The View from the Cheap Seats Read online

  “I will tell you what,” I told her. “Why don’t you read it to your girls? If they’re scared by it, we’ll send it to my adult editor.” Her girls were Emily, aged eight, and Morgan, aged six.

  She read it to them, and they loved it, and they wanted to know what happened next. When she got to the end she called me and said, “They weren’t scared. I’m sending it to Harper Children’s.”

  Some years later I was sitting next to Morgan DeFiore, who was then about fifteen, at the off-Broadway opening night of a Coraline musical. I told my now-wife, Amanda, the story, and explained that it was because Morgan was not scared that Coraline was a children’s book. And Morgan said, “I was terrified. But I wasn’t going to let on that I was scared, because then I wouldn’t have found out how it ended.”

  IN THE LAST year I’ve written three books.

  I wrote a picture book called Chu’s Day about a baby panda who sneezes. It may be the simplest book I’ve ever written. It’s the only time I’ve ever imagined myself writing a book that I intended to be read to children who could not yet read.

  It exists because none of my children’s picture books have ever been published in mainland China. They have been published in Hong Kong and in Taiwan, but there has never been a Neil Gaiman–written picture book in China because, I was told, in my books the children do not respect their parents enough, and they do bad things without getting properly punished, and there is anarchy and destruction and insufficient respect for authority. So it became a goal of mine to create a picture book that would contain all of these things and also be published in mainland China.

  I wrote it, and I drew pictures for it, to show an artist what happened, and I gave it to my publisher, who gave it to Adam Rex, who painted much better pictures for it, and I am still waiting to find out if it will be published in China.

  Still, a baby panda who sneezes.

  It’s a children’s book which I wrote, peculiarly, with an adult audience in mind. I wrote it because I wanted a picture book of mine to be read in China. I wrote it to make children imagine and dream and exult and pretend to be pandas and pretend to sneeze, so I wrote a book that I hoped adults would enjoy reading to children, and, more importantly, enjoy reading the tenth time that week or the third time that night.

  It contains a simple world, in which a small child is not listened to, but should have been, with disastrous consequences for everyone except the child. The pictures are beautiful and filled with detail.

  And as I made it, I looked at it with two sets of eyes: was I making a book I would have liked as a very small boy? Was I making a book that I would enjoy reading as a parent—soon, perhaps, as a grandparent, for life goes so quickly?

  That was the first book.

  I wrote another book, almost definitely for children. It was called Fortunately, the Milk. It was intended, when I began it, to be as short as The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, to which it was a thematic sequel. That was a book that contained a father physically present but so absent that children were able to swap him for other things, like a gorilla mask, or an electric guitar, or a white rabbit, or a goldfish, while he simply read the newspaper. I thought I should redress the balance. I would write about a father who would have incredibly exciting adventures, or at least, claim to have had them, while going to get milk for his children’s breakfast cereal.

  The book grew until it was entirely too long to be a children’s picture book, then ran out of words before it was long enough to be a novel.

  My editor’s first, perfectly sensible question to me was, since this was a children’s book, why was a father the hero? Shouldn’t it, couldn’t it, have been his son, our narrator, who had the amazing adventures? Which meant that I had to ponder whether an adult protagonist was right for this kind of children’s book.

  I had no rational response, mostly because the book had not been written or composed or even conceived rationally. It was a book about a father who went out for milk and came back late and related his unbelievably exciting adventures to his disbelieving and unimpressed children. It was called Fortunately, the Milk. It was not created, rationally or otherwise: I had simply described it, as if I had stumbled across it and needed to record it for the world. I could not have changed it because that was what it was.

  So the father remains the hero, and is the one who returns with the milk.

  The third book I wrote is the one that inspired the title of this talk, and is the reason why I puzzle and I wonder.

  It has a working title of Lettie Hempstock’s Ocean.* It is written, almost entirely, from the point of view of a seven-year-old boy. It has magic in it—three strange, science-fictional witches who live in an ancient farmhouse at the bottom of the protagonist’s lane. It has some unusually black and white characters, including the most absolutely evil creature I’ve made since Coraline’s Other Mother. It has Sense of Wonder in it, and strangeness. It’s only fifty-four thousand words long, short for an adult book, but for years considered the perfect length of a juvenile. It has everything in it I would have loved as a boy . . .

  And I don’t think it’s for kids. But I’m not sure.

  It’s a book about child helplessness. It’s a book about the incomprehensibility of the adult world. It’s a book in which bad things happen—a suicide sets the story in motion, after all. And I wrote it for me: I wrote it to try and conjure my childhood for my wife, to evoke a world that’s been dead for over forty years. I set it in the house I grew up in and I made the protagonist almost me, the parents similar to my parents, the sister an analogue of my sister, and I even apologized to my baby sister because she could not exist in this fictional version of events.

  I would make notes for myself as I wrote it, on scraps of paper and in margins, to try to work out whether I was writing a book for children or for adults—which would not change the nature of the book, but would change what I did with it once it was done, who would initially publish it and how. They were notes that would say things like “In adult fiction you can leave the boring bits in,” and “I don’t think I can have the scene where his father nearly drowns him in the bath if it’s a kids’ book, can I?”

  I reached the end of the book and realized that I was as clueless as when I began. Was it a children’s book? An adult book? A young adult book? A crossover book? A . . . book?

  I once wrote the English-language script for a beautiful and prestigious foreign animated film, and was asked by the film company, before I began, to try and include some swearwords in there somewhere, as they needed to be sure that the film had at least a PG-13 certificate. But I don’t think it’s swearing that makes fiction adult.

  What makes a book an adult book is, sometimes, that it depicts a world that’s only comprehensible if you are an adult yourself.

  Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you’re ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can. Then, perhaps, you will come back to it when you’re older, and you will find the book has changed because you have changed as well, and the book is wiser, or more foolish, because you are wiser or more foolish than you were as a child.

  I have told you all this in the hopes that the action of writing it all down and of talking to you would clarify things for me, that it would shine a perfect and illuminating light on that most vexing of questions, what the fuck is a children’s book anyway?

  And I have talked a lot tonight, but I suspect I have not answered the question. Not really.

  But then, you do not come to authors for answers. You come to us for questions. We’re really good at questions.

  And I hope that, in the days, and weeks, and years to come, the question of where the dividing lines between adult and children’s fiction really are, and why they blur so, and whether we truly need them—and who, ultimately, books are for—will rise up in your mind when you least expect it to, and vex you, as you also are unable, in an entirely satisfactory manner, to answer i
t.

  And if that is the case, then our time together has been worthwhile. I thank you.

  * * *

  I gave this as the 2012 Zena Sutherland Lecture. It’s given in Chicago every year in honor of the late Zena Sutherland, an internationally recognized scholar of young people’s literature.

  * * *

  II

  SOME PEOPLE I HAVE KNOWN

  “Nothing much has changed, except everything.”

  These Are Not Our Faces

  These are not our faces.

  This is not what we look like.

  You think Gene Wolfe looks like his photograph in this book? Or Jane Yolen? Or Peter Straub? Or Diana Wynne Jones? Not so. They are wearing play-faces to fool you. But the play-faces come off when the writing begins.

  Frozen in black and silver for you now, these are simply masks. We who lie for a living are wearing our liar-faces, false faces made to deceive the unwary. We must be—for, if you believe these photographs, we look just like everyone else.

  Protective coloration, that’s all it is.

  Read the books: sometimes you can catch sight of us in there. We look like gods and fools and bards and queens, singing worlds into existence, conjuring something from nothing, juggling words into all the patterns of night.

  Read the books. That’s when you see us properly: naked priestesses and priests of forgotten religions, our skins glistening with scented oils, scarlet blood dripping down from our hands, bright birds flying out from our open mouths. Perfect, we are, and beautiful in the fire’s golden light . . .

  There was a story I was told as a child, about a little girl who peeked in through a writer’s window one night, and saw him writing. He had taken his false face off to write and had hung it behind the door, for he wrote with his real face on. And she saw him; and he saw her. And, from that day to this, nobody has ever seen the little girl again.

  Since then, writers have looked like other people even when they write (though sometimes their lips move, and sometimes they stare into space longer, and more intently, than anything that isn’t a cat); but their words describe their real faces: the ones they wear underneath. This is why people who encounter writers of fantasy are rarely satisfied by the wholly inferior person that they meet.

  “I thought you’d be taller, or older, or younger, or prettier, or wiser,” they tell us, in words or wordlessly.

  “This is not what I look like,” I tell them. “This is not my face.”

  * * *

  This was the text I wrote to accompany a photograph of me in Patti Perret’s book of photographs of authors, The Faces of Fantasy, 1996.

  * * *

  Reflections: On Diana Wynne Jones

  It was easy, when you knew her, to forget what an astonishing intellect Diana Wynne Jones had, or how deeply and how well she understood her craft.

  She would certainly strike you when you met her as being friendly and funny, easygoing and opinionated. She was a perceptive reader (I had the enormous pleasure of spending a week with her at Milford Writers’ Workshop, hearing her opinions on story after story) but she rarely talked about stories technically. She would tell you what she loved, and she would tell you how much she loved it. She would tell you what she didn’t like too, but rarely, and barely wasted breath or emotion on it. She was, in conversation about stories, like a winemaker who would taste wine, and discuss the taste of the wine and how it made her feel, but rarely even mention the winemaking process. That does not mean she did not understand it, though, and understand every nuance of it.

  The joy for me of reading these essays and thoughts, these reflections on a life spent writing, was watching her discuss both her life and the (metaphorical) winemaking process.

  She does not describe herself in this book, so I shall describe her for you: she had a shock of curly, dark hair, and, much of the time, a smile, which ranged from easygoing and content to a broad whorl of delight, the smile of someone who was enjoying herself enormously. She laughed a lot, too, the easy laugh of someone who thought the world was funny and filled with interesting things, and she would laugh at her own anecdotes, in the way of someone who had simply not stopped finding what she was going to tell you funny. She smoked too much, but she smoked with enthusiasm and enjoyment until the end. She had a smoker’s chuckle. She did not suffer fools of the self-important kind, but she loved and took pleasure in people, the foolish as well as the wise.

  She was polite, unless she was being gloriously rude, and she was, I suppose, relatively normal, if you were able to ignore the swirls and eddies of improbability that crashed around her. And believe me, they did: Diana would talk about her “travel jinx,” and I thought she was exaggerating until we had to fly to America on the same plane. The plane we were meant to fly on was taken out of commission after the door fell off, and it took many hours to get another plane. Diana accepted this as a normal part of the business of travel. Doors fell off planes. Sunken islands rose up beneath you if you were in boats. Cars simply and inexplicably ceased to function. Trains with Diana on them went to places they had never been before and technically could not have gone.

  She was witchy, yes, and in charge of a cauldron roiling with ideas and stories, but she always gave the impression that the stories, the ones she wrote and wrote so very well and so wisely, had actually happened, and that all she had done was to hold the pen. My favorite essay in this book describes her writing process, and shows the immense amount of craft and care that went into each book.

  She made a family, and without her family she would not have written. She was well loved, and she was well worth loving.

  This book shows us a master craftswoman reflecting on her life, her trade and the building blocks she used to become a writer. We will meet, in these reflections, someone who has taken the elements of a most peculiar childhood (are there any non-peculiar childhoods? Perhaps not. They are all unique, all unlikely, but Diana’s was unlikelier than most) and a formidable intellect, an understanding of language and of story, a keen grasp of politics (on so many levels—personal, familial, organizational and international), an education that was part autodidactic (but in which, as you will learn here, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien both lectured for her, even if she was never quite sure what Tolkien was actually saying), and then, armed with all these things, has become quite simply the best writer for children of her generation.

  I am baffled that Diana did not receive the awards and medals that should have been hers: no Carnegie Medal, for a start (although she was twice a runner-up for it). There was a decade during which she published some of the most important pieces of children’s fiction to come out of the UK: Archer’s Goon, Dogsbody, Fire and Hemlock, the Chrestomanci books . . . these were books that should have been acknowledged as they came out as game-changers, and simply weren’t. The readers knew. But they were, for the most part, young.

  I suspect that there were three things against Diana and the medals:

  Firstly, she made it look easy. Much too easy. Like the best jugglers or slack-rope walkers, it looked so natural that the reader couldn’t see her working, and assumed that the writing process really was that simple, that natural, and that Diana’s works were written without thought or effort, or were found objects, like beautiful rocks, uncrafted by human hand.

  Secondly, she was unfashionable. You can learn from some of the essays in this volume just how unfashionable she was as she describes the prescriptive books that were fashionable, particularly with teachers and those who published and bought books for young readers, from the 1970s until the 1990s: books in which the circumstances of the protagonist were, as much as possible, the circumstances of the readers, in the kind of fiction that was considered Good For You. What the Victorians might have considered an “improving novel.”

  Diana’s fiction was never improving, or if it was, it was in a way that neither the Victorians nor the 1980s editors would have recognized. Her books took things from unfamiliar angles. The dragons and demon
s that her heroes and heroines battle may not be the demons her readers are literally battling—but her books are unfailingly realistic in their examinations of what it’s like to be, or to fail to be, part of a family, the ways we fail to fit in or deal with uncaring carers.

  The third thing that Diana had working against her was this: her books are difficult. Which does not mean that they are not pleasurable. But she makes you work as a reader. As an adult reader coming to a Diana Wynne Jones book I expected to reread great chunks of a book as I reached the end, all puzzled and filled with brow-crinkling “How did she do that?” and “Now wait a minute, I thought . . . ,” and I would put it together, and then see what she had done. I challenged her on this, and she told me that children read more carefully than adults did, and rarely had that trouble—and indeed, when I came to read Diana’s books aloud to Maddy, my daughter, I discovered that they weren’t ever problematic or even hard. All the pieces were there for you. You just had to be paying attention to everything she wrote, and to understand that if there was a word on the paper, it was there for a reason.

  I don’t think she minded not having the medals. She knew how good she was, and she had generations of readers who had grown up reading and loving her work. She was read, and she was loved. As the years went on and the readers who had discovered her when young grew up and wrote about her, talked about her, wrote fiction influenced by her, as magical fiction for children became less unusual, as her books sold more with each year that passed, Diana knew that what she had written had worked, and found its readers, and that was all that, in the end, mattered.