Mal Peet, winner of the CILIP Carnegie Medal for Tamar, his second novel, talks to Elspeth Hyams about the importance of understanding the past.
‘I’ve sat on train journeys with my book and seen teenagers, sitting there, looking absolutely bored to the verge of death. And I think: If that boy was any more bored, his breathing would actually stop. And I think: Poor little sod! Read a book! Just transport yourself out of this box and into somewhere. Because, you know, for me, reading and writing is all about transportation. It’s to take you somewhere else. And to be stuck in this devastatingly dull place, without reading, deliberating, is a terrifying prospect!’
Mal Peet, who has just won the Carnegie Medal for Tamar, had a working-class upbringing in 1950s Norfolk. He was one of only two boys on his council estate who passed the Eleven Plus. To get to their grammar school, they had to ‘run a gauntlet’ in their school uniforms. ‘Kids who had been our friends helped to throw things, jeer and abuse.’
Escape into books
This sort of social punishment, he thinks, has always existed. ‘There is nothing very new about it.’ Nonetheless, for him, books were an escape. There was not a great deal for children to do when for most people there was no TV. (It made an appearance for his family when he was 11 or 12.) The only diversion was a Saturday morning trip to the pictures. If the weather was good, you could ‘mess about on your bike’. In fact, you did a lot of messing about. Otherwise, the only escape was books.
His family home was overcrowded, so he read a lot. ‘I hid in books, I took refuge and ate my way through the school library and the town library.’ He wasn’t at all ‘geeky’, though, he says. ‘I played a lot of football. I wasn’t a classic book worm, I just had a huge appetite for books and comics.’ In fact, a lot of his childhood reading of war comics distilled itself into Tamar, just as his reading of football comics distilled itself into Keeper, his first novel, which also won an award.
Exploring the past
Tamar is a complex, tightly plotted novel, about the effects on a present day family of the grandparents’ past as part of the wartime resistance to the Nazis in occupied Holland. The episodes in Holland are actually a domestic drama, played out against the reality of the war, much of it spent waiting for something to happen.
Tamar takes in big themes: love and jealousy, rivalry in politics, the awful consequences of the divisions in the Resistance, revenge and retribution. ‘It’s a story about envy, it’s about very ancient human feelings… beautifully exacerbated by a wartime context, where they would matter an awful lot more than they would in peacetime. They would become, literally, matters of life and death.’
Only connect...
At the same time, it is about one of his passions – ‘connectedness, the way that we are all individually shaped by past events, by our family experiences, whether they are secret or not, by our grandparents’ lives’. He feels that the way we currently teach history, jumping from topic to topic – ‘the ancient Egyptians, then the Tudors, then the Second World War!’ – means that ‘children seem to be in a gravity-free, disconnected kind of space, where their historical relationship to other events and times is denied them’.
The result is that they are poorly equipped to answer the whole question of ‘How did I get here?’ (which, he thinks, is one of the most interesting and important questions of all). So, Tamar is a book about history. ‘As well as being a historical novel, it’s about rediscovering the past in a highly dramatised, possibly lurid way.’
But, as will become typical in future Mal Peet novels, one feels, it deals with many contemporary themes. ‘It’s about people not comprehending each other’ and, he says, about the collapse of language, about history repeating itself and about losing the power of speech. On the way, it takes in dementia, family breakdown and family secrets – ‘different forms of inability and concealment’.
Inspired by imagination
When you read it, you are propelled by the sheer power of his narrative. The themes need to be teased out later, when you analyse and reflect. One is struck by their ambition, as by those in Keeper (which can be – and is – happily read by girls) – football and how to keep goal; sport as a way to escape from rural poverty in Brazil; rain forests and logging and conservation. It’s also a ghost story. Interestingly, both Mal Peet’s novels were inspired by imagination. The visits to Holland and Brazil came later. The themes are not accidental.
‘I’m the Jamie Oliver of children’s literature! I want to wean children off pot noodle. There are plenty of people out there producing lip gloss and thongs, or junior James Bond. I just want to give them something substantial. I like to get a lot of stuff in there. I like to think you’ve had a meal by the time you get to the end!’
Family issues
Mal swears his novels are not autobiographical but, clearly, a lot of his family’s issues work themselves out in his writing. First of all, he thinks all families have secrets – ‘Maybe not dramatic or dark ones, but all kinds of things that they don’t talk about. And all parents obviously keep things from their children. You simply can’t tell children everything you are feeling, knowing, doing.’ He has tended to dramatise all that, making it more sinister and deep to develop it into a good story.
His own family was not in any way ‘brutal or anything like that’. It was just devoid of open displays of affection and intimacy. ‘My parents were of a generation where one was terribly coy about things like sex and emotion. I just felt that my family was emotionally impaired, but I don’t think that makes it any different at all from most working-class families in the 1950s. It was entirely typical, and it was probably worse in middle- and upper-class families!’
Common themes
It took him a long time to realise that both novels have common themes. He had set out to make Tamar as different as possible from Keeper but both are about fathers. ‘Lo and behold! It looks as if this obsession of mine has surfaced again. I’ve got some issues there, but I don’t want to resolve them or be cured of them as long as they’re earning me a living!’
On the other hand, he has a lot of other issues, too. He has worked in education, and admits that one of his reasons for writing was to encourage boys to read. But, equally, and with, perhaps, contradictory ambitions, it was, in the case of Keeper, to ‘write a book about football that girls would read’. What really concerns him is not literacy, or boys’ reading, but articulacy.
‘The two are interrelated, of course. It’s hard to know where you would get language from if you don’t get it from reading. But I’m depressed about the way kids talk. They, especially boys, are under a great deal of pressure to use only the restricted codes of their peer group, to talk in televisual, tele-approved clichés, or phrases borrowed from Rap.
Self-expression almost makes you a social pariah in certain situations. I don’t think that books can do much about it, frankly. One keeps writing in the hope that they might.’ He is determined to counteract the ubiquitous pressure on children to be stupider than they really are. ‘It alarms me, actually, I find it quite difficult to be relaxed about it.’
Thrill of research
A passion retained from childhood is the excitement of reading. Now, as an adult, some of that is channelled into the thrill of discovery through research. Tamar was inspired by the wartime experiences of a friend’s father. The detailed technical material about signals and radio transceivers, aerials and communication triggered thoughts about codes, and messages handed down in families across generations. It also took in his interest in riddles, puzzles and pictograms.
He went back two generations to the war because, to be interesting to young people, he needed the distance of time. It was this that led to research in Holland, to finding out more about the historical background as well as identifying plausible places for some of the action.
Storyboarding
He has great ability with words, but was an illustrator before he became a writer. Occasionally, he says, if he can’t get an episode right, he ‘storyboards’. ‘Whether that’s imagination or a strange form of pedantry, I’m not sure really! I do have to visualise. In my head, I have to know where the door is and what the wallpaper is like, otherwise, I can’t stay imaginatively in that place.’
When he was younger, he wanted to be a cartoonist. ‘I wanted to draw the Beano! I thought one guy did it all!’ He puts that down to Norfolk. Irony aside, though, it may have influenced his choice of Holland as a location for Tamar. ‘That flat landscape, where you can’t hide, is a very important idea in the book. You couldn’t find the sort of war that was fought in France in the Ardennes there.’
He writes very slowly, sometimes losing characters in the process. ‘I’m not a rigorous plotter. I write organically, and then my poor editor suffers.’ She, the ‘wonderful’ Avril Whitehouse, is old-fashioned in a way that writers love. ‘Sometimes I’ll ring her up and distract her from her work, just to have a chat. Most publishers won’t stand for it.’ It was she who helped him interleave the contemporary and historic strands of the novel, and to cut it to manageable proportions. Mal did a lot of research – ‘It’s a naughty mistress, isn’t it? You can easily fall in love with the activity. You lose sight of why you’re doing it, and then you acquire masses of stuff. You bitterly resent not using it and end up writing a monster.’
With such a fertile imagination he is bound to cook up more of the sort of ‘rich stew’ you might expect after Tamar. His next novel is due this autumn. In the meantime, he’s a bibliophile’s dream. ‘Reading’s a blessing,’ he says. ‘I’m now deeply grateful that my life was so boring as a child, that my only recourse was to books.’
Mal Peet’s Tamar won the 2005 Carnegie Medal, awarded this year. It is published in paperback by Walker Books (ISBN 1406303941, £7.99). He is also the author of Keeper, which won the Branford Boase Award in 2004.
Updated: 23 August 2006