I want to try to keep up the momentum with the blogging, but I wanted a change. This comes from the first book and gives one of the big ideas of the book. It's a nice walk and a talk about fairy stories. Hardly any violence at all.
We walked out and locked the door. I noticed we were both looking around for any signs of the guys we’d duffed before, but I dunno what we’d have done if we’d seen them. We started to walk. I didn’t know where, but when I asked, he said we’d go to Jesmond Dene.
It turned out to be a really nice park in a narrow valley. We walked across an old metal bridge and down a steep path, got an ice cream each from a café at the bottom and just wandered.
“So what do your friends call you then? Fee, is it?”
“No, my dad calls me that; my friends call me Feev, like in fever.”
I'd already seen the joke in that, but he couldn’t think of anything more to say about it, so we walked on in silence for a bit.
“Look,” I said, “Maybe it’s none of my business, but how come you don’t know anything about the story here? I mean, you can tell me to butt out, but you can see why I’d be curious, can’t you?”
He nodded his head, thought about it for a few more steps and then shrugged.
“Aye, why not. Haru’s always saying I should open up more about it, it’s no big deal if I just stop letting it be. So why not? Do you mind if we keep on walking while we talk?”
I didn’t mind at all, so I nodded my head and we walked on. I was beginning to think he’d changed his mind, when…
“Mam, my mother, Sarah, married Alistair about two years after my dad died. I was about, well, it was three days before my ninth birthday. She’d known him from work for a long time, but she didn’t really notice him until after the death. He was kind to her, she always said. I didn’t take to him much. I’m not sure if that’s why we didn’t get on, or if we never would have. It doesn’t make much difference now, but I do wonder if we would have wound up liking each other if I’d given him a chance. Mind, he didn’t need much excuse to have nothing to do with me.”
He walked a bit further, thinking about it.
“Nah, he would probably never have liked me anyway. I reminded Mam of Dad, and Alistair never liked that. We all agreed I should go to a boarding school.” He laughed, but it wasn’t happy. “Mam sent me, for a better education. Alistair packed me off. He’d have used a cardboard box and sellotape…
By the time I was eleven, we’d settled into a sort of truce. He didn’t take much notice of me and I didn’t get in his hair. Neither of us liked upsetting Mam and that’s what arguments always did. I think I’d have come around when his first book was published, but then I found he’d put in my mates from school and they were all the worst characters. I mean, Mark Hadaway - famous around the country as a bully. He was my best mate.
So, I refused to read Book One. I think I would have changed my mind after a few months, but it was clear Alistair didn’t really care. The book went straight to the top of the best-seller lists everywhere and he got a lot of very good reviews. I don’t think he reckoned he needed my good opinion anymore.” He threw the stick of his ice-cream in a bin.
“Didn’t he talk to you about the book before it was finished?”
He laughed. It sounded sour. “I didn’t think Alistair so much as read books before he suddenly came out with the news that he was having one published. Mam and him used to talk about it a lot, apparently, but he didn’t want people to know he was writing.”
“Really, why not?”
“Well, you have to remember he didn’t know it was going to become the instant classic, did he? I think he dreamed it would, but he couldn’t let himself believe it. And he wasn’t the sort who would want people to know he’d written a flop.
Mam told me he was working on it for about two years and sometimes it just wouldn’t progress at all. I think a few times he was worried he’d never be able to see a way of finishing it.
And he really wouldn’t have wanted to tell everyone he was writing a book and then not be able to show it. I think that probably put me off more. I was a boy of eleven when he was writing it, but he never got me to check if it was interesting for me, or seemed realistic or anything. I suppose I just thought if he didn’t care whether I read it or not, I wouldn’t.”
“Y’see, there’s always been this idea on the fan pages that you were the one he based the character on, like obviously he would use his own son as a model…”
“I never was his son though. That’s why I’m still a Ward. He planned to adopt me at one stage, Mam said, but then it never happened. She wouldn’t talk much about why...”
“Well, maybe he did use you as a model, sort of, y’know, like by looking at you?”
“Would that be why a boy born on Tyneside would have this Irish accent then?”
“Oh.”
We walked on a bit further. The Dene was really pretty. I would love to be able to go there regularly. There isn’t anything like it near home. Parts of it made me think of the Land and I said so.
“Yeah, since I got here, I’ve thought he might have taken ideas from around the area as background or locations for over there.”
We went back to just walking in silence. There were more things I wanted to ask him, but he looked like he was thinking hard, so I kept quiet, waiting to see if he would speak again.
“I think he painted himself into a corner with the Brendan Earle books. All I know about what’s in them comes from talking with Harumi, but I know he didn’t like the image that went with being the famous children’s author.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, Alistair was always worried about his image. When Brendan Earle first made it big, he was more surprised than anyone and just couldn’t believe it was going to go on. I mean, he’d worked hard to get the position he had. University and long hours and being polite to the right people and then along comes this thing, this life-changing, unexpected thing. Well, I think he couldn’t trust it, because it was too easy. I think a lot of the things he did until the second book came out were to try to get people to like him, so, when the second book flopped, they wouldn’t savage him too much. Something like that.
He started doing all those things for charities. He’d never done anything like that before. He visited that girl in hospital, but I know he hated it, I heard him say so. The second book went mega, but by then everyone had this fixed image of him. So he was scared of what the tabloids would do if he stopped being nice. I think he wanted to ditch Mam and me, go off somewhere and be rich and powerful, but there was always the next book to write and the thought that it could bomb if he wasn’t still the nice children’s book writer. And, look, you might not want to believe this, but he hated Brendan Earle. And all the people who read about him. ”
“Oh, no, you can’t get me to believe that!”
“True though. After a bit he believed he could write something else, but no one was interested. And that burned him up. Alistair won the Smarties Prize for Children’s Literature. Got that? The Smarties prize. But after the second book he was always sure he could do something serious and be in with a chance at the Booker. He just couldn’t stand the idea that he had Smarties on his shelf. So demeaning.”
“But he cared about Brendan, you can feel it in the books!”
“Oh come on! Even I know every book got darker and more characters Brendan cared about got chopped. I’ve never believed that was realism. He was getting back at the poor bugger for making his life miserable.”
I didn’t want to believe it, so this time we walked on in silence ‘cos I didn’t want to talk any more. Except…
“But there are all these good things in the books and they’re all so well written and they really understand what it feels like growing up and being a teen and stuff.”
“Oh that? Yeah, I suppose so. Haru always says that he’s one of the most proficient writers at updating all of the whatsits, the great archetype themes that run through folk tales. Someone else said that about him. It was what made him think he could write more seriously. His stuff always got good critical reviews… But that’s not the same as liking your reader, is it?”
“This Haru, she’s your girlfriend, is she?”
He nodded.
“What makes her the expert on all this?”
“She’s taking a Masters in Evolutionary Psychology at Kyoto University. Don’t get me wrong. Harumi thinks Alistair was a genius and she can’t let up on trying to get me to read his books. I would have started, but I wanted to read this book on the psychology of fairy stories first. I was reading it on the zeppelin coming over and then I promised her I’d start on Brendan Earle, Book One.”
“Fairy stories! Brendan Earle is nothing to do with fairy stories!”
“No, but she’s talking about psychology. She’s talking about the themes in the stories and what they represent. And anyway, they’re not that different with all that magic and stuff, are they?”
“But Brendan Earle is all about growing up and dying and…”
“Yeah, but the folk stories are all about growing up and…”
“No, they aren’t! They’re about gingerbread cottages an’ wicked witches and things. Baby stuff!”
“Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Think it through. Gingerbread cottages is Hansel and Gretel, isn’t it? So, you have this little girl, separated from her parents, right? Biggest fear for little kids and a worrier for older ones who don’t know if they can make it on their own. She learns to trust her older brother, because he can think things through better than she can. Then the cottage is the ‘stranger-danger’ thing, don’t trust people who give you sweeties and while you’re on the subject, think about how dangerous it is to get fixated on the short-term thing that seems good right now. In the end she has to stand up for herself and defeat the thing that scares her and save someone. Haru reckons the same themes got used again for a big horror film from the turn of the century.”
“What was that, then?”
“You probably wouldn’t know it. It was called ‘The Silence of the Lambs’.”
“I do know that. Sara’s brother downloaded the DIV for us. He wants to be Quentin thingy when he grows up and he said it was a genre classic or something. I couldn’t sleep after watching that! But it’s nothing to do with Hansel and Gretel, it’s about Hannibal Lecter, he eats… Oh.”
“Getting it? One girl’s dad is dead and the other one is kidnapped away from her mother. Separation from…Clarisse is guided by her older male boss who’s very smart. Now you say Gretel gets a wicked witch and Clarisse gets a cannibalistic serial-killer. But what would you call a woman who cooks and eats kids? There’s even a chicken bone in the film.
The folk stories are about the dark stuff that’s always inside kids’ heads. That’s why people are still telling them after so many centuries. And you can turn one into a thriller, because that stuff’s still there inside adults’ heads too.”
I felt an idiot for not having seen it before. We crossed over a pretty little bridge and started walking back down the way we’d come.
“But anyway,” he said, “none of that explains why we’re still here or gives us any clues about how we get out.”
“Yeah, sort of destroys the idea that you’re supposed to live out the story and write the final book. Mind, that never made much sense, unless they started the action at the end of Book Six. Who was going to sit through years of this game and not just cheat?” We both thought about this one for a while.
“You’re right. It looks more as if they’ve had some kind of glitch.”
More silent walking as we thought this through. This walk was in a nice place, but wasn’t doing much to cheer me up. He must have thought so too.
“So, what we can do is head for the Quayside and I’ll show you some of the sights. Then we can wander up into the town centre and check out the cinemas. I’ll cook tonight, so we can go to the Grainger Market for shopping. If you like, we can drop into a bookshop.”
“Not really. Unless they’ve got books on how to escape from defective computers, I think I’d rather go to see a DIV.”
Adam
Just as well we got started on Hansel and Gretel. If I’d had to explain ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ or ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ I think she’d have slapped my face. LRRH is pure porn.
