Has teen fiction taken a nasty turn?

The Hunger Games, a story about children killing children, is currently breaking box office records. Some adults agonise over its violence and cruelty, and wonder if it is bad for their children.

There has been a run of popular books in the same vein, many of them prize winners.  The Carnegie medal winning Chaos Walking Trilogy by Patrick Ness for example and last year’s Costa Award winner Blood Red Road, as well as popular books by Michael Grant, Scott Westerfeld and Philip Reeve.

So popular are they, that a quick search in our catalogue for booklists of dystopian fiction brings up  twelve pages of lists, mainly for young adults and including one for our own library network by Zackids .

Arguments abound as to why this is so. Does it simply reflect a need by teenagers to deal with their anxieties through literature? Are their anxieties worse than ours were? Or is it a backlash against the tight control which has enveloped this generation of children? Is it redemptive, or an indication of despair? Or is just about a good exciting story?

Some point out that dystopian fiction for this age group is hardly new. Previous generations have enjoyed classics like Salt by Maurice Gee, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L Engle and Lois Lowry’s The Giver.

What do you think? What do your kids think?

Sali Mahomet: Picturing Canterbury

Sali Mahomet making icecream in his ‘dairy’ behind his house at 69 Caledonia Road, St Albans
[ca. 1910]

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Secrets (and lies?) at Wellington Writers and Readers Week

Kate Grenville appeared at an Auckland Readers and Writers festival a few years ago, talking about The secret river, a book based on the stories her mother told about her great-grandfather Solomon Wiseman, who was transported from England and “took up land” on the Hawkesbury river.

Grenville’s family’s eyes glazed over at these stories, but in 2000, walking across Sydney Harbour Bridge in a Reconciliation March, Grenville looked down, imagined a convict ship off-loading in the harbour and wondered – how did Solomon Wiseman “take up land”? Wondering led to The secret river, and, while at that Auckland Readers and Writers festival talking about the book, she climbed Rangitoto.

While she was climbing, a voice spoke to her with a synopsis of a novel and its first lines. She had nothing to write on except the brown paper bag her lunch came in, a bag she produced triumphantly on the stage at the Embassy in 2012.

The novel was Sarah Thornhill, and it features the story of Solomon Wiseman’s grand-daughter, a six-year-old Maori girl who was plucked from her family on Stewart Island after her parents died. To research the book Grenville visited The Neck on Stewart Island, as she believes novelists have to visit the place they are writing about, as a matter of respect, acknowledgement and humility.

Her books question everything about being a white Australian. In writing them Grenville says “let us not forget this”, but she has been attacked by the ‘commentariat’ annoyed that historians don’t sell many books, whereas writers of historical fiction do. Obviously really smarting from this criticism, Grenville gave some opinions I hope I’m reflecting accurately, opinions shared by a few fellow authors who also talked about historical fiction, but not by others.

Ron Rash seemed to be a kindred spirit as they both used the Faulkner quote “The past is not dead. It’s not even past”. Grenville said she writes fiction about the present set in the past; Rash said his book The cove was written about what is happening now in America, set in 1918.

The three ’emerging’ writers who were all writing books set in the past felt that just rendering time and place is not the point of  writing historical fiction. When Peter Carey wrote The true history of the Kelly Gang he “made it all up”; when Michael King reportedly suggested that Maurice Shadbolt distorted the historical record, Shadbolt’s’ reply was “it’s true if I say it is”.

I’m not sure what I think. Where does history end and the novel begin? Should history be registered in a “contemporary poetic”? Is voice the most important thing?

Placement at Wellington Writers and Readers 2012

Denise Mina and Ron Rash were two discoveries for me at Wellington Writers and Readers 2012. Two different writers setting their books in very different places, but seeing them together examining the importance of place in their novels was a real treat. For a start I could listen to their accents all day, but what they were saying was just as good as how they said it.

Although the fabric of their landscapes is far apart, from Rash’s rural Appalachian Mountains to Mina’s gritty, mean streets of suburban Glasgow, they are connected by a strong sense of history.

According to Mina, Scottish people are obsessed by history; it’s a part of being poor. Rash’s Southerners are poor too,  less mobile than other Americans with roots running deep into the history of the place they live in, where something as long ago as the Civil War can be very near.

Both writers distiguished between local colour and regional writing. Local colour is concerned with what makes an area different, while regional writing is universal, looking out from the inside. We tend to think of things being neutral if they are set in New York or London, but that is exactly what they’re not. It’s not true that New York is never regional and that London doesn’t have an accent.

When I thought about books with a strong sense of place the first that came to mind was Winter’s Bone, set in the Ozarks and written by Daniel Woodrell, who happens to be a friend of Ron Rash’s. Woodrell’s Ozarks are a long way from suburban Christchurch and Ree Dolly may be moving through a very particular landscape, but what keeps her searching is universal – love for her family.

What books would you recommend for their strong sense of place?

Early peoples

World Book online resource Early Peoples  is a mine of information about the history of ethnic groups like the Maori and Aborigines, as well as historical groups like the Greeks and Aztecs. Great for homework and assignments and a good way to inform yourself about ethnic groups.

It’s designed for children, but personally I found it pretty  interesting myself – although to be fair, I am a bit of a history junkie. For example did you know that what is now Western Sudan was the home of  three great West African kingdoms?

Or that the first Chinese dynasty, The Shang dynasty, began its rule began in about 1766 B.C. That is compared to Archaic Greek civilisation which began around 6-800 B.C.

The Egyptians of course beat everyone else by about 3000 years – they were up to about their 18th dynasty by the time they got to Tutankhamun in about 1300 B. C. Well that is unless you include the Indus Valley  and Mesopotamia which  are not included in the resource, and which both began about 3000 B.C.

Oh yes I could spend a few happy hours just browsing around in here. You’ll find it in The Source if you feel the same way.

Secret Lives at Wellington Writers and Readers Week

9.30 a.m. on the first day of Wellington Writers and Readers Week. Turning up at this hour on a Saturday shows true dedication to literature, but plenty of people were there to see Selina Hastings talk about her biography of Somerset Maugham.

Gratifyingly for those among us who like our authors to look the part (that is, me), she looked and sounded just as the biographer of Rosamond Lehmann and Nancy Mitford should: like an immaculately groomed English gentlewoman whose skin has never felt the relentless rays of the harsh Antipodean sun, and whose vowels were rounded at Oxford.

Hastings was attracted to telling the life story of that ‘dissolute charmer’ Somerset Maugham because, like so many of us, she read him off the shelves of her parents’ library when moving from children’s to adult’s books.

Maugham was once the most famous author in the world, although he said of himself: “I know just where I stand, in the very front row of the second rate”.  Probably best remembered now for his stories of the British in the Far East, his spy stories are his true legacy. John le Carré has said the modern spy story begins with Maugham’s Ashenden stories as he was the first author to write about the actuality of espionage. Winston Churchill, a life-long friend, actually told Maugham to destroy 14 of the Ashenden stories because they breached the Official Information Act.

Maugham was implacably opposed to the idea of a biography, holding a large bonfire of his personal papers and embargoing the rest, even writing to old friends ordering them to tear up his letters. All for naught though, as Hastings was granted access to his papers by the Royal Literary Fund, his literary executors. She even tracked down the notes made by his first biographer, who had spoken to people who knew him when he was alive. These notes were owned by a reclusive book collector in Sydney who was also very helpful.

Maugham’s stated conviction that “a life of myself is bound to be dull” seems to be very far from the truth; he trained as a doctor, completed over 90 undercover missions as a secret agent, survived a disastrous marriage to Syrie, the most celebrated interior designer of her time and the woman responsible for the craze for the all-white room, became fabulously wealthy and lived a long life on the South of France, that “sunny place for shady people”.

I couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for Maugham, going to such lengths to thwart future biographers and being ultimately unsuccessful, but, as Hastings said, he died in 1965, so there is no-one left alive to be hurt by anything that could be said about him, he was an important figure and people are interested in him.  And I plan to read her book so I can’t get on any sort of high horse.

Should the wishes of those who don’t want to be written about after their deaths be honoured?

Emerging at Wellington Writers and Readers Week 2012

Being an ’emerging’ writer is an interesting thing to be. What is the criterion for emerging? Is it that you are young? Not according to one questioner at the New Zealand’s Emerging Writers session  at Wellington Writers and Readers 2012. Slightly unkindly, he observed that Eleanor Catton, Hamish Clayton and Craig Cliff didn’t look particularly young to him, causing each panellist to ‘fess up their age. All under 40, which might be a sign that they are young, because I’m not sure anyone who is not would announce their age from the stage of the Embassy.

Can a writer still be emerging when they have won prizes?  That would exclude Catton, whose debut novel The rehearsal won the New Zealand Book Award for Best First Book of Fiction, and Craig Cliff, who won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best First Book Award for A man melting.

Perhaps writers are still emerging when they have only written one book so far. So how did these writers begin to emerge?

Catton wanted to break the convention of the coming-of-age novel – the idea that there is some sort of arrival into adulthood.

Clayton had an urge to write but nothing to say so he went to university, thinking that if you want to be a decent writer you need to be well-read. (If only it was that easy, I thought to myself). He discovered that you do have to be very patient for overnight success.

Cliff found that a 21-year-old man alone in a room writing a novel is never a good idea. A few years later he tried again, and it still wasn’t a good idea. Then he thought of trying the short story form, where a first draft can be finished in the first blast of inspiration.

All three are now working on novels set in the past, a departure for Catton and Cliff, but not for Clayton whose first novel Wulf is about early 19th century New Zealand, its explorers and that fascinating and terrifying character Te Rauparaha.

Clayton and Catton saw some problems with the talk around Historical Fiction. For Clayton it is limiting; faithfulness in the rendering of time and place is not the point.   Catton sees the problem as the present foisting onto Historical Fiction the things we are most  preoccupied with now, resulting in works that exist only to confirm what we already know.

Craig is reading a lot (The story of a New Zealand River was mentioned) and using the part everyone reads in The Count of Monte Cristo as a model for the book he is working on, leaving out the bits everyone skips.

This was all very interesting as I don’t read much Historical Fiction. The last book I read in the genre was Wolf Hall, which led to some heated debates. I loved it, but others dismissed it out of hand because of its modern voice.  Any dedicated H.F. readers out there with an opinion?

Ron Rash at Wellington Writers and Readers Week 2012

One of the great things about writers’ festivals is stumbling across a writer you’ve never heard of. 11 a.m. on the first day of Writers and Readers Week at the New Zealand International Arts Festival 2012 and the temptation was to hit one of the coffee bars.

I’m very glad I decided to take a punt and hear Appalachian writer Ron Rash instead. Not only did I learn I’d been saying Appalachian wrong all these years (Rash said it with what sounded like a T in it, as in Appalatchian, rather than a Y, as in Appalaychian), but I found another writer to add to my endless ‘For Later’ shelves.

A poet, short story writer and novelist whose family has lived on or around the same patch of land for 200 years, Rash was very entertaining (a Southern accent never hurts, I find). It can be a mixed blessing to be a Southern writer as there’s often an unspoken ‘just’ before the Southern, but being in the company of William  Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote and Tennessee Wiliams is some consolation.

The cove, his latest novel, is set in one of the German internment camps set up in the U.S during the First World War, examining what it means to be a patriot. Other novels include Serena, with a main character who is a cross between Medea and Lady Macbeth, and One foot in Eden, which is shaped like a tragedy although the reader never really knows where it is going.

Rash’s short readings of his work really whetted my appetite to check it out further. The moral of the story? Always go for literature over caffeine.

Queen Denise – Wellington Writers and Readers Week 2012

“The Queen of Tartan Noir”.  Who could resist her session at Wellington Writers and Readers Week 2012? Not me, even though I was unaware of quite what constituted Tartan Noir nor of ever having read any.

Denise Mina is the Queen in question and was the winner of the best-dressed author and best author’s hair competitions, contests held only in my irredeemably trivial head. She is the owner of an enviable quiff, a raconteuse of the first order and an award winning writer.

Born in Glasgow, but brought up as part of an ‘oil family’ who moved 21 times in 18 years, Mina ended up back in Glasgow after studying ceramics in Galway. At  University in a Law Faculty full of crime fiction fanatics, her PhD topic involved mental illness in female offenders, but, instead of completing her thesis, she began Garnethill, her first book. When she told her supervisor she was dropping out of her PhD to write a crime novel his first question was “what’s it about?”.

According to Mina people read crime fiction for fun. If they don’t like it they’ll say it was bad, but if they don’t like literary fiction they’ll say they didn’t understand it.  Having bought one of her books on the strength of seeing her sessions, I’d have to say it wasn’t exactly fun although it was extremely enjoyable, and it made me want to read all her books.

She’s been selected to write the graphic novels of Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy; selected in that she was sent an email asking “do you fancy this?”.  The headline for that piece of news read “Queen of Tartan Noir to take on Tattoo Girl”. I can’t wait.

Christchurch people, 1952: Picturing Canterbury

Spectators during the ceremony marking the running of the last New Brighton tram
[18 Oct. 1952]

Some of the crowds who greeted the last tram travelling from Cathedral Square to New Brighton are pictured. Thousands of people filled Seaview Road almost from the bridge to the seafront.

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