Geraldine McCaughrean
Best-selling author GERALDINE McCAUGHREAN has written over 120 books for children and adults, and has previously been published by Oxford University Press and Orion. Geraldine received the 2004 Whitbread Award for Not the End of the World (OUP), and previously for A Little Lower than the Angels. She has also won the Blue Peter Award for her retelling of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Her earlier collections of Bible stories include God’s People and God’s Kingdom (Orion Children's).
The Jesse Tree Geraldine’s first book for Lion, The Jesse Tree, has received much critical acclaim. Described as ‘highly wrought, subtle and compelling' by Ian Hislop in The Sunday Telegraph, the inspiration for this book was the tradition of carving a Jesse tree, a method used in some countries in medieval times to tell Bible stories. Using her skills as a storyteller and her love of the Bible, Geraldine imaginatively blends the story of a craftsman recreating a Jesse tree with selected Old Testament stories and the Nativity. The result is a fascinating blend of simple yet evocative retellings and a sensitive contemporary story about the transforming power of love.
Geraldine has also published The Nativity Story with Lion, which is complemented by wonderfully opulent illustrations by Sophy Williams. Fellow children’s author and friend, Phillip Reeve, says this is ‘a very fine retelling, simple, direct, and beautifully written, and
Sophy Williams’ illustrations are charming.’
Praise for Geraldine McCaughrean
'McCaughrean (is) an extraordinarily accomplished storyteller... McCaughrean's book... is highly wrought, subtle and compelling.'
The Sunday Telegraph
'A superb new children's book... it manages to straddle contemporary times and biblical times in a thoroughly charming and meaningful way. Excellent.'
Christian Herald
'This book is an outstandingly successful demonstration of McCaughrean's skill at retelling traditional stories for contemporary audiences… Highly recommended.'
Books for Keeps
An interview with Geraldine McCaughrean
Geraldine talks about her writing career and her first book for Lion, The Jesse Tree.
Interview: July 2003. Reproduction of this interview is not permitted in any format whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher.
How did your career as a writer begin?
I never really expected to write for a living… I’ve had a number of other jobs which I did extremely badly while writing my books as a hobby… I only really took up writing because I was desperately shy as a child and incapable of coherent speech… The only way I could express myself as a child was to write it down, so I was always off writing stories. Then my brother… got published when he was 14, so that finished me really because everything he would be doing I wanted to do as well. He never wrote another book but I never stopped – it just took me 20 years longer than him to get published! I got into it by nepotism really… I used to go to church with Ron Heapy, the editor of Oxford University Press’s children’s books, and he was saying one day, sitting round after mass in the kitchen, ‘I fancy doing Arabian Nights,’ so I said, ‘Oh, give me a chance – I can do that!’ So I auditioned for Arabian Nights by writing three chapters, and that’s my first book.
A few books down the line he said, ‘Time to write a novel’, at which point I completely panicked! Completely and utterly panicked – ‘I can’t write a novel! I’ve drawers full of novels… I’ve been submitting for years – tell me what to write about!’ He said, ‘I’d hate to give you any advice at all, but avoid historical because nobody buys historical, and have a girl for the heroine because boys don’t do books.’ And so I come back after four months saying, ‘I’ve done it! It’s about a little boy in the Middle Ages!’ But fortunately it won the Whitbread prize. So that was OK in the end.
You’ve written a lot about Greek myths and legends… what’s the fascination there?
It tells us about the national curriculum – when you go into schools and children know more about Greek myths than they do about Bible stories, which is slightly appalling. But I do love myths and legends. I write for every age – I write for really little kids and I’ve done five adult novels as well, but there’s a gulf between adults’ books and children’s books. The world of adult books is pretty nauseating – I don’t think I’ll be going there again… and the world of children’s books is on the whole pretty honest. It’s getting a bit ruthless now, but largely very honest – you know where you are…
I hate this gulf that has grown up between the two – adults would never think of reading children’s books unless they’re reading to their children, or they happen to be librarians or teachers. Children of course wouldn’t read adult books. I hark back to the time when the storyteller came to town and everybody would be there from the youngest newborn baby to the oldest old man. The stories that the storyteller told were about things that mattered to everybody. They were about who made the world and why and what our place is in it, what we must do and what we absolutely mustn’t on pain of death do, and about great emotions of passion and jealousy, fear, horror and danger.
What was your inspiration for The Jesse Tree?
I’m quite keen on preserving all aspects of our heritage, including our religion… I would like every child to have their grounding in all the Bible stories because then I could use all my… metaphors again. For years I’ve been peppering my fiction with allusions to Bible stories. They must be wasted on the majority of readers. It must be the equivalent for children nowadays of me reading Paradise Lost where you only understand 50% of the allusions. So I’ve always hankered after children having that grounding in Bible stories. I have done the Bible straightforwardly in a book for Orion and it’s quite nice to come at it again and see if I can do something different. The Jesse Tree was quite good from that point of view because you can make various associations between the Old and the New Testaments and it’s a very nice device for drawing parallels between the stories of the Old Testament and what they might signify in the New Testament.
Do you have a favourite Bible story?
Yes, I do. It’s the one that I allude to most in my… metaphors – the one of Abraham and Isaac. I love Abraham and Isaac! It’s so scary and so terrible…
Did you have a particular reader in mind when writing The Jesse Tree?
There’s no point in writing books for the child that doesn’t read – people do it all the time – they struggle to write books for children that don’t read. I do assume the child has some acquaintance with the Bible as well and probably does know the rudiments of the Bible stories… If you were reading these stories for the first time, you wouldn’t come here. Parents wouldn’t buy this as a first introduction to Bible stories – they’d buy ‘Your First Book of Bible Stories’ so this is a way of coming a bit further, slightly older. Because so many Bible stories are ‘My First Book of Bible Stories’ children have a tendency I think to feel as if they’ve outgrown Bible stories. They probably get to the stage with those stories that they used to read together with mummy when I was 6… well now I’m 9, I don’t need to read Bible stories…
How easy was it for you to write the book?
It was very enjoyable actually. I enjoyed it much more than I thought I was going to…. Because I was doing it with somebody else telling the story I had a different voice to use. It was really very enjoyable and, letting the relationship develop in ways that I didn’t know it was going to, it was quite fun.
Where did you get the inspiration for Mr Butterfield and the boy?
Well, we had to have someone carving this Jesse tree, and it had to be a learning process. There had to be some kind of journey going on, either with the carpenter or the person he was talking to, which is what I started off with – a chap carving this Jesse tree and telling the stories to someone who would be all the better for it afterwards. But then, since I have a hatred of clich�, where possible I will try and reverse the situation so that the one telling the story is the one who’s ignorant. So Mr Butterfield comes along and doesn’t really understand, and a boy comes along that does understand. He’s the one who’s fetching all the stories in order to achieve something in the end. I like old and young, and I like developing relationships, because the children reading the books are always in search of a friend, and if they end up feeling as if they’ve made a friend in Mr Butterfield and saved him from ratty old age, then all well and good….
Mr Butterfield is quite a grumpy chap really, isn’t he?
He is, yes. Mr Butterfield was the name of my father’s Sunday school teacher! He seems to have inculcated in my father that old biblical saying – ‘If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.’ What we got from my father was biblical wisdom.
What did you learn through writing The Jesse Tree?
To like Mr Butterfield better I suppose… I worry still about treading on people’s sensibilities… I have this feeling about storytelling that… you tell the best story you possibly can, and the most important thing is your audience and as long as you’re true to the message, you’re entitled to do it the best way you can possibly manage. That’s why it’s so much easier to do the Old Testament than the New Testament because you cannot put words into Jesus’ mouth. The other nice thing about doing The Jesse Tree is that you can tackle the subject of Jesus without pussyfooting desperately around what people actually said, because with the New Testament people are so touchy about using any words that don’t actually appear in the Bible. So if you’ve got somebody else telling the story, in a way you can do it with more vigour than you could if you were just doing a straightforward retelling…
There are many different themes in this book. What would you like your reader to take away from it if nothing else?
As I say, I do assume that the child reading this would probably have some understanding of the Bible. It would be very nice if they thought for the first time, ‘Oh I see that these aren’t just random stories, they do actually have something to do with each other – at least they could have something to do with each other – and that themes do recur…’ There must be the occasional child that thinks, ‘Oh yeah, I see!’
(c) Geraldine McCaughrean/Lion Hudson. July 2003
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