Authorgraph No.108: Anthony Masters
Anthony Masters is sitting in a whitewashed workroom adjacent to his rambling cottage in Sussex. By the side of his desk a makeshift easel supports a terrifyingly complex timetable of deadlines, testifying to the energy of one of the most prolific and versatile authors at work today. There is an adult novel set in Eastern Europe to complete; the third instalment of a futuristic trilogy depicting a nightmarish dystopian London; another short factual account in the ‘Danger Zone’ series to add to his retellings of the adventures of lone yachtsman Tony Bullimore and kidnap victim Nicola Brunelli. The surrounding shelves are loaded with photographs of his family, editions of his numerous books, and bits and pieces of flotsam and jetsam that look as though they have been harvested during strolls around Romney Marsh, the South Downs, and the coastal wilderness that culminates in the gravel dunes of Dungeness: the various and evocative landscapes that border his secluded home and provide inspiration for many of his stories. The idea of ‘spirit of place’ as a motivator for fiction is one that recurs often in our conversation.
‘I was at a writers’ forum in a school the other day when a child asked me that old question, what I do when I get writer’s block. I told her I go down to Rye Harbour where there’s a marvellous old jetty on the Camber Sands side. I stand out there at low tide and try to empty my mind as the waves move in. That might sound like pretentious communing but it really has helped to sow some seeds. I must say that I don’t often suffer from writer’s block. I’ve always led a very vivid interior life, a kind of waking dreaming that always convinced me that I would become a writer, but I can’t just write to somebody else’s suggestions. There’s got to be some atmospheric place that I experience quite thoroughly; then the resonances that come from that sense of place actually form the characters who people my stories.’
It was the stultifying atmosphere of a minor public school in Wimbledon that generated the resonances that launched Anthony Masters’ writing career forty years ago. Bored into anger by petty regulations, Masters ran an unofficial satirical publication that specialised in lampooning the pompous NCOs of the school cadet corps. This journalistic enterprise was tolerated until Masters, orchestrating a campaign against the antique school uniform, persuaded a crowd of supporters to turn their backs on the school rugby team as they were competing in a match. He was promptly expelled, and had to turn to the machinations of his fertile inner life in order to earn a living. While still in his teens, he had a book of short stories ( A Pocketful of Rye ) accepted for publication, and he has been writing professionally ever since. His first novel, The Sea Horse , won the John Llewellyn Memorial Prize, but it was not until he had been writing for almost thirty years that his first children’s book was published. This arose from an encounter in Somerset with Earnest Neal, a veteran badger watcher, after he had been commissioned to write a nature article for the Daily Telegraph .
‘Neal said that in order to become invisible, you had to swallow yourself, literally disappear down your own throat, and that’s what we did, we stood there invisible for hours, watching the badgers, until I noisily ripped my Parka on a fence and ruined the whole thing. So when Methuen asked me if I’d consider writing a children’s book, I felt that if I could get back to that place in Somerset, to that extraordinary feeling of being there but not there, I could write a book about badger watching and badger baiting.’
Badger , published in 1986, is typical of Masters’ subsequent novels in its ability to keep the reader turning the pages while combining a social issues theme with a concern for the complex tensions within a specific family. His second novel for children, Streetwise , was short-listed for the Carnegie Prize. It deals with police corruption and racial strife, presented from the viewpoint of a murdered policeman’s son. The panicky flight of the family from pursuing gangsters takes in locations from several parts of London and the south coast, all of them realised with vivid geographical accuracy. Subsequent novels have presented variations on this tightly plotted synthesis of the social and familial within precise, story-shaping locations. Dead Man at the Door uses the inward-looking atmosphere of an Isle of Wight community to explore the relationship between an incomer and a seemingly disturbed local youth. Bypass describes a battle between road developers and a damaged family of protesters whose woes seem to reflect the turmoil of the earth they seek to defend. In Bullies Don’t Hurt, a manipulative school thug who is himself the victim of a paedophile stepfather, flees from the tangled social webs of his south London comprehensive and seeks a near suicidal simplicity in a return to the sea he swam in as a child.
These books deal with troubling, realistic crises, but they are written with the same engaging straightforwardness as his purely recreational collections of fantasies and entertainments. Masters’ ability to hook the reader into the first page and to keep him wanting to turn subsequent pages has, as my choice of pronoun suggests, brought him to the attention of publishers seeking what he calls the ‘Holy grail of young male readership’, leading to his authorship of several series of short, concentrated yarns full of action, humour, violence and paranormal phenomena.
‘This is an evangelical thing with some publishers, but there’s also a commercial side to it of course. They feel that the reluctant reader is out there, waiting to be brought in, and it leads to some amusing consequences. I was in Glasgow at a book event a while ago and spoke to all these boys there who’d been buying ‘Goosebumps’, and swapping them by number, a 9 for a 7 and a 6 for a 3. When I asked them if they’d read them, they said, “oh no, we’re collecting them!” When it comes down to doing series like ‘Weird World’, you’ve really got to build up a very atmospheric start to get those reluctant readers to read the first page and turn it. It’s got to be very grabby-grabby, but once you’ve got the readers inside – I hope this doesn’t sound too Jesuitical – you can do all sorts of surreal things to keep their imaginations engaged. I’m not being patronising here. I’m not the kind of pompous idiot who says, of course, these are only bridges to my novels, or to some other “higher” form of literature. I reject that and so do all the young readers I’ve spoken to. They argue that if they want to read something, it’s got to be interesting in its own right. At the age of fifteen or whatever they don’t want wrinklies building bridges to it for them, they can walk right there themselves. So I’ve got to make them want to do that. I write a lot about the paranormal, but I try to do it with an X Files type irony. Books like the ‘Roadkill’ series move at the pace of video games, but I’ve tried to add a little wit and urbanity to the characters.’
Masters has always put a lot of effort into maintaining direct contact with his audience and with the types of people he writes about. His residencies in schools and other institutions have been many and various, and have included working with a range of ethnic minority communities in Basingstoke, promoting oral storytelling at the Ernest Bevan School for Boys in Tooting, and cooperating with a group of travellers and Caribbean musicians in the production of two rock operas about life on the road. Currently, he is involved in a literacy project at Eastwood School in the East End, and has been extending his ‘Book Explosion’ work to California, a link which has provided material for a forthcoming novel inspired by the Day of the Dead festival in Tijuana.
The Book Explosion events were devised in response to a problem presented to Masters ten years ago by Kent librarians, who felt that their story sessions with older children lacked creative excitement. Masters decided to elaborate on the approach he had already used when planning book events involving creative writing in America.
‘Essentially they are drama simulations where you get the participants physically involved for about two hours in an adventurous theme, such as Conan Doyle’s Lost World. And I really do mean fully physically involved, with equipment such as nets and ropes. That does two things. It increases people’s confidence, particularly those who feel that they don’t have a body, only a mind; and it also produces an awful lot of adrenaline for creative writing. About three quarters of the way through the kids lie on the floor and they write – they tend to do this in a foetal position, as if they’re sheltering from the stress of the experience. There’s a “safe danger” about the process that somehow enables people to produce powerful atmospheric writing full of images.’
The writing thus produced tends to evolve through the same stages as Masters’ own writing: an initial stream of consciousness transcribed as a block of barely punctuated prose that is subjected on subsequent days to repeated shaping and reshaping.
Masters’ plans for the future include more expansive writing as contribution to what he sees as a renaissance in epic storytelling for children, characterised by such books as Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy. He wants to explore what he refers to as ‘the enlightening tunnel vision’ of first person narrative. He would like to become more involved in educational work, particularly in schools where there is an urgent need to further literacy through whole community involvement in storytelling and the joint creation of literature.
‘As a writer you need to get totally involved with what children feel and think, and exactly what they want to read, and they have to have the opportunity to tell you what they think of what you’re doing. I do that quite often through Critics’ Forums in school, and God, I’m terrified of it. But I see an important part of my job as answering the challenge of kids who say, I bet you’re going to bore me. They can spot formulaic writing, so every book has got to be different, and that takes a lot of experience on my part, a lot of long walks, a lot of time on that jetty.’
Some of Anthony Masters’ books currently available
Bullies Don’t Hurt , Puffin, 0 14 037484 1, £4.99 pbk
The Sea Horse , Macdonald, 0 7500 1703 1, £8.50 hbk, 0 7500 1704 X, £3.99 pbk
Deadly Games / Haunted School / Poltergeist / Possessed , ‘Ghosthunters’ series, Orchard, £4.99 each pbk
Ocean Tomb / Extreme Survival / Held to Ransom / Enemy Fire , ‘Danger Zone’ series, Franklin Watts, £3.99 each pbk
Bypass , Bloomsbury, 0 7475 2988 4, £3.99 pbk
The Taking of Doug Fox / Doing a Runner , ‘Police Dog’ series, Bloomsbury, £3.99 each pbk
The Beginning / The Alliance , ‘Roadkill’ series, Bloomsbury, £3.99 each pbk
George Hunt is a lecturer in Language in Education at the University of Reading