I read Roald Amundsen’s diary, guide books to Antarctica, books about The Ice in all its forms, novels set there, catalogs selling cold-weather clothing and equipment, websites about Symmes’s Hole, and absolutely everything I could find about Lawrence Oates.
But my most useful material came from people I met who had been there on business or their own holiday-of-a-lifetime. Take Craig, who won a grant to compose an Antarctic symphony out of natural noises; he had himself lowered into a crevasse to make music on the ice leaves at the rim. He told me the sound an icebreaker makes as it cuts through sea ice. Take Richard, who saw a film cameraman’s camera accidentally brush his cheek and have to be cut away. By the time I had finished researching, I knew I did not ever want to go to a place so very determined to kill me at the first opportunity. I equally knew, from what people had told me, that Antarctica changes the way you see the world, changes the way you feel and think—that it is more terrifying and wonderful than anyplace else.
Making People
I rarely base the characters in my books on people I know. It’s not a good idea. My husband, John, thought that Uncle Victor was based on him because he is inclined to mutter “Say again?” But I ask you, would I base an evil maniac on my nearest and dearest?
Often, though, I do use a real-life “template” to help me construct a main character. It is usually an actor whose face, expressions, bearing, and voice I can study and learn so well that I can then picture and hear that person in my imagination. Why actors? Because, in times of stress or strong emotion, they show more in their faces than real people do. They react with the whole of their bodies. The actor Richard Morant, who acted Captain Oates in The Last Place on Earth (the video Sym watches), was the template for Titus: I made a point of meeting him, and he became a great friend. That is why The White Darkness is dedicated to him (and Titus Oates, of course).
Getting to the end of a book is like a little bereavement because the author has to say good-bye to her characters forever. It is as though they trekked off to some distant continent from which they will never return.
The Facts and the Fiction
There used to be an expression in the States equivalent to “You’re joking,” “You’re kidding me,” or “No way.” In the early days of the last century, people would exclaim “Symmes’s Hole!” meaning they didn’t believe a word. But in his day, John Cleves Symmes (1780–1829) very nearly convinced the US Senate that his “Hollow Earth” theory was worth investigating. They came close to financing an expedition to explore Antarctica and find the larger of two entrances to the Earth’s hollow interior.
Globe within globe within globe, warm and fertile and inhabited by animals: that was how Symmes pictured the planet, all illuminated by sunlight entering aslant through the holes on top and bottom. He was not the first to think it; Sir Edmund Haley (of comet fame) had a similar theory. Symmes never made the trip south himself to investigate, though he toured the States endlessly with his little wooden model of the hollow planet and gave lectures. His words convinced many people, including the later polar explorer Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd. Novelists seized on his ideas to create early science fiction.
Symmes was not a con artist; he believed utterly in his theory, though it beggared and exhausted him and thousands ridiculed him. He was not a fool, either, but intelligent, sincere, and persuasive. It was just that every time his theory was shown to conflict with science, his agile reasoning could find a way of squaring the conflicting arguments.
His statue stands in Hamilton, Ohio. A Hollow Earth Society still exists, in Stanford, Missouri.
An Interview with Geraldine McCaughrean
How does a book of yours begin life?
I prefer not to plan at all and not to know ahead of time what is going to happen. Since I write adventure, I like to be in the same frame of mind as my reader—wanting to know what happens next and how things are going to turn out. That’s important. It gives me a sense of whether a story is moving along or standing still or just lurching from one scene to the next like a country bus.
I do tend to plan “milestones” along the way—various scenes and events that I want to include, and roughly what my climax will be. If a plot gets very complicated, then I do have to step back and plan, of course.
To say I don’t plan is not the same as saying I don’t prepare. I usually build up a card file of index cards with ideas, characters, and useful information on them. Invariably, research for a book will suggest unusual twists and turns that I could never think up by myself.
You’ve published more than 140 books, and in them have told a wide range of stories—from a medieval Chinese action-adventure to a journey through the American Wild West to a thriller in the Antarctic. How do you come up with your ideas?
I like all my books to be as different as possible from one another. This is foolish, of course, since publishers like an author’s books to be as alike as possible, so that they know (and the buying public knows) what to expect if they open a book by Geraldine McCaughrean. It can’t be helped.
Generally I base a novel on some grain of truth: some snippet in the newspaper or something glimpsed from a moving train. Stop the Train, for example, was inspired by a TV documentary about the town of Enid, Oklahoma, in 1890. I let an idea lie underground for a good long while to see if it sprouts, then, if it does, I start to read around the subject.
Do you preview your books with family members for feedback?
Of course! That’s what daughters are for, isn’t it? Ailsa is the first person who reads a finished book. Then my husband reads it. He is good at finding spelling errors and mistakes, but Ailsa can tell me everything, from which words I’ve used too often to where the plot slows down. The day I finished writing The White Darkness, I was so anxious about it that I furtively trailed Ailsa around the house, like a spy, while she read the typescript. She didn’t put it down until it was finished. Have you ever seen someone try to put on a pair of tights while holding a typescript in one hand and reading it? Now and then I could hear her laugh or gasp or say “Idiot!” or “No, don’t!” or “The swine!” (which I took for good signs). When she finished she came and put her arms around me and gave me a big hug. “Marvelous,” she said. “Marvelous, marvelous.” So then I had the nerve to send it off to the publishers.
What part of the writing process do you enjoy the most (research, creating the first draft, revising)?
The best bit is when a book swallows me up like a blizzard and I don’t even realize I am writing it or that time is passing. Often, though, I find I am researching just to put off the scary act of writing the first word. Revising is satisfying—like polishing up an engraving to make the overall picture stand out better.
When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
I was always writing as a child—too tongue-tied and shy to express myself in any other way. I found I could escape into a brave new world while I was writing . . . but I did not have any particular “gift.” It was just my hobby. I used to write pretend episodes of the television show The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and read them aloud to my friends at break time. (We were big fans.)
My brother Neil got published when he was fourteen, but then he was all-around brilliant. And I thought you had to be clever at school to be a writer.
You don’t. I wasn’t.
So I never expected to get published; I wrote for the fun of it. At last, when I was twenty-eight, I got lucky—that’s all it ever is: luck. I am still waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and say, “You’re not a real writer at all, you charlatan! You’re not clever enough.”
What would you say is the biggest influence in your writing?
It isn’t other book writers. I mean it must be, to some extent—all those historical novels and horsey books and Greek myths I soaked up as a child. But the writers who made me so dizzy I had to stop and lean against a wall—they were playwrights. Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, The White Devil by John Webster, The Lady
’s Not for Burning by Christopher Fry, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard all set my head aswirl with words and my heart full of the longing to write.
There are book authors I admire, of course—dozens. Ted Hughes’s stuff for children —Tales of the Early World, for example. Unpredictable plots, wonderful characters, glorious words.
What do you do to relax?
I write! And, of course, I have an interior imaginative world, as Sym does, with a lover not so very different from Titus. I shall never write about that world, though. Then it might crumble away inside my head, like a winter wasp’s nest.
What are you working on now?
I’ve just finished a young adult novel about a boy who has been told he must die before his fourteenth birthday. (My husband, John, was once told by a fortune-teller that he would be dead by thirty.) Now it needs a title. Finding the right title for a book is like chasing mercury with a spoon. So if you will excuse me. . . .
About the Author
GERALDINE McCAUGHREAN’s THE WHITE DARKNESS is the winner of the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. Geraldine is also the winner of England’s most prestigious children’s book award, the Carnegie Medal, for A PACK OF LIES. She won the Whitbread Children’s Book Award in the UK for NOT THE END OF THE WORLD, making her the first ever three-time recipient. In recognition of her talents and accomplishments, Geraldine was selected by the Great Ormond Street Hospital to write the sequel to PETER PAN, entitled PETER PAN IN SCARLET, which was a New York Times bestseller. Her recent books on the HarperCollins list include THE STONES ARE HATCHING; THE KITE RIDER, an ALA Notable Children’s Book, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and a Nestlé Smarties Book Prize Bronze Medal winner; and STOP THE TRAIN!, an ALA Notable Children’s Book, a New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age, a School Library Journal Best Book, recipient of a Highly Commended Carnegie Medal Citation, a Publishers Weekly Best Book, and a Parent’s Guide to Children’s Media Award winner.
Ms. McCaughrean and her family live in Berkshire, England. You may visit her online at www.geraldinemccaughrean.co.uk.
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Books by Geraldine McCaughrean
The Kite Rider
Not the End of the World
Peter Pan in Scarlet
Smile!
The Stones Are Hatching
Stop the Train!
The Death-Defying Pepper Roux
The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen
The White Darkness
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Copyright
HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE WHITE DARKNESS. Copyright © 2005 by Geraldine McCaughrean. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Cover photograph from Getty Images/Hans Neleman
Cover design by Alison Klapthor
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCaughrean, Geraldine.
The white darkness : a novel / by Geraldine McCaughrean.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Fourteen-year-old Symone’s vacation to Antarctica turns into a dangerous adventure when her uncle becomes obsessed with seeking Symme’s Hole, an opening that may lead to the center of the Earth.
978-0-06-089037-7 (pbk.)
[1. Deception—Fiction. 2. Survival—Fiction. 3. Antarctica—Fiction.] I.Title.
PZ7.M1286Whi 2007
2006002503
[Fic]—dc22
CIP
AC
* * *
Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-300788-8
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-089037-7
First paperback edition, 2009
First U.S. Edition, 2007
First published in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, 2005
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