The Book that Made Me Page 8

  My classmates and I stood out the front of a theatre without a clue about what we were going to see. There were two Aboriginal men trying to gain entry into the theatre. The security team started giving the men a hard time. The men, who were well-dressed and made a point of this, presented their tickets but still the security tried to move them on. It was very clear to me why but I felt incapable to do anything about it. I’d also had a lifetime of seeing Aboriginal people being treated like rubbish without any recourse.

  Very early into the performance of the play, the Aboriginal men who were moved on by the security team appeared on stage. They asked why the audience members hadn’t jumped to their assistance. I found the experience mesmerising. The singer-songwriter Paul Kelly performed in the play and I was particularly impressed with the way non-Aboriginal people were working with Aboriginal people to show how racism was affecting Aboriginal Australia.

  It was then and there that I decided to become a playwright and decided to knuckle down so that I could go to university and get some advice on how to go about it.

  In one of my early uni tutorials we were supposed to discuss No Sugar by Western Australian Aboriginal playwright Jack Davis. Just when I knew there was a text on the curriculum that I felt comfortable discussing, the tutor refused to discuss the work, saying it was ridiculous that an Aboriginal text be read in a university English program. I protested, saying that the story contained within Davis’s work was similar to that of my grandparents and I wanted to discuss it. I was questioned about this and criticised for not being black enough. I almost packed my bags and jumped on the first bus back to Port Augusta.

  A few weeks later I was reading Summer Lightning and Other Stories by Caribbean writer Olive Senior and I knew that the non-Aboriginal students and staff delivering that English course were receiving Senior’s work much differently than Davis’s. This interested me because it really felt to me that Olive was speaking about my family and community, only the places she talked about and the accent of the people were different.

  My first play, Flash Red Ford, a story based on the experiences of my Nukunu great-grandfather was performed in Kenya and Uganda in 1999, shortly after Pop Fitz died. Roger Bennett read drafts of this play shortly before his death. Roger was a great influence for me. He had come from a very disadvantaged background and knowing what he had produced without a classic high-achieving mainstream background gave me hope regarding how my writing might develop. I felt privileged and was grateful that Roger was so giving of his time and knowledge.

  I later connected with people who had worked on Bennett’s play. In 2001, I worked as Second Assistant Director on the film One Night the Moon featuring Paul Kelly, and my 2002 play Love, Land and Money featured actors Robert Crompton and Michael Harris, the two actors who were refused entry into Funerals and Circuses. Beyond Bennett’s play inspiring me to write, I continue to encounter people who have some connection to Roger, his play and the people that worked on it. I come to collaborate with these people and they inspire and contribute to my development. In this way, I’ve felt like Funeral and Circuses has played a magical role in my life.

  I constantly revisited Olive Senior’s Summer Lightning and Other Stories, and it inspired me to write fiction, at first short stories and then a novel. The first reading of the novel and observing how non-Indigenous readers responded to it kept me in university study. Further readings enabled me to understand the great craft involved in Senior’s writing: how she produces pace and suspense, reveals contradiction and stays true to the motivations of characters.

  When I began writing the novel Calypso Summer in 2007, I decided to write to Senior to request her mentorship, particularly due to the references to the West Indies and Rastafarianism in the novel. I couldn’t believe it when Olive agreed.

  In 2008, I travelled with Olive through Jamaica and experienced the places she talks about in her work. Spending time with Olive helped me to understand the role and work of the writer and the type of discipline involved. The experience also highlighted the impact of colonisation upon black and Indigenous peoples and how literature plays an important role in assisting us to address issues. In 2009, Olive travelled to Australia and spent time with my family and me in Port Augusta. She was a neighbour to Bob Marley on Hope Road, Kingston and knew him well. We are good friends. Olive is now in her seventies and I am inspired to hear of her constant writing pursuits and travels around the world, presenting her work and teaching.

  The texts that I mention above, The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay, Funerals and Circuses by Roger Bennett and Summer Lightning and Other Stories by Olive Senior undeniably changed my life.

  When Pop Fitz handed me The Power of One, it wasn’t like he was just handing me a book: he was handing me a way of looking at the world that he knew would serve me well given my experiences and interest. The awakening of my interest in reading has led to a profession that has assisted me to travel the world and form enlightening and enduring friendships.

  The exciting thing is knowing there are writers and books out there that will push me in equally surprising directions in years to come.

  Invested with Enchantment

  Alison Croggon

  Every book that’s ever mattered to me has changed my life. There are so many that it’s hard to choose one. There are the books that formed thoughts I didn’t know I had and opened doors to new ways of thinking, books that have haunted me for years and changed the colour of my mind forever. Even books I hated have a place there, in showing me what I didn’t want to do and didn’t want to be. I am a writer because of every book I’ve ever read. And if you are a writer, you never stop finding new books to fall in love with. You never stop learning from other writers.

  But out of all of them, perhaps the honour ought to go to JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I read it when I was ten years old in a single twenty-four hour sitting. My parents had been fighting late at night, one of the interminable, bitter quarrels that marked the final years of their marriage, and I lay in bed listening. When they finally went to bed, I couldn’t sleep. I got up and found The Lord of the Rings on the kitchen table and, for want of anything else to do, began to read it. I read it all night and all the next day, unable to put it down, enthralled by this complex, dangerous and beautiful world that suddenly opened before me. Here were perils and marvels, grief and loss and conflict; but also the beauty of the natural world, the taste of bread, the importance of friendship. It was the world I knew, transfigured and invested with enchantment.

  Perhaps it’s not surprising, given how grindingly miserable I was for so much of my adolescence, that the world of The Lord of the Rings became an obsession for the next four or five years. I read everything by Tolkien I could get my hands on, including his more obscure stories – Farmer Giles of Ham and Tree and Leaf. The single-volume edition that I had first read became so tattered it was almost unreadable, and when my parents gave me a hardback three-volume edition I solemnly buried the old paperback in the garden. (I think I unburied it later.) For those years, I suspect that Middle Earth, with its high, graven language and its epic beauty, was the closest I ever came to religion.

  I was a confirmed atheist by the age of seven: I simply couldn’t bring myself to believe in the reality of God. Religion seemed to me so obviously a human invention. Perhaps as a result of this, I’ve always been fascinated by religious texts, from the Bible to the Upanishads, from the Judaic Kabbalah to the anonymous woman mystics of the Middle Ages. Some of my favourite poets are deeply religious. Perhaps I can understand the struggle for spiritual meaning, and for moral structure, but I can’t understand why you have to invent a god. There have been times when I desperately wished I could believe in religion, but it offended my rationality. For me, unable to believe in any god, fantasy seemed more honest.

  The Lord of the Rings was an escape, but if it had only been escapism I don’t think I would have been nearly as obsessed. It showed me that you could invent another world that coul
d live and breathe in your imagination, and communicate that to others. What made that world most real were all the things that were real in my day-to-day realities. In this world, I could face my confusions and fears and unhappiness, transformed through the act of imagination into something that fed my hunger for beauty and meaning. And hope, too.

  The Lord of the Rings is certainly the book that made me a fantasy writer. I was fascinated by Tolkien’s languages and scripts, and began to make up my own. I had written poetry from when I first began to form letters, but the desire to write an epic fantasy was my first real writerly ambition. From the beginning, I wanted to make up my own world, not to live in the one that Tolkien invented. Years later, when I heard of people who learned how to speak Quenya, one of the Elvish languages that Tolkien invented, I was baffled. The point, surely, was to make up your own language.

  When I finished that first, enthralled reading, I immediately began to write a novel that was almost exactly the same as The Lord of the Rings (if it was written by a lovestruck ten year old). I had a fountain pen with black ink, I remember, and a notepad with no lines on it in which I jealously wrote My Novel. I drew maps. I invented histories. It got to about a hundred pages long. At the stern, unsentimental age of fourteen, disgusted by my juvenile scribblings, I decided to divest myself of childish things and threw that notepad away. I’ve been sorry ever since. I’m sure it was terrible, but I’d love to still have it.

  I grew up. Along the way, I read other books, many of which have been as formative as The Lord of the Rings. I began to wonder why all the heroes in the stories I read were male. I began to wonder why all the heroes were white. I published several books of poetry and wrote some operas and worked as a journalist. I had children, who grew up and began to read, and because they read the books I loved as a child, I re-read them, and remembered how much they meant to me.

  One day, thirty years after I’d first read those lines “Concerning Hobbits”, I thought, why don’t I write a fantasy novel? And that old ambition, the first I ever had, reignited. Over the next ten years I wrote the Pellinor quartet. To my surprise, having never written anything longer than a twenty-page opera libretto, I discovered I loved making up long stories. In the end, the four volumes of the Pellinor books added up to 2000 pages. I have just finished another Pellinor book, which brings the total story to 2500 pages. It only took me thirty years to begin, and another twenty to write. Writing books can take much longer than you think.

  I know the writers I learned from in writing those stories. Tolkien is an obvious influence, although I rigorously excluded elves, dwarves, orcs, rings and dragons. Another was Ursula Le Guin, whose Earthsea trilogy I read as obsessively as The Lord of the Rings through my teenage years.

  The central idea for the Pellinor quartet came from Robert Graves’s eccentric and fascinating book The White Goddess, which is actually about poetry. In The White Goddess, Graves decodes a fourteenth-century poem by the Welsh poet Taliesin, which he claims is a sacred alphabet and calendar, with each letter representing a tree and a season. That became the basis for the Treesong, the central metaphor in the Pellinor epic. A lot of poets I love are twined invisibly through the story, often as private jokes: the name of one of the major characters, Nelac, is an anagram of Celan, a twentieth-century German poet I admire. I know there are passages in which I wanted to create the same feeling I had in reading books by Alan Garner. I structured the books like dramas, because that’s what Dostoevsky did with his novels.

  And my hero was a girl, because when I was young, I never read books in which the epic heroes were girls. I always had to imagine that I was a boy.

  Of course, the book you write isn’t simply the sum of every book you’ve read. What makes it come to life is your experiences, real and imagined: all your sadnesses, all your joys, which you transform into the body of the story. Many other things changed my life: falling in love, falling out of love, having children, working, witnessing injustice and the struggles against it. I bring all those things to every book I write, because I can’t help it. So many things have made me what I am, and all the time I am beginning again.

  It Looks Like a Comic

  Mal Peet

  Well, it wasn’t a particular book. It wasn’t even books in general, much as I loved them. As soon as I could read, in fact, I went through my primary school’s little library like a bookworm dipped in Red Bull. In part, this was because books were, to me, exotic. I did not come from a bookish family. There were few, if any, books in our house. Certainly no fiction, unless you count the Bible. This was not unusual. I grew up in a working-class council estate in the 1950s where spending money on books would have been seen as eccentric, if not actually irresponsible. Hence my greed for the stories in the library.

  My parents were puzzled, even startled, by my bookishness but, to be fair to them, they did not actively discourage it. When I was maybe eight or nine, my mum put away a few pence a week and subscribed to a mail-order book club called something like The Classics Library. Once a month or so, the postman would deliver a suspicious package and I, home from school, would rip it open to discover what new wonder it contained. I was frequently disappointed. I just couldn’t get on with Little Women. And has anyone out there read, or tried to read, The Children of the New Forest by Captain Frederick Marryat? Well, bless you if you have.

  Books with the word “island” in the title were generally more reliable.

  Despite the clunkers, the actual possession of these books was thrilling. I spent hours arranging them on my bedroom windowsill. They were cheap editions (obviously, but hardback with coloured jackets) and when you first opened them they gave off a distinctive smell, something like the whiff of a recently deceased fish combined with boiled turnip. The aroma of literature.

  If loving and owning books was a secret perversion in my peer group, the love and ownership of comics was universally shared. Ah, comics. Now we come to it.

  When I was a kid, there were lots of comics and most families could afford one a week. They got delivered with the newspaper, Tuesdays and Thursdays. There were boys’ comics and girls’ comics. Boys’ comics had manly names: The Victor, The Rover, The Hotspur, Tiger. The strips featured war heroes, sportsmen, detectives, pirates, spacemen, explorers: the adult heroes we would inevitably become. Girls’ comics (which I furtively read) were mostly about gypsy ballet dancers, gymkhanas and awkward girls in private schools. I found them intriguing and utterly baffling.

  As soon as I was old enough (eleven, I think) I got a before-school job delivering newspapers on my bike. My motive was not financial. I just wanted to read all the comics before I poked them through letterboxes along with the papers. It’s a wonder I wasn’t killed, pedalling along with my eyes fixed on Roy of the Rovers soccer star of Melchester Rovers. (It was a kick in the guts when I learned there was no such team as Melchester Rovers.)

  So when I started writing my childhood stories, I naturally wrote them in the form of comic strips. I drew what happened, then put the story beneath the pictures and the dialogue in speech bubbles. I was, of course, completely unaware that I was absorbing ideas about form and narrative that would be invaluable to me as an adult writer. These are (forgive me if they are obvious): imagine the scene, visually, in detail, before you put a single word on paper or the screen; how to order dialogue and keep it short enough to fit into a bubble; the difficulty of interrupting the line of a story to do “flashbacks” (“dream bubbles” always annoyed me); that something has to happen or change in every scene. I also became aware that the little white spaces between each frame of a strip had a purpose. They told the reader that between the last picture and this one stuff had happened that the reader need not be told about or could imagine for themselves, like “cuts” in movies or TV. (My family didn’t have television until I was well into my teens.) Today, white space (things left unsaid or mysterious) is something I think hard about and disperse tactically through my writing.

  Comics, in short –
and for better or worse – made me the writer I am.

  Contemporary writers who did grow up familiar with the conventions of film and TV learned these lessons far more quickly, of course. Their problem is how to make books different from, rather than similar to, video.

  In my early teens I discovered Classics Illustrated. These were comic-book versions of Great Works of Literature. I remember The Three Musketeers, The Iliad, Great Expectations. Most of all I remember the Classics Illustrated version of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. I guess if I was stood against a wall and asked at gunpoint to name the greatest novel in English I would have to say “Moby-Dick”. But I first encountered it as a comic. The unsophisticated drawings of the white whale bursting out of the frames scared the shit out of me.

  When I went to university to study American Literature I took the comic with me. And when we did a seminar on Moby-Dick I took it with me and instead of the proper book I put the comic on the table. (I was an irritating little sod.) The professor was a serious and severe American. After a while he noticed my comic.

  “What is that thing you have in front of you, Mr Peet?”

  “The Classics Illustrated version of Moby-Dick, sir.”

  “It looks like a comic.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Pass it down the table, please.”

  He studied it carefully and silently for several minutes. The other students slid their eyes back and forth.

  The professor said, “Where did you obtain this, ah, version, Mr Peet?”

  I said, “From a newsagent’s shop in Norfolk.”

  “I see,” the prof said. “Tell you what, I’ll give you five pounds for it.”

  Five pounds was a lot of money back then. More than a week’s rent. I thought hard about it.