Readers Place

Author Q&A

Margo Lanagan answers questions about her novel Tender Morsels:

Can you tell me a bit about the UK reaction to the publication of Tender Morsels?

Well, the Observer started it all, with a gasp of horror about the content of the novel, but it also seemed to set the modus operandi of the subsequent articles by the Daily Mail and Sunday Express, i.e. outrage that the book was aimed at children (which it is not); and refusal to consider the themes of the novel, which are all related to the protection of children from the evils or unpleasant things in the world.

There’s also been a lot of piling of responsibilities onto authors, publishers and cover designers that rightfully belong to parents, such as the responsibility to stay in touch with the reading material their teenagers are exploring, and to young adults themselves, to regulate their own reading to the extent of putting aside books that they’re not ready for. I have faith that young people will continue to protect themselves from material they find too confronting, but some parents’ comments about what they expect of publishers have been dismaying. ‘Make it possible for us to judge a book by its cover,’ they’ve been bleating. Well, no, people. Do your homework if you have so little faith in your children’s own instincts.

Why do you think it has caused so much controversy?

Well, it’s only caused controversy in the UK; in my own country (okay, so it’s not published as a YA book there yet – we’ll see what happens next February) there’s been no such reaction, and in the US, where it’s only a YA book, the novel has had an excellent critical reception and won a Printz Honor, one of the highest awards in the land. It’s only the British tabloids that have been clutching their pearls in horror, and it looks to me as if they’re wilfully misrepresenting both my novel and the young adult publishing industry for the kind of shock value that they accuse me and David Fickling Books of pursuing. There really is no other explanation. It’s an imaginary storm in an nonexistent teacup.

Can you tell me about the inspiration behind Tender Morsels? Comparisons have been drawn with Snow White and Rose-Red, do you agree with these?

Well, yes. If you read the acknowledgments at the end of the book, you will see a reference to that story. I used the Grimm Brothers’ version, as well as the original story that they bastardised, The Ungrateful Dwarf by Caroline Stahl, as the basic structure of my novel’s plot. The inspiration came from other things, including a TV documentary about Bear Day, a spring ritual in the town of Plats-de-Mollo in the Pyrenees. All sorts of influences and events play into a novel during its gestation and birth, and an author only knows a few of them, but the dark weirdness of traditional fairy tales was one of those influences, for Tender Morsels. Fairy tales are not innocent, harmless tales – we’ve always used them to tell serious truths about the world and how we should behave in it.

The book is very intense and challenging at times, almost claustrophobic. Why did you decide to write Tender Morsels in such a way?

Because I like to read books that are dense, that challenge me, and that invite me, almost as soon as I’ve finished them, to start again to get more of the juice out of them. I don’t read for entertainment; I don’t read to pass the time. I read because reading is a way to live more lives than the one I’ve been confined to, and to better understand the lives around me.

So when I set myself to writing, I need to feel I’m producing a reading experience that I, and readers like me, would enjoy. At the end I want people to feel that their own lives have been expanded a little in the reading. It may not be a fun experience, or always a pleasant one, but I would hope that it’s a fascinating one.

And there is a lot of beauty in the book, as well; it’s not all dire. I’ve worked very hard to balance the dark with the light, and it’s annoying to have commentators focus entirely on the darkness. There’s beauty and humour in here too.

Your voice and dialect is very unique throughout the novel, was that hard to maintain?

No, once I’d established the different voices, it was a straightforward matter to keep them true to themselves. More difficult was NOT falling into similar turns of phrase in other stories, after I’d finished the novel! It’s part of the enjoyment of writing, working out the points of view and the phrasing and word choice that will communicate what I want to communicate; it’s very pleasurable to work my way towards voices that speak in the right way to get the story told.

There is plenty of love and lust in Tender Morsels, could you tell us more about the complex relationship of Liga and Ramstrong? Annie and Dought? Branza and Wolf?

Pretty much all I want to say about those relationships is present in the novel already; I don’t know that I can add much to that. However, I note that your question is about the more healthy relationships in the novel; there are elements of strong attachment, loyalty and comradeship in all these relationships. Annie’s and Dought’s relationship was perhaps the most fun to write, because they were such strong, flawed and self-seeking personalities, and they had such colourful voices.

To what extent would you say Tender Morsels is a fairytale of our generation. Representing our narcissistic, greedy, and selfish culture but also our endless search for redemption and fulfilment?

To not much extent at all. I would say that since the Enlightenment we’ve found more sophisticated ways to pass on knowledge and wisdom than fairytales, although these still carry their essential truths down from the past and are fascinating for that. I would say that anyone who thought Tender Morsels represented our narcissistic etc. had not read the novel terribly closely.

Tender Morsels is not a fairytale; for a start, it’s nearly 500 pages long in the British editions. Additionally, it is much more complex than any fairytale, and can be read in a number of ways. Its main themes have more to do with protection of children, particularly female children, and with people’s different ways of coming to terms with the malign influences in and of their society.

You adamantly defend this book as YA, when writing Tender Morsels did you always have this audience in mind?

Actually I don’t adamantly defend the book as YA, but I do adamantly defend publishers’ rights to publish Tender Morsels in whichever market seems logical to them. I didn’t write the book as a young adult book, particularly, but I was careful which scenes I wrote explicitly, because I was aware that in some markets it was likely to be published as young adult, and I knew that the main taboos in that area were to do with sexual scenes. But also, including more detail in those scenes would have made them too strong to stomach – they were already powerful enough events without readers’ noses being rubbed in ugly move-by-move descriptions. There was no need for readers to have to experience every humiliation I visited on Liga; all I needed to do was indicate what had happened and let the power of the facts do its work.

What does Tender Morsels represent? Who is the tender morsel?

Liga, Branza and Urdda (as well as all the young women of St Olafred’s who are unlucky enough not to have male protectors, or magical powers) are all tender morsels, brought up to be vulnerable to the taunts and even attacks of the young men of the village, to exploitation by such people as Collaby Dought, to scoldings and judgement by St Olafred’s gossips, and to tremendous self-doubt in the face of the challenges thrown them by the real world.

Which is not to say that they’re the only vulnerable people in the book – this isn’t a feminist tract. There are an equal number of blokes that the world treats badly: Ramstrong, Bullock Oxman and Noer. But Liga is the person who is really exploited, and Branza comes close, and Urdda is in danger, although she remains blissfully unaware of it.

Could you tell us a bit about what you are working on at the moment?

I’m working on two new novels, one about selkies and one set in colonial Australia.