Bookclub: David Almond - Skellig

Editor's note: Radio 4's Bookclub is on at 4pm on Sunday 4 November and is repeated on Thursday 8 November at 3.30pm. You can also listen online after broadcast or download the programme. Here, Jim Naughtie talks about the themes that are discussed in David Almond's novel, Skellig. - PMcD

Bookclub went to Newcastle to record a conversation about Skellig with David Almond, who had an extraordinary success with the book when it was published in 1998. It was appropriate to be in the North-East, because that is David's home territory and also because the story - a journey of imagination for a 10-year-old boy, full of fears and excitements - has a mystical background that has connections with the experience of St Bede and St Cuthbert whose tracks are all over the history of the area. Mysticism is at the heart of the story, because Michael - our hero - discovers when he meets a mysterious figure (Skellig) who seems to live in the garage of his new family home that the real world that he can touch around him has another, deep layer of which he becomes conscious and in which his imagination can take wing.

Wings, indeed, play a part in the imagery of the story, because David found the influence of William Blake forcing itself upon him: Blake's angels and his towering imagination are threaded through the story of Michael, his friend Mina, and Skellig. Yet it is not religious in a formal sense. David's Catholic upbringing gave him a feeling for a world of saints and angels, but he describes it as a spiritual book rather than a religious one. "It is about a triumph of hope over adversity, but it is a secular religion." Asked by one of our readers to describe Skellig, he said "it is about faith, optimism and hope."

The story immediately became a best-seller, and raised an interesting question. Was it a children's book or not? David is one of that happy band of writers who deeply dislike the categorisation of books by age - he can't bear the sight of bookshop shelves marked 8 - 10 or 13 - 15, as if some books are automatically suitable or unsuitable the moment a particular birthday has come or gone. "Adults came to me who were deeply moved by the story," he told us. "There was something about the way I wrote Skellig that enabled me to reach adults in a quite different way."

The style of the book is simple, it is quite a short story and written straightforwardly, but the ideas have a vibrant life of their own. Michael's mind is opened up by the appearance of Skellig - a figure who seems scary at first, like a shabby ghost or a menacing interloper - because the relationship allows him, and especially Mina, who later became the subject of a book in her own right by David, to escape from the here and now, which we all know is exactly what children of that age are always trying to do. Skellig, says David, is just a fragment of a mysterious universe, in which it is quite easy to imagine an angel walking down the street if you try hard enough.

I suggested to him that he might be writing in the style of magic realism, the phrase that I suppose became particularly popular after the publication of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children thirty years ago. "When people began to describe me as a magic realist," David says, "I thought - I'm just me." The right answer.

I should say that one of the joys of the recording was that we invited this month's readers to the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Literary and Philosophical Society library, a wonderful institution dating from the last decade of the eighteenth century which still operates as a subscription library and is a glorious place, imparting its own atmosphere to the business of reading for pleasure. Long may it thrive.

Our next book is Sathnam Sanghera's memoir, an account of a Sikh upbringing in Wolverhampton, The Boy with the Topknot goes out on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday December 2nd at 4pm (repeated on Thursday 6th at 3.30pm) and our next recordings are with Ben Macintyre (Agent Zigzag) on December 4th in London and the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak on The Forty Rules of Love in London on January 17th - get information and apply for free tickets here.

I do hope you enjoy Skellig on Sunday, or the repeat on Thursday.

Happy reading

Jim

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