Tim Lott was born in 1956 in Southall, Middlesex, England and studied Politics and History at the London School of Economics. As well as journalism, he has worked in publishing and broadcasting, and was editor of the London listings magazine City Limits. He talks here to Nikki Gamble about his recently published novel for children, Fearless.

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I found Fearless a very affecting read.: one of the most affecting that I’ve read this year.

You acknowledge the role of your editor in helping you to pull the story together. Could you tell us something about that and the journey to getting this book published?

Well it was a very long journey. I started writing Fearless under the title The Strange and Somewhat Sad Story of Sadie Strongheart in 2000. At that time I was telling the story to my Goddaughter, Sadie. Kids are always asking me to tell them stories off the top of my head and I’m rotten at it, usually. But on this occasion, it went quite well and Sadie asked me to write it down. I started transcribing, not expecting it to take more than 15 minutes, but once I started writing, I kept going. I just couldn’t leave it alone. Within three months I had 80,000 words. I knew it had a lot of really interesting stuff in it but it wasn’t a proper book.

The problem was that there were so many ideas in it that I couldn’t stitch it together. I spent the next four years trying to make it work. I took it to my adult editor for Penguin books, my agent, another agent and several publishing companies, and all of them reacted with complete bewilderment. The only people who liked it were my dad, my stepmother, my brother and my kids. I was becoming pretty discouraged. I’ve never given up on a book before but on this occasion I was very close to it.

Then I showed it to Jacqueline Wilson and Mark Haddon. They both really liked it, particularly Jacqueline Wilson, so that kept me going for a little bit longer. I went to Spain and locked myself in a hotel room for five days to try and solve the problem with this book and even then I couldn’t do it. My finger was hovering on the delete button but I couldn’t bring myself to do that.

Six months later, Caroline Walsh, Jacqueline Wilson’s agent told me that Denise Johnson at Walker Books was interested. Denise just understood it completely. I’m indebted to her she had the courage and the inspiration to take on a book that no-one else could understand because it doesn’t really fit into any of the carved niches in children’s publishing; it’s a tragedy: half-fable, half-fairytale. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever written, because I was trying to create an entirely imaginary, parallel world that has its own rules, in a way that fables do with mythical undertone - an archetypal story.

 I suppose. It is a fairytale, the type without fairies…

The real influences on me were George Orwell and Oscar Wilde.

 Yes, it is very like Oscar Wilde in tone.

 It’s Orwell as well - an updating of Animal Farm in some respects. Orwell loved fairytales as well, which is perhaps surprising given his realist tendencies as a writer. Greek Myths and fairytales are so powerful for me, but I don’t really know what a fairytale is, and I don’t really know what a fable is. All I know is that it seems to appeal to something very deep and universal in us. It’s some truth that goes beyond words. It’s strange because one of the criticisms from one reviewer is that the characters are very poorly developed. They are, deliberately, because it’s a fairytale…. …

They’re generic. It’s why they have names like Fearless..

… … exactly. They are no more than their characteristics. That’s all you need to know about Fearless because the reader projects everything else on the character. In some ways that felt very strange because I had to try not to laden the story with character which detracts from the story; It’s the opposite of what happens in a conventional novel.

 I suppose the fable is a universal story which expresses a human truth.

 Yes, this one is about redemption through sacrifice. That’s Christ’s story – the renewal of the world by dying for it. That’s the pattern of the world - a constant cycle of renewal and death – and it’s the fundamental trope of this book.

 It stands out from post- modern fairy tales in the serious treatment of its themes.

I have some very un-post modern perspectives on human nature. I’m completely sincere about courage and compassion and truth, which I believe in as absolute virtues. I have nothing ironic to say about those things. The fashion for so long has been to lampoon and parody fairy tales. I just want to tell a straight story.

But doesn’t every culture reconstruct those stories so that they reflect the ideals of that dominant culture, either knowingly or unconsciously.

 Yes, you’re right but I think the current trend is to pull them apart, make ironic comments and be self-consciously clever about them. I didn’t want to play intellectual games with literary theory. I wanted to write something right from the heart. I think the older tales reached inside your soul and pulled at you. It is a tragic story in the same way that Andersen and Wilde told tragic stories.

Have you found that adults want to protect children from stories with deeply sad endings?

I’m sure publishers ran away from it because it’s a tragedy. It’s not an unmitigated tragedy because there’s redemption and a new dawn. However it is fairly unusual. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy has an uneasy ending too, doesn’t it?

 I think adults are frightened of making children cry..

Yes but it’s very purifying and cleansing to weep. And the crying that you do in response to a story like this is a different weeping to the kind that children perform when they’ve grazed a knee. There are many kinds of tears and this is a particular, kind of, tears that I wanted to draw forth from children.

You almost can’t bear the sorrow …

You should be suffering with the heroine and through that suffering there is a, kind of, catharsis of purification. I think that’s the idea, but there are clearly rules in contemporary in children’s literature that I don’t understand and I am transgressing in some ways.

Do you feel that there has to be an element of sacrifice in order for this common good to be achieved?

 I don’t think little Fearless was ever acting for the common good. I think she was acting out of a commitment to her mother, to be brave and to be herself. I don’t think she had a political perspective. She just thought if she went and told grown-ups, they would come and save her. Her tragedy is that they wouldn’t listen. There’s an obvious analogy for me, with the way we treat the developing world. They make our shoes for 10p a day and we know they’re suffering but we don’t want to look. We can have as many people come up to us and say, “Those people are out there suffering and making your shoes for 10p”, and we go, “Oh, yeah, yeah, no, you’re right”. We are very adept at only seeing the truth we want to see. I’m as guilty as the next person. It’s no coincidence that the Community Trade School is on the doorstep of the city. They all know it’s there and they send their laundry to it. It is a, kind of, moral cleansing, a way of washing their sins away, if you see what I mean. In the end, it’s the ordinary man, the dustman, who does something about it. It’s through the grassroots that people say, you know, “We’re not going to take this anymore, you’ve been lying to us”. For me, that’s the cycle that is political change. It always comes from underneath and there’s sacrifice and suffering on the way. There are always people who pay the price.

The power of fable and the fairy story is that it will resonate in so many different ways for different people. You’re talking about the child labour in a developing world, and  I’m thinking about issues surrounding terrorism and education.

The diction you use and the narrative is very direct, like a folk tale. Was it intuitive to write it like this, or consciously crafted?

 I always remember a quote from Dennis Potter, who was one of my heroes, and he said, “When he was writing at his best, it felt like he was taking dictation”. That’s exactly right, when you’re writing at your best it’s as if the writing is being channelled through you. The real work you do is to stop thinking – well that’s a very Zen type perspective.

One thing  that struck me is the way in which language is manipulated by those in power. So for instance, the Controller when the controller talks about freedom, there is an element of truth when he says, “If everyone has freedom, no-one has freedom.”

Of course, there has to be a truth in it otherwise you wouldn’t believe it. His perspective is giving everyone freedom means no-one has freedom, but he just thinks if anyone has freedom, then no-one is free, so he takes it to the ludicrous extreme. I am very interested in the belief and language that underpin the God wars. I think Orwell would be very shocked to see how the political language that he identified as a tool of the totalitarian regimes of the Soviet Union has now become a tool of the Liberal Left. In Britain, the Orwellian world has come about in almost the reverse way that he imagined it. Capitalist Liberal Governments and global multinationals, the ten corporations, as they appear in the book, are manipulating language in a far more sophisticated and clever way than the Communist regimes ever managed.

 Its’ true in educational contexts as well, you manipulate the semantics until words no longer hold the same meaning. This is the same as calling the laundry girls ‘residents’ when really they are prisoners.

Yes and in contemporary society we use the term Police Service now, not the Police Force. I think the criminals are their customers!

Can you tell us why Fearless has one blue eye and the brown eye?

 Don’t expect me to understand everything that’s in my own book, because I’m not sure that I do. I just thought it was a really striking image. I love the strangeness of it. Sometimes images are just powerful and you write them down in the same way a painter paints.

 I expect you’ll offer a similar response when I ask you about the white roses, though they were a symbol of resistance in the Second World War.

The image of a white rose growing from a child’s tear struck me as a very beautiful idea. And there’s something lovely about the idea of casting the roses onto the water in the end.

I can talk about the angels a bit more explicitly - the worn out old angels in a forgotten part of town. There is a part of me that feels that about modern life. I often walk round Central London and down by Trafalgar Square, there is a Statue of Edith Cavell, which has the inscription, “courage is not enough”. That’s a monument of courage for an amazing woman but when I look at Modern Art it’s just playing tricks. Yes, it’s being interesting, but it never has the courage to be able to say, “this is about being courageous”. Why are we so scared of these simple straightforward emotions? Why are we scared of fate or truth? Truth is not relative; that’s an absurd belief. There are perpetual human truths that human beings have experienced since the time of the Greeks and before, the same emotions that come in waves: love, hate, misery, jealousy, fear, these are perpetual truths about human nature.

Thank you, Tim Lott for talking to Write Away.

2008-01-05