Good news, and bad...

Yesterday I was very pleased to learn that Mister Creecher had been shortlisted for the UKLA Book Award.  I know I say this every time, but there are so many books out there, so many really strong writers, that it is a real honour to be singled out in this way.  A big thank you to all those involved in choosing it.

I was still glowing from this news when I heard, today, that once again I have failed to make it from longlist to shortlist for the Carnegie Medal.  I am hugely disappointed, of course - but I don't intend to stop writing any time soon, so I just have to hope my time is yet to come.  This was the third time one of my books had reached the longlist, and that in itself is very gratifying.  Good luck to those who have made it onto the shortlist.

World book day

I did a World Book Day event yesterday, at the Cambridge International School just down the road from me.  If you are reading this outside of the UK and Ireland you will be confused.  We decided against having World Book Day on April 23 when everyone else celebrates it, despite it being a UNESCO idea.  I'm not really sure we have much of a claim to calling it World Book Day, but it is such a good cause that no one ever seems to complain.  It does miss the point of the whole world joining in, though.  The reasons seem to revolve around the idea that schools may be closed because of the shifting nature of the Easter school holidays and the fact that it is St George's Day.

I'm not sure why St George's Day is incompatible with World Book Day and April 23 is also cited as the anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, which seems to make the day more suitable, not less.

Anyway, my World Book Day event was fun.  I arrived to watch teachers in costume recommend books to their students, who were also in costume - and that is rare in a secondary school.  We had some readings and even a little acting, and then I had eight minutes or so to sum up my career, explain the plot of my latest book, do a reading and take questions from the audience.  It was all a bit of a blur and then I was back in the car and back home.

Through dead eyes

A package of advance copies of Through Dead Eyes arrived in the post the other day ahead of the publication day on March 14.  I thought I'd tell you a little more about why I wrote it.

The first and most obvious thing about the book is that it is the first book I have done for Bloomsbury that has a contemporary setting.  Why?

Well, much as I love writing books that have a period setting - and I have no intention of stopping doing that - I know that for some young people (possibly many young people) the period setting is a turn off.  A Victorian setting requires a certain language level to make it believable, it requires descriptions of things that no longer exist and of which the reader may have no prior knowledge.  It is inevitably 'old-fashioned' - it has to be.  For some children, that is enough to put them off.

I am not saying that I am chasing readers.  That way madness lies.  many young people will never read a horror book, whatever the setting.  But it is also interesting for me, as a writer, to see if I can create the same atmosphere without recourse to a period setting.

As with so many of my books and stories, Through Dead Eyes was sparked by my response to things created by other people - things that affected me deeply and stayed with me.

When I was at school we had an English text book called Voices - a very eclectic mix of drawings and photographs, poetry and prose.  I have a memory - although I do not have the book to prove it - that in one of the Voices editions there was a detail from Bruegel's Children's Games which focused in on the strange mask in the window at the top left of the picture.  I found - still find - that image disturbing, every time I revisit that painting.

I also have a very strong memory of watching the BBC adaptation of Schalken the Painter from the late 1970s.  The whole thing seemed to exist in deep shadow and carried with it the strange otherworldly atmosphere of so many interiors and portraits of the Dutch Golden Age.

Then there is movie Don't Look Now of course.  The canals of Amsterdam are blacker than the canals of Venice on a dull day.  Although the layout of the town is not so maze-like as Venice, Amsterdam is still a perfect location for a ghost story, full of atmosphere and history.  There is a little homage to Don't Look Now in the book, for those who know the movie.

So I knew I wanted to set it in Amsterdam and I knew I wanted it to have a link to the seventeenth century - the Dutch Golden Age - and those black-clad merchants who stare out from the paintings in the Rijksmuseum.

But I also knew that I wanted to deal with a boy's awkward attempts at relating to the opposite sex.  I wanted everything to be in a state of flux - I wanted him to have no solid ground at all.  This is common in psychological chillers for adults, but I wanted to try and put some of that emotional confusion into a book for teenagers.

Copying

I was drawing in a café in Manchester, when I was a student there, many years ago.  A girl of about eight or nine wandered up and looked at what I was doing.  She looked at my hand drawing and she looked at the people I was drawing at the other side of the small basement cafe.

'Can't you draw without copying?' she asked.

That has stayed with me ever since.  For her - like most children - drawing was all about sitting and retreating into a private world - of trying to make your imagination come alive through drawing.  My own son would spend hours at a similar age, drawing complex battle scenes or fiendishly complicated plans of imaginary houses.  Very little thought was given to how well rendered these things were.  They were simply ways of recording the thoughts in his head.  They were functional.

Of course, I didn't see objective drawing as 'copying', even though - in a way - it is.  The subject matter is given to you.  It's one of the things that appeals to me about it - the freedom from invention.  Freed from the pressure to invent, I can just relax and enjoy the accidental arrangements that occur in real life - the way one object partially conceals another, the way hair falls, or clothing creases.

I used to carry my sketchbook everywhere, sketching friends, the corners of rooms - whatever was in front of me at the time.  Over time, as my illustration career and painterly pretentions kicked in, I decided that sketching was all a bit blasé.  I became more and more dissatisfied with the drawings I did and more and more sceptical of the reasons for doing them at all.  Real artists didn't sit about sketching, for goodness sake!

Looking through some sketchbooks from college, I was struck most of all by how thankful I was to have done them and to have these reminders of those I loved and of the places we lived and worked.  But I was conscious too that I had lost some of the confidence I showed in those drawings.  It had been replaced with a doubt - a doubt I think I persuaded myself was the authentic sign of a true artist.

When I write, I am interested in what makes the character I am writing about specifically that character and not another.  I am very, very concerned about setting - about the particularities of the locations that I choose.  I will often set a story in a very specific location.  Even when I have not named it, I still usually know in my head where it is.

When I write, I invent the plot but use actual locations, historical detail and observations of the world around me to make that invention real for the reader.  I think I need to do something similar when I paint and illustrate.

And I think I need to get back to the joy of drawing for pleasure.

The turn of the screw

I went to see the The Turn of the Screw at the Almeida the other day.  As I mentioned a long time ago, we are trying to get a play based on one of my books - Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth - off the ground, and so it was a research trip as much as anything.

It was fascinating to see.  There is a trend at the moment for this kind of effects-based theatre, full of appearances and disappearances, sound effects and thrills.  This was the first I had seen and by all accounts it is not as strong as The Woman in Black production, for instance.

I know the story reasonably well - and was encouraged to revisit it on the way home on my Kindle.  I know it best through Jack Clayton's 1960s movie The Innocents, which improves, in my opinion, on the book.  Film allowed for a much more naturalistic performance from the young actors and also allowed them to be genuinely young.  Miles is ten in the story, but was much older here, with a man's voice.  It was understandable, given how much of the story they have to carry, but it did detract.  It was harder to imagine Miles as the beautiful innocent, corrupted by Quint.

The effects were good, in the main.  But it did inevitably become all about the effects, with people craning their necks to see where the next appearance was coming from.  The set revolves so much in the second act that it is in effect a roundabout.

It was also a strange atmosphere.  A little like a pantomime for grown-ups, with people coming for a good time.  And The Turn of the Screw is quite a serious plot to house that kind of fun.  As Gemma Jones as the housekeeper described Quint's depravity, the man next to me chuckled loudly - and he wasn't alone.  The script seemed to have become a connecting device to prepare us for the next jolt.  I don't really know what to make of it, except that it simply did not carry the psychological threat and menace that the story should have.  There was no ratcheting up of tension as there should have been.

Interestingly, it was pointed out to me that although The Turn of the Screw begins with the story being told to house guests and then read to them from a manuscript of the tale told by the governess, we never return to that wraparound story.

This is quite odd.  The man who tells the story was clearly in love with the governess at the centre of the story and when he meets her she is a governess at another house and apparently completely normal. We don't hear what the storyteller thinks of her after he reads the manuscript, nor do we hear what the guests think of it.

Creecher confusion

I just wanted to talk a little bit about Mister Creecher.  The book has been out for a while now and I'm very pleased to say that it has garnered lots of nice reviews and quite a few award nominations.

But nice though the reviews are, time and again the same errors keep cropping up.  I wanted to try and clear some of these things up before I attend some of those award ceremonies.

Firstly, Mister Creecher is not a Victorian-set book.  I actually state the date at the very beginning.  The book opens on New Year's Day 1818, which is the day Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was first published.  Queen Victoria wasn't even born at that point and it will be almost twenty years before she comes to the throne.

So why do so many reviewers wax lyrical about the Victorian setting?  Well, some of this is down to the stepping stone nature of historical knowledge.  We are more sure of the Victorian period and so reviewers tend to assume if we are talking about foggy London streets and horses and carriages, then we must be in a generic 'Victorian' world (which is actually just as often Edwardian).

This is the Regency period.  Jane Austen has just died.  If you want to people the streets of London in Mister Creecher, a Jane Austen film or television adaptation would be a better guide than a Dickens adaptation.  We are also in the age of the Romantics, so Jane Campion's film Bright Star (about John Keats) is an exact match - and it is a lovely movie too.  Percy and Mary Shelley did indeed live for a while in Great Russell Street, before they left for Italy.  Keats really was at that stone circle in Cumbria that summer.

The confusion about the era is also - I think - to do with the ending of the book.  I don't want to go into too much detail or it will spoil it for those who haven't read it, but what I will say is that Charles Dickens was five when Frankenstein was published.  He was already a published author before Queen Victoria came to throne in 1837, Oliver Twist being serialised in monthly instalments during that same year, when Dickens was only twenty-five.

There is also a continued insistence - particularly I find - among American reviewers to call Victor Frankenstein a doctor.  There is no Dr Frankenstein in Mary Shelley's book or mine.  Neither was Victor Frankenstein a medical student.

I met up with Pierre Fournier who writes the Frankensteinia blog and who knows just about all there is to know about Frankenstein and we talked about this.  We also talked about the fact that whilst everyone assumes the creature - my Mister Creecher - is made up of stitched together body parts, Mary Shelley herself makes no reference to this at all.  She says that Victor Frankenstein frequented charnel houses as part of his research, but makes it clear that he was studying decay, seemingly in an attempt to learn how to reverse it.

Frankenstein is a pro to-scientist - possibly the very image of a mad scientist - but he is also obsessed with alchemy and magic.  The creature seems to have been born out of some meeting of science and alchemy.  The crude scars and stitches that cover the faces of the cinematic creatures are there to frighten us.  They are there to make the  creature seem more horrific.

Mary's original concept of the creature, with its huge build, like a Romantic giant, the workings of his anatomy visible through his wrinkled translucent skin, is far more disturbing and it is the one that I tried to keep in my mind at all times.

Prague, day 3

For my last day in Prague I had nothing to do but wander round the city revisiting some of the things I had seen with Richard and Petra and taking lots of photographs.  My flight wasn't until the evening so I had the whole day to myself.

The first thing I did was to go and have breakfast in Cafe Slavia, which Petra had pointed out to me the day before.  It doesn't really look much from the outside but it has an incredibly evocative interior. From there I walked back across the Legii bridge to the Lesser Town and walked up towards the castle,   stopping to look in the sumptuous Church of St Nicholas.

I reached the castle via Nerudova Street, which is very pretty and very steep, cobbled and lined with shops and restaurants, still sporting their old signs - most of them in painted plaster set into the walls.

The castle was much busier than it had been the evening before and for the first time I felt like a tourist, in among all the other tourists.  The castle isn't really like an English castle, but instead it is a complex of buildings - many of them huge - including the famous St Vitus's Cathedral that appears in almost every view of Prague.

I bought a 'quick visit' ticket that allowed me access to the cathedral (although I discovered I had to pay extra to take photos).  It doesn't quite live up to the exterior but it has lots of quirky details, huge flying silver angels above the tomb of St John Nepomuk and some very nice stained glass, some of which is my Alphonse Mucha.

The castle also houses a beautiful Romanesque church - St George's Basilica.  This was so so restful after the extravegances of the Baroque churches.  The interior is lovely with some nice frescos.

The castle also houses the famous Golden Lane, once home to alchemists and, for a while, Franz Kafka.  The tiny houses are little museums and shops now, each a different colour.  It is a magnet for tourists of course.  I had been asked several times to take photo of couples - I think having a large camera round my neck makes me look like I know what I'm doing - so I wasn't surprised when two Japanese schoolgirls asked if it was OK to take a photograph.  I happily agreed, only to discover that they didn't want me to take a photo of them, they wanted to take a photo of one of them standing with me.  I think the fact that I was wearing a black suit and coat, a tie and black trilby hat was enough.

After looking at the view, I walked down the Old Castle Steps, across Nánusûv bridge and into the Jewish Quarter - the Josefov.  I had been here already with Petra but I was determined to see the Jewish Cemetery if nothing else.

 I bought a ticket allowing me into all the synagogues and the cemetery and after looking in the Ceremonial Hall and the Klausen Synagogue, I wandered over to the famous Staranova Synagoga - the Old-New Synagogue - which must have the most unprepossessing doorway ever.  I walked past it twice and when I did finally open it, it creaked and scraped the ground as though it hadn't been used in a century.

The Old-New Synagogue is a lovely building.  It is very old and reminded me of St George's Basilica at the Castle.  This may be explained by the fact that it was built for the Jews by gentiles.  It is in effect Gothic, with ribbed vaulting and so on - but it is also a very different kind of space with a totally different layout.

I had a long talk to a guide at the synagogue, and she told me all about the building of the synagogue and about the history and details.  I mentioned the Golem and she told me about Rabbi Löw and the genizah - the storeroom above the synagogue where items of religious significance are kept when they are old or damaged.  Because of their sacred nature they cannot simply be thrown away - instead they are periodically gathered together and buried.  After the Velvet Revolution many treasures were found, forgotten about in the genizah of the various synagogues in Prague.

The Golem was still supposed to be in the genizah of the Old-New Synagogue - though of course many have looked (including, according to Richard, Terry Pratchett when he visited Prague).  The guide at the synagogue said she had a theory about the Golem and I was expecting to hear that she thought it was a story that was meant to be more symbolic, when she told me that she thought that the Golem would have been broken and forgotten about in the genizah, then buried in one of the periodic clear-outs.  She thought the Golem was buried in the Jewish Cemetery.

And indeed, from there I went to the Jewish Cemetery, which was a rather wonderful place, crammed full of headstones, many of which were beautifully carved from different shades of stone, some green with moss.  Rabbi Löw's grave is here, small pebbles left on his headstone.  As with so many cemeteries, the Jewish Cemetery seemed to be separate from the rest of its surroundings, quieter, and with a wholly different atmosphere - not simply melancholy, but peaceful and calm.  I like the idea of the Golem being buried here.

I had a late lunch in Bakehouse Praha on V. Kolkovné near the fittingly odd Franz Kafka monument, and very good it was too.  I had not been inundated with either fruit nor vegetables since I arrived in Prague and it was nice to have a salad.

After lunch I visited the Spanish Synagogue, which is as different from the Old-New Synagogue as it is possible to be.  It was built in the 1850s and seems like the equivelant of one of those English opulent Victorian Gothic churches, with every surface covered in pattern.  It is a spectacular interior, for sure, but I preferred the quietude of the Old-New Synagogue

I set off back to the Old Town and found myself at the clock tower as the hour was about to strike.  I joined the rest of the tourists as rain began to fall and watched the show for the second time.  Light was fading and I proceeded to lose all sense of direction and actually ended up walking in a complete circle, ending up back in the Old Town Square when I was sure I was heading for the river.

I just had enough time to have a browse in the wonderful secondhand bookshop I'd been into with Richard before heading back to my hotel. On the way back I heard shouting and watched with other bemused passers by as a woman strode along the wet pavements, shouting at the top of her voice.  What she was shouting about, I couldn't say.

At the pedestrian crossing by Cafe Slavia - the crossings tick in Prague, rather than bleep, by the way - I set off across the road to see a car turning right across into the stream of pedestrians.  It paused momentarily and then floored the accelerator, the tyres spinning on the wet cobbles, before racing away along the riverside.  It was pure luck that it didn't kill someone.  It was the only display of aggression I had seen in Prague.

It was dark now, and raining.  I checked out of my hotel and David Kočár arrived to drive me to the airport.  He was the partner of one of the cast and it was incredibly kind of him, given that the airport is not exactly close and he told me in the car that this had been his second trip there that day, having driven his mother there in the morning.  David was yet another young, clever, witty, creative type - a filmmaker this time - and again spoke fluent English.

I saw a lot while I was in Prague, but it was the people I met there who made it such a great experience.  I want to thank them all and wish them well in all their endeavours.  I hope to be back one day soon.