Bookwitch

It was in Publishing News last year that I first found Oliver Jeffers, in an interview with, I think, Graham Marks. I was left with an impression of handsome biker, who was also the “in” illustrator of the moment, responsible for the World Book Day posters. I wasn’t all that interested, to be truthful.

By the time Oliver materialised at Simply Books on Friday, I’d worked up more enthusiasm, and by the time he was done, the enthusiasm level was really quite high, and not just because of the biker looks and the designer stubble. I even had the opportunity to start by translating Oliver’s request for a USB pen into something more intelligible, rendering me an aura of being almost useful.

His appeal must be fairly universal, as the people who turned up to hear him talk were of all ages, and whereas my tolerance for slide shows and power point presentations isn’t that great, this was interesting. How a picture book is made and why they are often 32 pages and how the text comes last in the printing process. And how the Americans will change his words if they don’t like them. Now, how could little boy running out of rocket fuel near the moon possibly be seen as too unrealistic?

I’d made several visits to Oliver’s website, and had had considerable problems with all the insects, until I finally worked out what’s what. And then he said he was thinking of changing it, to make it easier. I said no, not when I’ve actually got it, at last. Anyway, I’d had a good look at some of his “proper” art, and if the witch household had any spare walls, not to mention some spare cash, there would soon be a Jeffers on our walls.

Being slow (me that is), I didn’t make the connection with Hopper until Oliver mentioned it, but that will be why I loved “my” favourite painting instantly. And look, there is Hopper in the books as well. Couldn’t be better. Quite liked Michael Sowa, too, who’s another of Oliver’s favourites.

Oliver uses whatever paint feels right at the time, but seems to prefer acrylics, at least now. He also uses water colours, Dulux One Coat, and finds his white pen extremely useful. With the water colours he sloshes on too much water, adds colour and then tilts the paper from side to side, letting the colour slide this way and that. And I think Oliver said he rests the paper on a toilet roll, until the colour settles as he wants it.

He has, or had, two work areas in Belfast; one for making a mess vertically and one for making a mess horizontally. Makes sense, when you think about it. Right now he is living and working in New York, so his visit here is a short one, and supposedly so he can see his uncle. Oliver was born in Australia, grew up in Northern Ireland, which is why he has that lovely accent, and has lived in Sydney, before New York. So, very cosmopolitan. At one point he and some friends also kept posting a work of art across the Atlantic. They started with an empty book, and then added a picture, before posting it on, and on, for 36 weeks. Surprised it didn’t go missing.

His interest in how words and pictures go together made him experiment, and before he knew it he had made a picture book without meaning to. Among his favourite books by others are Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are, and Quentin Blake’s Clown. Oliver feels young children make the best critics, because they get bored easily.

I’d say he is rather like an overgrown child himself, with his ideas. For one page in The Incredible Book Eating Boy, he photographed books which he and his brother threw into the air, to let them fall in the right way, before Photoshopping them onto the page.

After meeting a quantum physicist he thought about how people become intelligent, and took to combining oil paintings of people, with equations. Another unusual idea is to leave his mug of coffee on the paper, letting it leave a ring and then doing a picture round the coffee ring.

Oliver did typography at university, so is very keen on doing all the lettering in his books, even when it involves writing the copyright page in Spanish by hand four times because he kept making mistakes. When asked whether it’s important to have gone to university, he says it is, because then you know all the rules, before you go on to break them.

Among things he has done that aren’t picture books, is a poster for Starbucks, an ad for the big bookshop chain, cards that the Government sends to all new born babies, and something unintelligible about Orange priorities. And a Darth Vader helmet.

It doesn’t sound as if Oliver is man who struggles, but when he does, coffee helps. That and knowing there’s a mortgage that needs paying.

His next book is, supposedly, called The Great Paper Caper, and has something to do with FSC paper, but he won’t say too much. “A children’s detective thriller”.

Lost and Found is being animated, using CGI, and Oliver got his Mac out to show a short piece from the film. Absolutely adorable, are words that come to mind. However, putting his own nephew (Henry, I think) in the penguin compound at Belfast Zoo, doesn’t strike me as very nice. Henry was helping illustrate Lost and Found, but what they did find, was that he’s scared of penguins.

Well, so much for the man who wins everything or is shortlisted for everything. Good artist, but is he a good uncle? And he uses books from Belfast Central Library to paint on. Hang on; that’s what I was complaining about a couple of months ago, in regard to Daughter’s school…

And have I just lost an opportunity to interview Oliver properly in the future? This blog post is too long.

As Daughter and I watched, yet again, one of her favourite episodes of our favourite NCIS, I was reminded of how easy I have it. There, poor Agent McGee who writes crime novels in his spare time, found that the characters from his as yet un-finished next novel were being bumped off. So, who had access to his top-secret manuscript? We were assured that the really keen fan will search through authors’ rubbish bins for clues as to what they are writing.

The witch didn’t have to do anything as crude as that. Declan on Crime Always Pays emailed to ask if he could (!) send me his next novel as a Word document. I allowed him to do this, because I’m a kind witch. Also, because I was fairly desperate to read the new book.

The Blue Orange, as he calls it, is a continuation of The Big O, with all the same characters, except those who may have died in the first book. Plus a couple of new ones. The Big O was very funny, if rather full of four-letter words, and had endearingly inept, mostly minor, crooks.

In The Blue Orange we meet them again, and this time I found myself quite fond of even the less charming ones. It’s a mad-cap race across the Continent, with everyone ending up in Greece, where Declan has totally taken over his favourite holiday island, which I understand was quite nice before this.

As is to be expected, there are so many double-crossings that the witch developed a squint trying to cope. The best thing is simply to sit back and enjoy, while laughing quite a lot. The story is crying out to be made into a film, and I know which part I can play.

And as Mother-of-witch so rightly said, crime is not nice. But this kind of crime is as nice, and as funny, as it gets. The worst baddies are killed or have lots of blood removed in interesting ways, and maybe the rest lived happily ever after. I’m hoping for more. And sooner rather than later, Mr Burke.

Anyone who by now has the slightest inclination to read The Blue Orange, will want to murder me. The book will be out in the US in the autumn of 2009. If he gets round to it, Declan might just publish it in Ireland in the spring. 2009 again, I’m afraid.

And he is checking I’m not selling it on ebay, so I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do. But I just felt I had to rave about it now. I can always re-rave when the time comes.

I love Michelle Magorian’s books, and her new one after an exceedingly long ten years doesn’t disappoint. Just Henry continues in the same vein as Michelle’s earlier books. It’s post-war, 1949, and it’s set in the world of cinema goers.

14-year-old Henry is in his last year at school, and lives with his mother and stepfather and his little sister Molly, and his gran. It’s a house fraught with bitter disagreement, added to which you have post-war rationing and hours of queueing. There’s also the added complication of popular prejudice in those days, which is hard to understand now.

Henry’s salvation lies within the cinema. He goes several times a week, which might seem extravagant by today’s measures, but then they didn’t have television or computers. Even the radio is seen as a luxury. Through his massive interest in films, Henry makes new friends, which is lucky for him, as he soon stumbles across a mystery, which threatens to tear apart life as he knows it. He needs his new friends.

There’s a fascinating background of popular films and the history of film making, and it’s a wonderful story about woman power. The fairy godmother character in the book teaches Henry to look for diamonds in dungheaps, and there’s plenty of dung before the story ends. It’s quite a nice way of looking at things, I feel, and more people should look for diamonds. Daily, if necessary.

And I really, really don’t feel up to waiting another ten years for another book from Michelle.

The Sara Paretsky interview is finally here. It may look long, but it could have been longer still. She’s very interesting, and there was so much to talk about. Writing it was good, but not something that combined well with school holidays. One day I’ll work out how to go without sleep. Maybe. And as you can see, photos were not down to the witch alone (forgetting, or otherwise). Son is responsible for all the diagonal pictures…

Seeing as it was the Easter holidays you’d be forgiven for expecting something good on at the local cinema. Daughter needed to take her new haircut to the cinema, so with the nearest one a disappointment, we went to Manchester instead. The train fare there was also cheaper than the bus fare locally. Britain is such fun.

We saw Juno, which at least the witch had read good things about. And I think it was a very good film. American, but not glossy. It’s about a pregnant teenager, and the ending in particular reminded me so much of a Sarah Dessen book, that I needed to get it out when I got home.

Someone Like You is also about a teenager who gets pregnant, and being a Sarah Dessen story, it makes for a good read. As is to be expected, there is a child birth at the end of the book, and it’s sad and funny and wonderful.

Babies have preyed on my mind recently, with the addition to the Crime Always Pays family. This otherwise hardened crime blog is awash with the cutest baby photos, which just goes to show what a softie Declan really is. The witch and Daughter ooh and aah regularly over at CAP. And not a nappy to change at this distance.

I wouldn’t normally have any interest in a movie companion (and I don’t mean the human variety eating pop corn in the seat next to me), however official and illustrated it may be. But as with all things Pullman, I found it very easy to make an exception for The Golden Compass Official Illustrated Movie Companion.

This companion could take the place of several magazine articles of the best kind, about a favourite subject. And you get the stills from the film, and photos of things and people to do with the filming. With a book you have time to look at and appreciate it properly.

And there’s lots more on the technical background to the film. Everyone involved with the making of the film gets their say, and for someone like me who doesn’t know that much about film making, it’s quite interesting in a general way, too.

Just as with the film itself, the photos are beautiful, and as far as clothes are concerned, they “stand still” so you can admire them.

Nicole Kidman gives me the creeps, which is as it should be, and I still feel I want to be Serafina Pekkala in my next life.

Can you have too much Alex Rider? As I’ve said before, we quite like him around these parts. Like so many other fast paced stories, Stormbreaker was made into a film. It was OK, though I’m not sure how well it did, as I’ve not come across any evidence that there are more films on the way.

I’ve just been road testing two graphic novels about Alex. Stormbreaker is exactly like the film, rather than the book. The changes made to the plot, etc, for the film are in the graphic novel as well. That’s not necessarily bad - just interesting. It probably made the job easier to take the film almost frame by frame.

Talking about taking - that’s what happened to the book once it got here. You’d think Daughter would have had enough with book and film, but oh, no. Alex Rider quietly disappeared off the kitchen table, and I only found him a week later. When I did, I carried him back downstairs, only to find him gone again (if you can say that). The Resident IT Consultant is not the type to read comics, so what was he doing with Alex? (Rumour has it that when he was six and got put on the train to Glasgow to visit his grandmother, he was given some money to buy the Beano, or equivalent. It appears that he was found with a copy of The Times.)

Point Blanc carries on in much the same vein, though as I have no film to compare it with, I don’t know how they decided to adapt it. One thing that feels a little wrong is that both Alex and Sabina look far too young. More like twelve than fourteen. But even the cynical witch found it quite addictive. That could be why this book also disappeared. I warned him that it was not to be taken out of my sight, so he read it standing right next to me. It could be that if he had read the Beano that time long ago, he wouldn’t have needed Alex Rider. On the other hand, the witch bought two comics regularly during her teens. No serious side effects.

I remember saying a while back that I already have a face for Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander, and so I didn’t feel that Kenneth Branagh could really be Wallander to me. Maybe I can learn to accept change.

While on half term holiday I watched a more recent Wallander on television, and found that the man going round arguing with someone at the beginning of the film, was actually Wallander himself. New actor; new face. And I really didn’t feel this was Wallander. Perhaps I could adapt, but there’s only so many faces one man can have. To tell the truth, I didn’t feel this actor played Wallander as I understand his personality to be.

I’ll have to wait and see what Kenneth Branagh can do with him. Can Gilderoy Lockhart ever be a moody Swedish policeman?

We went to see The Golden Compass again, the other day. The Resident IT Consultant hadn’t seen it first time round, so we indulged him. To tell the truth, it was Son’s birthday, and the dratted boy had asked loads of friends to visit him in Edinburgh, but we weren’t invited. Hah. Not that we’d have gone, but it would have been a nice gesture on his part to pretend the boring old people are worth having around.

Now I want to be Eva Green even more than last time. Please tell me I can be Serafina Pekkala. The rest of the film stood up well to a second viewing, I thought.

After GC we polished off a couple of take-out pizzas. At least I didn’t have the same amount of cleaning up afterwards, as I usually would on that day every year. It brings back fond memories, as one year a few years ago Son’s nicest, bestest behaved and well brought up friend called me a witch. He did it by mistake, the poor boy, but it was fun.

Check out Spinebreakers again. With the paperback of Sara’s Face by Melvin Burgess coming out next week, they have recorded some video logs based on the book’s vlogs. Very tense stuff. And they are supposed to change several times over the next week.

There’s also a competition to make your own vlog. So get going.