DIFFERENT ways of ‘being’ and the “permeable border” between human and animal, nature and artifice, story and dream, are the fairly grown-up themes permeating Booker longlisted author Sam Thompson’s latest novel for 8-12-year-olds: The Forest Yet to Come.
It is the third instalment of the Belfast-based writer’s award-winning Wolfstongue saga which tells the story of Silas, a boy who can communicate with wolves – written at the time to help Thompson’s 11-year-old son, Odhrán, overcome speech difficulties.
In The Forest Yet to Come, the use of language – and value of silence – also plays a role, this time through the voices of two neurodivergent siblings, Sally and Faolan, who find themselves in a mysterious land which, according to the writer, “could be our distant past or our far future”.
“Sally and her brother are growing up in a fairytale land where benevolent spirits protect the village and savage wolves prowl in the woods – but they do not belong there,” says Thompson, whose adult novel Communion Town was longlisted for the Booker prize in 2012. “When a trickster, a stranger called Reynard, arrives, claiming to know the secret of the children’s origin, they start out on a journey that will take them through the dangers of the Forest, into the company of wolves and beyond the boundaries of the world...”
Written again with inspiration close to home – his eldest child, Oisín (now 13) was diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder - The Forest Yet to Come touches once more on a the challenges of language, but also explores how the language we use “creates the world around us”.
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“When Oisín first got his diagnosis, it was incredibly helpful to have a set vocabulary that helped us make sense of the things we were struggling with,” says the father-of-three (Thompson and his wife, Caoileann, also have a 10-year-old daughter, Sadhbh), “but I have also become aware of how that vocabulary has become less meaningful for us and is no longer a good way to describe Oisín - or any of us.
“It has left me with a strong interest in the language we use to describe the neurodiversity of our family - and the diversity of neurology and perception in general. It became more obvious in our family life how everyone was becoming their own person, but just in a different way.”
As well as language, he says The Forest Yet to Come is also about the way stories about the world around us affect not just humans, but also the world of “non-human beings”. His hope is to open the door to “a kind of dream world” that readers can enter – “a dream world where we can imagine our relationship with the natural world and with all the non-humans we share the world with – and we can imagine different ways they could be”.
These “different ways” take the form of animals, of shadowy spirits - ‘The Shapes’ – and of shifting, timeless, “reincarnated lives”.
When Oisín first got his diagnosis, it was incredibly helpful to have a set vocabulary that helped us make sense of the things we were struggling with... It has left me with a strong interest in the language we use to describe the neurodiversity of our family...
— Sam Thompson
In a section towards the end of the book, the young Faolan asks if one life could be an echo of another and concludes: “Perhaps, at every moment we shed echoes of ourselves, echoes of echoes, leaving our shapes behind us to wander in the Forest that is there forever…”
“What Faolan discovers is that he is a kind of echo of Silas, the main character in Wolfstongue and the dad in The Fox’s Tower,” Thompson explains. “It is almost like Silas has been reincarnated as Faolan, while Willow [Silas’s daughter in the second book] has been reincarnated as Sally.
“Yes, it’s a bit mysterious, definitely, and, as an author, you do worry sometimes if things will be confusing in some ways, if is all going to make sense to everyone the way it makes sense to you… but while I think this book does have some grown–up things in it, some slightly scary things, I have found that no-one seems to worry about that too much.
“You can be quite worried about it, but then you look at the book and think, ‘Well, you are a living thing now and I just have to let you be and see what happens...’”
Interestingly, as an atheist, he finds writing a children’s fantasy novel layered with a distinct sense of otherworldliness a creative diversion from his own unwavering lack of belief.
“That aspect really interests me in writing fiction, even though I don’t have religious beliefs, as such,” says the English-born writer who teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University.
“I was brought up in a secular culture in my family, but I also had a lot of religious people in my wider family - my parents both came from backgrounds where religion was very important.
“I don’t have those belief systems myself, but I am fully aware that human beings are religious creatures and I can absolutely recognise those spiritual impulses, so for me, fiction writing is actually all about that – it’s about a kind of secular place where you can think about all that and explore the things you can’t see.
“I guess I have always liked that as a reader – things that are a little bit weird and a little bit fantastical in a surprising way. Those things feel like home territory for me, as a reader, and I guess I’m always looking for that feeling in the stuff I write, as well – the presence of something else, something a little bit otherworldly.”
Something very much of this world, though, of the reality here and now, is technology, particularly Artificial Intelligence, which the author has symbolised through the ‘Shapes’ – technologies that we make our slaves but that in turn enslave us.
The Shapes are “sort of technologies” that have become so pervasive and powerful that we no longer recognise them as technology – instead, “it is a kind of magic”.
“They appear to be these nature spirits, these benign powers which make everything very easy for the human beings,” Thompson continues. “It seems to me that the way people live in the story is the way we live - in a world where we are sustained by this technological magic that seems to be entirely beyond us, in a way.
“We live with astonishing capacities to interfere with the world and make it as we would imagine it to be - a world where we all have enough to eat, where we are all safe, where we are all at peace – and we do our best to kind of talk that story into existence.
“Think about coronavirus – these moments come and suddenly the story of the world as you know it turns out to be a lot more fragile than you thought. You realise the solid pillars of reality was just a story we were telling ourselves.”
The Forest Yet to Come, written by Sam Thompson and illustrated by Anna Tromop, is published by Little Island Books, £9.99