A Slip of the Keyboard (19 page)

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.

There had to be a girl. She would be a Victorian girl, with all the baggage that the word brings with it. She would have to be prim, and by the standards of the trouser-wearing peoples of the Northern Hemisphere, well brought up. But, under those stiff Victorian clothes, she would be as tough as nails. I took that as a given, because my creativity always appears to fail me if I try to write a soppy girl. I just can’t. You could poke me with sticks, and it would have no effect. Oh, they sometimes start out soppy as anything, but as soon as they find that it doesn’t work, they tend to become a reasonably close relative of Miss Piggy.

And so on. In short, I practically nearly drowned under the force of this book. In my mind, it is still totally visual, a sequence of images rather than words, as if I was getting a glimpse of the movie that was yet to be made (and probably never will be. See later.).

Authors tend to have pack rat minds as a matter of course, and I suspect that my mind packs more rats than most.
Nation
became a happy dumping ground for the hoarded junk of fifty years of joyfully undirected serendipitous reading. Henrik Willem Van Loon’s story of the Pacific gave me a good background. Various accounts of the Krakatoa explosion and its aftermath were dredged up. A whole three shelves of accumulated world folklore got distilled into the affairs of one island. Scientist friends dug out esoteric information on how you can measure the age of glass. And—this was a real coup—I found myself at a dinner sitting next to a man who not only knew that bullets can be slowed very, very rapidly by water and also that in some circumstances they might even ricochet off the surface, but who was able to set up some tests in his big tanks, just to check for certain. Blue Jupiter—viewing the giant planet in the daylight—is something I discovered for myself, one evening in early autumn, when I spotted Sirius just visible in the sky and realized that the highly sophisticated go-to function on my shiny new telescope would be able to use this data to locate Jupiter right at that moment.

And, five minutes later, there it was, blue and white like the daytime moon and with three of its own satellites visible.

They kept the universe turned on even during the daytime! I had always known that to be true, but it was a moment of epiphany; by whom, from what, and why I don’t know, but any epiphany is worth having.

Even now, more than a year since the deed was done, I am still not sure what
Nation
is, because it seemed to me that I channelled half of it. I have a reputation, or possibly a crime sheet, as a comic writer, and indeed humour does break out sometimes in the book
and a smile will force its way through. Yet it begins with a boy burying the corpses of almost everybody he has ever known. I admired Mau’s dilemma as he single-handedly invented humanism, railing at the gods for not existing, while at the same time needing them to exist to take the blame. I find it difficult to remember that I invented him: he seemed to create himself as the book progressed.

At this point, people say, in a kindly voice, the novel was clearly influenced by the fact that I was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease during its completion.

That would be interesting if it were true, but it is even more interesting because it is not true. The first, and quite complex, draft had already been finished when I was diagnosed, and posterior cortical atrophy, which is the official term for my variant of the disease, is quite hard even for an expert to discover. From what I have been told, the disease may have been quietly and unobtrusively taking over the territory for very many years before I had an inkling that anything was wrong.

All authors must occasionally wonder where the magic comes from, and sometimes I wonder where the strength of Daphne came from, and about the source of Mau’s almost incoherent rage. Wherever their origins, I believe that
Nation
is the best book I have ever written or will write.

Finally, or perhaps I should say climactically, I must thank my editors on both sides of the Atlantic, who got the best out of me with
Nation
by pushing needles under my fingernails, an ancient skill of the craft. I know it was for my own good, and I am grateful. Sincerely grateful, and this time I’m not kidding.

I would be astonished and gratified to be standing in front of you today, if indeed I was, in fact, standing in front of you today, because it would mark something very special—a second chance that worked.

Up until the mid-1990s I was barely known in the United States, while already selling in great numbers almost everywhere else in
the world. The publishing situation was woeful. I remember that one edition, in paperback, went out across America with my name spelt wrong on every other page. And yet, when I went to U.S. science fiction conventions, I would be faced by a huge queue of fans, all burdened down with grey import U.K. editions—hardcover ones at that.

My agent did some calculations, and presented the publisher with figures to show how much their sloth was costing them. Things began to move. Not long afterwards my publisher either took over somebody else or got taken over themselves; in practice it’s always a little difficult to be certain in these matters, because publishers tend to collide like galaxies, and you are never quite sure who ran into who, only that some stars have exploded and some constellations have gone freelance.

But, in short, I ended up with bright star editors who knew my work and cared about it, and even publicists who knew my name, which is always useful in a publicist.

Strange things began to happen. I began to get royalties, I began to get big crowds at events; at one signing a few years ago where the independent bookshop was stripped of all my titles within minutes of the beginning of an event, the crowd surged down to the nearest Barnes and Noble and did the same thing there. Who would have thought it?

Am I proud? Well, I am English, and a Knight and, of course, properly modest and diffident. Hooray! Bingo! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!

I have always treasured having one of my novels named an Amelia Bloomer Book by the feminist task force of the ALA, because there is something heartwarming about a man with a beard receiving accolades for strong feminist writing. But this is the Boston Globe–Horn Book award. I am truly honoured to receive it, especially so, as it is given by people who, if they are not librarians themselves, are often in league with librarians.

Not long ago I was invited to a librarians’ event by a lady who
cheerfully told me, “We like to think of ourselves as information providers.” I was appalled by this want of ambition; I made my excuses and didn’t go. After all, if you have a choice, why not call yourselves Shining Acolytes of the Sacred Flame of Literacy in a Dark and Encroaching Universe? I admit this is hard to put on a button, so why not abbreviate it to: librarians?

As I am sure some of you know, I boast of the fact that for a couple of years I was a volunteer librarian, working weekends for no more reward than a cup of tea, a sweet biscuit, and a blind eye to the enormous number of books that I was taking home.

It seemed to me, even in those days, that librarians and their ilk were not mere “providers.” Information sleets down on us like confetti; we are knee deep in the stuff.

But I saw my fellow librarians as subtle guides and givers of context, a view which must have taken root when, one day, one of them pushed across the counter three books bound together with string. He said, “We think you might like this.” It was
The Lord of the Rings
. Now that’s what I call real librarianship.

Postscript:
Nation
has done the rounds of Hollywood, but apparently is not of interest because it does not leave enough room for hilarious, wisecracking animals. We must be grateful for small mercies.

Daily Telegraph
,
16 December 2009

Last Wednesday I went to the National Theatre to see the play
Nation
, based on my book, which by a happy coincidence was also called
Nation
. It is, I think, the best book that I have ever written or will write; it is certainly the one that took most effort.

(In short,
Nation
is set in an alternate nineteenth century, where a tsunami of Krakatoan proportions lays waste the oceans and leaves a native boy, Mau, alone on a devastated island with Daphne, a prim mid-Victorian girl marooned by the same wave. Their shy and
difficult relationship becomes the centre of their drive to save the storm-washed refugees who reach the island, in the course of which they have to fight off attackers of all kinds to find the secret hidden in the island’s traditions, that almost literally turns the world upside down.)

That is just an aside; what is important right now is that when the play opened to the press two weeks ago, it got rather more kicks than plaudits. There was praise for the staging, but the play on the whole got such epithets as “racist,” “politically correct” and “fascist,” although to be fair, I think that whoever said that was probably confused.

All this for the play of a book which was universally well received last year and this year won the Printz Medal, given by the American Librarians Association and the highest U.S. award for young adult literature that it is possible for a British author to win! I know some of those librarians. They are tough cookies. Racism, fascism, and overt PC wouldn’t stand a chance.

I was so depressed that fellow authors rallied round as a kind of small support group to say “Don’t take any notice of the critics” and to remind me that the author doesn’t get blamed.

I hadn’t seen the play in the previews. The people at the National said they didn’t want me to see them until the play had been sufficiently tuned. They also made it abundantly clear that I had no say in the production.

The reason for this, apparently, is that “writing a play is different from writing a book.” This is true: it’s different, and is, I suggest, easier. The playwright has got sound, light, movement and music—and a lot of staff—as part of their palette; the book author has one lousy alphabet. And we don’t get previews to help us tighten the work; we give it our best shot, press the send key, and pray.

Quite a large number of spies at the various incarnations fed me back dispatches from the front: it doesn’t flow, difficult to follow, confusing even if you know the book, too much dance, “a curate’s
egg,” not enough explanation, not enough explanation, not enough explanation (I put that one in three times because it kept appearing), actors working hard, but it never had a chance to engage. No one was telling me they didn’t like it; they were telling me that liking it took an effort. Mysteriously, they reported that nevertheless it was getting rapturous applause.

So last night I walked into the theatre like Wyatt Earp on a deceptively quiet street in Tombstone, my finger already on the trigger. And what I found is this:
Nation
is pretty good. You still have to pay attention, but according to the chief spy, attention has been made a lot easier. Cox, the chief villain, has an unnecessary back story, in my opinion; in the book he is a vicious psychopath, almost a force of nature. I wanted him to be not a two-dimensional but a one-dimensional character, evil incarnate. There were one or two places where the laws of narrative demand their due; if you’re going to have a young Victorian girl sawing off somebody’s leg during a musical number it’s pretty important that the audience can understand why this is happening. And refugees arriving at a hospitable island after terrible suffering really should look close to death—which segues neatly into the amputation problem. And in my experience the ending needs approximately another twenty words of dialogue to make a complex and very delicate scene come into focus. All this being said at length, I couldn’t help but love it. It isn’t my book. The medium changes things.
Nation
the book whispers where
Nation
the play shouts; this is because the book has to reach your eyeballs, while the play has to reach the back of the theatre, and making things louder also makes them different. Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage. In the book there is time to make certain that the reader, or even the reviewer, understands the difference between the grandfathers, the departed elders of the tribe, and the grandfather birds, vulture-like scavengers. In the play they collide,
but not on the whole badly. In all fairness to Mark Ravenhill (the adaptor), to fully realize
Nation
on stage would probably require a performance of Wagnerian proportions, and much, sadly, had to go. As it is, it could be honed further to helpful effect, and I, who came prepared to be appalled, found myself charmed by it. The house was two thirds full, which would seem to me not too bad for a Wednesday. People sobbed, gasped, cheered and cried, and all moreover in the right places, as it dawned on me that what I was watching was, in a very strange way, a Victorian melodrama for the twenty-first century.