuinely like them, and Michael in particular.

By a spooky bit of prescience, I was showing my son the Thriller video on YouTube the other day - that and Beat It. I'm not quite sure what he made of it. I can remember staying up to watch the Thriller video. Everyone did. Jackson was already quite strange by then, though. He is arguably scarier as 'himself' than when he changes into the werewolf.

Carnegie winner

Burntwood School got it wrong. Bog Child has won the Carnegie Medal.

As I have already said, this is a beautifully written book. But I am sure Siobhan Dowd was going to write much better ones than this had she lived. She was a proper writer with lots more to say.

The Siobhan Dowd Trust has been set up to help disadvantaged children experience the joy of reading. And what an excellent cause that is.

Talking of Burntwood, when Taskeen Siddiqi took us to the station at the end of the day, I expressed the hope that Ofsted will show their appreciation for her work. Taskeen said that Ofsted are not interested in the work of the library. Can this really be true? I have been a governor at two schools and I ought to know, but it does seem extraordinary if they do not take an interest and just plain wrong if there are librarians like Taskeen working their socks off and not getting credit for it.

There is a hell of a lot of work involved in organising these events as well as Burntwood organised theirs, and many, many schools do nothing at all. If anybody from Ofsted happens across this blog, then maybe you can let us all know the reasoning behind this if it's true. What happened to raising standards in literacy?

I think that getting authors into schools, demystifying the business of writing and enthusing children about reading for pleasure is work that should be valued and applauded.

Librarians rock.

Carnegie (sort of) winner

There was a great sky over Cambridge today: a beautiful cobalt blue with Fra Angelico clumps of clouds here and there. I couldn't resist taking some photos.

I bumped into David Aaronovitch in Borders. He needed a bit of prompting to remember me, but we used to sit opposite each other a couple of days a week at the Independent when I was an illustrator and cartoonist there many years ago. David was in Cambridge to interview someone for the Times where he now works.

I forgot to mention that at the end of the day yesterday the students voted for their favourite book from the Carnegie Medal shortlist. The Knife of Never Letting Go came out on top (Bog Child came fourth). I must confess here that I haven't read Patrick Ness's book but the students here clearly liked it. The Carnegie Medal is announced tomorrow, so we'll see if the judges come to the same conclusion.

Burntwood

I spent the day at Burntwood School in Wandsworth, London. I was the guest of Taskeen Sadiqqi, the school librarian, who had organised a Carnegie Medal shadowing event. All three authors - Anthony McGowan, Mary Hooper, and myself, were all a bit late and so I had to leap out of a car, walk in through the side entrance to the hall and go straight into my talk to a room full of students from Burntwood and four other local schools - Elliot School, Graveney School, Battersea Park School, Streatham and Clapham High School. Thanks to Taskeen and to all the librarians and staff who looked after us so well and to the students for managing to stay alert and good-humoured on a very long and hot day.

I spoke about my writing career and about writing creepy stories in particular. The students asked lots of thoughtful questions, and the time whizzed by. Mary gave an interesting talk about the chance discoveries that can spark an idea for a novel. Anthony spoke in the afternoon about the notion of fact and fiction in writing, and how the line between them gets blurred.

Each of the authors chaired a discussion group of between ten and fifteen students about a particular novel on the Carnegie shortlist. These groups rotated half a dozen times. It was hard work, particularly as, not surprisingly, not all the students had managed to get through all of the books!

Yesterday I was wondering what today's teenagers would make of Bog Child - a book set in 1981 in Northern Ireland. I have to say my concerns turned out to be well-founded. Not many of the students I spoke to had any real grasp of the period. More than that - no one actually seemed to like it, or be excited by it. They understood the poignancy of a book centred around sacrifice being written by an author who was shortly to lose her battle with cancer, but it was not enough to make them love it. More than one mentioned too many plot strands and these themes not being tied up satisfactorily at the end. They had a point I think.

The setting (time and place) did seem to be an issue. I was three groups in before someone asked what the main character and his uncle are doing at the beginning. I said they were stealing peat. She had no idea what peat was, and neither did almost anyone else. No one knew that it was a fuel.

This is the problem of writing for children. You cannot assume any prior knowledge. The more you stray from the everyday experience of the reader (geographically and historically in this case) the more you run the risk of confusing them and alienating them.

Of course, this is not a reason for not trying to drag them to look at some world other than their own. Far from it. One great quality of reading is that magic carpet ride of being taken to another time, another place - another world. Or even just to walk around in someone else's shoes for a while.

But they are only going to go with you if the story is compelling enough. The more effort they have to make, the more compelling the story has to be. And the truth is, for all its many qualities, Bog Child just did not seem to grab them.

Bog child

I've been reading the late Siobhan Dowd's Bog Child in preparation for a Carnegie Medal shadowing event at Burntwood School in South London tomorrow. That's a great cover by the way, isn't it?

Bog Child is very good - very well written - though I do wonder at what the average fourteen year-old will make of it. It is one of the things I am looking forward to finding out tomorrow. The book is set on the border between the South and Ulster during the Troubles. I read a review on the US Amazon site that said US teenagers would not understand the background, but are British teenagers (outside of Northern Ireland of course) any more familiar with the Troubles or Bobby Sands?

It is 1981 and the brother of the main character, Fergus, is on hunger strike in the Maze. The story of Fergus and his struggles to come to terms with the political reality of Northern Ireland at that time and how it affects him and his his family is compelling, but I do wonder if the references will mean as much to the audience it is aimed at. It had a lot of resonance to me, because my generation (which included Dowd) grew up with the IRA and Northern Ireland as daily news items. I certainly know that my son would be mystified. But then that is the problem with all historical fiction for children - whether it is 1891 or 1981 - as I know all too well.

The politics of Ulster is not all that is happening in the novel of course - not by a long way. It starts with the discovery of a well-preserved Iron Age body in the peat - the bog child of the title. This turns out to be - well, I shouldn't really say too much more for fear of spoiling it for you. Suffice it to say that Fergus appears to have a strange connection with this 'Mel'. He also falls in love with the daughter of the archaeologist called in to investigate and forms an unlikely (possible a bit too unlikely?) friendship with a British soldier.

I'll let you know what the students at Burntwood have to say about it in due course.