Judging day! I woke, feeling like a young child on Christmas morning: how often can one spend a whole day talking with one's peers about the year's best new fiction? Beverley Naidoo, Bali Rai and I, under the guardian eye of Julia Eccleshare, had a very cheerful and fruitful time of it.
As soon as we addressed the stack of books, the underlying trends and motifs began to come into focus. It's plain that the tide is flowing very strongly for issue realism but has largely ebbed for adventure realism. And again, adults (when present at all) are often given a horrible mauling for being self-interested, short-sighted, unreliable, even violent. If we're to believe some children's authors, the gap between children and their parents has never been wider, and the bridge of love and trust is extremely shaky.
We were struck by the way in which the outsider was the driving force in several of the books we rated highly - the idiot savant, such as Marcus Sedgwick's wolf-girl in The Dark Horse (Orion), Sonya Hartnett's mole-boy and Susan Cooper's mute boy who is in tune with Gaia and in the end more powerful than concrete and money (Green Boy , Bodley Head).
A recurring sub-theme was the nature of story, and therefore the relationship of art to life. Cooper writes of how children, as custodians of word and story, are "the weavers of rebirth". But for all this, the quality of writing was extremely variable. Some was downright sloppy, much was no better than depressingly serviceable. Only a handful of writers thrilled us by treating language for what it is: a wonder and a glory, endlessly plastic, a sort of music.
I know it's a familiar cry, but what has become of the editor who actually worked on a text and improved it? Of course there are a few shining exceptions, but the species is almost extinct. This is crucial, isn't it? If children's authors and editors are not guardians of the wordhoard, who is?
We had no difficulty in deciding on a longlist, and little trouble in establishing a shortlist. We liked Linda Newbery's The Shell House (David Fickling Books) very much for its sense of history, and for engaging calmly and authoritatively with big issues - class, sexuality, religion, free will. Elizabeth Laird's intense Jake's Tower (Macmillan), in which idealised and actual father come face to face, is strongly narrated and movingly explores vulnerability and resilience. And Terry Pratchett's parable, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (Doubleday), already a prizewinner, is not only very funny but richly imaginative and finely written. But in the end, we agreed that the choice came down to three books. And at this point, of course, the temperature began to rise.
Although it's set in no specified time or place, The Dark Horse is plainly the work of a man well-read in Norse myth - and with it Marcus Sedgwick joins the small troupe of British writers inspired by the glorious, racy, ice-bright literature of early northwest Europe. We found the power of his writing absolutely compelling, the questions he raises about crossing boundaries and identity fascinating, and the inclusion of his own rather murky illustrations a complete mistake.
Keith Gray's Warehouse (Red Fox) reads as if it actually happened. It's a wonderfully convincing, funny, hurtful, pulsing account of a society within society - a group of young outcasts living together in a northern dockland town, bound by loyalties, riven by betrayal. It's foul and grim yet warm and moral.
And that leaves Sonya Hartnett. Here and in the US she is what the Americans call a "debut novelist", but she's already well-known in her native Australia, and no wonder. Was it Hardy who wrote: "Childlike, I danced in a dream..."? That, anyhow, is the flavour of her remarkable book, Thursday's Child (Walker Books) in which Harper Flute (now 21) remembers her childhood on an outback farm during the Depression. Harsh days, and days where little happens, and yet for Harper each ordinary hour is charged and vivid. So is Hartnett's writing. She is superb at describing people, places, states (especially childhood) and atmospheres. Harper's little brother, Tin, a sort of dwarf-mole, digs and digs, networking the farm with tunnels, and the family reckon he is digging to "get safe"; Hartnett, meanwhile, is using Tin and his burrowing to layer and deepen her story.
Thursday's Child is original, visionary and deeply moving; it's tough-minded yet immensely kind; and it prints itself indelibly on the mind. I would have been heartbroken had it not won this year's prize.