ROYAL TROUBLE
England’s ex-poet laureate Andrew Motion is sticking with writing novels these days
The New World Andrew Motion Doubleday
All Andrew Motion wanted to do was to tell the world through poetry that Prince William was a “new” kind of royal figure. And that got him into trouble. Back in 2003, writing about the royals was part of his job as England’s poet laureate, and he was acutely aware he was following in the footsteps of such previous luminaries in the post as William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson.
So he faithfully fulfilled his duties, writing poems about matters of public import, including the obligatory ones about the royal family — for example, the 100th birthday of the late Queen Mother and the wedding of Charles and Camilla.
But it was Prince William’s 21st birthday that landed him in hot water.
Motion — also a popular novelist whose latest book is The New World — can now laugh about the commotion he caused.
“As you know, the laureate is expected to write about events in the royal calendar, and I can say — with all due respect to my former employer — that they can be difficult to do for reasons I don’t even need to elaborate,” Motion tells Postmedia.
“So as a kind of joke, I wrote a sort of jaunty rap-like thing on William’s birthday.”
The result was a multi-stanza poem that began: Better stand back Here’s an age attack But the second in line Is dealing with it fine That poem sparked the most controversial moments of Motion’s 10-year laureateship. Both the public and critics lambasted him.
He cheerfully survived that storm — but admits the post of poet laureate posed real challenges.
“The most obvious one is that the expectation is always there that you’re going to write poems about things you frankly might not want to write about very much and that are not inspirational in the most definitive way.
“So when somebody rings you up and says that there’s an outbreak of foot and mouth disease and the Today program wants a poem about it by Thursday, it must be about foot and mouth disease — and no messing around. But I’m very much of the view that the best poems get written, not by going in the front door of the subject, but through the side or around the back or down the chimney ... to make it resonate in unexpected ways.”
The job’s peculiar mandate finally led to a frightening writer’s block.
“My poetic system seemed to go into a nose dive. I think probably what was happening was that I was protecting myself as much as I could against the damage I felt its demands were having on my writing.”
Today, however, six years after he stepped down, his poetic output is soaring. Furthermore, Motion is enjoying a fascinating parallel life as a novelist — writing highlypraised sequels to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, with the most recent, The New World, now available in Canada from Doubleday.
He has been writing fiction since 1989, but it was the publication in 2012 of Silver, the first of the sequels, that attracted international attention and an enthusiastic adult readership.
Motion was a still a young man when he began thinking about the “untied loose ends” in Treasure Island. He mused about the possibility of revisiting the world of Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver in a new book — “but it took me about 30 years to pluck up the courage to do it.”
Silver is set in 1802 and deals with the return to Treasure Island of young Jim Hawkins, son of the narrator of the original Stevenson novel, and the feisty Natty Silver, daughter of his father’s roguish companion, Long John. This adventure yarn, about the catastrophic results of their search for Squire Trelawney’s fabled bar of silver, had a cliffhanger ending — a shipwreck off the coast of what is now Texas. That’s where The New World takes up the story.
The new novel sends young Jim and Natty on a picaresque adventure in an alien world — a world in which they’re almost murdered by one savage tribe of natives and befriended by another, in which they become a part of a bizarre travelling troupe of entertainers while continuing to be stalked by the vengeful Black Cloud, an adversary of almost mythic horror.
“The road to hell is paved with bad sequels and prequels,” Motion warns. “But I felt the ones that succeed do so because they take a significant step away from the original ... They use it as a platform to bounce onto something sympathetic to the original but still distant.”
He’s chatting on the phone from his new office at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, where he takes up a professorship this fall.
“It’s a wonderful job, and it would be very hard to turn it down under any circumstances. There’s also the fact that I’m 63 years old and I wanted another adventure in what will probably be the last part of my working life.”
His decade as poet laureate was also an adventure. For his services to the country and the Crown, he received a modest annual stipend of £5,000 (about $10,000) plus “this notorious vat of sack” — a much-honoured tradition that sees the poet laureate receive the equivalent of 630 bottles of sherry.
“I don’t want any one to think I’m sorry I did it. I’m not. I’m very pleased to have done it, but I was also very pleased to give it up.”
The road to hell is paved with bad sequels and prequels. But I felt the ones that succeed do so because they take a significant step away from the original.