8) Ysabel is your first book set entirely in the contemporary world, and it also features as its protagonist a 15-year-old (Ned). Why, and why to the first two, and was it a coincidence that your first entirely contemporary book would have a teenaged hero?
The broad answer you can guess from what I’ve said above: I keep wanting to test myself as a writer, try something different, see what emerges. One reason for a younger protagonist is that when I was writing Last Light I was conscious of working with very young and much older central figures, and my readings in history made clear that those very young people could play major roles in a society. In ours, we keep teenagers (and twenty-somethings, too, I suppose) remarkably youthful, unfledged. I wanted to do some inner dialogue in the book around that point. I’ve always enjoyed a bildungsroman, a coming of age book, have been irked (slightly) by the emerging assumption that any such book is YA … it simply isn’t so, from Goethe to Dickens to Twain to How Green Was My Valley.
One sharp early reader noted that this is the first time I’ve been able to write about history, instead of in an historical period. And that struck me - I hadn’t thought about it before in those words - as perceptive, because that is central to what Ysabel is trying to do. A contemporary setting lets me comment and explore motifs of the past in a different way, and a younger protagonist offers an effective ‘window’ for the reader to grow into the book.
9) I thought that you did a very good job of getting into the head of an adolescent. Some might complain that he's a little sophisticated but I look at his parents, at teenagers in general these days, your style in general and as you have a character point out, when did 15 become young – used to be war leaders who were 15, (maybe its only because we live so long that we've made teenagers into something less responsible than they are capable of being), it was very apt. Did you find you had to adapt your way of looking at the world when working on his character in order to give it that authenticity, and if so how?
We’ve both made the same point here, it seems. I’m really pleased by the early response to Ned’s ‘voice’ and I’m also pretty adamant about something else: just as adults run a wide range of maturity, anger, patience, curiosity so - obviously - do people on the cusp of adulthood. I’ve often been ‘accused’ of having overly intelligent or perceptive characters … but to be honest, as a reader I get bored if I feel too much ahead of, quicker than, the protagonists of books.
Article comments
1 - Imani
That was a great interview: I really appreciated your focus on his work rather than the typical "how do you like promoting? What's your favourite colour?" questions with which so many authors are plagued.
Canadian stores do indeed have his books out in force and I'll be getting it ASAP.
2 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!
I'd say this is possibly the best interview I've every read on BC Magazine!