I'm giving some space on my blog today to Alan McClure to talk about his first novel, which is about to be published...
Over to Alan!
*
"I have a slight issue with children's books which try to explain every bit of magic and mystery in them. Callum and the Mountain, as well as being exciting and funny (I hope!), is supposed to create a whole in-world atmosphere which leaves a lot of questions only vaguely answered and trusts the reader to apply some imagination. I want it to haunt readers, to pop back into their heads years after they've finished it, and I want the language to leap off the page. I'm a primary school teacher by profession and I've huge faith in the intelligence and judgement of young readers. Despite the march of technology, today's kids still have the access to magic that we all had as children, and I hope this book provides a gateway for that. Finally, I wrote this as a man who reads aloud to his kids - if you're a parent, I'd love this to be a story shared at bedtime so that you can jump into the peculiar world of Skerrils along with your kids!
Writing is my passion and I do it because
I'm compelled to - this became crystal clear during a week long course at
Moniack Mhor in 2018, led by Paul Magrs and Joan Lennon and attended by a
diverse and talented group of writers. I'm tremendously grateful to them for
their encouragement, and for making writing a thing to be shared and not hidden
away."
Beaten Track: https://www.beatentrackpublishing.com/callum
Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/callum-and-the-mountain-alan-mcclure/1132533600?ean=9781786453266
iBooks: Callum and the Mountain
There’s a lovely musical dialect running
through the whole of this book, with all these sweet, sparkling, squashy and
sometimes unfamiliar words. We get glimpses of a place with its own lore and
legends – of Trogs and strange green Things. The second person address means
that the book is speaking straight at us, confidentially, with great panache,
giving us the feeling that we’re listening to a born storyteller, and he’s unpacking
a great shaggy monster of a tale for us.
I love the feeling in the early chapters,
that something is turning everything Callum knows upside down and that some
‘sleekit beastie’ has him in a ‘total dwam.’ These sections remind me a little
of Edith Nesbit’s Psammead stories, especially when the magic has unpredictable
results, like in the brilliant scene when the dog starts talking so politely,
and is at such pains to reassure his humans.
There are touches of Susan Cooper, Diana
Wynne Jones and Alan Garner, too, when the elemental forces of the Things enter
fully into the story. There’s something primal and disturbing about their
amorality and their reminder to us that nature isn’t always ‘friendly, or even
safe.’
There’s a great zest to all of this book:
it reminds us of being Callum’s age, when everything is both perplexing and
exciting: ‘another day, another adventure.’ Though it rattles along at a good
pace, it’s never at the expense of lovely, descriptive language: especially in
the rather beautiful episode, underwater with the selkies. I found that this
tale of ‘crazy cavemen, treacherous friends and troublesome nature sprites’ was
exciting and rich, but it also wasn’t without realistic jolts of sadness, like
when Callum thinks his beloved Papa might be dying.
The book builds to a very unusual, poetical
climax. It’s a spartan, lyrical interlude that feels a bit like we’re reading a
guitar solo. It’s the bit when our hero is isolated and facing all the forces
that his story has unleashed.
Following that, there’s a coda that has a
lovely logic to it, as it talks us through the magic of forgetting at the end.
Everyone in town seems to benignly remember that something tumultuous has been
sorted out, and our heroes have forgotten some of the specifics of their
adventures. Yet everyone agrees that the day has been saved by Callum, and this
leaves us with a sweet sense of closure.
I really like the inclusion of a glossary,
and that description of the way Scots words can be said to spice the English.
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