To win one of five copies of Trilby Kent's new novel Silent Noon, just answer this question in the Comments section below:
"Name a school story that engages with its historical context in a compelling or unexpected way."
Competition closes on 7th June and is open to UK residents only
Showing posts with label Trilby Kent. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trilby Kent. Show all posts
Saturday, 31 May 2014
Thursday, 29 May 2014
Silent Noon by Trilby Kent
Trilby Kent is a novelist, children’s author and journalist. She read History at Oxford University and completed a MSc in Social Anthropology at the LSE; Silent Noon was written as part of a PhD project that was completed in 2013, from which this post is partially extracted. She has previously contributed to The History Girls on the subject of writing race in children’s fiction; her Young Adult novel, Stones for my Father, went on to win the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Prize and the Africana Book Award in 2012.
Silent Noon
September 1953. Fourteen-year-old Barney Holland is promised a fresh start when he is offered a place at a boarding school on the remote North Sea island of Lindsey. Instead, he is shunned by his peers both for his status as a charity pupil and for being the replacement of a recently deceased student, the popular Cray. The arrival of Belinda Flood, a housemaster’s daughter stigmatized by her expulsion from another school, provides Barney with an unexpected ally. Both outsiders soon fall under the influence of charismatic senior pupil Ivor Morrell, who reigns over the forbidden corners of the school.
A gruesome find and the friendship with a local woman rumoured to have been a wartime collaborator draw the three into an increasingly dangerous web of personal and social shame. Gripped by mounting horror at his discovery of secrets harboured by the isolated school community, Barney personifies the struggle of a young peacetime generation finding its way out of the shadow of war.
“The past that’s not past yet” (a wonderful phrase coined by Damon Galgut) is a major theme of Silent Noon, which features schoolmasters living with the memory of war and schoolboys who have inherited its legacies, both proud and shameful. Having previously written novels set at the turn of the last century and in the 1930s, I had some experience of evoking historical periods poised on the brink of calamity. Writing a novel set during the post-war years offered a new challenge, for the great drama of the age already lay behind my characters, in the recent past.
My fear of slipping into nostalgia for the 1950s and school stories of that period was slightly abated by the fact that the book is, in some ways, not about the 1950s at all, but rather about the way in which the 1940s lingered, and the 1960s failed to arrive quickly enough.
Furthermore, the fact that ‘my’ islands – Lindsey and St Just – are entirely fictitious allowed me a certain freedom. I was able to identify a moment when Britain and its allies had been victorious in a war fought to defend its borders and beliefs, but which was followed by an anti-climactic unease and sense of isolation in the world, as well as a reversion to conservatism, fears about an uncertain future, and shortages of resources. Today, still, we face an energy crisis, grapple with concerns about international terrorism and war, fear North Korean nuclear tests, bemoan unsocial youth, warily eye China as a rising superpower, and partake in the steady rise of consumer culture.
Asked why she didn’t write about ‘modern times’, Isak Dinesen replied
“I do, if you consider that the time of our grandparents, that just-out-of-reach time, is so much a part of us. The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquility… a painter never wants the subject right under his nose; he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes.”
It is a sentiment echoed by Thomas Mann in his question, “Is not the pastness of the past the profounder, the completer, the more legendary, the more immediately before the present it falls?”
As Guernsey and Jersey felt too small to reinvent for the purposes of my novel, and their wartime stories too familiar, I opted to create a landscape from scratch. In constructing Lindsey Island, I borrowed several elements from the Scottish outpost of St Kilda – the crofts and screes, the outbreaks of infantile tetanus, the Chimney and use of gannets’ stomachs as containers – as well as the awkward position it occupied in the context of wider historical events.
I also researched the histories of two major Channel Island boarding schools to better understand their uses as physical spaces during and after the war. Ms. Dot Carruthers of Elizabeth College was able to fill in the fate of the buildings during the school’s exile to Derbyshire, while Mr. Ricky Allen of Priaulx Library expanded on the college’s use by the Feldkommandantur 515 (Guernsey branch). This was where civil government was administered, affecting everything from occupation costs and price control to police, education, and health services. It was also used as a timber lot; as Mr. Allen was able to quote from J. C. Sauvary’s ‘Diary of the German Occupation of Guernsey’: “Today I had to go to Elizabeth College to see Inspector Hannibal for a permit for coffin material” and “I went to Elizabeth College again yesterday, for a permit for timber. It is heartbreaking to see the old College”. Victoria College, too, was requisitioned to house a contingent of Hitler Youth, but not before masters and boys removed the honours boards and pictures from the Hall and boarded off the library. The 1930-56 college register records that a number of English-born masters and pupils were deported to Germany (“among them Mr. Kennett, Mr. Williams, and Crumpton (the College Porter)”), although their fates are not recorded.
There is an undeniable element of nostalgia associated with the Second World War and the decade that followed it, and one of my primary aims in writing Silent Noon was to resist falling into the trap of exploiting history for its shock value. It is a problem I partly evaded by constructing an imagined geography; but questions of historical appropriation remained, not least because they are of central interest to my characters. Kazuo Ishiguro has said,
“To some extent, we, in a very decadent way, felt envious towards writers who lived in oppressive regimes because they could just describe their everyday life, and it was immediately big and significant”:
“I think the solution that a lot people came to…is that you can either travel … Or you can go back in time. And you can keep talking about Britain, England, Europe, whatever. And you don't have to go back very far to a point when all these values that we take for granted today: democracy, freedom, affluence, all these things were really threatened.” (http://www.writersblocpresents.com/archives/ishiguro/ishiguro.htm.)
Silent Noon was never intended to be a ‘big’ novel, but rather a tightly controlled story about a small group of people in a closed institution. I hope that, although ‘big history’ is touched on, the thrust of the story remains about the young people at its centre trying to find their way out of the shadow of war, and not about war itself. The Carding House School is haunted not only by a recent student death but also by its war history; similarly, the misdirected rage of Barney, Belinda and Ivor is symptomatic of a disenfranchised generation suspended between a glorious past they can’t remember and an uncertain future they can’t envisage.
In this respect, the setting is crucial: isolated from the fields of battle, yet tarnished by memories of a shameful occupation, Lindsey Island is suspended between victimhood and collusion, honour and despair. It sits awkwardly on the fringes of Britain, forgotten in its ‘finest hour’. It rejects a standardized history. Like a teenager, it sulks, it dwells, and it guards its secrets jealously.
I always knew how I wanted the book to end: with an explosion, with a last-minute revelation, and with a freezing of time at the school’s sports day. In Silent Noon, I wanted to resolve with an ending-that-isn’t and a sense of Barney walking away from a specific moment and place while realising that these things – the here and now – would haunt him for the rest of his life. As such, his story concludes with a paen both to the end of his school days and to the complex era in which he comes of age – a past that is certainly not past, yet.
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| Elizabeth College, Guernsey |
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| Victoria College, Jersey |
Saturday, 13 October 2012
Writing and Race by Trilby Kent
[A longer version of this piece originally appeared in the Summer 2011 issue of Canadian Children’s Book News.]
Last year, a decision to edit out racist language in a new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn became the latest in a series of controversies surrounding racial representations in YA fiction. According to NewSouth Books, the expurgation of “hurtful epithets” – replacing 219 uses of the word “nigger” with “slave” – was designed pre-emptively to protect the book from wider censorship (it has already been banned by several American school districts).
The story broke just a few months before the release of my second YA novel, which concerns itself with racial tensions from a different period. Stones for my Father tells the story of a 12 year-old Afrikaner girl whose family is forced to flee their farm from an invading British army; a difficult stint living in the bush is followed by their eventual capture and relocation to an internment camp. Corlie’s friend, Sipho (a farmhand’s son whose father is fighting alongside his Boer oppressors), disappears from the story when his own family is sent to an African camp. Had the tale been told from his point of view, it would necessarily have been a very different book; as it is, his presence haunts Corlie long after they are separated.
Growing up in the Transvaal, the children share many common experiences. Much as Corlie longs to be ‘properly African’, over the course of the novel she comes to realize how little of Sipho’s world she truly understands. In some ways, they remain as foreign to one another by the novel’s end as at the beginning, when first they flee the farm:
As we waited in the kitchen, considering all the things we would have to leave behind, I noticed Sipho staring at the knife my mother used for gutting fish.
“For protection, kleinnooi.” He picked it up, ran one finger along the mean edge.
“But we have the rifle.”
“A rifle is only useful as long as we have bullets.” Sipho reached for the muslin cloth that Ma used for steaming puddings and began to wrap it around the blade, a makeshift sheath. “Just in case. No need to worry, kleinnooi.” His gaze drifted around the kitchen, and for the first time I saw the room through his eyes: the uselessness of my mother’s lace curtains, the crocheted tablecloth, the decorative milk glass plates.
“Aanjaag,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Unlike Huckleberry Finn, Stones for my Father reflects on a time far removed from our own. What it shares is the inclusion of a loaded vocabulary. For many years in South Africa, blacks were often referred to as ‘kaffirs’: a word which developed from the Arabic ‘kafir’ (meaning ‘non-Muslim’) into a term considered highly derogatory today. To omit this word from an account of an era and a society characterized by racialism would have been false. At the same time, I felt that it was vitally important not to normalize its use. For this reason, it is italicized throughout the book.
Perhaps naively, I didn’t dwell on the challenges of writing Sipho’s character until two drafts in. This may have been just as well, as the more I found myself reflecting on the possible pitfalls of appropriating a black narrative (I am white, and my mother’s family are of English and Afrikaner descent), the more difficult it became to decide on the ‘right’ approach. Ultimately, I hope to have saved Sipho from becoming the ‘saintly victim’ by virtue of an act which, although leading to his own downfall, preserves his agency and integrity and renders him neither an Uncle Tom nor simply a cipher for ‘Africa’.
Stones for my Father became a book about how hard times create hard people. Suspicious though I am of the tendency to read South African history backwards – apartheid would not be introduced for another half-century after the war – it was tempting to leave out the tricky bits for fear of getting it ‘wrong’.
But as a reader, I find it far more frustrating to feel that the wool has been pulled over my eyes than to know that I’ve been offered a clear picture of something deeply unpleasant. John Boyne’s parabolic approach in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas prompted some critics to wonder about his use of a distinctive narrative style as a kind of pardon from historical integrity. Effective though the book is, there were readers who couldn’t help but feel slightly manipulated by it, as though history had been hijacked for its shock factor.
I believe that we owe readers young and old historical honesty, with as little sanitization as possible. In books that address prejudice, race itself should matter less than the characters’ relationship with race.
The casual cruelty exacted by whites against blacks, as well as the phlegmatic manner in which Corlie reports this cruelty, made for uncomfortable writing. But to give Sipho the neat resolution denied to roughly 20,000 individuals like him would have been to whitewash history. The challenge must surely be to transcend stereotype, rather than ignore the fact that great swathes of history have been shaped by cruelties watered by racism. Worst of all would be to ignore the elephant in the room – and in so doing, strip those characters of any voice at all.
© Trilby Kent
Stones for my Father is published in the U.K. by Alma Books.
We thank Trilby Kent for visiting our site. Here is a bit about her:
Trilby Kent is the author of two novels for children and young adults. Her first, Medina Hill, was one of Booklist's Top 10 First YA Novels. The latest, Stones for my Father, was published by Random House/Tundra Books in North America last year and has since been released in the UK and South Africa. Her first novel for adults, Smoke Portrait, was published in the U.K. by Alma Books in 2011 and has since been translated into Russian and Dutch.
Trilby was born in Toronto and grew up in London, Miami and Boston. A graduate of Oxford University and the LSE, she has worked as a rare books specialist at a leading auction house, a freelance journalist contributing investigative, arts and feature writing to the Canadian national press and publications in America and Europe, and an academic editor. In July 2010 she was shortlisted for the Guardian's International Development Journalism Competition. She has contributed essays and interviews to such literary journals as The London Magazine and Slightly Foxed. Her short fiction has appeared in, among others, The African American Review ('Fallout'), Scrivener Creative Review ('King Leopold's Return'), Mslexia ('Stealing Their Churches Behind Them'), and Litro ('A Fine Woman'); 'The Dancing Telemetrist' was shortlisted for the 2009 Fish International Short Story Prize.
She is currently completing a PhD in Creative Writing at Exeter University and is represented by Judith Murray at Greene & Heaton.
Last year, a decision to edit out racist language in a new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn became the latest in a series of controversies surrounding racial representations in YA fiction. According to NewSouth Books, the expurgation of “hurtful epithets” – replacing 219 uses of the word “nigger” with “slave” – was designed pre-emptively to protect the book from wider censorship (it has already been banned by several American school districts).
The story broke just a few months before the release of my second YA novel, which concerns itself with racial tensions from a different period. Stones for my Father tells the story of a 12 year-old Afrikaner girl whose family is forced to flee their farm from an invading British army; a difficult stint living in the bush is followed by their eventual capture and relocation to an internment camp. Corlie’s friend, Sipho (a farmhand’s son whose father is fighting alongside his Boer oppressors), disappears from the story when his own family is sent to an African camp. Had the tale been told from his point of view, it would necessarily have been a very different book; as it is, his presence haunts Corlie long after they are separated.
Growing up in the Transvaal, the children share many common experiences. Much as Corlie longs to be ‘properly African’, over the course of the novel she comes to realize how little of Sipho’s world she truly understands. In some ways, they remain as foreign to one another by the novel’s end as at the beginning, when first they flee the farm:
As we waited in the kitchen, considering all the things we would have to leave behind, I noticed Sipho staring at the knife my mother used for gutting fish.
“For protection, kleinnooi.” He picked it up, ran one finger along the mean edge.
“But we have the rifle.”
“A rifle is only useful as long as we have bullets.” Sipho reached for the muslin cloth that Ma used for steaming puddings and began to wrap it around the blade, a makeshift sheath. “Just in case. No need to worry, kleinnooi.” His gaze drifted around the kitchen, and for the first time I saw the room through his eyes: the uselessness of my mother’s lace curtains, the crocheted tablecloth, the decorative milk glass plates.
“Aanjaag,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Unlike Huckleberry Finn, Stones for my Father reflects on a time far removed from our own. What it shares is the inclusion of a loaded vocabulary. For many years in South Africa, blacks were often referred to as ‘kaffirs’: a word which developed from the Arabic ‘kafir’ (meaning ‘non-Muslim’) into a term considered highly derogatory today. To omit this word from an account of an era and a society characterized by racialism would have been false. At the same time, I felt that it was vitally important not to normalize its use. For this reason, it is italicized throughout the book.
Perhaps naively, I didn’t dwell on the challenges of writing Sipho’s character until two drafts in. This may have been just as well, as the more I found myself reflecting on the possible pitfalls of appropriating a black narrative (I am white, and my mother’s family are of English and Afrikaner descent), the more difficult it became to decide on the ‘right’ approach. Ultimately, I hope to have saved Sipho from becoming the ‘saintly victim’ by virtue of an act which, although leading to his own downfall, preserves his agency and integrity and renders him neither an Uncle Tom nor simply a cipher for ‘Africa’.
Stones for my Father became a book about how hard times create hard people. Suspicious though I am of the tendency to read South African history backwards – apartheid would not be introduced for another half-century after the war – it was tempting to leave out the tricky bits for fear of getting it ‘wrong’.
But as a reader, I find it far more frustrating to feel that the wool has been pulled over my eyes than to know that I’ve been offered a clear picture of something deeply unpleasant. John Boyne’s parabolic approach in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas prompted some critics to wonder about his use of a distinctive narrative style as a kind of pardon from historical integrity. Effective though the book is, there were readers who couldn’t help but feel slightly manipulated by it, as though history had been hijacked for its shock factor.
I believe that we owe readers young and old historical honesty, with as little sanitization as possible. In books that address prejudice, race itself should matter less than the characters’ relationship with race.
The casual cruelty exacted by whites against blacks, as well as the phlegmatic manner in which Corlie reports this cruelty, made for uncomfortable writing. But to give Sipho the neat resolution denied to roughly 20,000 individuals like him would have been to whitewash history. The challenge must surely be to transcend stereotype, rather than ignore the fact that great swathes of history have been shaped by cruelties watered by racism. Worst of all would be to ignore the elephant in the room – and in so doing, strip those characters of any voice at all.
© Trilby Kent
Stones for my Father is published in the U.K. by Alma Books.
We thank Trilby Kent for visiting our site. Here is a bit about her:
Trilby Kent is the author of two novels for children and young adults. Her first, Medina Hill, was one of Booklist's Top 10 First YA Novels. The latest, Stones for my Father, was published by Random House/Tundra Books in North America last year and has since been released in the UK and South Africa. Her first novel for adults, Smoke Portrait, was published in the U.K. by Alma Books in 2011 and has since been translated into Russian and Dutch.
Trilby was born in Toronto and grew up in London, Miami and Boston. A graduate of Oxford University and the LSE, she has worked as a rare books specialist at a leading auction house, a freelance journalist contributing investigative, arts and feature writing to the Canadian national press and publications in America and Europe, and an academic editor. In July 2010 she was shortlisted for the Guardian's International Development Journalism Competition. She has contributed essays and interviews to such literary journals as The London Magazine and Slightly Foxed. Her short fiction has appeared in, among others, The African American Review ('Fallout'), Scrivener Creative Review ('King Leopold's Return'), Mslexia ('Stealing Their Churches Behind Them'), and Litro ('A Fine Woman'); 'The Dancing Telemetrist' was shortlisted for the 2009 Fish International Short Story Prize.
She is currently completing a PhD in Creative Writing at Exeter University and is represented by Judith Murray at Greene & Heaton.
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