Author Mal Peet scores a big hit in Liverpool

Feb 20 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

Laura Davis talks to Mal Peet about his award-winning novel which is this year’s Liverpool Reads

EXPERIENCED explorers who have conquered the frozen slopes of the Himalayas or dived to the bottom of the ocean, where no daylight has ever reached, would still be enthralled by the depths of a writer’s sub-conscious.

There, beneath the mental post-it notes to file the tax return and buy more washing up liquid, grubby orphans work up the courage to beg for a second helping of tasteless gruel and knights of yore plunge glinting spears into the soft flesh behind a dragon’s scales.

Mal Peet’s mind is typically cluttered – characters from the books he has already had published mingle with the ones he has yet to write and then there are those, written by others, he is in the middle of reading. All that on top of the bills to pay and his up-coming visit to Liverpool.

“I’m just slightly scared about standing up and talking to a whole host of sceptical Scousers,” confesses the author of the city’s official novel for 2008 – well, two novels actually – chosen as the focus for this year’s Liverpool Reads project.

His fear is probably misplaced, judging by the enthusiasm with which Liverpudlians met the scheme’s previous choices – Holes, by Louis Sacher, in 2004; Millions, by Crosby’s Frank Cottrell Boyce, in 2005-6; and Andrea Levi’s Small Island in 2007.

However, as his first novel is about a goalkeeper on his visit to such a football-loving city, he should probably steel himself for questions about allegiance.

“I don’t really support any team,” he admits. “I love the game but I sometimes think it’s a misfortune to support a team. My son, Tom, is a Newcastle fan and he suffers horribly.

“The team I support is the team that’s playing the nicer football, which at the moment is Arsenal. I realise I’m going to be asked that a lot in Liverpool – which team do you support. I’ll learn everything I can about Tranmere Rovers. I think I’ll get a certain sort of grudging respect for that.”

That he is a successful, prize-winning author seems to still come as a surprise to Peet, who spent 12 years writing and illustrating educational books for children with his wife of 20 years, Ellie, before beginning Keeper.

He puts his transformation to novelist down to “boredom”. He was desperately trying to find another way of making a wage when he learnt from a senior editor at his publisher, Walker, that she was looking for books about goalkeeping and books about death.

Thinking it might be a funny idea to combine the two, he came up with Keeper about an international football star revealing how he was taught to play by a supernatural figure living in the rainforest.

“It is a book that still kind of confuses me,” he says. “It’s set in South America, a place I’d never been to when I wrote the book, and it’s about goalkeeping, about which I know nothing at all, and a ghost and I don’t believe in them, so I don’t know what I was doing.

“I realised half way through the second draft that I was actually writing about my relationship with my dad, or lack of it.

“People have said it’s about King Arthur, about the quest for the Holy Grail or forest conservation and all of that’s probably true, but it’s one of those books which seems to mean different things to different people which is great actually but is probably the result of me not really knowing what I was doing.”

Imagining himself into a goalkeeper’s boots must have been a simpler task than embodying his next character – the 15-year-old granddaughter of a Dutch former special operations executor.

Tamar, called after a codename used during the Second World War, inherits a box containing a series of clues and coded messages that lead her to the dark truth about his experiences of working alongside the resistance in the Netherlands.

The plot swings between her journey, both metaphorically and geographically, and the terrifying world of Nazi-occupied Holland.

“I created a huge problem for myself because I was going to have to write in the voice of a 15-year-old girl and I’ve never been one,” explains Peet, who grew up in Norfolk and now lives in Exmouth.

“Finding that voice was hard for me. I didn’t want to use one of these slangy teen voices that you see in teenage fiction ’cause they’re horrible and it goes out of date in five minutes.

“The way I decided to do it was to reveal at the end that, in fact, the storyteller isn’t 15, she’s 10 years older than that and this is an adult woman describing her teenage experience. I don’t know why I felt more comfortable being a 25-year-old woman than a 15-year-old girl, I’m a bit vague with both sorts of creature.”

The inspiration for Tamar, which Peet says he nearly gave up on five times in the two years it took to write, was a conversation with a friend whose father was an SOE in Holland during World War II and was one of only three wireless operators to survive. Until just before his death, he had kept quiet about his role in bringing down the Third Reich.