Geraldine McCaughrean: Of ice and men

Geraldine McCaughrean's new novel The White Darkness is her first for teenagers: a departure for this much-garlanded children's author, who earlier this year won her third Whitbread Children's Book Award in as many decades, for Not the End of the World.

The heroine of The White Darkness is Symone, a shy, teenage misfit who lives life mostly in her head, where Captain "Titus" Oates, hero of Scott's ill-fated expedition to the South Pole, is her constant companion, adviser and soul-mate. But Sym's timid outlook on life is to change for ever, when her "Uncle" Victor tricks her into accompanying him on an utterly ludicrous but highly perilous quest to find the secret world which, he is convinced, lies beneath the Antarctic ice.

"The White Darkness was born out of a line of Kafka which I heard Anne Fine quote at a talk she gave: 'A book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us'. It is the perfect metaphor for why I write. And I've never enjoyed writing a book so much as this one. It's odd, discursive, a bit off the wall, and Symone is a cross between me and my daughter.

"I wanted to write about the imagination, because that's what I talk about when I go into schools. To quote Paradise Lost, 'The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven'. Our imagination is the nearest thing we have to the transporter room on the Starship Enterprise. Children can go there to be someone else, to get away from worry, to learn about the world. It's portable magic, and it's a crime to let it atrophy. For this book, I rummaged about in the cupboards of my own imagination, pairing hypothetical socks.

"I am a bit prey to the British obsession with ice, which Francis Spufford explores so beautifully in his book I May Be Some Time. It holds a fascination for me too. Originally I was going to write about walking across the Bering Straits, but then Antarctica took over. And I had a thing about Oates as well--he had always been stuck at the back of my imagination.

"I did a huge amount of research. I asked a group of 14-year-old girls at my daughter's school how and when they used their imagination, and discovered that they do still use it for quite major things. Sym is bombarded by teenage gossip and hype, but just doesn't want to be part of the mating game. But that's the one thing you can't admit, you can't say you don't like sex. The White Darkness is a meteorological phenomenon, when everything is 'whited-out'. It's also an allegory for the teenage years when you have things coming at you from all directions, but still can't see the way ahead.

Disorienting the readers

"I do like raising the expectations of my readers and then disappointing them. So when Uncle Victor and Symone are in Paris, you think 'Oh no, he's some kind of horrible paedophile', then you think 'Ah, no, he's okay, he's fine', and then--'Oh no he's not! He's seriously mad!' In the same way, I try to raise the expectation that Sym is going to fall in love with a nice blond boy--but not a bit of it! And then there's Titus--will he turn out to be real?

"I've never been to Antarctica. I did read a lot about it and I hung on the words of everyone I met who'd been there. I'm told it's a ravishing, life-changing place, but one whose sole aim in life is to kill you as soon as possible. So I think I've now talked myself out of ever going!

"Usually I start my books at the beginning and work chronologically, but not this time. I wrote lots of bits in advance, such as crucial conversations, because I needed to capture them as they came into my head. I've never done that before. So for a while I had bits of the book left, right and centre until I joined everything up.

"The White Darkness is a book of discovery and exploration about the allegorical journey of the soul out of the pack ice. I was nervous of it at first, but it was actually wonderful to write, because it felt like the good old days when I used to write as a hobby. It was almost as if somebody else was writing it, like the Muses. That's why it's quite bizarre and zany, because I didn't have great control over it. But I loved every minute of it. It was like eating my way through a box of chocolates."

Caroline Sanderson

Geraldine McCaughrean

The White Darkness (OUP, 1st September, h/b, £10.99, 0192719831)