Imaginative Ink: Exploring Metty’s world
Tanja Jennings talks to author Philippa Leathley about her fantasy adventure series, Inkbound.
It was a joy to chat to the marvellously inventive Philippa Leathley who builds her amazing flying cities and character arcs from vivid images in her mind that she equates to paintings. She counts the enthralling stories of Philip Pullman and Cornelia Funke, ction-adventure movies The Mummy and Indiana Jones, the immersive dystopian video game Bioshock Infinite, surrealist artist M.C Escher and Ada Lovelace, the Victorian author of Flyology, among her influences. At the age of 11 she wrote an autobiographical novella about ‘an angsty girl with horrible younger twin brothers,’ which she found cathartic, but her passion was for dramatic journeys and fantasy stories. She even auditioned for the part of Lyra in the film version of His Dark Materials.
Inkbound carries the reader along on a current of imagination just like the magical ink river coursing through the city of New London. Philippa’s protagonist 10 year old Meticulous Jones embarks on a voyage of self-discovery just like Lyra, only hers emanates from a mystifying tattoo. She also discovers that her family are keeping secrets from her.
The reader is invited into the ingenious world of Inkbound via an intricate and fascinating map in the opening papers.
Philippa is meticulous about noting details, like Metty who keeps a journal, with the magical city of New London materialising after she’d drawn rough versions of it to ‘keep track of the geography’ and where Metty was travelling. After a two month first draft and 18 month edit, it came to life. Philippa explains how her vision was translated onto paper by freelance illustrator Nicolette Caven. ‘When my editor asked me, ‘would you have a go at something and we can send it to the artist’, I was very excited, then I thought, ok, this city is 3 dimensional. It’s shaped like a chandelier. How on earth do you get that into a two dimensional drawing? It was quite challenging. Along with my rough sketch I sent about four pages of notes of ‘this is here and this is there.’ Nicolette Caven did an incredible job of putting in all these tiny details into the map.’
Thinking about the intricacies of travel, blending fantasy with reality to make the city feel grounded and believable and time restraints on detail were among the challenges Philippa faced while designing New London.
Enchanting, exciting and unpredictable, Philippa’s fantasyscapes capture a munificent myriad of fantastical architecture and tumultuous transport including a roller coaster train ride into the phantasmagorical Darkwell underneath Old London, flying gondolas, wind speed bikes, a tardis café, a peculiar museum and a transformative park. There is also a balance of light and dark with the division of the Have and Have Nots of High Fate and Low Fate split by six rotating bridges with solar powered birds shimmering above and the threat of The Darkness lurking below.
Philippa’s original story went through a metamorphosis, with initial plans including a different title, a male Magnificent with a twin sister and the idea of New Hull, where she is from.
Interestingly the concept of ink being capitalised as a magic system also came into the book late, evolving from the changed title. She explains, ‘When I sold my book and got my book deal there wasn’t ink in the story really at all. The reason it ended up being ink was because my publisher suggested Inkbound which I loved. It had originally been called Metty and the Black Moths. We were talking about how to deepen the magic system and I had in my mind something like oil which is in our world, something that’s a natural resource and can be monetised and then with the tattoos and stuff ink felt like a natural way to go with that.’
She also enjoyed thinking about the limitations such a system could have, adding another facet to the most common one of the use of magic draining energy, ‘I thought I’m surprised I haven’t seen more magic systems that are basically capitalism like they’re feeding into that very real-world system. I was kind of fascinated by that and the idea that if magic is monetised who will have access to it and how would that shape the world?’
That sparked the idea of control through tethers, ink meters and magical grades.
At the heart of Leathley’s Inkbound trilogy is the feisty rule breaker Metty and her miraculous family the Jones. Wacky long names beginning with M, which her family had great fun with, paired with a shorter name, reflecting her Welsh roots and perhaps, she realises, a subconscious tribute to author Diana Wynne Jones, provide humour in the series. Her favourite character Magnificent is inspired by her grandmother, who was ‘very caustic, extremely clever and fiercely loving.’
As Metty’s fate is linked to her symbolic tattoo, Philippa thought carefully about her character development and created a version of her special tattoo dictionary, which is now battered and in much demand on school visits, containing multiple meanings for Metty to interpret, similar to Lyra’s alethiometer. Readers can marvel at its Index of Common Fates or even think up their own. One enthusiastic child even informed Philippa that ‘he would be a chicken because he’s always peckish.’
Metty was given a strong personality who wouldn’t play the victim about her terrible fate but would instead ‘push against it and poke fun at it.’ Leathley thought it was important to ‘play with the idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy and how dangerous that can be for children in particular to be told how this means this and you will be this and how easy it could be to get it wrong and misinterpret.’
Miraculously, following the rapturous reception for her first book she didn’t need to wonder about where Metty’s story would go next, ‘I actually wrote all of the series before the first one came out. That way I had a very strong sense of where I was going to take Metty, her character evolving across the three books. I really wanted it to be consistent as I wanted her and the whole relationship with her fake tattoo to have an ambiguity with it across the series. There would still be a question in her mind- is that definitely what it means? Am I really in control of it? It would be about her deciding what she wants to be and what she wants to do.’
Book two, Meticulous Jones and The Shadow Compass, recently released, is indicative of this with more challenges for Metty, her fierce friend Faith, who is her counterpoint, and her adopted brother Sundar, plus gothic settings, a new villain to be reckoned with, a labyrinthine library full of surprises, slow reveals and more quirky characters. Pumpkin, the animated Gargoyle, who is based on Philippa’s rescue cat, Theo the Brave, who likes to eat weird stuff, is joined by Feral, a hybrid book.
While readers are waiting for the next instalment of Metty’s adventures they can explore Philippa’s website which has a wealth of Middle grade fantasy suggestions, particular favourites including Megan Hopkins’ Starminster, Siobhan McDermott’s Paper Dragons, Ashley Thorpe’s Spirit Warriors and Aisling Fowler’s Fireborn series. She says, ‘I could honestly reel off a hundred. It’s a real golden time for fantasy novels.’
With a wealth of great books available and publishers adapting to meet modern multi-media needs, Philippa hopes the current reading crisis will abate. She says, ‘It’s disheartening. I’m concerned about the impact it will have on all those statistics about children’s future success and the chances of that being elevated by reading levels of empathy. I have theories about why it’s happened. Children are not being read to in the way I was when I was at school because of the curriculum being so tight and teachers being exhausted. I think it will improve.’
Philippa’s new project The Starsea Mysteries, planned for release in 2028, which will take place in a town on the back of a giant, fuses magic with murder and promises more visual thrills. For now, we can look forward to Inkbound 3: Meticulous Jones and the Storm Heart which will land next January when eagle eyed readers can anticipate the flight of a magical new city mentioned in The Skull Tattoo and inspired by the O’Connells.
Tanja Jennings is a judge of the Cilip Carnegie Medals, a dedicated school librarian, children’s book reviewer and creative book blogger from Northern Ireland.
The Inkbound books, Meticulous Jones and the Skull Tattoo (978-0008660956) and Meticulous Jones and The Shadow Compass (978-0008660963) are published by HarperCollins Children’s Books.
