The Middle of Nowhere

Geraldine McCaughrean has been my favourite writer since long before any of my own books were published. (In fact it was reading her adult novels back in the early 1990s which made me start writing novels in the first place.) I've never read a book by her which I didn't like, and when a new one arrives I always read it twice - the first time for the story (which will be be perfectly plotted, while still managing to swerve in completely unexpected directions) the second time just for the pleasure of the way she uses words. 

I've only had time for one read of The Middle of Nowhere so far, but I can recommend it without hesitation. Its heroine, Comity, lives in a remote telegraph station in the Australian outback, sometime in the late 19th century. When her mother dies she starts helping her distraught father to transmit telegraph messages. She also makes up messages of her own, trying to conceal from her far-off relatives the truth about her mother's death and about how grim and difficult life on the station has become, especially with the arrival of her father's dangerous new assistant.

Like many McCaughreanian (?) heroes and heroines, Comity is a storyteller. So is her friend Fred, an Aboriginal boy who holds her spellbound with his sometimes wayward versions of tribal myth and mission-school Bible stories.  But Geraldine McCaughrean knows that stories can be dangerous things, and Comity's innocent inventions lead to a whole torrent of dangerous misunderstandings.

I think my favourite of Geraldine's children's novels to date is The White Darkness, an adventure set in the Antarctic. In a way, The Middle of Nowhere makes a perfect companion piece, once again pitting its heroine against a pitiless landscape and a sinister older man. As in The White Darkness, there is madness and danger, and some shocking deaths. But it's also funny, and exciting, and extremely beautiful. The strange desert terrain is captured with a cinematic clarity, and the friendship between Fred and Comity is touching and true. And then there are those trademark GM similes and metaphors, whole interlinked chains of them, which seem to go off like strings of firecrackers as you read...  She is one of those rare writers whose style is instantly her own, and one thing which links all her very different books together is that only she could have written them.

The other thing, of course, is that they are all exceptionally good. The Middle of Nowhere is no exception.

Geraldine McCaughrean and Some Geezer at the launch of The Middle of Nowhere

The Middle of Nowhere is published by Usborne Books, and is available from all good bookshops, including this one.

You can find out more about Geraldine McCaughrean and her writing on her website.  She has also recently joined Twitter.

Visits to Cambridge and The Middle of Nowhere

I've been away for most of this week, and for once it wasn't part of the never-ending Oliver and the Seawigs publicity tour...

Photo: Sarah McIntyre

I'd been invited up to Cambridge, to be presented with an Honorary Doctorate by Anglia Ruskin University. I'm sort of an old boy, since Anglia was where I studied illustration back in the 'eighties. In those days it was just plain ol' CCAT - the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology - but it's now morphed into a fully fledged university, and the illustration course has become one of the best in the country.

I've never attended a graduation ceremony before, let alone had to make a speech at one, so I was very glad that Sarah McIntyre came along to lend me some moral support, as did Dave Shelton, author of A Boy and a Bear in a Boat and a fellow graduate of the old CCAT illustration course, and Farah Mendelson, SF scholar and critic and author of The Intergalactic Playground (among many others), who is now part of the faculty. I also got to meet Pam Smy, whose illustrations for the forthcoming Siobhan Dowd book The Ransom of Dond which I glimpsed at David Fickling Books earlier this year - it looks astonishing.

And Philip Pullman was also being given a Doctorate, so I was able to meet him at last! (That's him in the photo at the top of this post.) Apparently he's had thirteen of these honours already, so I still have Some Way To Go. He gave a very good and serious speech about what a degree means, and used a lovely phrase about us 'living in a time that is still warmed by the background radiation from the enlightenment'. (I mostly just reminisced about my college years and made cheap jokes about McIntyre's hat.)

As if meeting one legend of children's lit wasn't enough, my second appointment of the week was at the W Hotel in Leicester Square, where I was part of a discussion with Geraldine McCaughrean and Nicolette Jones to celebrate the launch of Geraldine's latest novel The Middle of Nowhere.  Geraldine has been my favourite writer since long before I was published, and I'm still in awe of the way in which she turns out so many books, all on very different subjects, but each perfect, and very much her own. She's also one of my favourite people, and I still can't quite believe it when I'm asked to share a stage with her. I shall try to put a full review of The Middle of Nowhere here soon, but don't wait for that - run out and buy it NOW, it's flippin' brilliant.