Mr Godley's Phantom
Page 11
We don’t meet any real ghosts till the latter part of this book, but it’s been a ghost story all along. It’s about two men, both alive (just about), both haunted by their losses and their traumas from the two World Wars. Those, then are its ghosts – those persistent haunting presences in the lives of the living, the unforgiving, devastating things that are alive and real in our memory. Not the ghosts we see with our eyes, floating around implausibly under bedsheets clanking chains and going WHOOOO!!! – but the ones which come to us whether we’re waking or sleeping, unsummoned, into our mind’s eye.
Several of Mal’s books are, like this one, troubled by the way people drag the past along with them, and by how that affects their lives today. How to deal with that pain? How to carry on? The books often span generations, and take an interest in what happened then, but mostly in order to ask: how did that lead us to now? Historical settings reveal something about today. So Life: An Exploded Diagram is, yes, a coming-of-age story about a Norfolk lad, but it’s also (though we might not know it) the story of the older man looking back, to what made him – the man that Norfolk lad became. Mr Godley’s Phantom is not about war itself, but about people for whom almost intolerable post-war grief has become the default state – every bit of fight they have left is spent just keeping it merely bearable.
Before reading this final Mal Peet novel, I treated myself – and it was such a treat – to rereading the seven that came before it, almost-but-not-quite in order. Eight books in total, which make up The Complete Novels of Mal Peet. The experience was bittersweet, of course, a pang of sadness and of indignation that such a thing as The Complete Novels of Mal Peet already exists! (How can this be all we’re getting? Surely we were promised more?) But there was also great pleasure in seeing the work together, composing the picture of what it adds up to.
Well, then. My story – another ghost story of sorts – begins fifteen years ago, with the appearance of Mal’s first ‘Young Adult’ novel. (I won’t go into what that means, as I can’t think of a writer for whom the categorisation is more irrelevant.) Keeper introduced us to a terrific central character and his world. (Mal would return to both three years later in Penalty – his most underrated book, to my mind.) Keeper won the Branford Boase Award, a ‘best debut’ prize with an impressive track record not only in rewarding talent, but spotting promise of more to come.
Those prize judges were right – what a start it was. Not every writer who produces a great first novel can then keep it up. Some find they only really have one or two good books in them, they’ve said all they have to say and everything that follows is bit of a disappointment; some get rushed, under pressure to produce something for a waiting readership and impatient publishers (Keeper came seemingly from nowhere, it had no readers awaiting it); some just get lazy. But Mal started great, and got better.
I attended a ‘Children’s Writers’ Question Time’ event at the Hay Festival many years ago where a lad in the audience asked the panel anxiously, ‘What advice would you give a reader about choosing their next book, when they’re convinced that the last thing they read was the best book in the whole world and nothing else will ever match up?’ One of the panellists – I think it was Patrick Ness – asked the boy, out of interest, what he’d just read that had brought this crisis on? It was a book called Exposure, he said, a book by Mal Peet. (I later pointed out to Mal that he had basically managed single-handedly to destroy reading forever for this poor kid.)
Mal would follow Exposure, this apparently unimprovable book, with something better. Life: An Exploded Diagram comes as close to a perfect contemporary novel as any I know. Everyone, simply, should read it. It has all the qualities of, well, almost everything Mal wrote, but not least the ability, by some baffling sleight of hand, to make small things, on the scale of unassuming individual lives, seem like the most important thing in the world. Though Mal could do the big picture, too, of course, when he wanted – and (harder still) was a deft handler of the simultaneity of the two. There’s one paragraph in Life that starts with a boatful of revolutionaries leaving Mexico for Cuba (Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and co.), and by the time the paragraph ends some dozen lines later we’re in a Norfolk lane with an unfortunate lad who’s just had his cap chucked on the back of a passing lorry by the local bully. The switching between the two is a subtle effect, highly ambitious … and yet sort of typical.
I don’t know whether Mal thought of himself as a brave or ambitious writer – he may have had no truck with such praise – but he certainly seemed so to me. His Carnegie Medal winner Tamar is set across three time periods – there’s a 1945, and a 1995, and an implied ‘now’ – but it’s structurally braver than even that suggests. (It’s also very occasionally funny, when he notices things and can’t help himself.)
Tamar, another war novel of sorts, is about the stories we choose to keep secret, to keep private, and what happens when we tell them. And Exposure itself is in part about celebrity … Now I think about it, there’s a lot in Mal’s work about how we choose to show ourselves to the outside world – it’s in this very book you’ve just finished reading, isn’t it? Remember those early exchanges between Martin and Annie, where he is aware of the fake jollity of his speech? It’s in the conversations that very deliberately aren’t had (‘the honest words hung silent in the air between them’), in the woman who ‘seethed with questions she didn’t know how to ask’, in the choices made not to reveal the truth about ourselves if we can help it. Annie ‘had two ways of speaking, two voices. One her own, one borrowed.’ We do see tiny revelations of the vulnerable inner self all the time, but they’re inadvertent. They’re all so well-observed, these tiny things that we readers can’t help believe because this is how people truly are. Mal may have been a writer of fiction, but in eight novels I don’t think I ever once caught him lying.
Our author is himself careful what he does and doesn’t reveal to us, too. In Tamar he seems wilfully to defuse a great emotional moment by pre-announcing an important death hundreds of pages before it happens; and at one point Mr Godley becomes something like a murder mystery – except that Mal, uninterested in the old narrative conventions, blithely solves the murder for us around the halfway mark. Meanwhile other significant things are more surprisingly withheld, so we readers aren’t even allowed to make our minds up about what the title is referring to (the ghost haunting Mr Godley? the Rolls-Royce? the ghost of Mr Godley?), as he changes our minds for us again and again, layer added to layer. Even that three-word title works hard.
Mal Peet produced some of the least lazy writing I’ve ever read. He manages so much in so few incredibly economical lines. Look at how much he gets done in just this book’s first couple of paragraphs. (His opening sequence to Life: An Exploded Diagram is, incidentally, possibly the best piece of condensed narrative I have ever read.) Or look at page sixteen, where he manages to make you feel deep and painful sympathy for a character you literally only met a dozen lines earlier!
And he chooses words with such care. They’re never approximate, never just-good-enough, always exactly right. He’s a great coiner of language, but a subtle one, and he makes individual words do things you didn’t know they could. (Flicking through my copy of Tamar, I see I underlined the word ‘surly’ on page 87. It is used to describe a sofa. It is – implausibly – the perfect word.) I’ve only seen a couple of his pre-edited manuscripts, and while I’ve invariably had editorial thoughts, they’re always about how things might change only on a big structural scale; but taking it line by line and word by word it always looks perfect. He talked openly about the difficulties he encountered in writing, how hard it was to get a book right, how hard it was just to get the damn thing done. But reading him you’d never know it.
Not that he tried to make life easy for himself. Think of The Murdstone Trilogy, the last book published in his lifetime, utterly different from anything he’d ever done before. ‘A bit of a leap in the dark, this one,’ he said. (It’s the only one where his wicked h
umour is allowed off the leash entirely, and it’s such fun to watch.) Or of the uncompromising, psychologically complex book which eventually – with Meg Rosoff’s collaboration – became the posthumous Beck. Another book about dealing with hardship, but more importantly about becoming. About the character becoming who he became.
Every novel of Mal’s improves with re-reading – that’s certainly true for Mr Godley’s Phantom. It’s a good posterity test for a book, I think. Mal gives us more with each re-encounter; and in his best books, he gives us wonders of character and prose on every page.
He gives us?
Yes, that’s the prerogative of a great artist – as long as we read him, he can be forever in the present tense.
We’re told quite firmly, as students of literature, that we must resist assuming too much about writers themselves from their books. We learn that this blurring is unhelpful, and naïve. But how are we to believe someone could write books so humming with warmth and wit, generosity and mischief, insight and compassion, if the writer wasn’t such a person? Mal was, I think; and thanks to these books, he still is. And that’s the very best kind of ghost story, the most generous and the most benign kind of sustaining afterlife I can imagine. The book you’re holding in your hands is a part of that.
The End.
But … not really.
Daniel Hahn
Reader, fan and friend of Mal Peet
Acknowledgements
To John Schofield and John Field, for introducing Mal to one of the main characters of Mr Godley’s Phantom.
Thanks to John Schofield for allowing us to spend time looking at, and reclining in, his Rolls-Royce Phantom III, H J Mulliner Sedanca de Ville.
Thanks to John Field for showing us his beautiful collection of Rolls-Royces – and for the free-range duck eggs.
To the IIML at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, for providing Mal with space and time to write Mr Godley’s Phantom. Special thanks to Bill Manhire for the invitation, and to Damien Wilkins for the hospitality. And thanks to everyone else in Wellington whose warmth and welcome made the time that Mal spent writing Mr Godley’s Phantom such fun.
Elspeth Graham-Peet
Copyright
Mr Godley’s Phantom
First published in 2018
by David Fickling Books, 31 Beaumont Street, Oxford, OX1 2NP
This ebook edition first published in 2018
All rights reserved
Text © Mal Peet, 2018
Cover and Inside Illustrations © Ian Beck, 2018
The right of Mal Peet to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
ISBN 978–1–910989–53–1
Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press: THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942, by Martha Dickinson. Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965, by Mary L. Hampson