'Treasure Island' sequel charts brand new course
By Elaine Lies |
September 9, 2012, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
WRITER Andrew Motion, England's former poet laureate, is taking a new generation of readers back to "Treasure Island" in his latest book, which follows the characters from Robert Louis Stevenson's classic adventure.
In "Silver: Return to Treasure Island," Jim Hawkins is four decades older and runs an inn with his son Jim, who meets an unusual girl on the river that runs by his home.
Natty is the daughter of Long John Silver and has what turns out to be an irresistible proposal for young Jim: to return to Treasure Island and seek the treasure abandoned by their fathers.
Motion said the book was prompted partly by his desire to revisit the original and to show that Stevenson deserved to be valued more.
He spoke about the challenges of writing the sequel to a beloved classic.
Q: What got this book going?
A: It wasn't until I got to university that I read "Treasure Island" for the first time. I can remember thinking how amazingly good it was, which is perhaps a rather naive thing to say. But actually there's a sense in which that's interesting because by and large, Stevenson is not somebody who's valued much by the academy.
I began to think that was an idea that needed knocking on the head. Then, of course, I began to notice that even though we read "Treasure Island" feeling that we've had a complete meal, we don't push away the book feeling unsatisfied, but we do notice various things in it which are unfinished business.
I kept thinking "one day I'll go do that," and take that invitation to take the story on a bit farther. But every time I thought about it I thought there was a great risk of offending a lot of people because there I'd be sticking a lump of chewing gum on the face of a much-loved national monument, as it were.
Q: Why Natty as a girl? There aren't women in the original.
A: Well, for that reason, actually. I thought that it was sort of high time. There's Jim's mum in the original, and the woman of color whom we never meet, and they both go off the radar very early, so essentially they're never there. I thought that because I wanted to make it feel more modern.
Q: What was hardest and easiest with this book?
A: I did keep having to check myself and say, much as I'd like to liberate these people more dramatically and give them more empowerment, I just can't do that - it's not reasonable.
Q: Any special preparations?
A: Mainly reading Stevenson... And I read "Treasure Island" and read it again, and read it again, until it was absolutely in me, as if it had been something that had happened to my father. Not so I could slavishly imitate it but so I could push off it and feel steadied by it. It was fantastically good fun to write.
In "Silver: Return to Treasure Island," Jim Hawkins is four decades older and runs an inn with his son Jim, who meets an unusual girl on the river that runs by his home.
Natty is the daughter of Long John Silver and has what turns out to be an irresistible proposal for young Jim: to return to Treasure Island and seek the treasure abandoned by their fathers.
Motion said the book was prompted partly by his desire to revisit the original and to show that Stevenson deserved to be valued more.
He spoke about the challenges of writing the sequel to a beloved classic.
Q: What got this book going?
A: It wasn't until I got to university that I read "Treasure Island" for the first time. I can remember thinking how amazingly good it was, which is perhaps a rather naive thing to say. But actually there's a sense in which that's interesting because by and large, Stevenson is not somebody who's valued much by the academy.
I began to think that was an idea that needed knocking on the head. Then, of course, I began to notice that even though we read "Treasure Island" feeling that we've had a complete meal, we don't push away the book feeling unsatisfied, but we do notice various things in it which are unfinished business.
I kept thinking "one day I'll go do that," and take that invitation to take the story on a bit farther. But every time I thought about it I thought there was a great risk of offending a lot of people because there I'd be sticking a lump of chewing gum on the face of a much-loved national monument, as it were.
Q: Why Natty as a girl? There aren't women in the original.
A: Well, for that reason, actually. I thought that it was sort of high time. There's Jim's mum in the original, and the woman of color whom we never meet, and they both go off the radar very early, so essentially they're never there. I thought that because I wanted to make it feel more modern.
Q: What was hardest and easiest with this book?
A: I did keep having to check myself and say, much as I'd like to liberate these people more dramatically and give them more empowerment, I just can't do that - it's not reasonable.
Q: Any special preparations?
A: Mainly reading Stevenson... And I read "Treasure Island" and read it again, and read it again, until it was absolutely in me, as if it had been something that had happened to my father. Not so I could slavishly imitate it but so I could push off it and feel steadied by it. It was fantastically good fun to write.
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