YE GODS! by Mal Peet

A few weeks ago, in a television programme, Martin Amis put a host of backs up. Most, but not all, of these backs belonged to my fellow writers for the young.

Asked by his chum Sebastian Faulks if he had considered writing a book for children, Amis repeated his assertion that he could do so only if he incurred brain damage. I was surprised. Not by the assertion, obviously, but by all those raised hackles. Surely Amis’ condescension could not have come as a shock. Were we not already deeply familiar with Olympian Disdain Syndrome, pandemic among our great ‘literary’ novelists? Sneering is, after all, one of its common symptoms. Not long ago Howard Jacobson, who still refuses to recognise that being male and Jewish in contemporary Britain is unremarkable and not of itself especially interesting, took a gratuitous sideswipe (just like that one) at ‘would-be serious’ children’s writers. Will Self is of course sui generis, being professionally disdainful about anything with, or without, a pulse. Children’s writers are inured – or so I’d thought – to being on the receiving end of this kind of hauteur. Hence my surprise at the ruffled feathers; the bilious blogs.

In part, I guess, the rumpus was a response to the smug assumption behind Faulks’ question: that Amis – or anybody else, really – could write a children’s book if he had nothing better to do. And indeed Olympians, in moments of remission or impecuniousness, have been known to knock out a kids’ book, thinking it an easy way of making a bob or two. (This delusion is, by the way, a symptom of another nasty but common disorder known as Rowling’s Chorea.) Almost always, these efforts are feeble but the reviewers genuflect and the gods return to Olympus rubbing their hands together and muttering “That’ll show yer.” This can, of course, occasion resentment in certain quarters.

Acid Off A Duck’s Back

As a writer of Young Adult Fiction (whatever that is) I’m used to condescension. Immune to it. Acid off a duck’s back, mate. However, the Amis fuss has excited my hobby-horse, and it needs a little canter.

… the books we put into our children’s hands are immeasurably more important than the latest works of high-profile novelists.

In terms of sustaining a literate and literary culture, the books we put into our children’s hands are immeasurably more important than the latest works of high-profile novelists. I have no trouble believing that Amis Junior sprung from the womb clutching Ovid’s Metamorphoses in one hand and Nabokov’s Ada in the other, irritated by the obstetric interruption of his reading. But most children need literary nurturing, and the quality of that nurture is crucial if they are to grow into readers of Ovid and Nabokov. And, of course, Amis.

The press regularly publishes Jeremiads on the subject of our children’s downward spiral into illiteracy. Our schools are failing. The book is dead. Print is obsolescent. We are evolving into a race of pasty-faced strangers to the sun with overdeveloped thumbs and atrophied legs and minds.

The past 20 years or so have seen a truly remarkable flowering of writing for the younger reader.

Experimental And Beautiful Work

Nevertheless, something between a fifth and a quarter of all UK book sales are of children’s books. Worth something like £800 million. And most children’s books are purchased for them by adults. The past 20 years or so have seen a truly remarkable flowering of writing for the younger reader. I won’t name names because I’ll get reproachful emails from those I omit, but there are children’s and teenagers’ writers out there who are producing challenging, experimental and beautiful work. True, there’s also a lot of dross about vampires and suchlike, but when I look back at what was available to the young me in the 1950s and early 60s, I grieve. I feel like poor old Larkin (or Amis Senior) lamenting the arrival, too late, of bold and bare-legged young totty. And when, as I do (I can’t help myself) I read the adult books shortlisted for the big prestigious prizes I find myself thinking “Really? This is ‘ground-breaking?’ My editor would never let me get away with toss like this.

These things considered, the discrepancy between the importance of children’s literature and its coverage by mainstream media is weird. Grotesque. A couple of column inches here and there in the national press. The Jeremiahs appear to see nothing inconsistent in their moaning about children’s literacy and their lack of interest in children’s books. Since the demise of Treasure Island there is nothing on BBC radio. Nothing on any of the 10,000 TV channels. Then Channel 4 finds occasion to give the subject 30 seconds of Sebastian’s middle-brow ramble through the pastures of literature, and what does it do? Gives the precious moment to Martin Amis who uses the opportunity to trash children’s literature on the altar of his own ego.

It’s the squandering of that rare opportunity that – forgive me – really pisses me off.

Mal Peet is the author of several novels for young adults, including Tamar, winner of the 2005 CILIP Carnegie Medal, and Exposure,which won the 2009 Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. His latest novel, Life: An Exploded Diagram, came out this June.

PS. As for me …

While Mal’s been talking to you I’ve been gallivanting off to the Royal Highland Show. Wow! What a feast of excellence. I just have to share a taste of it with you.

How about this for starters?

And creatures with this amount of scary power wandering round awfully close to the public!

Beautiful and delicate handiwork.

And lots of artists in action (thanks to textile artist Jennie Louden for permission to snap her in her booth).

The sheer breadth of potential of the human mind and hand was both inspiring and humbling.

And as Voltaire said: Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

But I’m hankering after a more literary idiosyncrasy myself.

Philip Henscher – he of The Northern Clemency fame (a door-stopping 700+ pages long) – reckons he’s written all his books in longhand using a green Pentel pen and A4 Black’n’Red notebooks. I cannot begin to imagine the sheer hand-strain and number of trees involved there. Or the consequences of innumerable changes required by fastidious editors.

Will Self says he’s returned to a manual typewriter on the grounds that ‘the computer user does their thinking on the screen, and the non-computer user is compelled to do a lot of thinking in the head.’ Hmm. But what about corrections, and cutting and pasting, and sending copies to editors?

Jane Austen kept a creaking door un-oiled so that she had warning of any impending interruption. Now I like the sound of that …

But I’m looking for something unique. Of course, I could just resort to totally unimpressive and un-noteworthy truths like being compelled to finish any book I start reading. Or having to tidy my environment before I can function creatively. Or needing silence to write … Hmmmm. How sad is that? And if there are any psychologists out there reading this, don’t bother; I already know I’m a crazy mixed-up loon. I didn’t dare study psychiatry during my training because I’m too close to the limit myself.

No, all I’m trying to do is find something stylish for my epitaph. Perched precariously on a couple of planks miles above a stairwell hanging wallpaper tends to foster thoughts of imminent demise.

Maybe something like: She routinely ate pickled onions before meeting her publisher; or She stored her own books spine to the wall lest she be tempted to read them; or …

I’ll need to think. On the other hand, perhaps I do actually do something off the wall, but it’s so normal for me I can’t identify it as a peccadillo. Now there’s a thought to conjure with! So those of you who know me personally, all insights gratefully received.

Apropos of nothing really, I came across a quote recently that I jotted down because it reflects something of my own raison d’être as a novelist:
‘I see myself as someone who drops tiny crumbs of nourishment, in the form of comment and conversation, into the black enormous maw of the world’s discontent.’ (Fay Weldon)
Cool, huh?

Hope you’re all weathering this severe winter intact.