Anne Fine
The Monster Child
Thursday October 16
The plan had been that GP Taylor would join Anne Fine after the announcement of the winners of the short story competition: the audience was briefly disappointed to learn that he had been detained by urgent parish business and was unable to leave Whitby.
Thanks to the resourcefulness and unflappability of Anne Fine and Ann Key, chair of the Northern Children's Book Festival (and herself a last-minute replacement) the evening was rapidly recast into an informal conversation on the advertised topic The Monster Child.
This, maintained Anne Fine, was more of a literary construct than a real phenomenon. Every parent at times felt that their own child was a monster (a show of hands confirmed this thesis) but genuine monster children like those written about by Roald Dahl did not really exist. The monstrous children in her own fiction were of two kinds: those temporarily behaving monstrously and those who were permanently damaged by monstrous parents.
She illustrated the first of these with a reading from The Book of the Banshee - "This is my most autobiographical novel", she said - to the extent that when it was completed she had given the text to her teenage daughter, by now well out of her monster phase, with the offer: "If you prefer, I'll publish it under a pseudonym." This didn't prove necessary: "I think I came out of that rather well", said her daughter.
Another of Anne's protagonists, Tulip, was clearly not going to come out of her adolescence unscathed. The Tulip Touch is the story of a folie à deux in which the young narrator tells of her friendship with Tulip, a charismatic but unhappy child with a talent to spread misery to others. Anne read a number of short extracts to illustrate how she had approached the job of conveying what was wrong with Tulip to the young reader in a way that they could deal with. She spoke of the awareness that her fans were liable to pick up books that she intended for an older age and how careful she was to put things in such a way that those who already knew what she was taking about would understand but which would not give anything away to younger readers.
Her much-publicised criticism of Melvyn Burgess's Doing It related to his failure to consider this issue. Much as she personally disliked the book she would have no problem with its publication as an adult title, but did not think it should have been published on the children's list.
But it took the question and answer session afterwards to show children's literature at its most genuinely tragic: somebody asked, what about Little Women? "Oh, Little Women," said Anne. "Oh that's so awful when Jo's manuscript gets destroyed. Of course it's very sad when Beth dies, but when the manuscript is burned, that's tragic."
Anne Fine's books are available from the bookstall throughout the Festival:
