STEEPLEJACK: hybridity
or when the books you thought you were writing turns into something else.
I had ideas for two books.
One was a faintly Dickensian murder mystery which centered on one of the boys
who worked to maintain the tall factory chimneys and other high places in a
Victorian city. It came to me as an image inspired by spotting one of those
chimneys on my drive to work and noticing that a bush was growing out of the
top. It got me thinking about the steeplejacks who—though rare and dying
out—still existed in my native Lancashire when I was a kid. I could see the
cover illustration. A boy on a rickety ladder a hundred feet above a smoggy
industrial landscape…
The other idea was for a fantasy novel. It centered on a girl who had a rare
condition that allowed her skin to mimic the color and texture of her
surroundings in the ways octopuses do. She had to hide her gift/curse, but then
had to take in a baby sister who had the same condition. The book would be about
how she juggled the perils of her predicament while learning to use them as a
kind of spy…
I liked both ideas, but both had elements which felt over used. The Victorian
environment, and its being dominated by an Artful Dodger-type hero working as a
kind of Bakerstreet Irregular seemed familiar. The shape shifting aspect of my
fantasy story was hard to pair with the hard social reality I had been trying to
create, and the “gift” itself was too like the X-Men’s Mystique.
After months of tugging at both stories I woke up with an insight (which the
present reader will have seen coming a mile off). What if my two stories were
actually one?
I dropped the skin changer aspect, reworked my gritty social reality as a quasi
Victorian world torn by racial unrest in a place that looks a little like an
industrialized version of nineteenth century South Africa, and made my hero a
seventeen year old girl—Anglet Sutonga, steeplejack. The fantasy dimension
receded (now present only in the alternate history environment and a single
mineral—luxorite—which generates a brilliant light and is extremely valuable),
and the murder mystery was shaped by that environment’s hard social and
political edges.
The result was a book I probably could not have written with much hope of
publication twenty years ago, because it is so generically hybrid. I spent a lot
of time as a young writer having books rejected because agents and editors
“didn’t know what shelf to put it on,” but times have, apparently, changed.
Fantasy, it seems, has become far more elastic than it was in my childhood when
it seemed like if you didn’t have dwarves and elves you weren’t doing fantasy,
or even in the nineties, when a central hallmark of fantasy seemed to be a
pervasive use of magic. My book has neither of these, and in many ways reads
more like a thriller, but I think that the internet’s creation of niche and
sub-sub-compartmentalized genres (along, perhaps, with the downgrading of the
physical book store with its carefully defined sections as the key way of
thinking about the retailing of genre fiction) has created the space for books
which straddle genres. This is, of course, particularly the case in YA, where
genre is driven by reading age (supposedly) rather than generic features of
story, creating stories which can—so long as they have their own unity—can
borrow effectively from different narrative forms. For a writer like me, who has
always wandered from genre to genre (yes, I’m an agent’s nightmare) the appeal
of the hybrid is especially compelling.
And if the two books I first imagined suffered from being, in parts, a bit over
familiar, the resultant mash up (to use a nineties-ism) is very much its own
beast: a winged horse, perhaps, or some other combination of creatures which
might once have been thought monstrous but which is, I hope, unified, consistent
and logical within its own rules. I guess we’ll see.
Alternative Detective
Thoughtfully imaginative and action-packed, Steeplejack is New
York Times bestselling A. J. Hartley's YA debut set in a 19th-century South
African fantasy world
Seventeen-year-old Anglet Sutonga lives repairing the chimneys, towers, and
spires of the city of Bar-Selehm. Dramatically different communities live and
work alongside each other. The white Feldish command the nation’s higher
echelons of society. The native Mahweni are divided between city life and the
savannah. And then there’s Ang, part of the Lani community who immigrated over
generations ago as servants and now mostly live in poverty on Bar-Selehm’s
edges.
When Ang is supposed to meet her new apprentice Berrit, she instead finds him
dead. That same night, the Beacon, an invaluable historical icon, is stolen. The
Beacon’s theft commands the headlines, yet no one seems to care about Berrit’s
murder―except for Josiah Willinghouse, an enigmatic young politician. When
he offers her a job investigating his death, she plunges headlong into new and
unexpected dangers.
Meanwhile, crowds gather in protests over the city’s mounting troubles.
Rumors surrounding the Beacon’s theft grow. More suspicious deaths occur. With
no one to help Ang except Josiah’s haughty younger sister, a savvy newspaper
girl, and a kindhearted herder, Ang must rely on her intellect and strength to
resolve the mysterious link between Berrit and the missing Beacon before the
city descends into chaos.
A.J. Hartley is the bestselling author of mystery/thriller, fantasy,
historical fiction, and young adult novels.
He was born in northern
England, but has lived in many places including Japan, and is currently the
Robinson Professor of Shakespeare studies at the University of North Carolina,
Charlotte, where he specializes in the performance history, theory and criticism
of Renaissance English drama, and works as a director and dramaturg.
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