Authorgraph 269: Piers Torday
Piers Torday interviewed by Nicolette Jones
Piers Torday laughs when I suggest he might be part vampire. His new book, Midnight Treasure (Quercus), features vampirs (sic) and werwolves (sic) and was partly inspired by his own heritage. His family is originally from Hungary, via Northumberland, and at the time Transylvania was part of Hungary.
The novel, aimed roughly at readers of 9-11, follows the werwolf hero, 12-year-old Tibor, and his best friend Roza, a vampir who has been turned into a talking Alsatian. Their adventure involves a quest, several antagonists, dangers, and moments of both levity and profundity. They are in search of treasure but also of the truth about themselves.
The immediate trigger for this story was a map of a fantasy land his father Paul drew, which Torday found when he was, like all the rest of us, sorting papers during lockdown. The map of the place which became Torday Jr’s Princeland is reproduced at the back of his book.
He was also spurred by recent conversations in publishing ‘about who gets to write about what, and privilege and identity. I wanted to write about something that felt authentic to me, that had a personal connection. That was when discovering Dad’s map and remembering our connection made me think: no one else is writing about their Transylvanian heritage.’
Wondering about his father’s vision led Piers to order books from the London Library including Miklos Banffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travels in the region, and Emily Gerard’s collections of Transylvanian folklore, which influenced Bram Stoker. Then a Society of Authors scholarship took him there, and it was fertile ground for this story.
He was enticed by the ‘glamour and romance and excitement’ of mimicking Jonathan Harker’s iconic train journey to Transylvania. ‘It felt magical even in the modern day, crossing to Brussels, Vienna and then Budapest, and arriving in Sighișoara where Vlad Țepeș, whose father was Vlad Dracul, became Vlad the Impaler.’
Torday ‘wanted to write a story that was enjoyable and escapist, but also showed children coping with scary darkness. I think you have to be careful about a Doomsday narrative, but there’s no doubt from climate to war to economics and politics, we’re living in very turbulent and unprecedented times. The folklore tradition of vampire and werewolves, which comes after all from a deeply turbulent history of successive conquests, seemed an appropriate way of dealing with that.”
In the past Torday has given children credit for being able to handle darkness – in, for instance, There May Be a Castle, which has a 
disturbing twist. But how dark can you go for children? Torday read Lord of the Rings and other fantasies as a child, and says: ‘I’ve always written for the reader that I was, and people like me who are passionate readers and use reading as a way of growing and learning. I never want to push children back into childhood. I want to honour and embrace and love the playfulness and joy and innocence of childhood, but also provide a glass through which to view adolescence and adulthood coming down the tracks. And to say: the things you might be worried about can be navigated. That’s where myth and fantasy are so brilliant, because monsters defeating monsters help you think about defeating emotional monsters in your own life.
‘I feel it’s a bit like the night-time light on the landing. You can lead children down a path into a dark forest, but as long as they can look back and see the light in the cottage is still on, it’s OK. What you must never do is turn that light off, and do stuff that is traumatising, nihilistic, sadistic, psychopathic. That doesn’t belong in children’s books. But acknowledging there are shadows to human existence and motivation and action is just honest and not condescending to children.’
Not surprisingly for the writer of The Last Wild sequence about creatures whose existence is endangered (and who also chairs the sustainability Committee of the Society of Authors), Torday also relished the wildness of Romania (which now includes Transylvania). ‘There are more bears there than in any other part of Europe, and wolves and golden eagles. When I was in the mountains, the Carpathians, there’s real wilderness, which is very thrilling and although Ceaucescu did enormous damage to parts of Romania with pollution, Transylvania has some of the most unspoiled and undeveloped wild country in Europe. The most biodiverse certainly.’
He also felt a connection to the people. ‘It sounds silly and I’m not saying that I feel I belong, but I definitely felt a commonality. I thought “what a fascinating culture”, but also “I instinctively understand it” everything from the language to the food. I just felt very at home, and so when Tibor begins to discover who he really is, there is a personal element to that.’
And he found a connection with his own childhood landscape. ‘I’m from Northumberland and they’re not wildly dissimilar. Both have big acres of landscape and big castles and stone houses and farming but also blood sports. And Transylvania sometimes feels like a sort of dark mirror of Britain in the sense that for all the fact that it was communist for the best part of the 20th century, it’s one of those places where the European aristocracy is best preserved. King Charles likes to go there – and he is directly descended from Vlad the Impaler. Through his father Prince Philip, and Queen Marie of Romania. So playing with vampires and aristocrats [as Torday does in Midnight Treasure] is based on something.’
Midnight Treasure will have at least one sequel. He is well into the second book, but he did not have it all planned out. Planning is not his method. ‘For me, the excitement is if I’m enjoying discovering the story myself, then I’m confident that the reader will as well. Essentially if I can mimic the feeling I had as a child reader and as a child writer, that sense of flow and play, then I’m onto a winner. I begin with knowing what the ending is, where I want to get to, the sort of emotional feeling I want to have, the journey and the way I want characters to change.’
He also can’t plan because ‘characters go in directions you don’t expect, and I you can’t let them completely go mad but you have to run with that. Otherwise why are you writing? You’re trying to transmit something slightly undiscoverable. That’s the pleasure of a novel, I think.’
Torday was a television producer, is also a playwright, adapting Masefield’s The Box of Delights, for instance, for the stage, and tends to see a story in scenes. ‘I have set pieces if you like, and then the journey is how do I link them all up? It’s a bit like I’m doing a jigsaw but I don’t have the copy of the original picture in front of me. I do write some scenes in random order just as they come and then arrange them in a way that works.’
Although a book with a sequel leaves questions unanswered, it also has to ‘honour the promise to the reader’ to answer the questions asked at the beginning, which in this case are Tibor’s: ‘Who are we? Where are we from?’ The author and the protagonists had the same quest.
Nicolette Jones writes about children’s books for the Sunday Times and is the author of The Illustrators: Raymond Briggs (Thames & Hudson); The American Art Tapes: Voices of Twentieth Century Art (Tate Publishing) and Writes of Passage: Words to Read Before You Turn 13 (Nosy Crow).
Books mentioned, all by Piers Torday and published by Quercus Children’s Books.
Midnight Treasure, Quercus Children’s Books, 978-1786541420, £14.99 hbk
There May Be a Castle, illus Rob Biddulph, 978-1784292744, £7.99 pbk
The Last Wild, 978-1780878300, £7.99 pbk
The Dark Wild, 978-1848663787, £7.99 pbk
The Wild Beyond, 978-1848669536, £7.99 pbk
