18
INTERVIEW PIERS TORDAY
08.06.18
www.thebookseller.com
Piers Torday
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe had a lasting impression on author Piers Torday—so much so, that his latest book is loosely based on the classic
3 BY FIONA NOBLE
OF TORDAY’S TOP SELLERS
THE LAST WILD Quercus Children’s, £6.99, 9781780878300 In a world ravaged by climate change a boy and the last animals on the planet embark on a thrilling adventure. Torday’s début was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize.
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THE DARK WILD Quercus Children’s, £6.99, 9781848663787
The second novel in the trilogy won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize.
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ast spring Piers Torday retreated “from the chaos of Brexit and Trump” into a world of nostalgia
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and back to the book that, he says, “opened my eyes to the potential of storytelling”. One of the most memorable books of his childhood, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was, he tells me over the telephone from his London home, “the first time I really understood that reading was a magical act”. As a child he “hadn’t a clue” that the story was a Christian allegory. “It’s a book of its time and I’m definitely not going to be a cheerleader for C S Lewis.” But that magic of stepping through the wardrobe is what hooked him. “The appeal for me was the imagination and the world that I loved coming back to. I read the whole series and began to understand that fantasy worlds could be places to escape to.” Lewis was writing at the end of the Second World War, the beginning of an age Torday feels is now coming to an end with Brexit. “I was trying to write a book to make sense of where we were, partly for myself and partly for children of today. I wanted to write about those feelings, that sense of some connection with the past that we once had that is being reshaped.” The idea began to evolve. What if the children who tumbled through a wardrobe in 1940s England discovered not a Christian allegorical fantasy but a more modern struggle? “The idea of using a classic fantasy text that everyone recognises but to then start using some more contemporary issues once we got inside was really the hook.” His first challenge was to strike the right balance between homage and creating something very original. He initially planned to write a shorter story close in length to the originals: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is a modest 36,000 words long. But in the age of Rowling and Netflix he feels “children want more texture, more layer and detail than I think you get in the originals”. He worked hard to evoke the atmosphere, pace and warmth of the Narnia stories, using “the plot of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a handrail”, with enough nostalgic nods to
Title The Lost Magician Imprint Quercus Children’s Books Publication 06.09.18 Format HB (£12.99) ISBN 9781786540515 Rights UK &
Commonwealth rights to Quercus Editor Sarah Lambert and Kate Agar Agent Clare Conville at Conville & Walsh
satisfy readers while creating his own unique story. The result is one of the most clever and ambitious children’s books of the year. The Lost Magician begins with four children sent away from the war in London to the country house of Professor Diana Kelly, a scientist at military research facility Porton Down. There, a magic door leads the children into a library and the world of Folio, an enchanted kingdom of fairy knights, bears and tree gods under threat from The Unreads, a sinister robot army. Opposing factions are locked in eternal war and the children’s only hope is to find their creator, a magician who has been lost for centuries. The narrative is framed by papers from the National Security Archives telling of a shady government venture to investigate The Magician Project. The characters of the children are similar in tone to the Pevensies (from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe) but have more flesh, depth and nuance
here. “I wanted to play with the genders,” Torday tells me, giving Larry, a very sensitive little boy, the role of discovering the door. The Edmund character, Evie, is particularly interesting. In the Narnia stories Edmund is painted as the treacherous one, but here Evie’s decisions are borne “not out of any sense of disloyalty but because she felt the need to act for change, which is so important in our own time”. And because the book is so much about stories and reading, Torday felt it “important to have someone for whom reading wasn’t so easy,” creating a dyslexic character in Simon. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe the Second
World War is little more than a footnote but Torday’s children are deeply traumatised by their experiences. Writing so soon after the war “the last thing C S Lewis wanted to mention was the actual war. People wanted escapism and comforting”. Writing from a modern perspective gave Torday an opportunity to counterbalance the nostalgia.
summers and lashings of ginger ale.” The idea of recovery from war is central. The book is very much Torday’s love letter to reading,
“It wasn’t all golden
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