All my books start with a voice in my head.
It was about three years ago that I started hearing the voice of a serious little girl. And I realized that I was going to write a children’s novel about a serious little girl with a sharp tongue and a sharp longing for Venice. I called her Teodora, after San Teodoro, the original patron saint of the city.
But how to write something fresh about Venice, the most paeaned place on the planet?
Being resident, I have the luxury of time: I can listen daily to the city herself; read her. I can also walk around with Giuseppe Tassini’s Curiosità Veneziane, published in 1863, never translated into English, and never bettered. With Tassini in your hand, stories seep out of the very walls. Here are some street names in Venice: ‘The Devil’s Courtyard,’ ‘The Stinking Alley of the Dirty Habits’ or ‘The Narrow Street of the Big Eye’, ‘The Lane of the Velvet Moles’, ‘Murderers’ Street’… each one a story, waiting to be inhabited by a character.
When Tassini and I began to walk around Venice as Teo, even a trip to the post office became an adventure. After all, I’d already decided that Teo was the Undrowned Child of an ancient, menacing prophecy. So I began to experience Venice more intensely. Were those striped poles … dormant tentacles? Was that the shadow of a fin slicing through the Grand Canal? Why were those monstrously big seagulls staring at me? On whose behalf were they spying?
I resolved to pit my Teodora against a ghost with a savage hatred of the same thing that she loved. You don’t have to scratch very deep in the annals of Venetian history to realize that one – deliciously named – Bajamonte Tiepolo had unfinished business with Venice after the city put down his conspiracy in 1310, razed his palazzo to the ground and erected in its place a stark stone column of infamy to proclaim his crimes forever.
Next, I gave Teo a friend, Renzo, who is everything she thinks she isn’t – elegant, cool, composed and smugly Venetian.
It seemed to me that Venice, in her hour of need, deserved a few extra heroines. Inspired by the rollicking sculptures at my favourite church of Miracoli, I called in some mermaids. My Venetian mermaids are not girlie creatures who sit about warbling seductive songs and combing their silken hair. No, these are warrior mermaids, and they’re rough as guts. Their vocabulary swills like bilge-water. (For how could mermaids learn Humantongue except by eavesdropping on pirates and sailors?) They devour fiery curries with gusto. And given that The Undrowned Child’s about the tussle between science and magic, these are techno-mermaids, at least in 1899 terms: they are expert printers. Their Seldom Seen Press churns out warnings for the Venetians who, sad to say, do not listen …
I thought my mermaids shouldn’t have it all their own way either, so they got a natural predator – Vampire Eels, the minions of Bajamonte Tiepolo. And Tassini offered me a cannibal butcher executed for stewing children, a mummified saint, a rude statue, a headless Doge and Dalmatian pirates. The damp walls of Venice sent me some really nasty insects. My imagination – perhaps nudged by my own cat Rose la Touche – supplied a pompous, capricious know-it-all feline, The Grey Lady, who runs the Venetian archives.
I’ve loved writing the book, and even more so its sequel, The Mourning Emporium, which is just published.
The Undrowned Child was my debut for this age group. And it seems to me the most magical age to write for. At this age, children are still willing to suspend disbelief without cynicism. They’re informed enough to be excited by abstract concepts (if they’re rendered with the appropriate vividness). The dismal quicksand of the grey area is unknown: good is good, bad is bad, disgusting is disgusting. They’re still up for a belly-laugh. But they have a deep, impressive seriousness too.
It’s not a joke, I think, to be pushing up against adolescence. And there’s an extra sadness too, in saying goodbye to being a child. They seem to be conscious of the imminent valediction; these not-quite-children are already romanticizing their own childhoods.
No wonder they take refuge in books. My friend Ornella Tarantola, who runs London’s Italian Bookshop told me – ‘Adolescence is the time when we are all of one piece. It’s a gift to write a book that restores people to that simple feeling, that you can raise your head and say “NO, that is NOT right,” or ‘YES, that is how it should be!’
This a recurring theme in The Mourning Emporium, where I wanted to explore some darker issues. Paedophilia is the most publicized form of child abuse. But the mistreatment of children takes many forms. In fact, statistically, neglect is the most widespread of them. So I wanted to look at a basic and primitive fear – that of falling into the hands of someone who simply doesn’t care about us. The vile Miss Uish in The Mourning Emporium doesn’t hate the children she victimizes. She just doesn’t care whether they live or die. And I wanted to contrast her with another character who is utterly devoted to his ‘childer’ – the cockney English bulldog, Turtledove, who runs a Fagin-like operation at the Tristesse & Ganorus Mourning Emporium in south London.
In The Mourning Emporium, the action switches from Venice to London, just at the moment of Queen Victoria’s death. In fact, the novel is also about the elaborate business of death, as it was conducted in Victorian London. I had enormous fun researching the ridiculous extent to which the dictates of mourning dominated the lives of the fashionable. I prefer contemporary sources where possible, and there’s no shortage of documentary evidence for extravagant mourning accoutrements.
In London, Teo and Renzo become professional mourners at Tristesse & Ganorus’s lugubrious establishment. They join a tribe of London street children similarly employed and also permitted to sleep in the luxurious coffins of the showroom. Writing these London children caused me much joy and much sadness. Their biographies are confected from the many sad but true tales collected by Mayhew and other social historians of the time. Of course, only a fraction of each of their lives are told in the novel, but I decided to post the full story of each child on my website. Several of them merit their own novels … one day, perhaps.
London mermaids prove very different to their feisty Venetian sisters. They’re aristocratic hypochondriacs, who tipple on patent nostrums for ladies, all laced with heroin, gin and worse. Their movements are hampered by quack devices such as the Harness Electropathic Belt. As their guests, the Venetian mermaids suffer horribly, forbidden to cook their favourite curries as the smell makes their London sisters bilious, and frustrated in their plans to make a robust attack on the enemy.
And London’s own ghosts are similarly useless. The severe rationalism of the Victorian age means that few people believe in them. Their old haunted houses have been razed to build railway bridges and offices. So they’ve slunk back between the stones of London, which ooze trails of white moisture: ghost breath and ghost tears.
At the heart of The Mourning Emporium is a cold-blooded conspiracy between a Pretender to the British Throne and Venice’s ancient enemy, Bajamonte Tiepolo. It will take all of Teo’s and Renzo’s ingenuity and courage to galvanize the mermaids, ghosts and good people of London. As the crowds gather for Queen Victoria’s funeral, the stage is set for a horrifying massacre of innocent mourners.Teo and Renzo must save both London and Venice from a fate worse than death – which also includes plenty of death.
I’m now working on a third fantasy novel for children set in Venice. I’m going back fifty years to 1846, a time when Venice wasn’t truly Venetian, but occupied by the Austrians. My young heroine is a girl of several special talents, but most of all she’s known for being the most impudent girl in Venice. When the city is threatened by creatures called the Ravageurs, Talina doesn’t hesitate to get herself kidnapped and taken to their leader …
for a quick glance I had no intention of reading the book then and there, but testament to its power to draw the reader in, I was gripped from the first page and didn't put it down. Thus, I spent the reading week in the company of witches, vampires and daemons, but really - with one or two notable exceptions - what a civilised bunch they are, and what a ripping yarn this is!
. In turn, I'd add to the ghost stories I mentioned last time round and suggest Michelle Paver's wonderfully chilling 
. How about you? Anything you'd particularly like to read by the flicker of the flames? 
"In a secluded Welsh valley ringed by wild mountains, the characters and quarrels of three young people unfold as a tragic legend recurs..." There's a postscript by the author which I haven't read for fear it gives something away, but I couldn't help notice its intriguing beginning: "The Owl Service is a kind of ghost story, in real life as well as on the page. Right from the start things happened that had not happened with earlier books." Interesting.
set in the world of fine art in New York - and it includes pictures. Here's what Joyce Carol Oates says of it: "At first you think that An Object of Beauty will be a romantic comedy, starring a strong-willed, very smart and very ruthless heroine-adventuress ...; then, as its irresistibly rendered scenes unfold, you realise that you are experiencing, from the most intimate of perspectives, the quasi-tragic history of an era."
benefits the charity 
(for the forthcoming app) to see the sort of things a child can do as they read for themselves or use the narration, and here's the author/illustrator 
is all about love - all aspects, degrees, circumstances of love - and it opens with Mrs. Radinsky, a story of attraction and resolution beginning in the unlikely setting of a residents' association meeting, while Join Me for Christmas, about a new, second marriage, starts straightforwardly enough but proceeds to a surprising ending.
and 
, and I'd have said that her subtle, finely honed prose would suit the more abbreviated medium very well; so far, it does indeed, so much so that I'll even forgive her the following (from the eponymous Mrs. R):
as our December book, and the one to round off the group's third year.
by Elizabeth Taylor (with reference, of course, to 
).
(2004), Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Ambassador Book Award,
(2008), Orange Prize for Fiction.
. Her third novel, 
, was long-listed for the Orange Prize. Her fourth adult novel,
, came out with Bloomsbury in April 2010. Her first novel for 9-12-year-olds, 
, tells what happens when science meets baddened magic in Venice in 1899 (
, the sequel, was published on October 28th and transports us from a frozen Venice to a grieving London, where Queen Victoria lies dying, and a massacre of innocent mourners is the object of a dreadful conspiracy between Bajamonte and an unscrupulous Pretender to the British throne. All that stands between the forces of evil and their success are two Venetian children, a hundred mermaids, a talking bulldog, some pumpkin-sellers and a devastatingly handsome circus master …
is something to look forward to in a few months' time).
by Kathryn Stockett (I haven't read that one), Rosy Thornton's super new novel 
(post on it 
(I haven't read that, either - must do better, Cornflower), and lastly the recently published 
by Edmund de Waal* (another one on my tbr list, if not the pile).
