Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The White Hare
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | nb 99165092 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/nb99165092 |
| HEADING: | Fishwick, Michael |
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| 040 | __ |a Uk |b eng |c Uk |d DLC |
| 053 | _0 |a PR6106.I85 |
| 100 | 10 |a Fishwick, Michael |
| 670 | __ |a Smashing people, 2001: |b t.p. (Michael Fishwick) jkt. (works in book publishing; his first novel) |
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PERSONAL
Married; children: three.
EDUCATION:Oxford University, graduated.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Book publisher.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
British writer Michael Fishwick has worked in the book publishing industry and has published his own books centered on family dynamics and dysfunction. He grew up in London and lives there and in Somerset with his wife and children. He has a degree from Oxford University.
Smashing People
Fishwick’s debut novel, Smashing People, was published in 2002. Harkening back to the big hair and even bigger shoulder pads of the 1980s, Fishwick centers his story of greed and ambition on recent Oxford University graduates working in the publishing industry. Jaded Wilf Wellingborough gets a job at the small, struggling art magazine, Arts Unlimited, owned by Ferdy, his girlfriend’s father. When Ferdy dies in a suspicious car accident, Wilf’s nemesis and ambitious media mogul to be, Jimmy Spalding, buys the magazine and offer’s Wilf the editor position. Clueless, Wilf succumbs to Spalding’s manipulations and soon makes a mess of the job. Meanwhile some people are wondering if Spalding was involved in Ferdy’s death.
Finding the humor in Fishwick’s tale of rapid economic expansion, cut-throat careerism, and wife swapping, Guardian Online reviewer Alex Clark commented: “He deploys fast-buck reputations and apparently effortless success to create a well-oiled farce.” Clark added: “As a comic caper—one that, rather charmingly, ends in rooftop escapes, murky conspiracies and ringing gunshots—Smashing People is a rollicking read. Fishwick has a fine ear for the absurdities and pomposity of in-crowd chatter.”
In a review in New Statesman, Lisa Allardice praised Fishwick for having an engaging style and authentic insight into life, but perhaps too much heart in the publishing business that outsider readers may not be so enamored with. While Fishwick pays lip-service to stock 1980s yuppie images, “unlike the American brat pack or English novelists writing at the time, he fails to tell us anything new…None of the characters is nearly nasty or vulgar enough. Like all the friends, Fishwick himself is admiringly in love with his villain, and he seems to look back on that selfish era with more nostalgia than abrogation,” said Allardice.
In an interview with Danuta Kean online at Independent, Fishwick reflects on his career as a book publisher turning writer and how he did not write his first novel to be a commercial success, saying: “I actually thought Smashing People, because it was full of jokes and jollity and sex and stuff, would sell.” The book didn’t. However, “I would like to think that I was sensitive to my authors even before I was writing myself,” he said of the impact of his writing on the day job. “But it has made me realise even more what they go through.”
Sacrifices
Fishwick’s next novel, Sacrifices, was published in 2006. In the story, middle aged Anna is attending the funeral of her father, Christopher Hughes, the harsh and overbearing headmaster at the Meniston School for boys. Through colleagues and acquaintances paying their respects, she hears about his irascible personality. While Hughes’ students both adored and feared him, others despised him. Five characterizations of Hughes play out in stories told by school matron Mrs. Kobak who was dismissed, Anna’s ex-boyfriend Daniel who blames Hughes for their break up, the deputy headmaster Alex Rainsford, and Hughes’ beleaguered wife, Deborah, who sank into depression. Anna herself had a dysfunctional relationship with her aloof father. “If anything unites the central characters’ points of view, it is their inability to rationalise Christopher’s motives or desires. On one level, the novel is a fascinating critique of subjectivity; on another, it is an unbalanced medley of narratives,” according to New Statesman contributor Mike Brett.
“In a work which simultaneously conforms to the broad contours of classical tragedy and evokes recent events in British politics, Fishwick invites compassion for his protagonist as well as for those whose lives have been blighted by his actions,” said Jem Poster on the Guardian Online. Poster also noted how Fishwick is a subtle writer who encourages the reader to be both intrigued and baffled by the multiple narratives surrounding Hughes’ enigmatic character. “Sacrifices is not only expert in its characterisation; it is also wily in structure. It offers you one story, but tells you five more,” declared Bill Greenwell online at the Independent. Praising Fishwick for his analogies, dialogue, mastery of voice in each character’s description of Hughes, and study of difficult relationships between parents and children, Greenwell added: “Fishwick writes in a careful, exact and exacting fashion.”
The White Hare
Fishwick’s next book, The White Hare, centers on fourteen-year-old Robbie who deals with the grief over his mother’s death by setting fires. His father has remarried and moved the family from London to the country. There Robbie meets Maggie “Mags” Carr, a feral child at home in the woods. She tells Robbie of the legend that a woman who is treated badly by her lover can return as a white hare and exact revenge. Robbie begins to see the white hare, which he believes to be his mother, but Mags believes it is Fran, her friend who committed suicide after breaking up with boyfriend Tommy. In a small town with many secrets, the white hare could be anyone.
Describing the brutality of love and the pain it leaves behind, “Fishwick wields strangeness rather than certainty, and specificity rather than answers, in this rare offering filled with mystery and emotional depth,” noted Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers in ForeWord. With Fishwick’s precise prose, “a rich sense of place, magical folklore elements, multidimensional characters, and a well-paced plot create a suspenseful contemporary tale of grief,” according to a writer in Kirkus Reviews.
On the other hand, School Library Journal reviewer Stefanie Hughes described a jolting writing style and underdeveloped motives of secondary characters which creates confusion and disrupts the flow of the narrative. Hughes said the “lack of emotional intimacy fails to tug at the heart strings and build a connection to the characters” and that American readers will be unfamiliar with the Briticisms in the book. Nevertheless, in this odd fish of a book, according to Arifa Akbar online at Evening Standard, Robbie is a troubled adolescent, “Throw a white hare into the mix of his teen grief and a tragic tale of first-love and you have an intriguing, readable but off-kilter novel.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
ForeWord, February 27, 2018, Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers, review of The White Hare.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2018, review of The White Hare.
New Statesman, January 8, 2001, Lisa Allardice, review of Smashing People, p. 40; May 22, 2006, Mike Brett, review of Sacrifices, p. 56.
School Library Journal, February 2018, Stefanie Hughes, review of The White Hare, p. 93.
ONLINE
Evening Standard Online, https://www.standard.co.uk/ (March 9, 2017), Arifa Akbar, review of The White Hare.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (January 1, 2001), Alex Clark, review of Smashing People; (January 4, 2006), Jem Poster, review of Sacrifices.
Independent Online, https://www.independent.co.uk/ (May 28, 2006), Danuta Kean, author interview; (February 17, 2006), Bill Greenwell, review of Sacrifices.
About the author
Michael Fishwick is a publisher and author of two acclaimed novels, Smashing People and Sacrifices. He lives in London and Somerset, where the book is set.
Michael Fishwick grew up in London and graduated from Oxford. He works in book publishing, is married and has three children. His second novel, Sacrifices, was published in 2001.
Fishwick, Michael: THE WHITE HARE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Fishwick, Michael THE WHITE HARE Zephyr/Trafalgar (Young Adult Young Adult) $15.99 4, 1 ISBN: 978-1-78669-051-7
Longing to escape his unhappy home life, a troubled English teen becomes dangerously involved in a local legend about a mysterious white hare.
Since his mother's death, 14-year-old Robbie has expressed his anger and grief by setting fires, resulting in an arson conviction. Hoping for a fresh start, his family relocates to a village in rural Somerset. Alienated from his father and father's girlfriend, Robbie spends his time outdoors with Mags, an enigmatic local girl. She tells him of the local legend that a woman jilted in love can return in the shape of a white hare, bringing death to her former lover. Still mourning his mother's death and full of rage toward his father, Robbie is haunted by images of the white hare as well as a deceased friend of Mags'. Why did the girl kill herself? What was her connection to two local bullies? Why is Mags so protective of the white hare? Grappling with these secrets, Robbie discovers he may be the quarry in a legendary hunt for the white hare. Spot art evokes the pastoral setting. All characters are white apart from three black students, one of whom is a friend of Robbie's.
Finely tuned prose, a rich sense of place, magical folklore elements, multidimensional characters, and a well-paced plot create a suspenseful contemporary tale of grief, retribution, and healing. (Fiction. 12-14)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Fishwick, Michael: THE WHITE HARE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461443/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=feed5d53. Accessed 4 June 2018.
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The White Hare
Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers
ForeWord.
(Feb. 27, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 ForeWord http://www.forewordmagazine.com
Full Text:
Michael Fishwick; THE WHITE HARE; Head of Zeus (Fiction: Fantasy) 15.99 ISBN: 9781786690517
Byline: Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers
In Michael Fishwick's The White Hare, local legend has it that a woman who dies abandoned by her lover can return in rabbit form to seek revenge. Who this woman might be and who she's come for is a subject of village debate. Young Robbie, newly arrived, is learning the lore for the first time. However, his only friend, Maggie Carr, knows who the white hare is. And she's been waiting for her.
After the fire, Robbie remembers "loving the flames, their wildness and their strength." After all, fire was his anger. But now, everything has changed. He's moved from London to the countryside. He has a record. His mom is dead. His dad is going native, and his stepmother and stepsisters seem to have one foot out the door. When the white hare shows up, Mags drags him through forest and field and into legend, showing Robbie that change has just begun.
At the heart of the story are Mags, "almost invisible the clothes she was wearing so weathered and faded that she melted into the landscape and became a part of it"; the white hare, "her body hunched like a question mark"; and Robbie himself, blazing, running, and anxious. Revealed slowly in lovingly rendered scenes, this triumvirate navigate a landscape both internal and external and find themselves in the wildest, oldest, and most dangerous terrains of human experience.
Fishwick wields strangeness rather than certainty, and specificity rather than answers, in this rare offering filled with mystery and emotional depth. A treatise on the brutality of love and the pain it frequently leaves behind, The White Hare looks to the wild places and feral people that grief creates. The beauty of its prose lingers, a grace note amidst the heartbreaking realization that, often, "it's hard to know how guilty you are."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Montgomery-Rodgers, Letitia. "The White Hare." ForeWord, 27 Feb. 2018. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529896244/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=b9c4caea. Accessed 4 June 2018.
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Culture club
LISA ALLARDICE
New Statesman.
130.4519 (Jan. 8, 2001): p40. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2001 New Statesman, Ltd. http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text: SMASHING PEOPLE
Michael Fishwick Jonathan Cape, 250pp, [pound]14.99 [pound]11.99 at www.newstatesman.co.uk (+[pound]1 p&p)
The title of the publishing director Michael Fishwick's first novel is a punning allusion to The Great Gatsby: "They were careless people... they smashed up things and creatures." Like F Scott Fitzgerald's classic distillation of the jazz age, Smashing People draws on the immoralities of another decadent decade -- the Greedy Eighties. Fishwick follows the fortunes of a group of fashionable undergraduates at Oxford into the equally unreal world of literary London. They spend the next ten years falling in and out of business and bed with one another, happily demonstrating the incestuous possibilities of well-known university circles at that time.
Wilf, the novel's jaded innocent, lands a job on a "small, intellectually respectable but commercially dismal arts magazine" -- with a little help from its owner, Ferdy, his long-time girlfriend's father. Ferdy wraps his Mercedes around a tree and the magazine is bought by Wilf's lifelong rival, the fatally charismatic Jimmy Spalding, who surprisingly offers our hero the editorship. Wilf rises to the challenge -- and, in true boom-bust tradition, makes a horrible mess of it, wrecking his relationship in the process.
Fishwick's glittering jeunesse doree are tainted by their association with the sinister Spalding, and the niggling question of his involvement in Ferdy's death tugs at the narrative. These thrillerish elements lend the comedy pace and shade; while slapstick set pieces, such as a drunken riot and wedding fiasco, obscure the more subtle social satire.
The cultural context, convenient to a morality tale about the human cost of ambition and success, is otherwise anachronistic, despite a so-called Eighties revival. Rocketing advances and conglomerate takeovers, fogeyish magazines and Soho drinking clubs--publishing isn't all that different today. And Wilf's worries about his "blokeish hopelessness" and emotional inadequacies are essentially Nineties neuroses. Wilf's wiser, first-person retrospective repeatedly reminds us that "it was the Eighties" and crudely sets the stage, in case any of us missed the finer points: "It was the hour of the entrepreneur: the Falklands had been won, Labour had given birth to the SDP... Thatcher was trashing the miners and the creator of wealth was the new hero of the business and features pages."
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London's literary scene just isn't very sexy, so Wilf is packed off to New York to provide the prerequisite glamour. Fishwick pays lip-service to the stock yuppie images -- "power shoulders, power breakfasts and power hair" -- but, unlike the American brat pack or English novelists writing at the time, he fails to tell us anything new. We've definitely been here before. Even the names of the staff on Arts Unlimited--the literary editor Terry Smallish, the adman Adam Sale and the diminutive Sibella Smallwood--sound familiar.
None of the characters is nearly nasty or vulgar enough. Like all the friends, Fishwick himself is admiringly in love with his villain, and he seems to look back on that selfish era with more nostalgia than abrogation. The outcome, in keeping with the times and the characters, is morally ambiguous: Jimmy and his wife, like Fitzgerald's Tom and Daisy Buchanan, "retreat into their carelessness and let everyone else clean up the mess".
Fishwick has an easy, engaging style, and it is hard to dislike his hapless hero. His insights into life on a "dilapidated but august magazine" are authentic, although his heart is obviously with the publishing business, represented in the exploits of Wilf's amiable best friend, Milo. Insiders will enjoy spotting real-life prototypes. But, as with other recent media romans a clefs, readers outside the gilded square mile of Golden Square might wonder what all the fuss is about.
Lisa Allardice is deputy arts and books editor of the NS
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
ALLARDICE, LISA. "Culture club." New Statesman, 8 Jan. 2001, p. 40. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A69391576/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=bab065b7. Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A69391576
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School report
Mike Brett
New Statesman.
135.4793 (May 22, 2006): p56. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2006 New Statesman, Ltd. http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Sacrifices
Michael Fishwick
Jonathan Cape, 248pp, [pounds sterling]16.99
Michael Fishwick's second novel opens with the funeral of the former headmaster Christopher Hughes, whose tenure at Meniston School in the West Country earned him both a band of loyal followers and--more pertinently--a string of enemies. It is this last group that preoccupies Christopher's daughter, Anna, as she watches her father's former colleagues and acquaintances bowing their heads to "pay their last disrespects".
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
As we learn from Anna's invective against her father's detractors, Christopher's forthright and domineering style inspired many of his pupils to worship him. The thorny question of how the boys expressed their adulation is still a matter of lively debate among local parents, and even the police. What follows is an exploration of the dysfunctional relationships that radiate outwards from Christopher's reign at Meniston. Fish-wick gradually illuminates the headmaster's enigmatic behaviour and questionable sexual appetites through the perspectives of Anna, her ex-lover Daniel, the sacked school matron Mrs Kobak, deputy headmaster Alex Rainsford and Christopher's beleaguered wife, Deborah.
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Anna's narrative is the focal point. Combining childlike vim and intellectual vigour, she emerges as the tragic product of her father's precocious teaching talent and overbearing patriarchal instinct. Her description of a childhood part in The Tempest is poignant, given her father's Prospero-like role at Meniston. His omnipotence in the classroom is mirrored in his private life, as those who oppose his wishes are crushed and those close to him are suffocated with love.
Unfortunately, the emotional force of Anna's account is compromised by subsequent chapters. Fishwick's decision to explore the central character of Christopher from a number of perspectives is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's treatment of Percival in The Waves. However, the novel's five distinct narratives are bound so loosely that they seem unrelated at times. Mrs Kobak--the matron who befriended Anna and was sacked by Christopher--is neither interested in nor articulate about events outside the domestic sphere. Daniel's battle against alcoholism and depression is linked to Christopher's role in the breakdown of his relationship with Anna, but it is expressed through banal description. If anything unites the central characters' points of view, it is their inability to rationalise Christopher's motives or desires. On one level, the novel is a fascinating critique of subjectivity; on another, it is an unbalanced medley of narratives. Each takes us further from a meaningful understanding of the two main characters, and when the revelatory scene finally comes it feels impersonal and hollow.
Perhaps the essential truth of Sacrifices is that, no matter how much we love someone, he or she will always have a kernel of pure egotism that is beyond our comprehension. It is just a pity that our emotional estrangement from Fishwick's central characters reveals the faults of his novel rather than exemplifying its success.
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Brett, Mike
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Brett, Mike. "School report." New Statesman, 22 May 2006, p. 56. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A146961260/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=6b91a358. Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A146961260
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The best sort of magic realism
Richard Francis
Spectator.
333.9839 (Mar. 25, 2017): p35+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK) http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
The White Hare
by Michael Fishwick
Zephyr, 10.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 239
Michael Fishwick's new novel tells the story of a young man called Robbie, who has been uprooted from his London home after his mother's death. He finds himself in rural Dorset, where he inhabits a capacious present that has ample room for the intrusions of the mythic past.
Struggling with his loss, Robbie has taken to using arson to express his rage --which is why his father, having rapidly acquired a new partner and a couple of stepdaughters, has moved the family to his old childhood home to make a new start. But it's an ancient start that this landscape has on offer. Robbie makes friends with a girl called Mags, just a few years older than he is, but a wise woman before her time, and she immediately introduces him to the folklore of the area, and in particular to the poetry associated with hares--creatures that defy fire. Fishwick understands that myths are best served neat, without explanation to dilute and maybe dispel them, so he describes the apparition of a white hare with admirable grace and simplicity, communicating its radiance without striving for literary effect: 'Her ears were long and tapered like a bird's wings, her body hunched like a question mark. She was so bright and so near, and there seemed to be a light about her ...'
This stylistic directness enables him to integrate the varied ingredients of his tale into a single whole. When Robbie describes a sunset as 'awesome', the word is exactly poised between modern idiom and ancient wonder. Fishwick combines the pangs of bereavement and the perturbations of adolescence, exploring (often with a comic touch) family tensions as well as the terrors of the deep past, and all the time propelling his narrative along with an adventure that unfolds in the present. Apart from a few pages of clunky exposition about three-quarters of the way through, this is the best sort of magical realism--where the magic enhances the reality, and the realism gives solid immediacy to the magic.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Francis, Richard. "The best sort of magic realism." Spectator, 25 Mar. 2017, p. 35+. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498486071/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&
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FISHWICK, Michael. The White
Hare
Stefanie Hughes
School Library Journal.
64.2 (Feb. 2018): p93. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
FISHWICK, Michael. The White Hare. 248p. Head of Zeus. Apr. 2018. Tr $15.99. ISBN 9781786690517.
Gr 7-10--After Robbie's mom dies, his dad remarries, and they move to an English county village. His new friend Mags is gifted with second sight; she can see a magical white hare. The hare is Mags's friend, Fran, who committed suicide after her romantic relationship with Tommy ended. Fran has returned as the hare, seeking revenge against Tommy. Eventually, Robbie can see the hare, too. It leads him on a path enmeshed in legend, mystery, and village secrets which effectively create an unsettling atmosphere. Alice, another of Robbie's new friends, is one of three black students in the school. She becomes the target of bullies because of her race, and Robbie comes to her rescue. Ultimately, this is a story about the brutality of love lost, repentance, and vengeance. Almost every character experiences heartbreak through death, divorce, or a breakup. Robbie's response to losing his mother is well developed, but this is not the case for secondary characters. This lack of emotional intimacy fails to tug at the heart strings and build a connection to the characters. American readers unfamiliar with the legend (that is never fully explained) and Briticisms, coupled with a sometimes jolting writing style and underdeveloped motives of some secondary characters, creates confusion and disrupts the flow of the story. Because teens will not find a satisfying explanation of the legend, it may prevent them from full engagement. VERDICT An additional selection for tenacious readers only.--Stefanie Hughes, Mt. Pleasant, TX
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hughes, Stefanie. "FISHWICK, Michael. The White Hare." School Library Journal, Feb. 2018,
p. 93. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526734081 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c097ab85. Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526734081
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School for scandal
Michael Fishwick's choice of multiple narrators adds to the complexity of Sacrifices. By Jem Poster
Jem Poster
Sat 1 Apr 2006 17.50 EST
First published on Sat 1 Apr 2006 17.50 EST
Sacrifices by Michael Fishwick
Buy Sacrifices at the Guardian bookshop
Sacrifices
by Michael Fishwick
256pp, Jonathan Cape, £16.99
At the heart of this complex, intelligent novel stands Christopher Hughes, a charismatic figure whose gifts propel him rapidly, after a stint in the army, to the headship of a prominent West Country public school. The faceted narrative reflects its protagonist from a variety of angles, building up a composite picture of a man whose public face and private life are hopelessly at odds with one another.
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The trajectory of Hughes's rapid rise and long, ignominious fall is meticulously plotted, though not in neatly linear fashion. We learn about his marriage to Deborah, a 1960s free spirit transformed into a weary depressive by her husband's coercive rule; and about Anna, the daughter who grows up so emotionally stunted that when fate offers her the opportunity to escape into motherhood and an adult sexual relationship, she chooses to give up her newborn baby and her ineffectual but loving partner rather than sever connections with her father. More obscurely, we glimpse the shadowy outlines of Hughes's homosexual past, a past that comes back to haunt him in the shape of Jonathan, a former army comrade and lover, even as rumours begin to circulate of inappropriate liaisons with some of the schoolboys in his care.
We're given plenty of detail, yet Hughes himself remains a curiously elusive figure. In part this is an aspect of his character: Mrs Kobak, a former school matron who lost her job for daring to mention Deborah's mental state to Anna, describes him as "a wonderful liar" - a man with whom "you could never tell where the truth ended and the lie began". But it's also a product of a narrative strategy that acknowledges the unreliability of any witness, of any story. Mrs Kobak's narrative unpicks itself as it unfolds, Kobak herself slyly warning us not to take on trust the information she offers. "I can't remember everything now," she says, reflecting on details of Hughes's life as reported to Meadows, her dirt-digging employer, "so he should not rely too much on what I have to say."
Anna's testimony, though less inclined to self-examination, is equally flawed. The novel's emphatic opening statement - "My father was an honourable man" - is challenged at every turn by a narrative which progressively reveals not only Hughes's cruelty, mendacity and self-centredness, but also Anna's agenda as she labours to shore up the crumbling reputation of the man whose life has been the model for her own. Recruited early to her father's side in a miserably divided household, she echoes his impatience with her mother's gentler ways - "I do think she could have made more of a fist of things than she did" - and parrots his not entirely enlightened views on education: "Exam results are the litmus test of a school's character." Her motive is clear: if her idol falls, her own identity is also at risk.
Michael Fishwick is a subtle, knowing writer, not averse to reflecting obliquely on his own techniques. The illness of a marginal character is discussed by others, he tells us, in that peculiarly English way that "never quite comes to the point but proceeds through hints and significant pauses ... whereby something terrible can be described by what is not said about it rather than what is". And in a telling episode towards the close of the novel, Deborah trails her husband and Jonathan through the woods, unable to see exactly what she has stumbled on: "The sun flashed through the leaves and half-blinded her, but she could have sworn she saw something moving there, it could have been a man or an animal." Her uncertain perceptions stand for those of the reader, half intrigued and half baffled as the multiple narratives circle their quarry without quite closing on it.
This is a strength rather than a weakness. Some of the characters may pass harsh judgment on Hughes - "he was a devil", thinks Koback - but the form of the novel precludes narrow judgmentalism on the part of the reader. In a work which simultaneously conforms to the broad contours of classical tragedy and evokes recent events in British politics, Fishwick invites compassion for his protagonist as well as for those whose lives have been blighted by his actions.
· Jem Poster's novel Rifling Paradise is published by Sceptre.
Reviews: Illumination comes when it is looked for; Sacrifices, by Michael Fishwick, Jonathan Cape, pounds 16.99. Reviewed by Georgina Rodgers.
Byline: Georgina Rodgers
"Illumination comes when it is looked for," as Daddy used to say. "We are the architects of our own futures." He would go on. "And our failures."
Sacrifices commences with the funeral of Anna's father. Her opening utterance is: "My father was an honourable man". However, we soon learn that many do not think that the man in question, Christopher Hughes, was as heroic as his daughter would like to think.
In fact, in his last days he was doomed by accusations of improper relations with a boy, and Anna laments that guests have arrived to "pay their last disrespects".
Hughes is a wonderfully multi-faceted character. He is painted as a colossal and terrifying teacher, exceptional in his ability to recognise talent and motivate and encourage his pupils, whilst deftly controlling those around him. He is a monster, a tyrant, a bully, yet a loyal and remarkably inspiring tutor.
The novel continues as it begins, with a raw and brittle tone and oppressive tension, scrolling through the lives of various people Hughes has known. Firstly his daughter, who is blinded by her love for him' Daniel Ellis, the man Anna fell in love with and whose child she bore' Mrs Kobak, the outspoken and sprightly school matron who was disposed of and the distressed deputy headmaster Alex Rainsford and his failed actor son, Luke.
Finally, we see in to the life of Hughes's downtrodden and depressed wife, Deborah. The novel then gathers great momentum for a truly startling and shocking finale.
Fishwick exquisitely weaves the narrative around the main cast of characters, exploring the themes of duty, loss, power and sacrifices and uses evocative and precise language. This is not a fun read' it is very dark and certainly not for the faint-hearted.
COPYRIGHT 2006 Birmingham Post & Mail Ltd
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.
Copyright 2006 Gale, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
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A pain in the arts
Alex Clark on Michael Fishwick's pricking of pomposity, Smashing People
Alex Clark
Sat 20 Jan 2001 11.40 EST
First published on Sat 20 Jan 2001 11.40 EST
Smashing People
Michael Fishwick
250pp, Jonathan Cape, £15.99
Buy it at a discount at BOL
Anybody who stumbled out of university in the 1980s, slept through the milk round and fell blearily into a job in telesales might find this novel a touch dismaying. Despite the comfortingly accidental hero, Wilf Wellingborough, its characters exude an air of confidence and accomplishment that might, had the novel been set in a later period, be termed the culture of entitlement. With an outward semblance of bumbling raffishness, they become publishers, magazine editors, gossip columnists, literary agents, and tycoons, without appearing to languish too long in the dreary doldrums of less glamorous occupations.
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These mysterious and irritating transformations are, to some extent, Fishwick's point. Against the backdrop of a decade of rapid expansion, cut-throat careerism and insubstantial stylishness, he deploys fast-buck reputations and apparently effortless success to create a well-oiled farce. At its centre is Wilf, catapulted into the editorship of the small-circulation journal Arts Unlimited by childhood friend and aspiring press baron Jimmy Spalding, the on-the-make proprietor of a magazine empire who most resembles "a whale chasing plankton". Wilf, although clearly signposted as a fairly decent bloke, discovers that he is not immune to the allures of the gravy train: "I found myself wondering quite how sycophantic I was going to be, and the answer was, to my surprise, very."
As a comic villain, Spalding is reassuringly wicked - thrashing his wife and waving his pistol around to indicate displeasure -and Wilf, like a lamb to the slaughter, is properly dim and clueless. Blind to Spalding's stratospheric manoeuvrings, he makes a hash of Arts Unlimited and fails miserably at his relationship with the unworldly Grace. Having unexpectedly fluttered into the spotlight, he finds himself more smashed than smashing and, when intimacy with Spalding's wife offers itself as a consoling option, imagines that he has little else to lose. Actually, he has.
If Fishwick's characterisation often teeters uncomfortably on the verge of caricature - women who are either ballbreaking sexpots or naively trusting nurturers, men who adopt the persona of fop or shark - then his eventual conceit is ingenious. In a feverish atmosphere that polarises victors and victims, it is not always immediately possible to tell one from the other or to be sure that they will stay the same. Falling prey to the vicious fallacy that my enemy's enemy is my friend, Wilf discovers that even his half-hearted attempts at revenge are open to manipulation and that his trust in ancient friendships and loyalties is fatally misplaced.
As a comic caper - one that, rather charmingly, ends in rooftop escapes, murky conspiracies and ringing gunshots - Smashing People is a rollicking read. Fishwick has a fine ear for the absurdities and pomposity of in-crowd chatter - "Marvin's just been published by Chatto. He is our premier rap poet" - and a nicely ambiguous sense of its worth. When Wilf reminisces on the power of a high-flying journalist "whose editorials made Whitehall quiver, whose reviews closed shows overnight", he ironises beautifully the self-importance of those who manage rather than contribute to cultural production.
There is, however, a lingering sense that Fishwick has his eye on more weighty topics than period satire and could, in further novels, explore them to greater effect. Where his evocation of the 1980s can seem mildly laboured and unconvincing, his underlying interest in the exchanges of power between lovers and friends remains intriguing. In Wilf, he demonstrates a talent for conveying a meditative intelligence, a searching sadness, but never quite allows it to develop. And his exploration of charisma, ruthlessness and betrayal need not have been tethered quite so firmly to their setting. After all, power never goes out of fashion.
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Michael Fishwick: In search of all the smashing people
One publisher is acutely sensitive to the agonies of authors - because he is one. Danuta Kean meets Michael Fishwick of Bloomsbury, novelist - and cheque-writer
Sunday 28 May 2006 00:00
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If you meet Michael Fishwick, jovial publisher turned literary novelist, whatever you do, do not tell him you "enjoyed" his latest book, Sacrifices. By all means say it was "wonderful", "fabulous, darling" or even "I loved it", but "enjoyed" sends only one message to a man who is well versed in the coded language of the publishing fob-off.
"The difference between this and my first novel is that people are coming up to me and saying, 'I loved it!'" His first novel, Smashing People, only elicited an "I enjoyed it". "Sacrifices has to be better than my first novel, because 'I enjoyed it' is not the biggest compliment in the world." He launches into a very funny parody of a hapless author fishing for praise, head bobbing, eyes bulging, dog-like expectation. "You are supposed to say 'fabulous' and 'wonderful, darling'. 'Enjoyed' really is bottom of the heap." He lets rip a loud, cynical laugh.
Fishwick is well placed to spot a fob-off. He has delivered enough, and for the past 20 years he has been part of an elite group of A-list editors, whose authors, from Margaret Thatcher and John Major to William Dalrymple and Karen Armstrong, scream quality and connections.
Smashing People came out four years ago, and raised as many eyebrows among rivals in the business as it did plaudits. Publishers rarely put their heads above the parapet, let alone out themselves as writers.
"It was terrifying," Fishwick admits. Aware that, if his book was a dud, word would travel through the trade faster than gossip at the Groucho, he approached only one agent, David Godwin. "I thought that if I sent it to lots of agents and they all turned it down, my life wouldn't be worth living. The sense of vulnerability I felt was over-powering." He need not have worried: Godwin brokered him a two-book deal with Cape.
Sacrifices, which has garnered excellent reviews, suggests he has recovered his confidence. Bleaker than his debut, it is the story of Christopher Hughes, by all appearances an honourable man, father and public school headmaster, but through the multiple narratives revealed to be a monster and emotional terrorist.
We are in Fishwick's bright office at Bloomsbury, where he has worked for the past year as publishing director following 20 years with HarperCollins. Outside, tourists laze in the Soho sunshine. It is one of London's hipper addresses - a sign of his employer's affluence, mainly thanks to Harry Potter. Neighbours include 20th Century Fox and the Football Association. Publishing rivals are located further away, in the nether reaches of W1 and beyond.
Inevitably the conversation turns to Fishwick's day job. In the past few months Bloomsbury has become the Roman Abramovich of publishing, shelling out a fortune on author talent, taking advances to record breaking levels for the lucky few. Cookery writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and travel writer and historian William Dalrymple received £2m apiece. William Boyd was snapped up for £500,000, while David Blunkett's earned a reported £400,000.
Most surprising of all was £1m for Take That star Gary Barlow's autobiography. Eyebrows were raised. Barlow hardly fits the publisher's literary image - though it is worth remembering that before Harry Potter, Bloomsbury made a fortune with Anna Pasternak's Princess in Love, about James Hewitt's affair with Princess Diana.
Fishwick is playing his own part in the spending spree. He signed both Dalrymple and Blunkett - covers of The Blunkett Tapes are scattered about his office. They join other high-profile signings, including Germaine Greer, twentysomething Cambridge historian Anne Whitelock, Rosie Boycott and Ben Macintyre.
But he is adamant that whatever rivals say, and they have been saying quite a lot, Bloomsbury has not forced advances through the roof. "We may be outbidding for some books, but we are mostly matching what other people are offering," he claims. "We are having a lot of that - it is a sort of boast."
Rival editors beg to differ. One, who in the past has wielded the chequebook, tells me she has been unable to buy anything for a year because Bloomsbury outbid her each time. Another says that though he had matched some bids, he feels exposed by the number of six-and-seven figure investments he has been forced to make in a market that can only sustain a handful of expensive books. "These enormous advances have got incredibly out of hand. It is extremely worrying," he moans.
Fishwick will have none of it. "I have seen people throw loads of money around, but this company is not stupid. It is just constitutionally incapable of profligate behaviour. No one is going to suddenly go bonkers," he says with a passion unusual in editors talking about their employers.
But he stiffens at mention of the Dalrymple deal. "It wasn't wildly more than he was being paid at HarperCollins," he says sniffily. The reports ignored the small print, he adds. The £2m is for five books. "His last book sold 50,000 in hardback and will have sold 200,000 in paperback. All William's books sell 5,000 or 6,000 copies a year and have done since I first published him in 1987. So, in terms of where you are going to put your money, it is as safe a bet as you can think of."
Does he have pangs of advance envy when he signs the cheques? He laughs that loud hearty laugh. "No!" He sits back in his chair and gazes at the ceiling. "The trouble is that I wouldn't know how to write a commercial novel," he muses. "I actually thought Smashing People, because it was full of jokes and jollity and sex and stuff, would sell." It didn't - at least not in Dalrymple quantities - but the Shrewsbury-educated publisher does not seem to care.
"I would like to think that I was sensitive to my authors even before I was writing myself," he says of the impact of his writing on the day job. "But it has made me realise even more what they go through." It also means that the word "enjoyed" has been dropped from his vocabulary.
'Sacrifices' is published by Cape (£16.99). To order a copy for £15.99 (free p&p), call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897
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Sacrifices, by Michael Fishwick
The fallen head delivers a masterclass in fiction
By Bill Greenwell
Friday 17 March 2006 01:00
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'Sacrifices' is Michael Fishwick's second novel, and hugely more accomplished than his first, Smashing People. That satirised the publishing industry, laying about that world with glee, but its characters never quite caught fire. But Sacrifices is not only expert in its characterisation; it is also wily in structure. It offers you one story, but tells you five more.
At first, we must unravel a mystery: a charismatic public-school headmaster, Christopher Hughes, has been disgraced. The novel opens with his funeral. What has brought him down: circumstance, or some weakness in his personality? The first witness is his only daughter, Anna, whose voice is fascinatingly cold.
Fishwick contrives to switch attention away from her father, to absorb us in Anna's partial account of herself. The second section, even more skilfully written, shifts us to Daniel, Anna's ex-lover of 20 years earlier. Daniel is now a separated single father, devoted to his teenage son. Stealthily, Fishwick moves the focus further away from Hughes, and involves us in Daniel's own dilemmas.
Daniel's sacrifices become more interesting than the sacrifices (if that's what they are) of Hughes. We become engaged in the sentimental, romantic world of Daniel, and his anxieties about love. The adolescent uncertainties of his son, Jason, are touching and perfectly observed.
Fishwick now plays another trump. The third part develops a new character, Mrs Kobak, a former matron who has once fallen foul of Hughes, even before his move to Deniston, the school at which his career has mysteriously imploded. Originally an Austrian-Jewish refugee, she has featured briefly in Anna's narrative, but we have not expected her to take centre-stage.
For the third time, Fishwick shows his complete mastery of voice, drawing us into Mrs Kobak's slightly befuddled logic and involving us in her concerns about her daughter and grand-daughter. By now the novel has become a study of difficult relationships between parent and child. Only in the fourth section, in which we switch to Hughes's deputy Rainsford, and his only son, Luke, is there an uncertain diversion. Fishwick creates a set-piece in which a host of chatterers, climbers and creeps is assembled by the woman Luke loves. The novel shifts into the satirical mode of Smashing People. Soon we are back on track with Hughes's wife, whose narrative cleverly takes us back to her traumatised childhood.
We do eventually understand Hughes, but the triumph of Sacrifices is to make the revelations, such as they are, almost incidental. Fishwick writes in a careful, exact and exacting fashion. His analogies, his dialogue, his shifts in tone are all expert. But his tactics are what make Sacrifices so good.
Bill Greenwell's 'Impossible Objects' is due from Cinnamon
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The day a daughter buries her father
Helen Brown reviews Sacrifices by Michael Fishwick.
Helen Brown
12:01AM GMT 12 Mar 2006
Although Michael Fishwick's first novel, Smashing People, was set in the 1980s and his second, Sacrifices, is in the age of Ali G DVDs, the prose and characters on both occasions seems to have wandered, blinking and becardiganed, from the outskirts of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene novels. The secrets slowly revealed in Sacrifices have the old-fashioned and peculiarly English feel of letters steamed open over the kitchen hob, rather than of e-mails intercepted.
The novel opens, with a shiver and a sliver of sunlight, on a long, dark cemetery path. You get a sense of Fishwick's murky mood and mid-20th-century metre in his description of the mourners' slow march, their "black shoes glittering, their black trouser-legs edged like razors. All black cloth and silver buttons and dignified mien."
The landscape is bleak, and the first of several narrators observes it bitterly. "Over the flooded valleys and over the escarpment the wind swings, unable to let the winter go. Prickles of sweat turn to tiny cold globes. This is the day that a daughter buries her father, and my heart is splintering." She has chosen the readings to reprove his eye-avoiding enemies.
Anna's father, Christopher Hughes, was the disgraced headmaster of a distinguished private school called Meniston. A tall, frightening, flintlike man, he inspired the boys he taught, but was hated by his colleagues. Something about the physical description, the man's charisma in communication, the rugged setting and the dark accusations is likely to bring to mind an image of the poet Ted Hughes, also long protected from criticisms of personal misconduct by his daughter Frieda.
It will take the entire novel for us to understand something of this fictional headmaster's disgrace, and the effects of his bullying and his weakness on those who outlived his orbit: a sunken wife, a bereaved deputy, a dismissed matron, an isolated daughter and her former lover, Daniel.
Anna's narrative is the most complex. She takes a perverse pride in being something of a "curious coughdrop": a daddy's girl with little sympathy for her crushed butterfly of a mother. Because she has sacrificed her independence to spend her life at his side, she is the one who must stand in defence of his single-mindedness and sexual indiscretions.
As the "catastrophically vulgar" coffin passes her by, she recalls the life of "an extraordinarily exacting man". She begins with his first posting as housemaster of The Hall: "a clumsy early 19th century edifice that inflicted lifelong damage on the boys passing through its portals, not because it was architecturally dismal, though that would have been reason enough for anyone of sensibility, but because a regime had been allowed to form there which was repugnant to any right-thinking person. I think Daddy did a lot to help those poor innocent boys. Well, innocent? Not so innocent at all, if you ask me. It takes two to tango, as Daddy would one day learn to his cost." You get the picture.
If Anna's narrative is the circle closest to the thrown stone of scandal, then the others work concentrically, moving outwards. They all function fairly well on their own terms, telling melancholy stories, though less intense than Anna's. Daniel is dreamy and lost. The former matron is nearly senile, and rambling, gnawing away on the wrong done. The deputy headmaster's tale of estrangement from his son is nigh on tangential, while the final account of the widow's childhood plunges us into deep waters polluted before Christopher Hughes came into her life.
The result is a cloudy stew of slow-cooked matters. As with the meals served in so many minor public schools, it's quite hard to find the meat. Hughes's account of himself is, perforce, absent. Yet Fishwick keeps bringing the spoon to your lips - the bowl must be emptied like the lives of the novel's characters. In the ambiguous tradition of Graham Greene, the novel ends with two strangers meeting on a bench, one of whom has not yet decided if he should take the path to the church behind them.
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The White Hare by Michael Fishwick - review
A modern folk story of a boy who’s haunted, says Arifa Akbar
Arifa Akbar
Thursday 9 March 2017 10:15
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It turns out that the hare, in storytelling lore, is not just the hapless animal of Aesop’s invention that lost the race against a tortoise. In rural folklore the “white hare” embodies the spirit of a dead jilted lover, returning to wreak revenge on the man who spurned her, or so we learn.
Michael Fishwick, a publisher-turned-novelist, retells the white hare legend in this coming-of-age story which wavers uncertainly between young-adult fiction and a crossover modern folk tale.
Robbie, an unruly adolescent whose mother has died of cancer, moves to the country with his father and begins to channel visions of a dead girl: “A body was hanging from a branch of the oak…” Throw a white hare into the mix of his teen grief and a tragic tale of first-love and you have an intriguing, readable but off-kilter novel.
On the face of it, there are significant resemblances to Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and the ambition to appeal to the same demographic of “kidults”, or so it seems: there is the disappearance of a mother, a boy’s awkward relationship with his father and a mystery to solve that involves an animal.
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But where Haddon’s child protagonist applies a pure, Asperger’s logic to his investigations, Robbie’s psychic detective abilities allow him to see ghosts, with an empathy so strong that he can pick up the pain of the apparitions. And unlike Haddon’s slick, surprising plot, Fishwick’s narrative intrigue falters and then fails.
There is a shocking event in the penultimate chapter but this does not make up for the absence of a penny-dropping moment or a clever reveal. The end sums up what we knew at the beginning: that Robbie has “second sight”, even if he occasionally doubts it. The legend of the white hare plays itself out, with no riffs beyond that.
The novel seems, in the end, to belong in the YA camp. It is strong on showing how grief affects teenagers — Robbie’s visions of the dead are tied up with the loss of his mother — and also how his wayward behaviour is an expression of outrage at his father’s quick transition to another woman.
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His tense relationship with Sheila, the new woman, and her daughters, shows Fishwick to be a keen observer of blended-family life, particularly in Robbie’s relationship with his stepsisters, which is edged with resentment and rivalry but also affection and friendship.
For the YA reader, though, the moral of the story is unclear: maybe it is warning girls of obsessional first loves, or boys of jilting their girlfriends for fear that they might come back to haunt them as hares. Whatever it may be, this is an odd fish of a book.
£10.68, Amazon, Buy it now
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The best sort of magic realism — from Michael Fishwick
His rebellious hero is uprooted to the country — and is entranced by folklore surrounding the appearance of a white hare
Richard Francis
Richard Francis
25 March 2017
9:00 AM
The White Hare Michael Fishwick
Zephyr, pp.239, £10.99
Michael Fishwick’s new novel tells the story of a young man called Robbie, who has been uprooted from his London home after his mother’s death. He finds himself in rural Dorset, where he inhabits a capacious present that has ample room for the intrusions of the mythic past.
Struggling with his loss, Robbie has taken to using arson to express his rage — which is why his father, having rapidly acquired a new partner and a couple of stepdaughters, has moved the family to his old childhood home to make a new start. But it’s an ancient start that this landscape has on offer. Robbie makes friends with a girl called Mags, just a few years older than he is, but a wise woman before her time, and she immediately introduces him to the folklore of the area, and in particular to the poetry associated with hares — creatures that defy fire. Fishwick understands that myths are best served neat, without explanation to dilute and maybe dispel them, so he describes the apparition of a white hare with admirable grace and simplicity, communicating its radiance without striving for literary effect: ‘Her ears were long and tapered like a bird’s wings, her body hunched like a question mark. She was so bright and so near, and there seemed to be a light about her . . .’
This stylistic directness enables him to integrate the varied ingredients of his tale into a single whole. When Robbie describes a sunset as ‘awesome’, the word is exactly poised between modern idiom and ancient wonder. Fishwick combines the pangs of bereavement and the perturbations of adolescence, exploring (often with a comic touch) family tensions as well as the terrors of the deep past, and all the time propelling his narrative along with an adventure that unfolds in the present. Apart from a few pages of clunky exposition about three-quarters of the way through, this is the best sort of magical realism — where the magic enhances the reality, and the realism gives solid immediacy to the magic.
he White Hare by Michael Fishwick
The White Hare by Michael Fishwick
1786690527.jpg
Buy The White Hare by Michael Fishwick at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Teens
Rating: 4/5
Reviewer: John Lloyd
Reviewed by John Lloyd
Summary: Reviving the spirit of Alan Garner, this book doesn't fully convince as regards its location and fantasy – but the characters in it have the power to stand out, and stick around.
Buy? Yes Borrow? Yes
Pages: 192 Date: March 2017
Publisher: Zephyr
ISBN: 9781786690517
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That's the way it was with Mags. She put out his fires. The he in that quote is Robbie, a fourteen-year-old with many problems, mostly related to his mother's passing of cancer and the arson he found to be an attractive hobby while getting his head around her illness. The Mags is another teen, that Robbie has latched onto in his family's new home, deep in the southwest English countryside. Home life is still fraught for Robbie – he has a father he sees as weak-willed, a stepmother, and one step-sister either side of him in age. As a result he likes spending time with either Alice, one of the rare coloured girls at school and like him a newcomer from the cities of Britain, or Mags, who knows all the wild areas thereabouts. But she also knows a heck of a lot that she doesn't want to tell Robbie, even when it starts affecting his dreams…
There is a lot to commend about this book. For one there is what I would call the 'nature writing' aspect, where both the reader and story are richly imbued with the essence of the countryside and the nature, but never in an over-the-top way, so it's there in ways that don't differentiate either from how Robbie would experience it nor from how the teenaged audience of the book would want it. There's also the complexity of Robbie's character, upon which so much hangs here you could almost put it down and return to it surprised it hadn't been in first person all along. I think it could have been easy to make him someone I had no interest in, but there's a depth there that would have escaped a weaker writer, making him much more than the lumpen, reactive, firesetter he might have been.
But on the whole though, this is a genre title, and one with a semblance of a modern Alan Garner book. It's not quite the whole rural psychogeography thing, but it relates to ghosts, the truths related to rustic old wives' tales, and mysterious events – all laid out against a background of flora, fauna and topography. And here I didn't always think a completely high standard had been reached. Things bubble along more than nicely, then Fishwick sits Robbie down at the dining table and has too many people tell him too much he wants to know. We get unlikely things, histories and connections between the key people in this village. And as for the lore behind the drama, wherever it came to our author from, it seemed to be too much – with none of the brevity of commonly-held belief, and more like a full fantasy mythology, to ring true.
That all combined to make a slightly different sense of unsettlement than the author intended I get. But beyond that, I did enjoy what we had here. It certainly is a strong drama, and the balance of putting the rural legend in to the common-or-garden teenaged real-life mentality was finely poised. Character was strong, with a great look at a teenager finding his place in a new world – learning, growing, learning to love running, and so much more – but perhaps that was more noticeable for flaws elsewhere. The last of those I'll mention is that I never got the sense of a true place, and all the numerous locations were too scattershot for me, and not centred on one true-to-life village.
But while I wouldn't jump into re-reading this book, I was certainly grateful that I had. It's got a clarity about what it evokes, and a sterling mood to its pages. It could do very well indeed for this new imprint, and I must thank them for my review copy.
Straight fantasy for the YA/teen audience isn't as strong currently as that for the younger readers – Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake is the exception.
Buy The White Hare by Michael Fishwick at Amazon You can read more book reviews or buy The White Hare by Michael Fishwick at Amazon.co.uk
Interest age: 11+
Reading age: 11-14
Topics related to this book
9-12 years 12+ Myths and legends Bereavement Family Friendship Moving home
The White Hare
Author: Michael Fishwick Illustrator: Emma Ewbank
Publisher: Zephyr (Head of Zeus)
Review
Fourteen-year-old Robbie is what many people would call a troubled boy since his mum died. As well as losing a parent, he’s lost his home in London and moved to the countryside with his dad. Trouble is, Dad’s got a new partner and Robbie doesn’t feel at all welcome – despite their efforts – in dad’s new family, complete with two irritating girls, Jess and Lucy.
But alongside the modern themes of failing to fit in at his new school and in his new family, Robbie’s friend Mags introduces him to something far more ancient and mysterious: the local lore of the white hare, a mythical animal that portends trouble.
A magical and thoughtful tale about the place where old and new communities meet, this is also a sensitive, well-told story about the rifts that occur in families and friendships, and how they can be healed. Fishwick’s writing is fine and stylish and never loses the grip of a slowly building, powerful story.
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The White Hare by Michael Fishwick – Interview
March 23, 2017 7:25 am , mattlibrarian
Hi Michael, welcome to TeenLibrarian. Thank you for giving up your time to answer a few questions about The White Hare.
Before we begin would you please introduce yourself to the audience?
I am a publishing director at Bloomsbury, where I have authors like Peter Frankopan (whose book The Silk Roads was on the bestseller lists for thirty-one weeks last year, William Dalrymple, Frank Dikotter, Adam Sisman, John Simpson, Anna Pavord and many others. Lots of biography, history, memoir. I live in south London, and have a family that includes three now rather tall sons.
I think that I am right in saying that The White Hare is your first novel for young readers?
It is. I’ve written two other, adult novels; Smashing People and Sacrifices.
What inspired you to begin writing for a teen audience?
About fourteen years ago I went with a New Zealand friend to see the film ‘Whale Rider’, where a young girl has to win the trust of her grandfather by proving herself the natural leader of their tribe; she forms a bond with a whale and is ridden out to sea, and indeed under the sea. It made me want to write something that combined human relationships with a magicality that perhaps transcends and heals the fractures in the real world. I think Robbie’s encounter with Mags’s world helps him reconcile himself to the world he finds himself in, and ultimately to forgiveness towards his father.
What feeling did you have when you saw the first finished copy of The White Hare?
As a book comes together you see all sorts of aspects of it; cover ideas, proofs, book proofs, bits of flap copy, the look of the pages, and you know the text back to front from working on it so long. So in a way there’s no surprise when you see the final thing; but it is just amazing anyway, especially when your publisher has taken such care and paid such attention as Zephyr has. And detail such as the light blue silk ribbon and the way in which they have used the cover on the pages within the book, which I didn’t know about, were a source of lovely surprise and delight.
What is the most satisfying part of the writing process for you?
To be honest, it’s simply the writing; making something up on the pages, especially when you have an idea you are confident with and are just working it through. I write in ink in a rather lovely library, so there’s a very pleasurable feeling of seclusion and communing with one’s own thoughts and ideas; I’m always rather astonished that I have any.
TWH is also the first novel published under the Zephyr imprint – do you feel any pressure being their headline author?
I’m very proud to be their launch title, and I so hope it works for them (and me). They’ve done a terrific job, and I feel just the ordinary anxiety about what’s going to happen to my poor little brainchild, whom I hope many will love as I do.
Is any part of the story based on personal experiences?
That’s tricky. Lots of little bits and pieces along the way. Generally, I grew up in south London, as did Robbie, and we’ve been going down to a cottage between Arthur’s Seat on the Stourhead estate and Cadbury Castly, King Arthur’s castle, as Mags tells Robbie for twenty-five years, which I always felt was a deeply magical place (the cottage overlooks the Somerset Levels, which feature in the book).
Do you ever read the works of other Teen/MG authors? If yes what can you recommend?
Apart from Rowling and Patrick Ness, I drew upon my own favourites: Alan Garner, John Masefield and Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave (a friend of mine spotted a bit of Jez Butterworth in there, too).
How would you describe The White Hare to pique the interest of a potential reader?
That’s a hard question and something I am still working on! To any readers out there I would say that The White Hare is, at its core, a coming-of-age story. I would love the reader to join me on Robbie and Mags’ journey as they learn about what it means to love in a world where this is the bravest thing a person can do. And if you enjoy my story as I tell it, then I have succeeded in all I set out to do.
Do you ever visit reading groups in schools and libraries? If yes what is the best way to get hold of you?
Not so far, but very happy to do so. You can get in touch with the Publicity Director at Head of Zeus, Suzanne Sangster.
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The White Hare by Michael Fishwick
The White Hare by Michael Fishwick
Competition published on March 10, 2017.
A lost boy. A dead girl, and one who is left behind.
Robbie doesn’t want anything more to do with death, but life in a village full of whispers and secrets can’t make things the way they were.
When the white hare appears, magical and fleet in the silvery moonlight, she leads them all into a legend, a chase, a hunt. But who is the hunter and who the hunted?
In The White Hare, Michael Fishwick deftly mingles a coming-of-age story with mystery, myth and summer hauntings.
Read an extract
**We have a copy of The White Hare to give away – scroll down for your chance to win**
The White Hare by Michael Fishwick is the launch title for Head of Zeus’ new children’s imprint, Zephyr and we knew YA fan Jade Craddock would be keen to have a first look. Read her review below:
Michael Fishwick’s The White Hare is the launch title for Head of Zeus’s new children’s imprint, Zephyr, and it sets the bar very high. Unlike the typical middle grade/YA novel of the moment, which tend to fall into either the contemporary or dystopian/fantasy genres, Fishwick’s novel is positively literary. Not in a pretentious or exclusionary way, but in an ambitious, distinctive way that I think is great for teen readers, introducing them to a different style of writing and reading. Indeed, there’s a very natural lyricism to the novel that again is perhaps not of the typical YA fare, as well as a strong mythical and metaphorical element that encourages readers to engage their imaginations fully. This is not to dismiss other books and genres aimed at children, but purely to acknowledge the importance and place of a book like Fishwick’s, which opens up a whole other literary world for younger readers, which can only be a good thing.
At its heart the book is a coming-of-age story centred on Robbie, whose life has been turned upside down not only by the death of his mother but by his father’s subsequent relationship with Sheila and the family’s move from the inner city world where Robbie has spent all of his life to the quiet rural backwaters where his father grew up. Robbie’s readjustment is made somewhat easier by his friendship with the enigmatic Mags, but the appearance of a strange and mysterious white hare and his run-in with a pair of rapscallion local brothers ensure that his new life is full of curiosities.
Fishwick’s depiction of place and landscape as well as his creation of the atmosphere and mythology of the novel is excellent, if at times the mythology itself requires some inspiration. The dialogue was occasionally a bit erratic and the pace was pretty runaway but by and large this is a novel of high quality and creativity. I do wonder what the target market of teenage readers will make of it in an arena saturated by much more prosaic works but it is exactly the sort of book that deserves to figure in the reading lives of young people.
Jade Craddock, 4/4
For our stop on the blog tour for The White Hare we’re featuring an ‘author meets reviewer’ Q&A between Jade and Michael Fishwick:
JC: I believe The White Hare is your first novel for a younger audience, what motivated you to make the leap from adult to children’s fiction? And as an author what is the best thing about writing for younger readers?
MF: About fourteen years ago I went with a New Zealand friend to see the film ‘Whale Rider’, where a young girl has to win the trust of her grandfather by proving herself the natural leader of their tribe; she forms a bond with a whale and is ridden out to sea, and indeed under the sea. It made me want to write something that combined human relationships with a magicality that perhaps transcends and heals the fractures in the real world. I think Robbie’s encounter with Mags’s world helps him reconcile himself to the world he finds himself in, and ultimately to forgiveness towards his father. I think this kind of writing is only really feasible in children’s literature; it’s something to do with the way the imagination is allowed to flourish and empower, releasing the reader from the adult world. It was a challenge to write about a grieving fourteen-year old, to get the balance right, and I did want to write it for adults too, for anyone who likes to get caught up in a story.
JC: A lot of fiction aimed at younger/ teen readers at the moment tends to be less lyrical and mythical than your novel, was bringing this sort of reading experience to this age group important to you in writing this novel?
MF: In preparation for writing the book I reread old favourites of mine: Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, John Masefield’s The Midnight Folk, Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave, among others. I was really simply hoping to imbue my novel with the richness and intensity of those kind of works.
JC: Are you encouraged by the books that are available for children/teens, or do you think there’s more to be done?
MF: I read to my three sons until they were each eleven, and though in their earlier years we read contemporary books, as they grew older we read works that I had loved: C.S Lewis, Masefield and Garner, Tolkien, Arthur Ransom, Richmal Crompton and the beloved Moomins, etc. The advent of J.K.Rowling was greeted at the time with a universal hooray, partly because she got children away from games and TV to books; and her books were astonishingly creative; one did feel a new golden age had arrived. And children’s publishing is very vibrant and innovative and is a very passionate and enthusiastic community. There will always be more to be done, and it’s good to have variety so that all tastes are catered for.
JC: The White Hare relies quite a lot on imagery and metaphor, what do you hope younger/teen readers take from the book?
MF: I think I simply would love them to find an imaginative engagement with world of the novel; I often think enchantment is a quality of all good novels and poems and plays (and music and painting), and I would love them to find that quality in The White Hare.
JC: The hare itself is intrinsic to the novel, what was it about this creature that attracted you to using it as the central motif in the story?
MF: Its wildness, its otherness, its mystery, its elusiveness, its inherent magic; and everyone loves hares, the world over.
JC: What does the white hare symbolise to you?
MF: Well, it’s the legend of the white hare, which involves the brutality of love, I suppose; Fran’s broken-heartedness, and the desire for revenge; as Mrs Allardyce hints at, it could be said to stand for all the mistreated women of the world, and so when he sees it sometimes merges into a succession of women’s faces, until his mother tells him to learn forgiveness: ‘It doesn’t have to be this way.’ So love and loss, but also redemption and healing.
JC: The countryside also contributes significantly to the novel, was there a particular area that conjured this world in your mind before you wrote the novel?
MF: Yes, where the book is set; an area of Somerset which we as a family have been visiting for twenty-five years between Alfred’s Tower on the Stourhead estate and King Arthur’s Camelot, Cadbury Castle, and on the edge of the Somerset Levels. Bringing up children is a magical thing, and I always felt this part of the world was deeply magical, too.
JC: The city/urban landscape tends to be used more readily for children’s/teen novels than the countryside, aside from the fact that the white hare is more realistic in a rural environment, how important to your novel was setting the story away from an urban environment? And how did this setting contribute to Robbie’s development?
MF: I think you’re right, using the hare necessitated the countryside, but I could set up a tension in Robbie’s life between his love of the town and the world he now finds himself in, with a family he doesn’t like, grief-stricken and with a father who seems detached, finding solace and relief and distraction and friendship in the natural world. And I welcomed the opportunity to write about nature, which has always been important to me as a source of regeneration and healing.
JC: The so-called ‘issues’ elements of the novel – Robbie’s misbehaviour, his mother’s death, family dynamics etc. – are given a different significance through the prism of the novel’s use of imagery, myth and metaphor rather than tackling them fundamentally as the epicentre of the story, was it important to you that the novel didn’t just become an examination of these issues but wove them into something more literary?
MF: Absolutely; I wanted it to work on the differing levels of the seen and the unseen; the world is both what it is and a source of endless discovery of things you didn’t know about, and learning of alternative realities, which do and don’t exist, is both necessary and exciting.
JC: What will you take away from the experience of writing The White Hare?
MF: It was a long process, and went through many stages, so apart from simply loving the writing, especially as it improved (much harder to get the tone of a children’s novel right than an adult one) I relish the discovery that one can rework and rework until you shape the novel you had wanted all along to write.
Check out the rest of the tour and find out more about this magical novel.
We have a copy of the book to give away – for your chance to win simply fill in the form below:
The Competition is closed.
About the author
Michael Fishwick is a publisher and author of two acclaimed novels, Smashing People and Sacrifices. He lives in London and Somerset, where the book is set.