for a few months now, into the new realities of foreign climes…
But here I mean professionally. One of my books, Dream Land, has been translated into French and is available from the publisher Naïve Livres, with a great new cover, very different from the English version.
I am so excited to be in a foreign language! And delighted that the remarkable history and culture of the Crimean Tatars will hopefully reach a wider audience.
There’s a really interesting debate here about the merits of analysing young adult books for the beauty (or otherwise) of their prose.
It reminds me of my friend, who was absolutely outraged when I told her that an adult book group had recently read Dream Land and then invited me to discuss it with them. if her book group had chosen a YA book, she said, she would have walked out in protest.
Yes, I have supportive friends.
Her point (I think) was not so much that Dream Land, or any other YA book, is unworthy of serious discussion, but that discussion by adults is a kind of contradiction in terms, showing the book is not doing the job it was written – or marketed – for. As a book for teens, the people who should be reading and discussing it are teenagers themselves.
I don’t myself see why engagement from children and teens has to exclude engagement from adults, although I do think that many well-read adults will read and analyse a book in a different (not necessarily more sophisticated or valid) way than younger readers.
But my friend does have a point about these debates over YA literature, which all too often resemble all the other debates about young people today – i.e. completely lacking in input from the people in question. When an articulate teen does join the fray the response is one of David Attenborough-like hushed awe to a sighting of a rare, theoretically cherished but rather misunderstood elusive beast…
Shhh! It might run away!
Of course, it’s not actually that simple to forget people and events in real life, or when books are based on real life. Characters have a habit of living on in the imagination.
Dream Land, which is a novel about the return of the Crimean Tatars to Crimea in the 1990s, tells largely true stories, many of them heard from friends. I still visit Crimea, and worry about what is happening there. The characters I invented for the book do have a future that goes beyond the last page. I think Safi, the heroine, is married now, and handing on her grandfather’s stories to her children, who are not all that interested in them. Her brother in the book is radicalised by the hardships and discrimination they suffered as teenagers; I’m afraid he went on to fight against the Russians in Chechnya. I hope he came back. I expect he’s angrier than ever now, campaigning for the rights of his oppressed comrades in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza.
I watched a programme about Palestinian children in Gaza this week. There are some similarities between the situation there and that in Crimea with the returning Crimean Tatars. I was thinking about them as I watched these children talk about what it is like to have to live in a tent with your family, to watch your house being bulldozed right in front of you. To witness the death of your father or your brother, shot by soldiers. To be living every day with the pain of bits of shrapnel in your head.
The future for most of these Palestinian children is almost unimaginable, although they themselves tried to think about it. One wanted to avenge the deaths of his father and brother. Another longed to be free to travel the world. And a third said she wanted to die.
The programme ended, as documentaries and sometimes movies do, with a few paragraphs of information, those bald sentences flashed up on the screen summarising ‘what happened afterwards’. Finishing the story. Those paragraphs informed us that of the two children featured who had leukaemia and were unable to leave Gaza to get treatment, one subsequently reached a hospital in Israel. The other died.
And that’s that. End of the story. Except of course it isn’t, because there are devastated parents and helpless medical workers and border guards just doing their job and furious brothers and opportunist politicians and– and– and–
Stories are the way everyone makes sense of the world. I don’t think it would be possible to live otherwise. The children of Gaza are making their lives into stories – playing games of being stopped by soldiers, of torturing and being tortured, of shooting Israelis. The documentary told a story too, that us lucky viewers could sigh at or feel impotent rage over (and even vent it afterwards on a lovely channel 4 forum for online ranting).
I wish those children were in a book I’d written, so I could invent mostly happy futures for them and then mostly forget about them. But they’re not, and neither are the Crimean Tatar children. In real life, the people I wrote about in Dream Land have built busy, complicated, difficult, unexpected, fulfilling existences for themselves in Crimea. And in real life in Gaza?
A question from the Willesden Green Library reading group, who have just read Dream Land:
is it true, as they’ve heard other writers say, that once a book is finished and published the author forgets it, having long since moved on to the next thing?
I too have heard this, and never used to believe it. How is it possible to forget something you’ve spent so much time and effort over? I thought it would be almost the equivalent of forgetting your own child.
I realise now that’s not the right analogy. Maybe something closer would be the relationship to a former love.
For a time you were utterly obsessed with your love. You knew everything about this person, your life was utterly bound up in them. But then you parted and it ended. Children grow and change in themselves and their relationship with you. Former lovers never do; they are locked away in the time it was and the person they were when it ended. Just as books, once they’re on the page, are fixed in the time you wrote them and the ending you chose for them. Even if they are now off having meaningful relationships with other people…
I’m still on good terms with these former loves of mine. I look back on them with affection, surprise occasionally (that good…?), not too much embarrassment as yet, though sometimes a feeling that it could probably have been better. I’m happy to have the chance to get reacquainted. And it’s fascinating to hear other people talking about them, seeing things I didn’t realise at the time, or never guessed were there at all.
Thanks to the members of the Willesden Green Library reading group for so many insightful comments and questions on Sunday. Also many thanks to Hunting Raven Bookshop in Frome, for organising a book reading and signing on Saturday, and to everyone who came. It’s a wonderful privilege to have a chance to talk to readers about my books.
Right, now I can get back to thinking about the next thing, the new love in my life.
We all tell stories to explain and confirm who we are. In Dream Land I told stories that are not my own; they belong to the Crimean Tatars and define this group of people who were deprived of a homeland, a language and an identity for fifty years.
For that reason, I was very nervous about getting Dream Land right. I wanted to make the experiences of Safi and the other characters in the book accessible to anyone who has moved to a new strange place, who has felt unwanted, who has wondered about where they are truly at home and learned the hard way how to grow beyond their family and into the wider world. But I also wanted the characters and events to be recognisable to the Crimean Tatars themselves and to be true to this remarkable and inspiring group of people.
So I was really pleased to get this review from someone who knows a great deal about the history and present situation in Crimea. Be warned, it gives away rather a lot of the plot though. And I’m not sure about the Anne Frank analogy – as I’ve said, Safi’s story is not my own, however closely I identified with her when I was writing the book, or how strongly I feel about the Crimean Tatar cause and the questions of homeland and belonging that are so important not only to the Tatars but to all of us.
Dream Land was finally published this month, and by strange and awful coincidence Crimea, where the book’s set, is in the news, thanks to Russia and Georgia’s conflict in South Ossetia, and press speculation about where might be next. You can read some of my thoughts on this here at the Walker Books website.
The media might be full of parallels between Crimea and South Ossetia, but on my trip to Crimea last week – to the south coast and Bakhchisaray – no one I met wanted to talk about them at all. I don’t know if these Crimeans and holiday-makers are behaving like ostriches sticking their heads in the sand, or they’re wise people who know it’s all a storm in a media teacup… or maybe they’re just fed up of talking about bad news.
