Reading The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean by David Almond.

I have just started reading David Almond’s new novel The True tale of the Monster Billy Dean.It’s windy outside as Bolton gets the ‘tail’ end of Hurricane Katrina. Oddly enough we aare promised a ‘tail’ in Almond’s novel, a novel told using phonetically spelt words to describe a tale that so far seems obscured by experiences that also remain hidden.

Even so, as I am folded within each ‘loop’ of the ‘tail’ the effect is intimate  and compelling. I want to know, yet that is not my main concern. In fact the ‘tail’ generates a new type of relationship with words. I am aware that I am listening to their sounds because they are misspelt and have to sound their meaning ‘out’, I have to listen to their pulse,  or it will linger inside, hiding:

‘I rite thees things of memry & of luv.’

Writing( rite)  has become ritualised and is a possibly holy, repetitious  act. Even a transporting passage from somewhere-to someplace. But where? Are we dealing with life and death and a permeable curtain of ‘riting’ between?  A play on ‘riting’ as a medium form?

Where are the words generated from and for whom I wonder?

The isolation of the speaker and his subject again imbues a religious resonance to ‘thees’ things. The I/thou relationship? Who is the other and what signifcantly intimate relationship do they have with Billy or the  speaker?

Why is ‘luv’ only ‘luv’ and not ‘love’? Or am I giving too much weight to spellling? What is lost between ‘luv’ and ‘love’?

I wonder.

The novel is making me wonder and as I wonder what things might mean, I  feel lost and I suppose that is how Billy feels too?  Perhaps behind this lostness is something very sad, and very difficult to forgive?

In a couple of years I can forsee this ‘riting’ appearing on an ELAT Oxford Entrance paper.

What larks!

Billy told me:)

Janet Lewison

janet Lewison

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