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Authorgraph No.212


I


n a liminal place near a train station, in a gastro-pub where you can order duck hearts on toast, I pour tea for the novelist Frances Hardinge. We had met earlier under the clock at Waterloo – ‘in time-honoured fashion,’ as she punningly remarked – and were


now settling into a shady corner, whilst my lurcher puppy chewed on a bone under the table.


Hardinge is an author whose work gloriously defies convention and categories – much like her heroines. From her debut, Fly By Night, to her most recent work, The Lie Tree, her books have treated difficult subjects through the usage of highly distinctive language, and through rebellious, awkward protagonists who bristle and stretch against the worlds into which they are shoehorned. Last year’s Cuckoo Song, for example, saw an architect’s daughter up against fairies in an askew 1920s Britain complete with suffragettes riding motorbikes. 2015’s


The Lie Tree is set in an alternative Victorian world, and follows Faith, the young daughter of a discredited natural scientist, as she discovers a tree which is fed by lies – a typically Hardinge-ian conception, in which the world is not quite as we know it.





Hardinge is an author whose work gloriously defies convention and categories – much like her heroines


Frances Hardinge Interviewed by Philip Womack


his parents getting killed by a runaway rhinoceros, and there was this lovely feeling of gearshift, and a sense that this is not going to be the same kind of book. It was just very liberating.’ She reels off a list of classics, including Susan Cooper and John Masefield, that her parents read to her, all of which have left their mark on her writing mind. But it is that sense of bending the limits which is most pertinent to Hardinge’s body of work.


Hardinge’s fiction deftly interweaves the fantastical and the real. How did she deal with the concept of evolution, which plays a big part in The Lie Tree? ‘At first I was considering playing it completely straight – having some fantasy world and actually not having the


degree of ambiguity that you do end up having with this tree. I started thinking about it in a different way: where could I set it? What is the time when the Lie Tree would be particularly powerful? When there will be people who are desperately emotionally invested in being deceived, in clinging to something that is not true? When is there going to be a time when subterfuge is going to be natural or more easy or more socially condemned? And then I started thinking about a time where botany itself and associated natural science has elements of controversy. It just fitted much better. What had begun as quite a simple concept, but one I could definitely build an adventure off, became something with a lot more complexity or resonances.’





In person, Hardinge exudes amiability, a black hat perched on top of a long, kindly face. As I turn on my dictaphone, she remarks, self-deprecatingly: ‘If it doesn’t record and you can think of something more intelligent and eloquent than I actually said, feel free to put that instead, that’s fine.’


Since folklore is such an important strand in her work, I ask her how she came to it: ‘I was always fascinated by the fantastic and the macabre. I blame this partly on the fact that I spent part of my childhood living in a really weird grey gothic implausible house [in Penshurst, Kent] up on a hilltop, which actually did make the proper moaning wuthering sound when the wind blew. My imagination never stood a chance. A fascination with the macabre was pretty much inevitable.’ Her life there was full of imagination: intricate games she played with her little sister, to whom she also told stories. She wrote, always: ‘I think pretty much from the point when I could hold a pencil I was scribbling something.’


Roald Dahl was the first author to take her ‘by storm ... because of the rule breaking. James and the Giant Peach – I started reading it, very young, and read this lovely description of this happy little boy with a happy little family in a happy house by the sea, and then


10 Books for Keeps No.212 May 2015


Family relationships are often at the core of her novels. ‘They are one of the mechanisms by which we understand ourselves,’ she says. ‘And certainly for the age group I’m writing for, that is quite a transitional period, it is a point where it’s not Rupert Bear any more. It’s not “Rupert leaves happy safe little home, goes off has an adventure, comes back, happy safe home is there, and so is his tea” … Middle grade – and particularly middle grade – (if these definitions even really work, and I’m not convinced they do), you’re moving away from that. You can’t quite come back like that because even if happy home hasn’t changed, you have. Your dynamic has changed … It does become more natural to actually question and challenge.’


There is always a tension, in her books, between the


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