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At the most excellent event last month, both Lauren Beukes and Patrick Ness said that one of the things they liked most about writing fiction was allegory, a good meaty allegory to get their teeth into.

(see what I did there)

Now, I, (like Tolkien) have a ‘cordial dislike� of allegory, but give that two of my fave writers are so enamoured of it a reasonable question is, am I right to?

First � definitions. My internet dictionary tells me allegory is:

‘A symbolic narrative, the figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another.�

As I’ve always understood it, where allegory diverges from simple metaphor is in extension and precision. Allegory, for me, is the narrow one-to-one mapping of a fictional entity onto a real world correllary such that you can say that when the author was writing about ‘x� she was really talking about ‘y�. *

It’s that â€�°ù±ð²¹±ô±ô²ââ€� that trips me up. It’s the burr in my sock, the stone in my shoe. It rubs me the wrong way. It just feels vaguelyâ€� dismissive, of the fictional universe in the story, of the narrative you’ve asked the reader to invest in, it dismisses it with a hand-wave.

What’s more, and this may just be me, but when I’m reading a story and it becomes apparent that it’s allegorical, my brain starts to translate. Like an electrical pulse sliding down a well-worn neural pathway, it skips straight from the words on the page to the allegorical meaning spending ever less and less time immersed in the fictional bit. It’s a bit like someone who’s gotten really good at reading french as a second language seeing the word ‘singe� and getting a mental image of a monkey without running it through their native tongue first.

‘So what?� you might say. And you’d have a point, except that I (obviously) am pretty invested in the idea that fictional bit is important, both for its own sake and for meditating on whatever real-world issues it’s concerned with. If it weren’t, you might as well just write journalism instead.

Lauren Beukes actually put this the best I’ve ever heard it last year at the British Library when she said that the distance created by (science) fiction could ‘bring back the human�, bringing our emotions back off the bench when issue fatigue has set in. (There is a risk I’m paraphrasing here, it was a year ago). Fiction can derive a lot of power from real-world resonance, but that distance is key, and under the weight of an allegory, it can have a tendency to collapse.

From my point of view, there’s something of the tightrope in using fiction to meditate one the real world, and allegory falls down one side of it.

* This may not be a definition either Ms Beukes or Mr Ness recognize, and I certainly don’t mean to impute that they’re defending or enamoured with this kind of allegory. I have no idea, it was just their mention of it that got me thinking.

This piece was originally published at

I almost didn’t write this.

I’ve wanted to for weeks, since I finished the final part of Alan Garner’sÌýWeirdstoneÌýtrilogy, but I’ve been hesitating. It felt vaguely sacrilegious, like shouting in a crypt or shaking a friend awake when they’re smiling at their dream. Sometimes (perhaps you get this too), I’m reluctant to delve into the machinery of the books that impact me most deeply. I don’t want to look too close in case their effect collapses, quantum-like, under my observation, In case I wake the sleeper, and the dream dies.

The existence of this post is a testament to two convictions. The first is that this book is pressing so hard against the inside of my skull right now that it will start to run out of my tear ducts if I don’t talk about it. The second is that Garner’s dream is much, much too strong for me to kill.

This isn’t a review, by the way. I don’t know whetherÌýBonelandÌýis a good book or not, I’m not sure the term really means anything for a story with so few comparators â€� an adult novel to conclude a children’s trilogy, written fifty years after the first two volumes came out. I do know there were times it stole my breath.

A quick plot summary then â€� for all the good that will do us.ÌýBonelandÌýpicks up Colin Whisterfield decades after the end of theÌýMoon of GomrathÌý(1963), which saw his sister Susan disappear. He’s become a brilliant but unfocussed astronomer working at a British radio telescope. He’s suppressed all memories from the first two books, but on some level, just below consciousness he’s still searching the stars for his lost sister. Boneland follows him as â€� both inside and outside of therapy â€� his memories breach back into his conscious mind. Meanwhile, in what feels like a deeper ancestral memory, a man dances and sings and carves images into a rock face. He performs these rituals rooted in faith to keep the soul of the place he lives in alive.

It’s difficult to know how much Boneland’s impact on me owes to the highly specific circumstances of its creation. I readÌýThe Weirdstone of BrisingamenÌý²¹²Ô»åÌýThe Moon of GomrathÌýmore than 15 years ago (though I’ve ). Most of Garner’s readers will have gone as long or longer since reading the first two books. Their contents stirred me hugely when I read them, but all their vivid details were deeply silted under sediments of later memories and adult cares.

I have never been placed into such acute sympathy with a book’s protagonist as when Colin’s memories erupt back into his mind.Ìý°Â±ð¾±°ù»å²õ³Ù´Ç²Ô±ð’sÌýwitches andÌý³Ò´Ç³¾°ù²¹³Ù³ó’sWild Hunt rushed back to me at exactly at the same time. That little piece of me that is still the boy that read those books clamped his hand round my heart in shock, and refused to let go. This book haunted me, literally, and it used the fragments its older siblings had left in my mind to do it.

µþ³Ü³ÙÌýBonelandÌýwent further. Having got me and Colin in synch, it used that symbiosis. Reading the book was an intensely personal experience. Its tale of a man dredging himself for lost memories and of a dreamer battling desperately against the dying of his dream felt like it was talking to me, and about me. It tapped into the bit of me that’s scared that I have lost something since I first read Weirdstone in the harsh light of my Grandfather’s study lamp, the part that thinks I should have clung tighter to that bone deep belief that magic is real and that a place really can have a soul. It’s a dream that would look like madness had I held onto it any longer, but its echoes have never really left me. It’s why I do what I do.

That’s why (and if you’ve read it, you’ll understand this) I found the end of Boneland one of the most moving reading experiences of my life.

This sleeper, probably, is as awake as he’ll ever be, but the dream is still very much alive.

(Gotta hand it to Christopher Priest, that never gets old.)

Well, it seems that ‘Cotton Eye� Joe Abercrombie’s feet are not the only part of him that’s after our epic gladiatorial bout on Saturday night. He’s invited me to look into my heart and give up my title.

Honestly, anyone would think he’d lost to a talking horse.

Perhaps Joe has forgotten that The First Law of such competitions is that opinion is a dish Best Served Cold. He really ought to consider his comments more carefully Before They Are Hanged in the internet shop-window that is his blog. ÌýHe felt the music choice favoured the younger man, perhaps he would have preferred three Ìýcolours Red, Country and western, or perhaps, to ease the impact on his aging joints, he would have preferred to change the format of the contest to ice-dancing â€� no doubt so he could use The Blade Itself as a weapon to attack my already injured ankle, ingenious villain that he is.

Sadly, it seems that while dance-offs are the Last Argument of Kings, complaining about the judging remains the first refuge of a scoundrel.

One thing is certain, after contests like these, it is those of us who have the wisdom and humility to hold our peace* who will be remembered as The Heroes.

P.S. You want my title Joe? Help yourself. ÌýI’ve got ALL OF YOURS.

P.P.S. Same time next year? I think I should have gotten my breath back by then. Just.

*Not a euphemism. Neither of us were dancing like Michael Jackson, I leave that to my moonwalking amigo .

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Americans! And Canadians!

Next week I shall be bringing my enormous face to your shores by the miracle of modern digitalÌýcommunication!

Flux, my dearly beloved publishers are hosting me on a live Ustream chat at ÌýT (which I think os 4pm-5pm if you’re on the East Coast, and lunchtime on the West Coast).

Basically, the deal is this:

YouÌýlog into this page, go to the chat window, and fire cunning and pointed questions at me.

IÌýbroadcast my massive British mug over the internet for an hour, Ìýtalk a bit aboutÌýThe City’s SonÌýand the otherÌýSkyscraper ThroneÌýbooks and do my best to answer them.

Flux are even hosting a give away at the same time, so if you join us you could win a copy ofÌýThe City’s SonÌýfor your very own. As modelled here by my lovely assistant, The Internet:

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If you can’t join us â€� perhaps you have a hot date, or are battling ninjas or are the President of the USA and are Ìýjust too busyÌýat this point in the election cycle *sigh* excusesÌý â€� but you still have questions Ìý- fear not, either drop your question in the comments here, or fire them at me on Twitter @tomhpollock before the event. I’ll answer them on the day, and you can watch the video later on from the comfort of your own sofa/oval office/pile of bloodied ninja corpses.

Anyway, hope you all can make it. Do sign up on if you can, and I’ll catch you next week.

Cheers!

Tx

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You may, dear reader, if you’ve been very attentive, have noticed a some unfamiliar noises about these environs of late. a creaking of shutter, a snuffling of a rodent’s snout, a whirring of the washing machine from Pornokitsch upstairs. Sounds you never would have picked up on were it not for the the total, all consuming silence that has gathered about this parish.

Fear not however! For I have not been idle in the (oh dear lord) Month and a half since I last posted, I’ve just been muddying the waters in various other corners of the internet, where kind (and somewhat unwary) souls have given me time on their blogs:

Over at The Qwillery, I ran down .

At Parajunkee’s view, I exposed my inner alcoholic by explaining that

TheÌýmarvelousÌýfolk at All Things Urban Fantasy gave me their blog and let me .

And the brilliant Booksmugglers had me in to chat about

Oh, and I .

More soon, including a Fantasycon appearance and a Ustream chat with peeps in the US.

Later on

Tx

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Sorry for the total lack of posts here recently, I’ve been busy writing stuff you’ll soon be able to see in lots of other places, (Oh, and the small matter ofÌýThe Glass Republic -ÌýGiant, slate-feathered birds! Aesthetic tyranny! ÌýNaughty touching! In the immortal words of George Takei ‘OH MY!â€�)Ìýbut more on that later.

For now, I just wanted to flag up some meatspaces I shall be occupying in the near future. If you’re of a mind, do come say hello to the beardy bald-headed man in Ìýthe geeky t-shirt.

Thursday 9th August -ÌýThe City’s SonÌýLAUNCH EVENT.

6pm: ÌýForbidden Planet, Shafetsbury Avenue, London.

I’m doing an actualÌýbook launch. I will read. It will be delightful. These two facts may or may not be causally related.

Details are here:Ìý

Do come along, it would be lovely to see you.

Saturday 18th August â€� Blackwells, Charing Cross Road ÌýYA Day!

The marvellous folks at Blackwells on Charing Cross Road are doing a day to celebrate the many splendours of YA. With Will Hill (Department 19), Tanya Byrne (Heart Shaped Bruise), James Dawson (Hollow Pike), Kim Curran (Shift), Laure Eve (Fearsome Dreamer) (and me! ) If you’re a fan of YA lit, and if you aren’t signed up yet,Ìý

September 27-30 Ìý- Fantasycon â€� ÌýRoyal Albion Hotel, Brighton.

The UK’s premier fantasy get together and chinwag. ÌýI’ll be in the bar, as will lots of cool people.

So last week @alittlebriton and I were at (Book Expo) America, land of the free (book), & home of the brave (souls who got into the scrum for a copy of Cat Valente’s The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland).

Monday I was at the book blogger con, good write up from The Booksmugglers .

Tuesday saw my first proper signing, and as the random Brit who no-one there had any excuse to have heard of, I was all geared up for no-one to come. I expected to sign for the three guys I knew on Twitter and then for my own publicist to keep coming back around in a succession of ever less convincing fake mustaches, just to make me feel better.

Instead, um� this happened:

And then this happened:

(Why yes, that is me signing for Tessa Gratton, Brenna Yovanoff and Maggie Stiefvater. Did I squee? Perchance I did.)

(At the Flux booth with Brian Farrey-Latz, my editor, and Amy Boggs: agent, daredevil and acrobat)

Later on I went to the Teen Author Carnival and said ‘Twitter� a lot, which our American cousins seemed to enjoy muchly.

(Hanging with Hannah Moskowitz and Barry Lyga, not actual size.)

Wednesday I hit the , and met tons of amazeballs people:

Things I learned:

-Booksellers, authors and bloggers are outstandingly ace, but school librarians might just be my favourite people on this earth.

- Word of mouth goes through a crowd of bookish people like a Chainsaw through a zombie’s arm

- WORD in Brooklyn is just a fabulous bookstore.

Things I had occasion to say:

-’That’s no moon, that’s a Cheesecake.�

-’Holy sh*t Brenna Yovanoff!�

-’Cheeeeese dreams�

-’I now have disturbing images of milking�

People it was beyond awesome to meet/see again:

Amy Boggs, Brian Farrey, Steve Pomije, Charlie Van Wijk, Tessa Gratton, Scott Tracey, Hannah Moskowitz, Gretchen Mcneil, Zoraida Cordova, Kody Keplinger, Brenna Yovanoff, Maggie Stiefvater, Holly Root, Liza Weimer, Mitali, Genn Albin, Stefan from Civilian Reader, Jennie Ivins from Fantasy Faction, Karsten Knight, Austin, Amy, Andye and Abigail from ReadingTeen, Kate Treadaway, Victoria Schwab, Ana and Thea from Booksmugglers, Jenn from WORD� and� and� and�

You guys are all awesome, thanks for making me feel so at home!

Til later

T

³§´Ç´Ç´Ç´Çâ€�.

1 Week to go to my first Book Expo AmericaÌý- I’ll be panelling and chatting and, oh yes, signing. For the first time. Nervous? No. No not at all. Why would you ask that? No. Seriously. Why?

Anyhow, here’s what I’ll be doing in between bouts of throwing myself at NY’s finest cheesecake.

Monday Ìý- The Book Blogger Conference, all day (wellâ€� the morning at least).

Tuesday â€� 11am-12pm: ÌýAutographing (ulp) at table 15 in the Sci Fi & Fantasy suite.

1.30pm â€� 2.30pm: I’ll be hanging at the Flux booth Ìý(come say hey!)

6.30pm â€� 9pm: ÌýI’ll be panelling at the NYPL teen author carnival.

Wednesday Night � The Blogger Rooftop bash.

Hope to catch some you guys there! (I’ll be the shaven-headed one with the english accent. I may be wearing a taxonomy of dragons t-shirt. Depends how good you are.)

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First up, a warning, and a plea. What follows engages with Railsea in a fair degree of detail. As a result, even though I’ve tried to keep it free of plot spoilers per se, it inevitably includes things I would not have wanted to know before reading the book. I like to meet my favourite reads in a dark alley and have them mug me for my affections before I so much as see their faces. If you’re the same then take my word for it, ¸é²¹¾±±ô²õ±ð²¹â€™s a fantastic ride.

Caveats away, onwards. Thar she blows!

The Railsea: a vast plain of train tracks, branching and interweaving like nesting snakes, stretching beyond every horizon to the ends of the earth. Engines of many kinds rumble over the rails, merchant trains and war trains and most significantly, hunting trains, for it is on this last that our story focuses. The mole train Medes, tacking and switching across the iron of the great southern ocean searching for her captain’s obsession, a mountain-sized moldywarpe with a coat the shade of a discoloured tooth: Mocker Jack.

On one level Railsea is a straightforward-ish coming of age story. Sham Yes ap Soorap, doctor’s assistant on the Medes is listless. Like many heroes of classic children’s literature (Alice for example, or Norton Juster’s Milo), he’s curious but uncompelled. He’s most of the way to being grown up, but he doesn’t know what he wants to be when he gets there. On a planet-sized steel ocean teeming with train captains chasing assorted monstrous philosophies, Sham is set to find a philosophy of his own. An artefact found in a wrecked train leads him to seek out Railsea’s other teenaged protagonists â€� the ÌýShroake siblings. Dero and Caldera are brother and sister, exemplars of another classic YA trope â€� bereaved children of mysterious explorers. As these near-orphans set out to uncover the secret that two out of their three parents died for, Sham finds his purpose in helping them to fulfil theirs.

A gripping tale ensues, one that carries its three young leads to the limits of a richly imagined world and beyond. It’s moving too, which is something that for all the richness of his works, I don’t always find with Miéville. Railsea’s characters spring off the page with signal-switchers and cutlasses in hand. I found myself rooting for the Shroakes and Sham all the way, while eyeing the other stand out in the cast � the Ahab-inspired Captain Abacat Naphi, with a respectful suspicion.

Of course, this being Miéville, thar be monsters. I’ve spoken before about his teratological taxonomy. Now, added to Frankensteiny splices and chitinous Lovecraftian enigmas we have another category: really fucking big shit. Alp-sized talpas, earthworms as big as tube trains, earwigs that could decapitate you with their bumjaws (giggle, I know I’m 12, ok?), they’re all here. Also, as a special bonus, one of my favourite mythological beasts gets a remix. I won’t spoil it, but that moment of recognition was. Just. Awesome.

Up to this point I’ve been saying Railsea is about Sham finding his philosophy, now I need to qualify that a bit. What the story is closer to being about is him choosing his philosophy. And with that distinction, it’s time to change gears, switch tracks and start looking at the book on the level of metaphor.

The Railsea itself is a tangle of tracks. Each taken individually is a circumscribed, unidirectional path, but there are so many of them, and they interlink and fuse and split so intricately that, by skilful switching, a canny train captain can have all the navigational freedom of the open ocean. Each rail is a path, but you can follow them wherever you want. Obsessed skippers pilot their trains in pursuit of evasive monsters that stand for even more evasive meanings: ‘The Ferret of Unrequitedness, the too-much knowledge Mole Rat�. These semiotic quarry, erupting from the substrate beneath the iron, do more than determine the passage of the engines over the rails, they condition their captains� reading of them.

The Railsea is one giant, tangled overarching metaphor for narrative (1), for text. The rails can be read not just as narrative strands, but for individual interpretations of those strands, which makes this story a metaphor for metaphor itself. A meta-squared-phor, or, given that it’s a ferrovia mare, a metal-phor.

You really can choose your own adventure.

Choice is a theme in Miéville’s YA. We saw it in Un Lun Dun, with the savage disembowelling of destiny, and here it rides again, writ one order of magnitude larger, undermining not merely the idea of predetermination within the narrative, but of a predetermined reading of the narrative itself. TheÌý voice of the story works this angle, playful, teasing and ornery. It skips back and forth across time and space like a puppyish tardis.

‘Back a bit�

‘Bit more�

‘Time for the Shroakes?�

‘Not yet.�

This voice breaches periodically from the soil of the story to address the reader directly, questioning, rearranging, doubling back and tripling forward, making the narrative arc feel anything but inevitable. Also, it fleshes Railsea’s world out by digressing on detail beyond the scope of the story’s confines. It’s a fun, tantalising device where the full import of the metaphor feels constantly, within finger stretch.

In this respect Railsea makes an interesting comparison with another recent YA, Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls. In Monster, a series of conventional seeming fairy tales are reworked. They’re given less comforting, less patronising, thornier and ultimately truer feeling endings so that a boy, Conor, can begin to get to grips with his mum’s cancer. Monster questions our cosy assumptions about stories, but retains total conviction in itself, and it hits like a sledgehammer to the heart. Railsea by comparison (quite deliberately) calls itself into question, draws attention to its own artifice. It’s Brechtian, an attempt to have it both ways, to suspend your disbelief while pointing and shouting at the ropes which are holding it up. It’s a testament to Miéville’s skill that, for most of Railsea, he pulls it off. Very occasionally though, I found that this intentional immersion-breaking put distance between me and the characters. As a result I found Railsea a cooler, more cerebral delight than Ness’s masterpiece of affect.

One final thought: Railsea is gorgeously imagined, beautifully written, blinding fun. If it had nothing else going for it, that would be more than enough. But it’s also stonkingly ambitious. I hope it sells eleventy bajillion copies if for no other reason than, if it does, it might help lay to rest the lie that teenagers want easy answers and pat conclusions and short sentences and can’t handle complexity. We ought to have a little more faith in them. They want stories like Railsea. Stories that urge them to pursue ideas even when they aren’t quite sure they fully understand them. Stories that bid them shovel more coal to the boiler, man the switches and join the hunt.

(1)ÌýÌý Well, that’s one interpretation, anyway.

So, last night Lizzie, and I went to hear ÌýNorton Juster talk at Foyles, on the occasion of The Phantom Tollbooth’s 50th anniversary.

He. Was. ASTOUNDING.

He was witty and funny and kind. He unleashed a great wave of ‘will you be my Grandpa� across the audience. He really, really doesn’t look 83. He read us a story, a spoonerized Cinderella (If the Foo Shits, Ear Wit.) And was just a cuddly, white bearded fountain of wordplay, wisdom and fabulous anecdotes.

Apparently, (and I’m not surprised) his dad used to pun at him all the time. Including this little gem:

‘I see you’ve been coming early, lately. You used to be behind before, but now you’re first at last.�

Seriously, how happy does that make you?