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You are watching BBC | 0:00:00 | 0:00:00 | |
You are watching BBC News. | 0:00:00 | 0:00:04 | |
Now it's time for Meet the Author. | 0:00:04 | 0:00:05 | |
Mal Peet was a much-loved writer of what book shops | 0:00:05 | 0:00:08 | |
like to call 'young adult fiction' although he greatly disliked labels | 0:00:08 | 0:00:11 | |
of that kind. | 0:00:11 | 0:00:12 | |
When he died last year he left an unfinished novel, Beck, | 0:00:12 | 0:00:15 | |
the story of an orphan boy marooned in Canada during the Depression and | 0:00:15 | 0:00:18 | |
trying to make a life for himself. | 0:00:18 | 0:00:22 | |
Now the book has been finished by his friend, | 0:00:22 | 0:00:24 | |
another favourite among young readers, Meg Rosoff. | 0:00:24 | 0:00:27 | |
So what is it like to finish the story of a friend | 0:00:27 | 0:00:29 | |
and bring it to a conclusion? | 0:00:29 | 0:00:32 | |
Welcome. | 0:00:32 | 0:00:35 | |
It must have been quite an emotional experience to pick up the manuscript | 0:00:51 | 0:00:54 | |
of a friend and try to finish it? | 0:00:54 | 0:00:59 | |
Yes, it was emotional in the best way, actually. | 0:00:59 | 0:01:01 | |
We had never really made a firm arrangement and when Mal called me | 0:01:01 | 0:01:05 | |
to say that the chemo hadn't worked and that he knew he was going to die | 0:01:05 | 0:01:12 | |
quite soon, he said my great regret is that I haven't been able | 0:01:12 | 0:01:17 | |
to finish this book. | 0:01:17 | 0:01:20 | |
And I just said, I will do it for you and that was it. | 0:01:20 | 0:01:23 | |
And we never spoke about it, he never told me what he intended | 0:01:23 | 0:01:26 | |
or what I should do with it. | 0:01:26 | 0:01:28 | |
So it was like a kind of silent dialogue, in a way, | 0:01:28 | 0:01:30 | |
and because we were such close friends, it was like keeping | 0:01:30 | 0:01:33 | |
that conversation going. | 0:01:33 | 0:01:36 | |
That's rather interesting. | 0:01:36 | 0:01:38 | |
Did you know anything about the book before these conversations? | 0:01:38 | 0:01:40 | |
Nothing, literally nothing. | 0:01:40 | 0:01:42 | |
I had no idea it was historical... | 0:01:42 | 0:01:44 | |
So you opened it like a reader? | 0:01:44 | 0:01:46 | |
Yes, yes. | 0:01:46 | 0:01:48 | |
It was... | 0:01:48 | 0:01:50 | |
I guess it was incredibly lucky, actually, that I connected with it | 0:01:50 | 0:01:53 | |
enough so that I could treat it as my own book. | 0:01:53 | 0:01:58 | |
But every writer has a voice, a way of expressing himself | 0:01:58 | 0:02:00 | |
or herself on the page. | 0:02:00 | 0:02:03 | |
That is individual. | 0:02:03 | 0:02:06 | |
That's what makes a writer a writer. | 0:02:06 | 0:02:08 | |
And here you were, with your friend stalking the pages. | 0:02:08 | 0:02:12 | |
Did you want to write as him or as yourself | 0:02:12 | 0:02:14 | |
and will we see the join? | 0:02:14 | 0:02:18 | |
Well, I hope you don't see the join, although I think anyone | 0:02:18 | 0:02:22 | |
who knows my writing and Mal's writing really well might recognise | 0:02:22 | 0:02:25 | |
bits and pieces that are more Mal or more me. | 0:02:25 | 0:02:29 | |
But... | 0:02:29 | 0:02:31 | |
Yes, it is two separate voices but on the other hand, | 0:02:31 | 0:02:34 | |
he and I were so close, in a way, and we had such similar sensibility | 0:02:34 | 0:02:38 | |
that I didn't have to think about writing like Mal Peet. | 0:02:38 | 0:02:44 | |
I was writing as the voice of the book and that, | 0:02:44 | 0:02:46 | |
for some reason... | 0:02:46 | 0:02:49 | |
Because it's a strong enough voice. | 0:02:49 | 0:02:51 | |
So that you can pick it up. | 0:02:51 | 0:02:53 | |
Get its rhythms. | 0:02:53 | 0:02:54 | |
Exactly. | 0:02:54 | 0:02:57 | |
I found it remarkably effortless in the sense of picking up the voice | 0:02:57 | 0:03:00 | |
and because I can't write the way Mal writes. | 0:03:00 | 0:03:06 | |
He and I write quite differently but... | 0:03:06 | 0:03:07 | |
You know, it's like adopting someone else's baby. | 0:03:07 | 0:03:12 | |
You're not always thinking of someone else's mother, you are | 0:03:12 | 0:03:15 | |
being the mother to that child. | 0:03:15 | 0:03:18 | |
The boy in Beck, he is born as it were, by accident, | 0:03:18 | 0:03:21 | |
by a sexual liaison, as a result of a sexual liaison that | 0:03:21 | 0:03:25 | |
shouldn't have taken place or wasn't meant to. | 0:03:25 | 0:03:29 | |
He is orphaned, educated by the Christian Brothers, | 0:03:29 | 0:03:31 | |
in a school, in pretty harsh circumstances. | 0:03:31 | 0:03:38 | |
He finds himself in the wilds of Canada during the Depression. | 0:03:38 | 0:03:41 | |
This is the classic boy thrown into the wilderness and having | 0:03:41 | 0:03:44 | |
to find himself, isn't it? | 0:03:44 | 0:03:45 | |
It's an elemental story. | 0:03:45 | 0:03:49 | |
It is an elemental story and it's interesting that the trajectory | 0:03:49 | 0:03:53 | |
from Liverpool to Canada... | 0:03:53 | 0:03:55 | |
I mean, Canada was such a wilderness and it was a wilderness | 0:03:55 | 0:03:58 | |
after the American West was a wilderness. | 0:03:58 | 0:04:00 | |
It almost has elements of the western, you know, | 0:04:00 | 0:04:02 | |
the individual against nature as well as... | 0:04:02 | 0:04:09 | |
The emptiness that lies ahead. | 0:04:09 | 0:04:14 | |
The great emptiness and the kind of emptiness of his future and how | 0:04:14 | 0:04:17 | |
he is going to somehow resolve what it means to have a home. | 0:04:17 | 0:04:21 | |
Do you think because you didn't talk to Mal Peet about this, | 0:04:21 | 0:04:24 | |
as you've told us, do you think the way you see | 0:04:24 | 0:04:27 | |
the boy coming through it, developing, | 0:04:27 | 0:04:31 | |
finding himself, is probably the same as he would have found it? | 0:04:31 | 0:04:37 | |
I think he would have written a whole extra section to the book | 0:04:37 | 0:04:40 | |
and I didn't want to get into writing a quarter of a book | 0:04:40 | 0:04:44 | |
completely from scratch. | 0:04:44 | 0:04:47 | |
I wrote a bit less than that in the end and... | 0:04:47 | 0:04:50 | |
Do I think he would have been happy with what we did? | 0:04:50 | 0:04:54 | |
Yeah, I think he would have been very happy, actually. | 0:04:54 | 0:04:57 | |
And in fact I was rereading at the other day and thinking, | 0:04:57 | 0:05:00 | |
damn, it would have been such fun to collaborate on a book | 0:05:00 | 0:05:03 | |
because he did all the stuff that I don't particularly like doing, | 0:05:03 | 0:05:07 | |
which is the plot and I did all the stuff that I think he liked | 0:05:07 | 0:05:11 | |
doing less, which is the going over and over and refining | 0:05:11 | 0:05:13 | |
and refining and you know, adding characters and fixing | 0:05:13 | 0:05:17 | |
the dialogue and all that kind of stuff. | 0:05:17 | 0:05:21 | |
You have written, both of you, he did and you do, | 0:05:21 | 0:05:24 | |
for the same kinds of readers. | 0:05:24 | 0:05:28 | |
He didn't like and I don't think you like the categorisation | 0:05:28 | 0:05:31 | |
of readers by age because it can become a straitjacket, really, | 0:05:31 | 0:05:33 | |
you write a book for all ages. | 0:05:33 | 0:05:37 | |
But your focus has been for a similar, maybe | 0:05:37 | 0:05:40 | |
what they call young adults. | 0:05:40 | 0:05:42 | |
And I suppose in that sense, you are looking at the world | 0:05:42 | 0:05:45 | |
through the same lens. | 0:05:45 | 0:05:50 | |
I think both of us were interested in adolescence, more than interested | 0:05:50 | 0:05:53 | |
in an adolescent audience and I think that there's | 0:05:53 | 0:05:57 | |
a distinction, in a way and most writers will probably tell | 0:05:57 | 0:06:02 | |
you that they are not very much focused on their audience | 0:06:02 | 0:06:04 | |
when they are writing. | 0:06:04 | 0:06:08 | |
No. | 0:06:08 | 0:06:09 | |
You are focused on what is in your head. | 0:06:09 | 0:06:12 | |
My own adolescence was quite a difficult period, not in the sense | 0:06:12 | 0:06:14 | |
of having ended up in jail or being a drug addict or anything | 0:06:14 | 0:06:18 | |
like that, but in terms of struggling to figure out | 0:06:18 | 0:06:20 | |
where the edges of the world were and what it | 0:06:20 | 0:06:22 | |
meant to be grown-up. | 0:06:22 | 0:06:25 | |
Now, now that I am somewhat older, I actually think that really | 0:06:25 | 0:06:27 | |
the whole trajectory of life is a transition from childhood | 0:06:27 | 0:06:30 | |
to adulthood and that really, that process doesn't end | 0:06:30 | 0:06:32 | |
until the day you die. | 0:06:32 | 0:06:37 | |
The question is, do you ever get there? | 0:06:37 | 0:06:39 | |
And I think the answer is no. | 0:06:39 | 0:06:41 | |
A lovely phrase you used earlier when you talked about finding | 0:06:41 | 0:06:44 | |
the edges of the world and in a way that is what the boy in Beck | 0:06:44 | 0:06:47 | |
is trying to work out. | 0:06:48 | 0:06:52 | |
He is in the wilds of Canada, has had a particularly | 0:06:52 | 0:06:54 | |
difficult childhood, no home, cast adrift, | 0:06:54 | 0:07:01 | |
so it's a very unusual experience and yet, the feelings he has | 0:07:01 | 0:07:07 | |
and the things he learns are things that people who are living | 0:07:07 | 0:07:10 | |
very conventional lives will also recognise. | 0:07:10 | 0:07:15 | |
Yes. | 0:07:15 | 0:07:16 | |
They've just been exaggerated. | 0:07:16 | 0:07:17 | |
Exactly. | 0:07:18 | 0:07:18 | |
That is what fiction does, an awful lot of the time. | 0:07:18 | 0:07:21 | |
I'm always a little bit suspicious of too much plot in a novel | 0:07:21 | 0:07:24 | |
because I sort of think the ideal novel should have no plot | 0:07:24 | 0:07:27 | |
at all and really just concentrate on the mental journey but actually, | 0:07:27 | 0:07:30 | |
it's a little bit more readable when the character | 0:07:30 | 0:07:32 | |
is going through real hardship, in real life. | 0:07:32 | 0:07:35 | |
I suspect what you hope most of all about this book | 0:07:35 | 0:07:38 | |
is that Mal Peet would have liked the way it ends. | 0:07:38 | 0:07:41 | |
I feel... | 0:07:41 | 0:07:44 | |
Absolutely convinced that he'd have just had a laugh and a drink | 0:07:44 | 0:07:47 | |
and said, you know, thank you for doing this, | 0:07:47 | 0:07:51 | |
let's try it again. | 0:07:51 | 0:07:53 | |
So I... | 0:07:53 | 0:07:55 | |
Never felt any self-doubt in picking this up as a project and it was | 0:07:55 | 0:07:59 | |
partly because when you are very close to someone you can almost | 0:07:59 | 0:08:02 | |
hear their voice in your head. | 0:08:02 | 0:08:06 | |
And it wasn't that he was directing me what to do, he was mostly, | 0:08:06 | 0:08:10 | |
kind of, cheering me on. | 0:08:10 | 0:08:11 | |
Meg Rosoff, thank you very much. | 0:08:11 | 0:08:13 | |
Thank you. | 0:08:13 | 0:08:16 | |
Hello. | 0:08:26 | 0:08:26 | |
Hello. Good | 0:08:26 | 0:08:27 |