Fires' Astonishment

"I used to work in a bookshop back in the ’90s down in Brighton and I was looking around one night for something to read and came across this , Fires’ Astonishment by Geraldine McCaughrean. I didn’t realise at the time, but she’s known as a children’s novelist and she’s probably, for my money, our best children’s novelist. She’s absolutely superb, but I’d never heard of her till then. I’m not sure if many of her children’s books had even been published back then. I think this is probably the beginning of her career, published in 1990. It’s an adult novel, and it basically spins off from a mediaeval poem, about a duke’s son whose wicked stepmother transforms him into a dragon. It uses this as a basis for this little world, this quite small community, where various different characters interact. You have the wicked stepmother and the duke, and you have the son’s fiancée, who isn’t going to be able to get to marry him now because he’s vanished mysteriously, at the same time this dragon appears. So she ends up marrying a much older man, and you assume this is going to go badly wrong. But it doesn’t. It really works and becomes this rather beautiful romance. Geraldine McCaughrean keeps on doing this. She’s constantly surprising you. She has this way of just twisting your expectations around. When you’re a writer, and you spend a lot of time reading, a lot of time thinking about stories, you tend to be able to spot what’s going to happen next quite often, but with Geraldine McCaughrean, I very often can’t. She very often surprises me and she does in this book. She also had the best dragon ever. It’s my favourite dragon in all of literature. It’s the most physical dragon. She describes it incredibly well – the smell of it, the itchiness of the scales – it just feels like a real, living thing. There’s nothing very magical about it. It’s just this big, slightly dangerous animal, and being stuck inside it, the poor old son and heir is gradually becoming less human and more dragonish. He meets up with a failed monk who befriends him rather reluctantly and they travel on together. Of course, everyone is terrified of the beast. So hunts are organised to kill it. So, again, I suspect, as with Ray Bradbury and the prehistoric monster in The Foghorn , you sympathise with the monster. It’s just the most wonderful story told with an incredible use of language. Absolutely extraordinary. Her way with metaphors – there’s no one who writes like she does. I won’t pull an example out, but she has this way of linking one metaphor into the next, so you get these little chains leading you through a passage of writing. I read this book without any expectations at all. I literally picked it at random off the shelf thinking, “Oh, it’s about the middle ages. That sounds quite interesting,” and I was astounded by it. At a second hand shop somewhere I found another book of hers called Vainglory , which is another medieval novel, absolutely mind-blowing. It was around the time I was moving from being a bookseller to being an illustrator, and these were the books that made me want to write. These are the ones that really, finally made me think, “Okay. I have got to write novels. This is what I have to do.” So all the other books that we mentioned were fuel, but Geraldine McCaughrean was the spark that lit it. That was what got me really writing seriously. I started writing Mortal Engines which was going to be an adult book but I couldn’t find a publisher or an agent who would even read it, let alone publish it. Nobody wanted to look at it, so eventually, I took it to a children’s publisher and it became a children’s book. Around then I discovered that Geraldine was now a children’s writer and I actually got to meet her in the course of my career, which has been wonderful. There is no writer I admire more. Every Geraldine McCaughrean book is worth reading. They all have this beautiful, rich language and this sort of wayward storytelling. Fires’ Astonishment is still my favourite. She’s got this streak of cruelty in her, and being a kind and responsible writer, she reins it in when she’s writing for children. When she’s writing for adults, she’s very … not bleak exactly, but very unsentimental. Bad things happen. Vainglory is astonishing, the number of sympathetic characters who you think are the main characters of the book – who then just get killed off unexpectedly. She keeps doing it! I’ve seldom met anyone with an imagination like that. It’s so rich and there’s so much in there. Now that I’ve read dozens of her books, I can see that there are recurring themes but really, they’re all very different. Everything you read is fuel to the imagination, I guess, but there are particular things that you adopt, or they really influence you and I think you can see the influence in all of these books on what I write. I try to write as well as Geraldine. I never will, because very few people can. I try to make the words interesting and make it to flow with that sort of grace and I try to aim for Christopher Priest’s lightness of touch and just that sense of lots of ideas being thrown at you. I like books that fling ideas at you, that you can grab or let fall. The air is full of flocks of ideas. And the big Tolkien world building thing – all this went into Mortal Engines and its sequels. Mortal Engines was 16 years ago now. I wrote sequels and prequels set in the same world, and when that all came to an end I thought I should do something different. So I started writing books for younger children with the illustrator Sarah McIntyre, which has been fantastic. It was completely rejuvenating for me, and good to do something completely different and get somebody else’s ideas into it as well. There was a great sense of reinvigorating my work and one of the results was that it made me want to write another huge world – and that became Railhead and its sequel Black Light Express I’m busy on the third Railhead book at the moment. Black Light Express is in paperback on the third of August. So that’s what I’m busy with at the moment. That’s the world I’m living in for the time being."