People have already asked me if I had the current international situation in mind when I wrote the book. The answer is no. I wouldn’t insult even rats by turning them into handy metaphors. It’s just unfortunate that the current international situation is pretty much the same old dull, stupid international situation, in a world obsessed by the monsters it has made up, dragons that are hard to kill. We look around and see foreign policies that are little more than the taking of revenge for the revenge that was taken in revenge for the revenge last time. It’s a path that leads only downwards, and still the world flocks along it. It makes you want to spit. The dinosaurs were thick as concrete, but they survived for 150 million years and it took a damn great asteroid to knock them out. I find myself wondering now if intelligence comes with its own built-in asteroid.
Of course, as the aforesaid writer of humorous fantasy I’m obsessed by wacky, zany ideas. One is that rats might talk. But sometimes I’m even capable of weirder, more ridiculous ideas, such as the possibility of a happy ending. Sometimes, when I’m really, really wacky and on a fresh dose of zany, I’m just capable of entertaining the fantastic idea that, in certain circumstances, Homo sapiens might actually be capable of thinking. It must be worth a go, since we’ve tried everything else.
Writing for children is harder than writing for adults, if you’re doing it right. What I thought was going to be a funny story about a cat organizing a swindle based on the Pied Piper legend turned out to be a major project, in which I was aided and encouraged and given hope by Philippa Dickinson and Sue Coates at Doubleday or whatever they’re calling themselves this week, and Anne Hoppe of HarperCollins in New York, who waylaid me in an alley in Manhattan and insisted on publishing the book and even promised to protect me from that most feared of creatures, the American copy editor.
And I must thank you, the judges, in the hope that your sanity and critical faculties may speedily be returned to you. And finally, my thanks to the rest of you, the loose agglomeration of editors and teachers and librarians that I usually refer to, mostly with a smile, as the dirndl mafia. You keep the flame alive.
BOSTON GLOBE–HORN BOOK AWARD SPEECH FOR NATION
Speech read by Anne Hoppe, 2 October 2009
Nation was one of those novels that came to me out of the blue. That’s no lie—suddenly, there it was in my head, although my head of course was full of a lot of other things. And amazingly I didn’t need to do much research—everything I wanted to know, somehow I got when it came to Nation. To cap it all, while I was writing it, Lyn and I went off to Australia, to a very nice place in far north Queensland, and I found myself walking down a path that all the maps will tell you is in Australia, but I knew was in Nation. And I looked out towards the sea and there it was, all of it—those great big trees that almost reach the sky. It was Nation. Somehow I was in the place I needed to be.
I am sure that there are writers out there who are capable of telling the world, clearly and succinctly, why and how they wrote the books on which their names and likenesses now twinkle.
They would be real writers, who keep things in filing cabinets rather than in piles. They will have desks, quite probably glass topped, which, unlike mine, are not infested with mice.
Yes, I know, this should not be possible, but it is an old Victorian desk with secret compartments in it; secret that is to me but not, alas, to the mice. Patch, the office cat, occasionally unleashes a pogrom, but what we have now is a stalemate at best. I cannot bring myself to poison them in situ, because of the thought of the little bodies mouldering in there somewhere among the mislaid wills and long-lost maps to hidden treasure.
I have met real writers. They make lists. They plan out their books on file cards. They do proper research, with notebooks, and unlike me, they don’t get totally sidetracked by a wonderful book about the frozen-water trade on the U.S. seaboard in the late eighteenth century.
It would be hard to describe my usual way of working, but I suspect it would look to a bystander, at least in the early stages of a novel, like the activity of a man who does not know what he is doing. That would be reasonable to surmise; generally I do not, and the purpose of writing the novel is to find out. Fortunately, this usually happens about halfway through the first draft. I tinker with ideas, invent characters, try out lines of dialogue, and generally play around with it until I have found a way to let myself know what I am thinking; often, one of the characters says something that tells me what the story is about.
Nation was not like that. It arrived like a tsunami; it took me over, more or less.
This happened about six months before the dreadful Asian tsunami of 2004, and when I saw the terrible news I told my editors that there was no way I could write the book at that time. It would simply be wrong.
But the story banged away at me nevertheless, to the point where I had to give in. It was that or go mad. And the first thing I did was to write the song.
It seems to me that I have always known that the tidal wave after Krakatoa sent a steamship a couple of miles into the rain forest. It is one of those things that you remember. And ever since I heard it, I have cherished the word calenture, a condition that affects becalmed sailors who begin to hallucinate green fields around their stricken ship. I wondered if the first man who looked over the side of the boat when it had been thrust into the jungle thought he had gone crazy. So I wrote the extra verse of “For Those in Peril on the Sea” for poor Captain Roberts to sing as the Sweet Judy ploughed through the canopy, scattering birds and leaves. Here, indeed, was a sailor no longer in peril on the sea but suddenly—and urgently—in peril on the land.
And there it was, hanging in my mind like a vision, the white-sailed ship plunging out of the darkness, from the Old World to the New, with a near-deranged captain tied to the wheel and making up, as his vessel disintegrates underneath him, a postscript to one of the finest Christian hymns. I sang it quite a lot while I wrote the book.
But all the time there was another vision squatting there, too. It is so clear in my mind that I can taste it even now. There was a boy, his back to me, holding a spear and screaming at the sea. I knew that he had lost something, and instantly realized that he had lost everything.