Interview: Already in the running for the Whitbread Book of the Year award, to be announced on Tuesday, Irish-based author Kate Thompson's book, The New Policeman, is also on the shortlist for a new Irish children's book award. She talks to Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent
Steering an imaginative course between romance and realism has shaped the fiction of storyteller Kate Thompson. Recently announced as the winner of the Whitbread Children's Book Award for The New Policeman, which also won the 2005 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, she now stands alongside four other category winners - two novelists, a poet and a biographer - in contention for the overall Whitbread Book of the Year, to be decided on Tuesday. And as if insufficiently decorated by these accolades she was further honoured this week when the book was shortlisted for the Dublin Airport Authority Irish Children's Book of the Year.
In 2001, Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass, the final volume of the His Dark Materials trilogy, won the Whitbread Book of the Year, an award which had never been previously won by a work written for children. Kate Thompson is not expecting to take this overall prize, but she is not worried. Her point has been made.
There are some ironies. Thompson, the daughter of the famous Marxist social historian and peace movement campaigner, EP Thompson, was born and raised in England. She came to live in Ireland when her two daughters were small, settling in the Burren, in Co Clare. She now lives in Kinvara.
Most of her books have been published in London by major British publishers but her following to date, helped no doubt by having three times won the Bisto Book of the Year award, is Irish. Surprisingly, her books have until recently made little impact in Britain, according to Thompson.
"That may change now," she says. "This new book [The New Policeman] got good reviews in England and the Whitbread should help."
Her most Irish of novels to date, it is the one that has launched her in her native country.
Just as each of her books emerges as an independent entity from its predecessors, there are several Kate Thompsons. Even her accent is a mixture of here and there, "Yorkshire, the midlands [of England] and a bit of Ireland as well". There is a unifying theme though: justice. Most important of all is the fact that she does not set out to write for a particular audience.
"My books are for readers," she says. "My first book was an adult novel, Down Among the Gods, published by Virago, and I've written poems as well, a slim volume of poetry."
HER ADULT FICTION was well-reviewed, only to disappear quietly. "There are so many books published" she says with restrained wonder. "And so many just disappear."
Since the publication of The Beguilers in 2001, Thompson has shown little sign of disappearing. That remarkable book, a philosophical allegory exploring the quest for knowledge, won the Bisto Book of the Year award in 2002, and her next two novels, The Alchemist's Apprentice (2003) and Annan Water (2005), repeated the feat. All very impressive, but even before this hat-trick, Thompson was established through her Switchers trilogy about the adventures of shape-changers (children who change shape), which was followed by The Missing Link trilogy ("that one was harder to write, but I think the final book, Origins, is the best").
Writing for her was always going to happen; it just took time. First there was an intense life with horses that began when she got her first pony.
"He was magic and could do everything, but he had a problem," Thompson says. "We were sort of given him; it turned out he was a sheep-killer."
When I tell her that I have a great mare who kills rats, Thompson sounds genuinely impressed.
"Wow," she says, whistling her admiration like a teenager.
The moment proves special, one of the few times in our conversation - such as when we discuss the work of the Irish writer, James Stephens ("he's so underrated"), whose influence helped shaped The New Policeman - that she seems to relax fully. She has a good speaking voice, clear and emphatic, yet her speech is clipped, wary, like that of a teenager waiting to be cautioned. Thompson is measured and careful in her replies, nothing is glib or throwaway. She lives in her imagination, in her own private world.
Although friendly, she makes it clear that interviews are what they are: polite investigations, almost intrusions. The great modern dilemma, the ongoing shrinkage of time, which is a theme in her new novel, is something she is very aware of; there isn't enough time for Thompson to pursue all the things that interest her. Still, she has managed better than most of us. She rode and trained race horses, in England and the US, where she earned her trainer's licence.
Anyone who has ever been involved with horses will empathise with Annan Water, the story of a boy denied his childhood through working with horse-dealer parents determined to overcome the death of a daughter in a riding accident. The book is darkly romantic, characteristic of Thompson's singular approach, which is about as close to domestic realism as fiction can possibly be, without losing the essential magic.
SHE BEGAN BY studying law in London - "I had thought about becoming a civil rights lawyer, but I gave it up" - and then she travelled in India. Most recently she has become fascinated with traditional Irish music; she plays the fiddle and is useful at repairing instruments. Music dominates The New Policeman.
Whatever she did, and does, is done with an urgency and passion tempered by deep thought. Having been awarded an MA in Irish Traditional Music Performance at the University of Limerick - "I'd no degree, but they took me in on the strength of my having written 12 books, proof that I could apply myself" - she appears to have drifted slightly away from music for the moment.
The youngest child of EP Thompson and his historian wife, Dorothy, Kate Thompson was born in 1956 in Yorkshire and grew up in a household of ideas that in time moved to Warwick and on to wherever a university posting called. There were several moves and the Thompson home was also a place in which "some meeting or other" was usually going on. Her father was involved in European Nuclear Disarmament (End) and was devoted to saving the planet.
"He was really a poet, though, but history took over," says Thompson.
He also shaped her thinking. Thompson's storytelling is drawn to philosophical questioning. The Beguilers is a metaphysical performance of unsettling brilliance. In it, Thompson explores abstract concepts such as courage and complacency, and the role of the outsider. Set in a place that is anywhere, any time, she invented a world in which society has lost the ability to question. The book teaches without polemic; it also enriches, bewilders and beguiles. It is a remarkable work, her best.
Genetics made her a thinker, and experience ensured that her ability to think was harnessed to an imagination that never lost touch with reality.
Raised as an atheist, she does not expect to be asked about God, but she does admit to having some sense of belief. As for the afterlife, "I'll wait till I get there".
Her two elder brothers, eight and six years her senior, were distant enough in age to constitute a separate family.
"I was more of an only child," says Thompson. There are two ways in which the children of academics react to their parents: they follow - or don't. "I wasn't that bothered with school, I was too mad into horses. But I liked reading and was good enough at English and always liked music."
In her youth she wrote songs and played the guitar. Was she a hippie? "Yeah, sort of." Hippie or not, she was and remains a study in intelligent subversion.
SHE IS NOW 49, her daughters 21 and 19. "They've grown and gone - and I was glad to see them grown," she says.
She manages to sound as if she possesses the wisdom of a practical seer without having relinquished the aspirations of an edgy dreamer determined to experience deeply. Her approach is analytical and precise, a formula which keeps her stories brilliantly poised in the sacred land dividing children and adults. She writes books for everyone: "That's what I hope - they're stories, but yes, writing for children is right down my street."
Her gift lies in an understanding of children born of the fact she has never forgotten what it is like to be one. Tone, understatement and an element of ambivalence elevate her storytelling. She does not believe in protecting children from death. In Annan Water, Bandit, the loyal cob that never met a buyer with sufficient wit to look beyond his plainness to value his quality, is determined to help young Michael fulfil his dream.
Instead of a fairy tale ending, with the pair defeating the menacing waters on the way to freedom, Thompson offers only one sentence: "A dead horse had been washed up . . ." Michael does survive.
"Children don't want to be protected from death," says Thompson. "I suppose I was also thinking about Crin-Blanc [the French novel written in 1959 by René Guillot, based on Albert Lamorisse's film] - the horse and boy die in that one, and that's what happens."
Nor is there a happy ending for the mythical Bran in The New Policeman. JJ can't heal the injured dog, but he can, by bringing her with him back from Tír Na nÓg, give her peace.
The new novel draws its structure from traditional music, the chapters often being named after tunes. The use of mythology sits easily in it, contained as it is within a story of everyday life in Kinvara. The Ireland of today and the world of the fairies is beginning to collide on the issue of time and a solution must be found. Tied up with this mystery is another one, a family secret that has haunted a community. There is nothing stagy about it, nor is there ever a hint of self-consciousness.
Thompson enjoys living in Ireland, but she is not a born-again Irish woman and has scant interest in the Irish language.
"My head is full of stories," she says, and of course a new book is on the way. Horses, meanwhile, are no longer in her life. "You know yourself, once you've had the excitement of riding thoroughbreds, it's not very interesting riding anything else. But I still love horses, I just don't have one any more."
As for her music, studying it appears to have temporarily stifled the uninhibited enjoyment.
"I'm all deconstructed," she says. "But I'm sure I'll go back to playing."
Ideas continue to flow; this is an original, capable of subverting convention.