NOTES ON NOBODY’S CHILDREN
WARNING: This page contains substantial SPOILERS for Nobody’s Children.
NOTES ON BENNY
Although I’ve only been writing for her since 2004, I’ve been a huge fan of our heroine, Bernice Summerfield, since her first appearance in Virgin’s Doctor Who New Adventures back in 1992. One thing I particularly love is her voice: slangy yet erudite, sarcastic yet sincere, galactically cosmopolitan yet also fundamentally English.
When I write dialogue for Benny – and even more so when I’m inside her head writing her diary – words and even jokes appear by themselves, quite as if I were having a conversation with somebody else. She’s a joy to write.
For ‘Nursery Politics’, though, I wanted to try something more difficult.
Back in 2002 when I first pitched the idea that became my Faction Paradox novel Of the City of the Saved..., I wanted to write it in the first person. Eighteen first people, to be precise. There are that many viewpoint characters in the novel, and I was hoping to have them each tell their part of the story in their own distinctive words.
The Faction Paradox range editor, Lawrence Miles, convinced me that this was altogether too ambitious, and that writing about my characters in the third person – sometimes in their own voice but always with that extra objectivity of distance – would be a much better idea.
He was right, of course. But one of the advantages of a novella is that you can experiment with techniques which might be too risky for a full-length novel.
For most of ‘Nursery Politics,’ then, I deliberately distanced myself from Benny, showing her only through others’ eyes. Admittedly most of those others were politicians of one kind of another, and their voices were less diverse than those of my cross-section of a metacivilisation in Of the City of the Saved.... However, I’ve tried to make them all distinct from one another – effusive or reserved, aggressive or wistful, dry or emotional as seemed appropriate. (And then there’s Jason Kane, of course.)
This whole novella triptych was to be about conflicting points of view, cultural and personal, and I wanted to get across the idea that, while Bernice has her own rich internal life, others view her according to their own diverse relationships with her. Like the Mim, and like most politicians, she shows different people contrasting sides of her complex personality: enemy or friend; ally or accuser; mother, daughter, wife. It’s a deliberate antithesis of the first-person approach used in many of the other Benny stories.
Only at the end of the novella do I allow the reader to see inside Benny’s head, once again through the mechanism of her diary extracts.
Hopefully, the sudden return of intimacy should underscore the emotional resolution of the story. Or something.
- Notes on Nobody’s Children.
- Back to Notes on the Triptych.
- Forward to Notes on the Family.
- Buy Nobody’s Children at Peculiar Tomes.
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