Liminality, Marginality and Narrative Mode in David Belbin's Fiction

What We Don’t Know: Liminality, Marginality and Narrative Mode in David Belbin’s Fiction DAVID LAWRENCE BELBIN A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Nottingham Trent University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2016 1 I certify that all of the following material is my own work and the essay consists of original work undertaken solely for the purposes of this PhD. This work is the intellectual property of the owner. You may copy up to 5% of this work for private study, or personal, non-commercial research. Any re- use of the information contained within this document must be fully referenced, quoting the author, title, university, degree level and pagination. Queries or requests for any other use, or if a more substantial copy is required, should be directed to the owner of the intellectual property rights. 2 ABSTRACT This thesis consists of a selection of my published work from 1989-2015, accompanied by an essay and a bibliography. The essay looks at the ways in which I am drawn towards marginal and liminal zones within fiction, including the areas between Young Adult (YA) and Adult fiction, crime fiction and literary fiction, and that between depicting reality and fictionalising it. I also consider the use of narrative mode in defining these liminal areas. By ‘liminal’, I mean occupying a position at, or on both sides of a boundary or threshold, rather than the word’s other, looser sense, where it means ‘vague’. The examples of fiction selected are intended to display the range of my published work since joining Nottingham Trent University. The order in which the pieces are discussed is broadly chronological. There is an introductory section about and brief examples of my work prior to 2002. While the work selected has been chosen primarily to be representative of my published work, they also illustrate the liminal and marginal zones referred to above. The majority of the extracts and stories that follow are taken from those published during the thirteen years I have worked at Nottingham Trent University. The texts used are taken from the published versions. Consequently the editorial conventions applied to chapter headings, double or single speech marks et al. are not consistent. While I have endeavoured to correct typographical errors that appeared in the original publications, I have not attempted to improve the style. 3 Contents What We Don’t Know (essay) Foreword 6 Introduction 8 Chapter One: Turning Points 15 Chapter Two: Narrative Mode 21 Chapter Three: Liminal Literatures 25 Chapter Four: Marginality 30 Conclusion 37 Witchcraft 40 Being Bullied 45 The Foggiest (extract) 55 The Beat (extract) 65 Heritage 81 Love Lessons (extract) 106 Denial (extracts) 113 The Pretender (extracts) 121 Boy King (extract) 186 Student (extracts) 191 Limerance 192 The Old Gang 201 Random 214 No Depression 224 What Happened 233 4 In A Hot Place 241 Secret Gardens (extracts) 248 The Great Deception (extracts) 263 List of Published Works 372 Bibliography 380 Acknowledgements 385 5 What We Don’t Know Foreword I first came across the word liminal in relation to anthropology. In that discipline, liminality refers to the middle stage of rituals, where a young person is no longer a child but not yet an adult. Liminality has particular relevance to Young Adult Fiction (henceforth, YAF), which I will consider. Liminality is also, I will argue, central to my work, both in the anthropological sense and in a broader sense where the word has become synonymous with marginality, a distinction that I will explore. I will show how my work navigates the boundaries between different genres of fiction and thrives on the conflicts between those genres. For a novelist, the PhD by Published Works is itself a marginal zone, one whose regulations are primarily designed to link retrospectively a group of academic papers rather than a body of creative work. As Butt points out, ‘criteria are constantly evolving' in the creative PhD by Published Works1. There is no consensus on the function of the critical commentary in this essay. ‘Never trust the teller, trust the tale,’ I read in my first year as an undergraduate, ‘the proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.’2 Lawrence’s dictum rules out the very form in which I am writing. Yet there are elements of exegesis only the author can supply: in particular, context and an account of the key debates affecting authors in the field during the period of publication. In the case of YAF, where I have 1 Maggie Butt, 'One I made earlier: on the PhD by publication' Text, Special Issue 22, 2013. 2 DH Lawrence, Classic Studies in American Literature, London: Martin Secker, 1924. 6 written the largest part of my published work, these include audience, mode of narration, subject matter and censorship. In addressing these areas I intend, also, to demonstrate how my fiction forms a coherent whole. The essential element of exegesis concerns the author's life and how it connects with the work. Some aspects of this are covered in the brief introductions to the short stories and extracts submitted. I was born in Sheffield in 1958, the first child of a working class, Roman Catholic mother and lower middle class, Protestant father who both worked at an insurance company. We moved to Leicester when I was two and West Kirby, the Wirral (now Merseyside) when I was five. There, I began to write poetry. The family moved to Colne in Lancashire when I was sixteen. I went to university to study Law, but changed courses and left at the end of the first term, returning to take a degree in English Literature and American Studies the following autumn. After graduation, I began but didn't finish two novels, became active in local politics and did some temporary work. In 1983 I undertook a PGCE in English and Drama, which introduced me to YAF (a literature that had emerged since I left school). I worked as a schoolteacher (English, Drama and Media Studies) full time for five years, writing in the evenings, weekends and holidays. My first novel, The Foggiest, was published in 1990. After four years working part-time, I became a full-time writer and remained one until, in 2002, I took a part-time job teaching Creative Writing as a Senior Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University, a post that I still hold. 7 Introduction: the 1990s YAF is a literature composed of multiple genres. Until recently, it was read primarily by people of secondary school age (eleven to sixteen). Robert Cormier’s seminal The Chocolate War was published in 1974, the year I turned sixteen. YA novels began to proliferate in the late 1970s. I discovered the literature in 1983, when I trained to be an English teacher, and read YAF extensively throughout the 1980s, observing the literature’s development. Excited by the possibilities the form offered, I wrote a YA novel, The Foggiest. When this failed to get published, I wrote two adult, more ‘literary’ novels. In 1987-8, I reworked the second of these, about a pupil/teacher affair, and offered it to Penguin as a YA novel. Their response was enthusiastic but negative. Strong boundaries still governed the content of YAF. Ten years, during which I played a part in stretching some of those boundaries, were to pass before the novel, Love Lessons, was published. Although my first published stories appeared in literary magazines, they have both YA and liminal characteristics. ‘Witchcraft’ is explicitly concerned with a rite of passage. Its narrator is an abused child, detailing then undocumented, now notorious events. While she is fictional, the voice in ‘Being Bullied’, my second published story, was inspired by a real sixteen- year-old boy. From the start, then, my work sought to speak on behalf of the disempowered and inhabited a zone between documentary and fiction. My debut novel, The Foggiest, in its first version, predates these stories, but I rewrote it after their publication. The book follows many tropes of 1980s YA fiction: in length (30,000 words), character age (protagonists two years older than its target audience), the way it isolates these characters from 8 their parents (common in much children’s literature) and in one of its themes, summed up by a snatch of lyrics from the radio in the first chapter: Shall we talk about the weather? Shall we talk about the government? 3 The story has an environmental subtext, which wasn’t unusual in 1990, and an overt political agenda, which remains rare in YAF. The novel’s denouement reveals that what appeared to be an environmental disaster was caused by a far right group’s attempt to engineer a coup against a government who were about to lose a general election. Discussion of democratic, electoral politics, then, was also a concern in my earliest work.4 My next publications were short stories. Three of them feature a first person narrator, Alison, who is a student at the University of Nottingham. Although Alison is only a little older than the protagonists of a YA novel, these stories are frank about drugs and sexuality in a way the YA novel could not, and still cannot be. Gatekeepers have to be appeased before novels on these themes can find their way into school libraries or the YA sections of bookshops. Twenty years would pass before Student – the novel that grew out of these stories - appeared in book form5. This is one of the ironies of writing YA fiction: that the author is often not allowed to address the issues that most concern its audience: ‘books that take them to the edge and allow them to face their darkest fears,’ as Nicola 3 Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, Michael Stipe, ‘Pop Song 89’, Green, Warner Bros, 1989.

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