The Book that Made Me Page 6
Among the other things Black Jack blew to smithereens was my belief that all manga is fantasy or high school romance. Heck, that was miles away from the truth – a good manga can be about anything under the sun. It’s a medium, not a genre, and if a story about a surgeon can be interesting, so can a story about a fireman (Megumi no Daigo, for example).
As I said, a whole new world opened up.
Years later, when I became a professional manga artist, I would always remember the valuable lesson of Black Jack. Not just that I was now on the other side of that door, producing books that knocked on the doors of readers – but that I was once a reluctant reader myself.
So many things can seem dull at first glance. So many things can make you roll your eyes, and think …really?! So many things can turn someone away from cracking open a new book, and most of all, the people whose job it is to introduce books to others can sometimes give the wrong sales pitch. However, given the right pathways, the right person and the right alignment of the stars, a book can send someone down a completely different life path than the one they were on before.
Like it did for me.
Believe it or not, I had originally graduated from university with a degree in Information Systems, but I bypassed that career path to become a manga artist. In 2004, two years after I graduated, I wrote and illustrated my first published manga, a mystery-horror story called The Dreaming. It was an amazing experience, and I haven’t looked back since.
Sometimes, all it takes is an open mind.
Of Magic and Memory
Kate Constable
The bookish child sits in a quiet corner of a suburban house, turning pages. Inside her imagination, she’s a million miles away: exploring jungles, sailing distant seas, having swashbuckling adventures in wild and distant lands.
I was the other way around.
My home was in the middle of a wild and perilous country, a mysterious land of thick jungles, impenetrable mountain ranges, crashing thunderstorms and unpredictable earthquakes. The small town where I lived was situated among remote valleys, discovered by the outside world only a few decades earlier, a place of breathtaking natural beauty, and violent warfare between spear-wielding warriors. But while the thunderstorms raged, I was snug in a corner of our little fibro house, reading.
And what I read were books set in the sedate English countryside, stories written years before I was born, safely distant in both time and place from the confusing reality outside my door.
I spent most of my childhood in Papua New Guinea, in the Highlands town of Mt Hagen. Back in the 1970s, Hagen was a frontier town, a colonial outpost.
Once a week, on market day, local men from the villages would stalk into town, traditionally dressed with cloth laplaps hanging from their belts in front and as-gras like a bustle of leaves behind, sporting grand headdresses of fur and feathers, and necklaces of shells. Their wives followed behind, bowed down under the weight of the laden string bilum bags that hung off their foreheads. My mum would stock up on the fresh fruit and vegetables they carried, grown in the villages and hillside gardens surrounding the town, and I would stock up on books at the small but excellent library, located just next to the market.
There wasn’t much else to do in Mt Hagen but read. No television, hardly any shops, no swimming pools or playgrounds. We’d listen to my dad’s LPs of British comedy shows like The Goon Show and Hancock’s Half Hour until we could recite them word for word. When we came back to Australia, I knew nothing about football or fashion or pop music. I might as well have landed from another planet.
My world was books. I’ve tried to find out more about the Mt Hagen public library, without success; it doesn’t seem to exist any more. But I suspect now that the well-stocked children’s section, at least, might have been shipped to the Highlands all of a piece, as a government initiative, or a charitable impulse by someone. It had The Railway Children and the Bastable series, Little Women and Little House on the Prairie, the Narnia books and The Little White Horse, Dido Twite books and A Wrinkle in Time, The Children of Green Knowe and The Borrowers, ballet books and pony books. I gulped them all down. I borrowed my favourite books over and over, sometimes not even bothering to open them; I’d sleep with them under my pillow, so they’d enter my dreams. Some particular favourites were part of a process I called “dreaming about”: imagining myself as part of their story, in the hazy time just before falling asleep. The Summer of the Great Secret, a solidly written but fairly unadventurous pony book by Monica Edwards, set in the Romney Marshes, for some reason captured my imagination utterly for about two years.
One of the books I returned to over and over, not because I dreamed myself into it, but because I loved it with a deeper love, was Tom’s Midnight Garden.
Written in 1958, it’s the story of Tom, exiled to his childless aunt and uncle’s apartment for the holidays because of his twin brother’s measles. When he arrives, he’s disappointed to find that their flat, part of a large old house, has no garden. But lying awake one night, he hears the grandfather clock in the hallway strike thirteen, and when Tom wanders downstairs, he discovers that he has entered the house’s past.
When he opens the back door, he finds not the small yard with rubbish bins that exists in the daytime, but the original huge garden that once belonged to the house before its grounds were sold off. Exploring the garden, he finds that he is a “ghost” in this time; none of the inhabitants of the house are aware of him – none except Hatty, the young orphan girl adopted by the rather cold, cruel family of the house.
Lonely Hatty and lonely Tom become friends. Together they climb trees, make a bow and arrows, and explore the nearby river and fields. Tom encourages Hatty to take risks and Hatty falls out of a tree and is almost killed, and Tom realises that she is growing older much faster than he is.
In the garden it’s always high summer, until one night Tom enters the garden and finds that winter has come. He and Hatty skate together down the frozen river as darkness falls, and at last Hatty is given a lift home by a neighbour, seeming to ignore Tom completely. He is outraged by this betrayal, and the next night, the last of his stay, he finds he can’t enter the garden. It’s gone, and he blunders into the rubbish bins of the present-day yard, calling desperately for Hatty.
This commotion wakes everyone in the house, and this is how he discovers that Hatty is, in fact, old Mrs Bartholemew. She is the owner of the house, the shadowy inhabitant of the topmost flat, and she has been dreaming of her childhood, night after night, summoning up the garden, and Tom himself, into her dreams. On Tom’s final day, the two friends are joyously reunited.
The last scene has always stayed with me: Tom is about to go home, but having bid a polite farewell to old Mrs Bartholemew, he impulsively turns and rushes back up the stairs to hug her, as if she were his own age, and they’d been friends all their lives.
Tom’s Midnight Garden is not a fast-paced book; it’s slow and atmospheric, every detail of the garden lovingly described (I wasn’t surprised to learn that the house and garden in the book were based on Philippa Pearce’s childhood home), and Tom and Hatty’s adventures are leisurely and largely undramatic. But it was a book I felt I could live inside, as if time stopped while I was within its pages. And for me, the simple elegance of the central time slip has never been surpassed. The final scenes, when Tom discovers that the wrinkled old lady upstairs and the lively young companion of his midnight garden are one and the same, are so poignant and so deeply satisfying.
I recently read this book aloud to my daughter and she foresaw the “twist” long before I had, on first reading; but for me, the joy of the twist was going back to re-read and pick up all the clues to Hatty’s real identity.
When I was ten, Tom’s Midnight Garden gave me ideas I didn’t understand, ideas to mull over. What was dream, and what was reality? Who was the ghost, Hatty or Tom? Did Tom create Hatty’s memories, or did Hatty build a reality for Tom to enter? Tom puzzles over the nature of time itself, i
ts shape and form – does it fly ever forward like an arrow, or a river; or loop back on itself, repeating its patterns like the seasons of a garden? Can two realities exist at once? It was my first real introduction to the mysteries of “timey-wimeyness”.
Children’s books are the right place to explore big ideas, philosophical truths, and ruminations on the world, before adolescence hits and it all becomes about personal journeys, when one’s own mysterious self is the most fascinating object in the universe. About twelve is the age when a young person best grapples with these big thoughts, old enough to grasp their implications, young enough for the ideas to be startling and fresh.
Something that had entered deep into my unconscious, without my knowing it, were the chapters where Hatty and Tom skate down the frozen river, night falling around them. These beautiful, haunting scenes resurfaced in my own writing in the ice-bound scenes of my book, The Tenth Power; but it wasn’t until I re-read Tom’s Midnight Garden that I recognised, with a jolt, their true origin.
At around the age of eleven or twelve, time-slip stories held a particular magic for me. I was bewitched by Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time, fascinated but unsettled by Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer, and enchanted by Joan G Robinson’s When Marnie Was There. Penelope Lively’s The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, with its similar reflections on time and memory, also captured my imagination.
I dreamed of entering other times, other worlds. Perhaps, living in untamed, dangerous, colonial PNG, I unconsciously sought security in the pages of my best-loved books, worlds of magic and memory, an imagined England that no longer existed in reality, if it ever had. But ultimately, when we open a book, aren’t we all trying to enter our own secret, midnight garden?
The Big Scooby-Doo Reveal
Rachael Craw
A scrawny ten-year-old girl, all elbows and knees, face plastered with freckles, scratching at her nape beneath a short sandy wig of tatty curls – that was me on Book Day at Kendal Primary School, Standard Four. Fossicked from the dusty innards of my mother’s wardrobe, that wig was a relic from the ’60s and a boon for an otherwise uninspiring costume of jeans turned up at the ankle and a plain cream shirt. It made my scalp and ears itch and the back of my neck red and sweaty. I wore it the whole day even though it was irritating and the colour, like the cream shirt, did nothing for my complexion. It was an act of devotion to my fictional heroine, Trixie Belden.
Trixie came into my life at a time when I needed her most, a tediously rainy school holiday on the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand, infamous for sandflies and precipitation. I must have been driving my parents mad with a constant liturgy of “I’m boooored” and “There’s nothing to dooooo” and sighing and moaning and making life miserable for everyone in the way that children do when they’re trapped indoors by bad weather and a waning appetite for imaginary play.
A mercy dash with my dad to the bookstore and there I found her – a fascinating thirteen-year-old rural American super-sleuth, resident of fictional Sleepyside-on-Hudson in upstate New York, club member of the Bob-Whites of the Glen, and best friend of wealthy and refined Honey Wheeler. Imagine my thrill upon discovering an entire shelf of adventures to pick from. Though the store didn’t have them all, I was eager enough that I didn’t even mind diving in mid-series. My choice was based on the sheer power of alliteration, a title so exotic and dangerous sounding I could not resist: The Mystery of the Midnight Marauder.
Now, I had no clue what a marauder was. I hoped and feared it meant murderer, though I was squeamish of anything bloodthirsty. I had only recently overcome a paralysing fear of vampires after copping an eyeful of the boy next door’s graphic encyclopedia of bloodsuckers. Flipping through those dark pages, it was the image of Nosferatu hanging in a belltower eating himself from the feet up that burned its way into my synapses. So I was in no hurry to read anything that involved a lot of blood, but the sense of high-stakes mystery that surrounded the word “marauder” drew me in. When I brought the book to the counter for Dad to pay, I made a point of looking as nonchalant as possible. I wasn’t idiot enough to ask him outright what the word meant. That would only draw attention to the potentially dangerous subject matter and risk confiscation. No, I played it cool.
Of course, I started the book in the car and when we got back to my nanna’s house I went straight to my room, lay on my bed and kept reading. By late afternoon I had gotten to know Trixie and her friends: sweet and gentle Honey, the enviably violet-eyed Diana and big, handsome red-haired Jim. Trixie was sweet on Jim. He gave her an identification bracelet. I suspected that was jewellery and it seemed a promising sign. I don’t think I’d ever read anything romantic before. I had started the book amped for mystery and discovered a bonus prize. Occasional flustered blushes, loggerheads arguments and lingering looks between Trixie and Jim made for giddy plot drivers that kept me turning the pages. Though, disappointingly, I never read a Trixie Belden story where they actually kissed.
Before the day was out, I had learned that a marauder was a roaming thief but that not all thieves were scoundrels. The moral lesson! Trixie, I discovered after several books, was often the beneficiary of the moral lesson, throwing herself into each mystery with righteous certainty to later trip on her own assumptions. Not all rich people were snobs, not all elderly recluses were hiding terrible secrets in their mansion attics, not all ethnically diverse people wearing leather jackets were villains. City life, drugs and motorcycles, however, were invariably bad. The reader might absorb these invaluable truths along with Trixie, usually just in time for the big Scooby-Doo reveal at the end when culprits were unmasked and motivations explained. The Mystery of the Midnight Marauder had all of these features and it ignited my imagination, leaving me hungry for more. Luckily, the rain persisted for several days and my father, for the sake of his wallet, signed me up at the Greymouth Public Library.
In retrospect, it’s fun to try to figure out why these books had so much appeal for me. As an adult I’ve had no interest in reading crime fiction or mystery novels, though in some respects my own novels in the Spark series carry a thread of mystery through it. I think what ultimately drew me to Trixie Belden stories was Trixie herself, a powerful female protagonist. She wasn’t perfect, she had fears and insecurities and she often made mistakes, but she was an instigator, an investigator, curious, bold and risk-taking. She was a thinker and problem-solver who came up with wild theories, a leader in the search for truth. In my later reading, Anne of Green Gables would also attract my attention for being a powerful female protagonist. She expressed herself, her curiosity, her creativity. She questioned authority and was ambitious and competitive, but before I met Anne, Trixie was the business.
I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it then but now I think I was looking for a protagonist I could identify with. I loved that she was outspoken, opinionated and take charge. I loved that she had freckles! A shared affliction. It made up for her being more on the blonde side of sandy-haired. Growing up, I resented the lack of black-haired, pale-skinned heroines in books and on television. There was Wonder Woman, who I worshipped, but even she had a tan. I wasn’t fussed with Snow White who really just did a lot of housework, fell unconscious and then married the first man who kissed her. Besides which, she was preternaturally beautiful and I was an ugly child. Or, at least, I felt ugly. I was too tall, too skinny, too pale, too freckly, too loud and my ears stuck out. The only feature that I loved about myself was my long black hair but my mother, sick of maintaining it, took me to the hairdresser and had it chopped off! Not into a pretty bob like you might find on little girls today but short like a boy. I cried all the way home from the salon.
When I found Trixie she had short hair too, admittedly with curls, but freckles and short hair were two more likenesses than I had managed to find anywhere else.
Another big part of the allure of these stories was the potent American-ness of Trixie’s life. She and her friends rode a yellow bus to school where the corridor
s were lined with metal lockers and the desks were scalloped around the sides of their chairs, where they pledged allegiance to a flag before class began. They carried their lunches in brown paper bags, they went to pep rallies where cheerleaders turned flips and waved pompoms. They came home and did chores. Chores! They celebrated Halloween, Thanksgiving and Fourth of July with corn dogs and pumpkin pies.
I already had a firm scaffold of popular American culture constructed in my psyche thanks to television with the likes of Little House on the Prairie, The Dukes of Hazzard and Happy Days (see Google and YouTube). The Steven Spielberg movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial had come out when I was eight years old and, quite apart from the thrill of alien encounter, the scene in the breakfast booth where the kids sat and ate pepperoni pizza straight from the box impacted the wiring of my brain to such an extent that I have never, ever forgotten it. I couldn’t get enough of the home of the brave and the land of the free.
Trixie Belden provided that portal to another place, another culture that seemed different, larger and more interesting than my own. I was young; I hadn’t yet fallen in love with the culture or beauty of the landscape in which I lived, though that would come in time. At the age of ten, I felt my home was boring, small and tedious with its sameness. America was a distant wonderland, glittering with otherness. Thankfully, there were many books in the series which meant I could return to that wonderland again and again, revisiting those characters like old friends.