The Untameables by Clare Pollard Illustrated by Reena Makwana
In this first children’s book from the poet, translator, playwright and novelist Clare Pollard, the Knights of the Round Table are quickly revealed to be a boorish, vain, heartless bunch – a far cry from the stories we may have heard. We are warned by the narrator that ‘history is written by the powerful, who can never resist tweaking it a bit’. For instance, Sir Lancelot, as well as being a singularly dreadful romantic poet (we’re subjected to some of his verse here and there), is a ‘blonde thug’ who is forever boasting that he defeated a ferocious wild boar, even though the creature was in fact ‘just a constipated pig’. The Knights seem to spend half their time hunting, rapidly deforesting and depleting the enchanted wildlife around Camelot. And Merlin’s just as bad, in his own maniacal way.
Putting Arthur and his band of braying bloodsport enthusiasts aside, the actual heroes here – The Untameables of the title – are a couple of Camelot’s lowly servants. Roan, the boy who looks after the castle’s hounds, is a gentle, empathetic soul. He has an instinctive, deep care for the natural world and a head full of worries about his sickly mother Bonnie. Elva is a kitchen helper, wise beyond her years, and keeps herself to herself, as the twisted spine she’s had since birth is liable to attract all sorts of nasty superstitions.
When Roan and Elva hear of a magical Holy Grail, they have their own reasons for seeking it out, but they must find it before the glory-hungry knights do. What follows is a quest that quotes bits of Arthurian legend (such as a Questing Beast and a castle of imprisoned maidens), giving each one a surprising, funny twist. On many occasions, Roan and Elva dodge past what could be predictable plot points and refuse to conform to the familiar, often violent, patterns of such stories. Their encounter with the Green Knight in the Land of the Giants is a particularly heartening, triumphant moment, when Roan faces a test a little like the Christmas game that’s central to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Simon Armitage is thanked for his marvellous translation, which planted the seed for The Untameables, in the acknowledgements). The remixing and reframing of this material, and the lampooning of ‘courtly love’, is a lot of fun for an adult familiar with all that, but it doesn’t get in the way of a terrific, witty adventure story for children.
I gather The Untameables began as something for Clare to read to her children, and I can’t wait to share this with my son in a few years. Its free-spirited characters, powerful ideas about ecology and optimism in the face of avarice, and charming illustrations by Reena Makwana are all things I’ll be delighted to revisit.
Cuddy is four novellas in one chunky volume, all linked by the life and legacy of St Cuthbert and his final resting place of Durham Cathedral. He was a humble hermit, wandering healer and missionary, and eventually a highly respected Bishop. He was already legendary in the North of England by the time he died in 687, having isolated himself on a remote island (little more than a rock) off Lindisfarne. He was honoured in death first by the incredible efforts of ‘the Cuddy Community’ to take his sacred body to somewhere of safety and significance, when the Vikings raided Lindisfarne – it was a journey that took generations, before finally settling on the site of what became Durham Cathedral. The building of the Cathedral round the tomb of St Cuthbert is an even more mind-boggling effort, a centuries-long building project that exemplifies many amazing architectural innovations and feats.
Cuddy begins with the tale of Ediva, a young woman accompanying the monks who are travelling with Cuthbert’s coffin. She starts to have conversations with the spirit of the dead saint, and powerful visions of the stone mountain that will eventually house his body. This section is quite experimental prose poetry, playing with type and layout – paragraphs are fragmented or taper like a knife blades, and sometimes the font size keeps shrinking, suggestive of a voice fading into the ether, which is brilliantly suggestive of Ediva’s dreams and prophecies. Here and there, Ediva’s tale pauses fir several pages of brief quotes from history books and the likes of Bede (selected from some of the 40-50 books Myers read as research) that illuminate the Cuddy’s humble life and legend.
I found Ediva’s voice very compelling, which surprised me as I’d actually abandoned the audiobook version of Cuddy last year, struggling to click with it at all. In retrospect I think the particular rhythms of this early part of the book are a challenge for that format – dozens of academic citations feel tedious and disturb the flow of the poetry when read aloud, whereas on the page they work, a kind of chorus of facts and theories filling in the gaps as Ediva’s comes to appreciate Cuddy’s legend and the role she has to play.
Following on from that, we leap ahead to 1346, and the gripping tale of Eda. She’s a brewer who lives in the shadow of the Cathedral and in fear of her husband, an archer who, when he’s not fighting off the Scots, is beating and abusing her. The side characters here are fantastic – the wonderfully frank prostitute Scum Gertie, the hateful, scheming monk Brother Barnabus (aka Cruikshank), and the proud stonemason Francis Wolfe. Here I started to notice and enjoy all sorts of clever echoes of Book I that were being laid down, and this interlinking effect was only enhanced as I read on.
After a short playlet set in 1650, when the Cathedral was used to imprison Scots captured at the Battle of Dunbar (and the Cathedral itself is given voice), we reach Book III, set in 1827, is about a faithless academic drafted in by the clergy to oversee an exhumation of Cuthbert’s body, for complex reasons. This section is constructed as a series of letters, so there’s an effect similar Dracula or M.R. James’ ghost stories, and I could sense Myers puffing up the pomposity of Forbes Fawcett-Black to match a typical M.R. James protagonist. This part starts out quite dry, and becomes more frantic and funny, the pastiche impossible to miss.
Finally, Book IV introduces us to Michael, a young man in 2019 who takes on a temp job at the Cathedral – part of which involves running errands for a team of masons replacing a weathered stone balustrade. All the while, he’s worrying about his finances and his mum’s fading health. Michael is likeable enough but seems hollowed out by the struggle of simply trying to get by, left fearful and unable to connect fully with others. His story underlines how lives are marked by many waves of austerity. Despite living in a nearby village, Michael’s never really thought much about the Cathedral, there’s the sense that places like this are not really for his kind – ‘Actually going inside the Cathedral was what middle-class families did; it wasn’t for those who lived in the outlying villages left fallow after their local industries had depleted in the years before he was born.’ Later on, settling into the work, Michael feels happy, partly as he’s comforted and inspired by the massive building, realising he is now ‘one more link in a chain of people – of experience – that stretches deep into a past, a past where people spoke and ate and lived differently, but perhaps thought similar thoughts and desired similar things’.
The sense of this continuum has built throughout Cuddy and the patterns Myers creates, with themes, locations and character traits resurfacing, each book commenting somehow on all the others, is marvellous. I was left with the impression that this could be Myers’ best book yet, though it’s difficult judge it against a back catalogue that’s already so varied, ranging from Beastings to The Offing.
It’s great to see that the ambition of Cuddy has been rewarded with appropriate accolades. It’s already the winner of the Goldsmith’s Prize for experimental fiction, shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction (shortlist coming up next month!) and it’s just made the shortlist for the Oondaatje Prize, which goes to‘a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place’. In a way that hat-trick of prizes would sum up Cuddy neatly – it’s stylistically bold, it contains four deeply researched, equally engrossing slices of historical fiction spanning more than a millennium, and it creates an awe for the Cathedral, making you watch a bunch of YouTube videos about it and promise yourself that you’ll visit someday.
I’m proud to have illustrated looking back at…The Beatles (Cognitive Books), which tells the Beatles story from their early days ripping it up in the Cavern and Hamburg, through to the breakup, just seven world-changing years later.
With its rhyming text by Matt Singleton, the book has been carefully developed in close collaboration with the Alzheimer’s Society, so that it can be enjoyed by people living with dementia or other cognitive difficulties, many of whom struggle to read and may have given up followed a diagnosis. You can read more about the project at Cognitive Books’ site.
I’m pleased that this week the book is now out in the world complete with an audio version narrated by the terrific Bill Nighy, and that I can share some of this work with you. Here are four of the final illustrations.
Although I’ve been commissioned to draw the Beatles in a few different ways in recent years, this was a rare chance to dive deep into a subject I know and love, exploring the whole story. As you can see, I had fun picking up on all the references in the text and adding plenty of extra details for fellow fans to spot. Watching my Anthology DVDs so many times paid off here!
I thought I’d share are a couple of the early roughs, seeing as you’ve read this far – a few things got shuffled around, cut or added as the book took shape.
I’m delighted that the book’s had a really positive launch this week, with coverage on The World at One and BBC Breakfast among other things. It’s great that it will be helping people with dementia rediscover the joy of reading, and even connecting them to their memories of this most beloved of bands. As well as from the usual bookshops, the book can be ordered from the Alzheimer’s Society, helping to support the work they do to give help and hope to people suffering from this dreadful condition.
No, you don’t have to have read Huckleberry Finn to be totally enthralled by Percival Everett’s James. This new retelling of the story, from the perspective of the slave character Jim, stands by itself. It’s in conversation with Twain, but it tells a story that, for all his sharp wit and expansive wisdom, he wasn’t equipped to tell.
Huck is still a key character – his scheme to fake his own death sets the plot into rapid motion that rarely lets up – but whenever Huck’s accompanying Jim, he’s something of a naive foil to the world-weary slave. And he’s absent for parts of the adventure, so for anyone who does remember bits of the 1884 classic, it might feel a little like Jim’s observation of how the river they’re trying to navigate by puzzlingly reshapes itself:
Things appeared different facing south from the way they did looking north. […] The Mississippi, in fact, seemed like many different rivers. The level was always rising or falling. Sediment got pushed around, changing the locations of bars and shelves. Islands changed shape, sometimes becoming completely submerged, and old outcroppings disappeared while new ones materialised overnight.
Some of the entirely new islets of plot that surface are where Percival Everett seems to be having the most fun, and he allows for more of this by nudging the story a few decades on. Twain set Huckleberry Finn in around 1840, but Everett opts for 1861 – partly so that rumours of the Civil War can creep in. It’s an interesting choice, and when he gets wind of it all, Jim seems slightly bemused by the fuss over abolition – he’s been in this hell so long that he doesn’t expect much can ever change, and more or less chalks it up to how some white people love to feel guilty. A chat with Huck after they’ve watched some Union soldiers march past in handsome blue coats illuminates this:
“To fight in a war,” he said, “Can you imagine?” “Would that mean facing death every day and doing what other people tell you to do?” I asked. “I reckon.” “Yes, Huck, I can imagine.”
The 1861 setting also allows him to drop in a cameo for a real life character, Daniel Decatur Emmett, who had an iffy claim on being the composer of ‘Dixie’ and established the Virginia Minstrels, an early group of blackface entertainers. Emmett briefly crosses paths with Jim, and an extract from his notebook, containing slave songs like ‘Ole Dan Tucker’ and ‘Jimmie Crack Corn’ that he took credit for, forms a kind of epigraph.
Placed at the very start of James, the stolen songs signal the book’s preoccupation with language. All of the slaves speak in standard English amongst themselves, but slip into a limited ‘lawdy’ dialect whenever in the company of their white masters. This code-switching is established early on when Jim instructs his wife and child on the finer points of language, how every word must be weighed to seem deferential and dumb.
“White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” I said. “The only ones who suffer when we are made to feel inferior is us.”
On the rare occasions when black characters forget whose company they’re in, they correct themselves and translate a perfectly cogent sentence back through the ‘slave filter’, tripping over consonants and mangling any words longer than three syllables. This is often funny to watch unfold, but also deeply sad. The hierarchy is inhumane, but all slaves agree that their best hope is to just reinforce it, with every breath, look and word.
The circumstances that do lead Jim to break these bonds and try to become James are best left as a total surprise – so many episodes of terror and tragedy, all mixed with humour that’s so sharp you don’t notice how deep it’s cut until a page or so later. They add up to an unforgettable book.
As usual, here’s some of the new music that’s been in heavy rotation here this year.
Shana Cleveland – Manzanita Margo Cilker – Valley Of Heart’s Delight Shirley Collins – Archangel Hill Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection – Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection 2 Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – Weathervanes Michael Nau – Accompany Nico Paulo – Nico Paulo Quasi – Breaking the Balls of History Setting – Shone A Rainbow Light On Sparklehorse – Bird Machine Kassi Valazza – Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing Yo La Tengo – This Stupid World
And my favourite reissue has to be Jason Isbell’s Southeastern 10 Year Anniversary Edition. This 2013 instant classic was remastered and bundled with a full complement of early demos, plus a recent live recording of the album played in full at the Bijou Theate in Knoxville. I think the performance currently available on YouTube is from a different night at the same venue, but it’s equally thrilling. Jason’s remarks between songs at those gigs remind us how so many of the lyrics were brave challenges to himself to stay sober – stuff that would become painfully embarrassing to sing if he had somehow relapsed into the chaos that had characterised his life before. 10 years of Southeastern means 10 years of sobriety, and with it unprecedented success and particularly great songwriting – of which this year’s new album Weathervanes is a perfect example.
Laurence Jago, muddling through his young life on the edges of government and high society in Georgian England, is now the unassuming hero of three gripping historical novels by Leonora Nattrass, with more to come I hope.
Jago can’t help but stumble upon corruption and skulduggery wherever his work takes him, and whatever his changing fortunes. He began Black Drop as a Whitehall clerk wrestling with a laudanum habit when he was implicated in a spy plot and the shocking murder of a colleague. In Blue Water, having swerved the gallows but left the Foreign Office under a cloud, he was tasked with guarding a momentous treaty on a voyage from Falmouth to Philadelphia. Over the course of these adventures, he became firm friends with the garrulous journalist William Philpott.
As this third title, Scarlet Town, begins, Jago and Philpott have returned to England (an adventure in itself, involving by the sounds of it) and travelled to Helston, Cornwall, where Philpott intends to report on an imminent parliamentary election. For Jago, more or less Philpott’s apprentice at this point, it’s also a return to his Cornish roots.
On the Friday afternoon they arrive, there’s a volatile atmosphere, with much jostling and heckling in the streets and bets being placed in the pub. Very quickly, a dead body is discovered, and it’s one of the two elderly electors due to vote in that weekend’s election. Yes, only two men in the whole borough are eligible to vote in the shambolic quasi-democratic setup of 1796, and they’re firmly in the pocket of Helston’s longstanding benefactor Duke of Leeds. In the background, the mayor is sponsoring an alternative candidate, who happens to be the chair of the East India Company.
Of course, it’s not long before Jago finds himself investigating the murder, and he’s dragged into the best, most intricate plot Nattrass has devised so far. We get to know the streets and people of this bustling market town, brought to life just as vividly as London’s damp garrets and the cramped cabins of the mail ship Tankerville in the mid-Atlantic were in the previous books.
Two favourite characters of mine were the cantankerous sexton Jeb Nettle, and the mayor’s niece Sarah Glynn, who dotes on her pregnant pug Claudia and diverts every conversation into an appreciation of the Gothic novel, which was very much in vogue at the time. (Jago and Philpott are stunned to discover that wigs have gone out of fashion whilst they were in America, another precise historical detail that Nattrass seems to have enjoyed introducing here.)
Then there’s Jago’s affable cousin Pythagoras (‘Piggy’ for short), who has recently stepped in as Helston’s surgeon and physician and finds he has his work cut out – grisly autopsies on top of the depressing rounds to tend to sickly children. At one point we glimpse Piggy’s frustration at the miserably imprecise nature of ‘physic’, and how his work can seem so futile in a world rife with lethal disease (smallpox, diphtheria, typhus) and infant death. ;Who knows whether any of our remedies work, and if so, which ones?’ he despairs, before outlining the dire situation as it was in the 1790s, when ‘every textbook has its own pet theories and contradicts all the others’. It’s a disarming moment, typical of the depth of character and historical colour that I enjoy in these books.
As with the previous titles, Nattrass ends with a welcome author’s note explaining which events and people are lifted from history. Her talent for dropping compelling, rounded characters of her own into genuine historical events, and laying before them a pacy, engrossing mystery, seems only to get stronger.
Utterly Dark and the Tides of Time by Philip Reeve
Mysteriously washed ashore on Wildsea as a young child, Utterly has grown up under the guardianship of the Watchers – those who live at Sundown Watch, where they observe the seas to the west, and fastidiously note down anything out of the ordinary. Much fear, folklore and superstition is attached to the great oceanic power said to lurk out there, the Gorm. That’s all despite this being very much the enlightened, empirical Regency era – but the Autumn Isles are a long way from London, and Wildsea is the most western and forgotten of these.
In the first novel in this fantastic series, Face of The Deep, Utterly learned a lot about her own mystical connection to the sea. Its sequel Heart of the Wild involved a trip to another of the Autumn Isles, where Utterly had to contend with earth magic and a treacherous vicar. This third story is largely a return to sea magic, but a bold time-slip twist allows us to see Wildsea in 1971, and there’s an even more compelling villain.
Much fantasy fiction seems keen to establish how its magic works. In the Utterly books it’s an elusive, intangible thing, defying not just explanation and logic but even memory for the characters who do encounter it. The tumultuous events of the first two books, including encounters with the brilliantly creepy Men o’ Weed (zombielike servants of the Gorm made up of floppy strands of seaweed) and a scramble through a vast primeval underworld, are hard to bring to mind in the cold light of day.
Magic was tricksy like that: more vivid than real life when it was happening to you, but harder to keep hold of than a snowflake or a soap bubble.
Reeve’s skilful writing is likely to make you feel that befuddled awe for yourself, with virtuosic passages evoking immense supernatural forces that leave you wondering ‘How did he do that?‘, when you turn the page and he’s once again describing something more tangible, like kippers for breakfast. A great example is how an early chapter ‘Into The Sea of Time’ captures the mind-boggling variety of the planet’s oceans, reasserts the dreadful cruelty and power of the Gorm, and expands and compresses centuries, all in the space of five pages.
While Utterly traverses the ocean and time itself, the other established characters all have their own adventures, prompted by the sudden arrival of the HMS Acantha on Wildsea. Will Dark’s involves an old pal from his days carousing in London, Constantine (who made an entertaining but brief appearance in Face of the Deep) and a haphazard maritime adventure into the Western Deeps. Meanwhile, his pregnant wife Aish detects a troubling, chillingly powerful new presence on Wildsea.
The characters who end up in 1971 experience it very differently, and it’s great fun reading about their initial impressions of motor cars, T-shirts, indoor toilets and Penguin bars, amongst other things. Reeve even finds time for a couple of sly Doctor Who jokes before we end up back in the 1800s.
I’ve enjoyed and admired these three books enormously. Even if Utterly’s own story is now complete, I gather from Reeve (when I briefly spoke with him at a Q&A earlier this year) that he hopes to tell more stories from the Autumn Isles.
Meanwhile, my son and I are enjoying another fantastic series from Reeve, this one for younger readers and produced with regular collaborator Sarah McIntyre – Adventuremice!
Where The World Ends is largely set on a remote sea stac in the Outer Hebrides in the 18th century. A group of St Kilda boys, supervised by three men, take the short voyage from Hirta to Stac an Armin (‘Stack of the Warrior’) and begin the regular summer visit to to harvest the numerous birds there. Only this time, no boat turns up to collect them a few weeks later. Why on earth would that be?
McCaughrean has based the story on true events of 1727, but come up with her own cast of boys and men, filling in the many gaps in the history beautifully. For most of the novel, we see this remote corner of the world through the eyes of Quilliam, one of the older lads. Quill is already adept at gannet-killing, and when he’s not busy fowling, he’s pining after Murdina, a young mainland woman he knew back on Hirta, and wrestling with those new feelings.
As the nigh-impossible Atlantic winter sets in, and still no-one comes to their rescue, it’s fascinating to see how each of the fowlers comes to terms with being marooned. It’s a hellish scenario, but they’re able to scavenge many moments of joy and hope from the shortening days, even while they’re so busy surviving. Quill himself appoints the other boys duties according to their particular skills – the tuneful Calum is ‘Keeper of Music’, and Niall is ‘Keeper of Memories’, such happy glimpses of home being precious currency on the lonely stac. The overbearing Kenneth is even included as ‘Keeper of Days’, trusted to keep count of the time they’ve spent in grim exile – so near to home, yet so very far.
Religion underpins the fledgling civilisation on Stac an Admin, as the group tries to hold onto and observe its faith, even though it seems like the world beyond must have come to an end. The boys begin to note omens to that effect, everywhere they look. There are flashes of horror, and of course major divides appear within the group, but the drama is always grounded in the very convincing characters, and builds towards a satisfying but nuanced ending.
Aimed at teenagers, but a compelling, thoughtful piece of historical fiction for any reader, Where The World Ends deservedly won McCaughrean the Carnegie Medal for a second time.
Usborne Quicklinks McCaughrean’s publisher Usborne offers up an excellent bunch of interesting links related to the book, including a letter from the author about what attracted her to the story, bits of history from the St Kilda archipelago, and videos of the gannets, guillemots fulmars and storm petrels encountered by the characters.
Alina and Liviu, a young married couple in 70s Communist Romania, are suddenly under suspicion when Liviu’s brother takes a trip to the West and doesn’t return. Are they defectors too? After a blunder at Alina’s work implicates her further, they fall under the harsh glare of the Secret Police and new strictures upon their lives become hard to bear. Their marriage starts to crumble.
What next? Enter Aunt Theresa, an unforgettable character. Married to Party nobility, she’s a woman of peculiar privilege (she drives a sleek black Volga and gold bracelets jangle on her wrist), yet she holds onto many of the folk customs and beliefs of the country. Could these old ways somehow help Alina out of her impossible situation? When Alina is at last forced to explore this, circumstances take a startling, sharp turn – one that’s signposted in the very first flash but still upends the narrative brilliantly.
This is a novel in flash, so theoretically any one of the very short chapters could be read and enjoyed in isolation – indeed, several of the pieces that make up Bottled Goods have previously won awards in their own right. But taken as a whole here, they offer a fascinating range of angles on a relatively simple, powerful plot. Alina’s voice is reflected differently in the different flashes, some of which span weeks or months, some of which chronicle a few fraught hours. Sometimes the plot is refracted through inventive formats like a pleading list to Father Frost, a table budgeting for the purchase of a used Dacia, and a sequence of postcards from the West. So much is left open to the imagination in the gaps between these pieces, but that makes Alina’s journey all the more compelling.
Montgomery Bonbon: Murder at the Museum by Alasdair Beckett-King – Illustrated by Claire Powell
Alasdair Beckett-King’s star has risen in recent years with a run of viral videos in which he’s spoofed Scandi noir, spooky podcasts, annoying companions in RPGs, old-school cartoons, and much else besides. His stand-up is going from strength to strength, and his podcast Loremen now runs to hundreds of hilarious episodes picking apart the weirdest of local legends. I first encountered him via AdventureX, the excellent narrative adventure games convention he has helped to organise over the past decade or so.
This very busy, very funny man has now found the time to write a middle-grade comedy murder mystery, teeing up a series centred on the great detective Montgomery Bonbon. Bonbon is really ten-year-old girl Bonnie Montgomery, wearing an old raincoat and a fake moustache – and pontificating in a wildly inconsistent foreign accent. Only Bonbon’s loyal sidekick Grampa Banks is aware of the little girl behind this cunning disguise.
Bonnie and Banks are established as an already seasoned crime-fighting duo, with their catalogue of previous successes, putting away the likes of the Emmental Bandit and Tortellini the Magnificent, merely hinted at in the opening chapters. This fresh investigation involves the disappearance of a prized sculpture, the Widdlington Eagle, and the simultaneous death of a security guard. That all takes place in a locked room in the turret of an eccentrically-curated local museum, which Bonnie and Banks happen to be visiting at the time. As soon as Bonnie senses that something is very much afoot, she transforms into Bonbon and launches an investigation, much to the chagrin of the police’s Inspector Sands.
One of the joys of this story is how Bonbon baffles, frustrates and somehow impresses the grown-ups in his orbit. The tortured turns of phrase, of course gleaned from the argot of Poirot, are deployed brilliantly – from ‘Everybody to stay precisely where you are being!’ to ‘Please do not discompose yourself, mein ami‘. Running through everything there’s an affection for, and deference to, the hallmarks of the crime genre. Bonbon dutifully goes through the ‘doldrums’ phase common to every great case (with a fun tangent into whether Watson would have ever called Holmes a ‘right sulky-pops’) and there’s a passage on the difficulty of spelling, pronouncing and executing a classic denouement.
The search for the Widdlington Eagle becomes an enjoyably twisty crime caper, with its entertaining range of suspects and its neatly laid clues, all building towards that satisfying reveal. It’s illustrated throughout by Claire Powell, whose drawings set the scene and throw in a few extra visual jokes. Every page of this first Bonbon book sparkles with Alasdair’s particular wit – even the acknowledgments and dedication are spoofs of a sort. It’s easy to see this developing into a very popular series.
Simon Reid 