Another Extract from "The Hunt for the Great Bear"

This is from near the beginning,when the main character, Grubhunter, is getting ready to go on his first hunting exedition.


I was up in the early morning long before first light. I hadn’t slept much. My mother and Ember were asleep. I could hear their breathing deep and slow. I moved quietly so that I wouldn’t wake them. I wanted the time to myself, to be alone with myself in the dark, getting ready to go hunting, excited about it, and keeping that excitement quiet and still inside me. I stood above my mother lying on her side touched my fingers to her shoulder. Then I went out of the shanty.
Outside I cracked the ice off the top of the water in the bucket and filled the cup and drank it down. It made me gasp. I drank another half cup then put the cup down and splashed some water over my face. I felt fresh and awake now, and I lifted my spear from where I’d left it leaning against the wall and started off, making my way across the Shelter and out of it towards the Rock.
The sky was clear and the snow shone bright hard in the moonlight. It was a few days to full moon, and the old man’s crumbly face was looking down at me sad and mournful as if I could make him whole again. I gazed at him up there, thinking about the spirits of the dead swimming in his pale seas, and wondering was my father’s spirit swimming among them, or was he still walking somewhere in the world? One day maybe I’d trek off after him and find out. When I’d come back from the hunt and proved a man. That’s what I was thinking then. I didn’t know when I came back I’d be trekking off for a different reason.
I looked down and left the old man to it. Ahead of me I could see where the Rock sloped up at the north edge of the Shelter, starting off gentle at first with tumbled boulders scattered around it, then rising high and steep, and the path winding up it to the top. Black rock, and the glow of a small fire on the skyline, with little flickers of shadow passing across it. So the others were there already. Waiting, and probably cursing my because I was late. The cold bit into me and I pulled my hood down across my face and wrapped my cloak tighter about me. When I came to the edge of the Shelter I stopped.
There wasn’t a sound. And there was the kind of stillness that you can almost feel touching you. Up on the Rock the others were making ready for the hunt. And back there in their shanties the people were sleeping, not stirring yet. And there I was, not in one place or the other, caught in between them, like I wasn’t in any place at all, like I’d stepped out of the world into a different one that had no name. And I had no name in it. As my father had stepped out one morning and was gone from the world forever. I turned and looked back then towards the Shelter, just to make sure it was still there. I could see out shanty from where I stood and there was a figure standing in front of it.
It was Ember, lit clear by the moon and the moonlight on the snow. I couldn’t quite make out her face but I could tell she was looking at me. I must have woken her when I left and she followed me out. Standing there now in the doorway and watching me go. I raised my arm towards her and waved it slow, and smiled, and hoped she could see it, but she didn’t show any sign or make any movement. My arm was still raised and I was still waving when she turned and went back inside. I stood staring at the empty doorway for a while and the dark beyond it. Then I lowered my arm and turned myself and went on.

The Hunt for the Great Bear

I've finished Part One of my new novel, and am just about to start on Part Two. I thought this might be an apt time to write a few words about it. It's set in what may be a far distant future, another ice-age, when life, both animal and human, is in the process of disappearing from the world. The humans don't know this, of course, just as for them their life is not being lived in the future, but in the present. As much of the book is being written in the first person, then this may seem to present a particular difficulty for the writer - how to create a sense of a future world, when the voice in which one is writing, or speaking, has no sense of it being the future. I struggled with this apparent problem for some time, until I came to the realisation that, as this is a work of fiction, then, like all fictions, it is its own imagined world, and belongs neither to the past or the future, but only to the present. Its own, eternal present. So, though I may say for convenience's sake, that it is set in the future, in fact it is set in the present, which is an imagined one. As all fictions are set in their own imagined presents. Even meticulously researched historical novels, which may appear to accurate down to the tiniest detail, are in fact as imaginary and therefore illusory, as a work set in some fabulous future. So, I've come to think of "The Hunt for the Great Bear" as an ancient myth set in the future which is taking place now. In other words, it is a fiction.

New Novel

Well, I've decided to post the opening to the new novel I'm working on at the moment. It's called provisionally, The Hunt for the Great Bear, and this is the prologue.

They got back as dark was falling, climbing the bank up from the river and through the trees leafless and brittle with glintings of frost. The last dull light of the sun cast a bloody glow across the snow they tramped through. They were a ragged band and starved-looking, in their skins and furs and with their spears held low, and their nerves were alert to the silence, knowing something was wrong before they saw it. They came out of the trees and stood looking and he stood with them. None of them spoke. Before them lay the torn down shanties, the bodies scattered upon the frozen ground. Dark blood in the snow. As if some storm had swept through from beyond the world’s edge. They went down among them and found none living. Some they could not even recognise. He found his mother. All had some loss. The bodies were cold and stiff and they had to cut them out of the ice so that they could place them together at the centre of what had once been their Shelter. Then they dragged across the tumbled and broken remnants of their shanties and piled them around the bodies. He made a nest of twigs and struck a spark with the edge of his blade and a stone, and the twigs smoked and crackled into flame and the blaze leapt up. It wasn’t long before the flames were roaring and they stood back for the fierce heat on their faces and sang with the flames their grief to sky. Through the night they watched as the funeral pyre burned and it was still dark when the flames died and they stood watching through the dark with the cold stars above and the moon glitter on the ice. It was not until first light that they made ready to leave, and a pale and dull-washed light it was. Nothing remained now of their Shelter, only grey ash and the ice melted where the fire had burned. There was a chill wind. Bones among the ashes too. The next snow would cover them and then there would be no sign that ever a a people were there. No sign or marker of them in the world. The world that they too were leaving, never to return. They had no care for that. Their only care was to hunt down the creature that had done this. To hunt it and track it and bring it down. The bear. The Great Bear of the wildness. So they took up their weapons and set off across the ice, towards the mountains and what might lie there and lie beyond. He went last and like them he did not turn his head. There were seven of them and he was the youngest. His name was Grubhunter.

First Day

This the first day of my new blog. Over the coming weeks and months I intend to post news about new work, novels, plays, and poems, and to post extracts from new work too. So, just to get myself started, first of all, some news.

News

My new novel The Map of Marvels, is publised by Oxford Children's Books in August. This is a fantasy adventure story about a boy who finds an old map of an unknown world and, through drawing it, brings to life, falls into it, and finds himself lost there. He meets others who are also lost in the map, and together they travel through the world of the map, seeking a way out. The inspiration behind this book is "The Tales of the Arabian Nights,", and, as well as being hopefully a good old yarn, it's also a book very much about storytelling, and the power of stories. I'll write more about this later, when it's published.

I'm writing a new book too. It's provisionally called The Hunt for the Great Bear, and though I've written quite a bit of it, there's still a long way to go before it's finished. I may be posting extracts from this book from time to time.

Finally, my play about knfe crime, Think Twice, produced and performed by Katch 22 Theatre Company, has just finished a first, very successful tour of schools and prisons, and a new tour is being set up for the autumn.

Ok. That's all for today.