Holding to Ransome

Thoughts on literary influences…

Excuses, excuses, I know, but it is a busy time, with just under a month to go to publication of Vows and Watersheds, Book Three of The Shattered Moon. I still have a few tweaks to do to the text and also need to finalise the picture and blurb for the back cover. Logically, text first as that will allow me to get an ePub file out to ARC readers, and I aim to have that done and formatted this week. Blurb next for preview purposes. And so on.

So I'm going to postpone my intended post about why so many of the leading characters in my books are female; I think this is an important topic (certainly to me) and I need time to do full justice to it. However, here's a quick thought. I commented recently in a science fiction writers' Facebook group thread discussing the Apple TV adaptation of Asimov's Foundation. I said: "It’s a very loose adaptation, but then some aspects of the original books really did need updating. I was shocked on rereading the trilogy recently by the absence of female protagonists, and ashamed that I didn’t really notice this when I read them the first time in the 70s." The first reply to my comment said, in essence, that there were few women in SF books, full stop. I must admit I don't read SF as ravenously as I once did, as I'm highly eclectic in my reading now, but I don't see any shortage of females in what I pick up (recently, for example, the very fine The Red Scholar's Wake); and other genders, and people of no gender, also seem to get fair due. But that may reflect the books I choose to read, rather than the state of play in the wider genre.

On that subject (books I choose to read), you might like to take a look at this blog post, where I list my favourite books and say a little about their influence on me. Twelve books, seven of them by women.

I’ll return to this topic soon, and that’s a promise. But it does tie in with what I am rambling on about today. One of the titles in my 'reading list' is the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome. Yes, perhaps it's cheating to pick a series rather than a single novel, but it's my blog so I make the rules. It connects with the above theme because when I first read Swallows and Amazons it wasn't the 'hero', John, whom I identified with but the adversary-turned-ally, Nancy. In later readings through the series I've also come to appreciate his other female characters; more about them below, but first let me set the context.

My first encounter with Swallows and Amazons came when I was about nine, at a wedding in Warrington. My mother handed me the book during the reception to stop me dying of boredom during the speeches and (worse!) dancing… and I was transfixed. It may have coloured my view of weddings ever since; it certainly gave a new slant to my reading, and helped sow the seeds for a life-long love of the outdoors, already primed by family holidays in the Lake District.

Much later, I closely studied Ransome's work, particularly in relation to the Lakes; I wrote and illustrated a book on the subject, later revised (with new photos) as an e-book.  I've also written several articles, created a dedicated blog, and gave a talk at Kendal Mountain Festival, undoubtedly Britain's leading festival of its kind, titled Swallows, Amazons and Adventure. I've recently been invited to speak at the Literary Weekend of the Arthur Ransome Society in April. It'll be on the same theme as the Kendal one, but updated to say a little about my own venture into fiction and how Ransome has influenced me here.

In all, Ransome wrote 12 novels for young people, five of them set in the Lake District. They portrayed a world in which children (aged between 7 and 12) could sail the lake, camp on an island, and have other adventures with almost no adult supervision. But the true magic was the way the children’s imagination added another dimension. Coniston Old Man, a peak of 803 metres, becomes ‘Kanchenjunga’ (the real one is more than ten times higher). When the lake freezes in winter, they become Arctic explorers. Even if I didn't realise it until I was much older, it was the way imagination works on multiple levels that captivated me.

To read requires imagination, much more than watching film and TV, and I think this is why other media can never replace it. Writing, too, is an exercise in imagination: Ransome himself referred to the 'romantic transfiguration of reality'. I think this is true for all fiction, unless it's disguised autobiography—and even then you have to wonder about the malleability of memory and the idea of the unreliable narrator. Its importance is particularly obvious in science fiction and fantasy, and also in historical fiction; the three genres where worldbuilding is most obviously called for.

Ransome taught me a few things about worldbuilding too. The Lake District setting was already familiar to me, but I'd never sailed, or camped on an island. In fact, Ransome didn't simply reproduce the real Lake District but created his own version of it, moving the scenery around as if it were a stage-set (romantic transfiguration). Some of my later work, in books and articles and on the blog, has  explored the correspondence between the real Lake District and the fictional 'lake country'.

I'd like to think there's something vaguely similar going on in Three Kinds of North and its sequels, and one reviewer (Norman Hadley) has picked up on this: "The familiar and the strange are expertly woven through this impressive novel, where multiple moons drift over a land whose placenames can be as reassuringly normal as Thrushgill. Are we in a distant galaxy or the Lancashire moors? Or neither?"

Of course the books have dated somewhat (Swallows and Amazons was published in 1930), and are sometimes criticised for their middle-class whiteness. We can't ignore this, but it is worth recalling that the real children on whom he largely based the Swallows were Anglo-Syrian. As for their privilege, yes: but the boat, Swallow, is borrowed, their tents are home-made, and they sleep on sacks stuffed with straw.

One way in which Ransome was radical for his time is in his treatment of female characters. In Swallows and Amazons itself, four of the six young leads are girls, and in my two favourites of the entire canon, Winter Holiday and Pigeon Post, it's five out of eight. In my early readings, the character I was most drawn to was Nancy Blackett, captain of the Amazon. It didn't matter that she was a girl and I wasn't. She very much defied conventional notions about femininity anyway; for instance, she repudiates her given name, Ruth, because Amazons were ruthless.

I can't quite say that Nancy was the first female character I really related to: George in The Famous Five probably came first, and there have been many others since. I've never felt constrained by a character's gender, and certainly never limited myself to 'boys' books'. Many of my favourite authors are female, as I've already mentioned, and so are many of my favourite characters. Like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, Dorothea in Middlemarch, or dozens of others. There’s another Dorothea in several of Ransome’s books, starting with Winter Holiday and, in a quiet way (quite unlike Nancy) she is another great character—and, as an aspiring author, maybe she influenced me too. My conception of gender was recalibrated once more when I read Ursula K Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness—but I'm starting to anticipate my promised main post on this theme.

Winter Holiday, by the way, is probably my favourite of all the twelve books, though it's a close-run thing between it and its immediate sequel, Pigeon Post.

Another way in which Ransome has influenced my writing is in his use of 'third-person limited' narration, not that I knew this at the time. This tells the story from the point of view (POV) of a single character, only relating this character's actions, observations, or thoughts. Like many writers, Ransome does this using multiple POV characters at different times, and I've taken the same approach in most of my fiction including the whole of the Shattered Moon series. In the first three books there are just two POV characters but when we get to Book 4, the number doubles, two of them completely new. However, under present plans, that won't be out till August 2024.

One of my favourites among Ransome's POV characters is Dorothea. She doesn't often lead the action (though she does mastermind the investigation in the detective story, The Big Six), but she's a close and empathetic observer. I'd like to think she grew up to be a successful novelist.

I also have great respect for quality of Ransome's prose. The tone is just a little wobbly in Swallows and Amazons, especially on those odd occasions when he addresses the reader directly, but it soon settles down.  Again I think he's at his absolute best in Winter Holiday and Pigeon Post. The writing is clear and straightforward, appropriately so for a book for young readers, but doesn't feel 'childish'. This, I think, is why so many people still find the books satisfying as adult readers. I don't think you can say the same for Enid Blyton, though of course you may have a different view.

George Eliot said, "The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words," while Albert Einstein put it this way, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." There are many writers who might do well to take note.

In general, I haven't borrowed too directly from Ransome, or at least not consciously. That said, I can't help thinking there's a fair bit of Nancy in Jerya. Her impulsive action in leaving the Guild of Dawnsingers and striking out into the unknown (in Three Kinds of North) is just the sort of thing Nancy would have done. I didn't consciously set out to model her on anyone, real or fictional, but that doesn't mean I created her from nothing. Can anything come from nothing? Well, there's the Big Bang, but that's a bit different.

There is at least one exception. One of Ransome's characters did contribute substantially to the development of one of mine, and this time I was quite aware of what I was doing. I'm just wondering how much to reveal at this point…? The character in question doesn't appear until Book 3 and the 'source' character also doesn't appear in the first few books of Ransome's canon. Vows and Watersheds is due in February and I think I'll leave further spoilers until then… but anyone familiar with Ransome's stories will have little difficulty spotting the connection, possibly in Chapter 1 (shades of Chapter 1 of Winter Holiday), certainly by about Chapter 6. Actually, that's probably quite enough of a clue already. Let me know if you've spotted the answer.

If you know Ransome, you may spot other resonances, which may or may not be ones that I deliberately intended, or have even recognised retrospectively. As Ursula K Le Guin said, "People like to believe that writers know exactly what they are doing and have their story under control, thought out, plotted from beginning to end. It makes sense of whole strange enterprise of novel writing, makes it rational. Many academics believe this, so do many readers, so do some writers. But not all writers have this kind of control over their material, and I wouldn’t even want to have it." As is nearly always the case, she speaks for me, and I'm sure for many other authors.

I'm always happy to hear your thoughts about this, or anything else.

Oh yes, and Happy New Year!