Talking About Fleshmarket - live!
A video in which I answer questions from Scottish students
Twenty-one years ago I wrote a teenage novel called Fleshmarket. Amazingly, it is still in print. This is very unusual in publishing and is entirely because every year a load of Scottish schools read it, usually in S2 or S3 (second and third years of secondary school). And every year, some of them contact me with questions or tell me how much they’re enjoying it. I don’t know if you can imagine how happy that makes me feel?
This year, two schools asked if I could visit them to answer their questions. Since I now live a long way from Scotland, I had a better idea: if they would send me their questions, I’d make a video of myself answering them and post it on my Substack.
Here I am! (Video links below.) The two schools are Stirling High School (Miss McSweeney’s S3 class) and the S2 students of Berwickshire High School. Thank you to them for their questions and enthusiasm!
Here are some of Miss McSweeney’s class:
I’ve divided the questions into ones about Fleshmarket and ones about being a writer. Each video is under 30 minutes.
If you don’t know Fleshmarket:
It opens with a famously gruesome prologue. It’s 1822 and eight-year-old Robbie has to hear the sounds of his mother undergoing surgery without anaesthetic to remove a tumour. He watches her die of blood poisoning five days later. We then jump to 1828 and fourteen-year-old Robbie is hurrying home through the icy Edinburgh streets. He’s hurrying because he’s cold and because his eight-year-old sister, Essie, is alone - their dissolute drunkard father has disappeared, again. Robbie overhears snatches of a conversation between two men, walking more slowly because they are wealthy and warmly dressed. They are discussing pain, dismissing the agony that patients go through in surgery as being merely “God’s will”. Robbie realises that they are surgeons. Remembering his mother’s suffering, he is angry at their lack of care. Then one calls the other by a name: Dr Robert Knox. And Robbie knows that here is the man who performed his mother’s surgery. He is responsible for her death and here he is, showing his lack of care.
Robbie is furious. He vows revenge. He will do and lose anything to make this man pay and to make him realise that he should care. He holds him responsible for the crushing life of poverty that Robbie and Essie endure, for the destruction of their home and the fall of their father into a mire of alcohol and hopelessness.
But Dr Robert Knox is not a character I invented: he was the man who bought the bodies from the murderers, Burke and Hare, and Robbie’s quest puts him in extreme and violent danger. Can he drag himself out of the gutter in time and can he find the strength to put his anger behind him and reconstruct a better life?
The first chapter is certainly gruesome and rather shocking. However, it’s fair to say that in 21 years the only people who have been worried about that have been adults!
The videos
I wanted to embed them in the Substack post but the files were too big so I have had to create Google Drive links. Here they are:
Two things I mention in the second video
Two questions were about whether my family write and whether they read my books. Well, both my daughters use the power of language in their own work, they have read all my books and now I proudly read their words! I think they are excellent writers!
So, there is my daughter Hannah’s beautifully-written website, Land Tales, selling gifts adults might buy for friends and family, especially if they are keen to “tread lightly” on our planet, as she puts it. (Show your parents - they might like what Land Tales sells!)
And here is my other daughter Rebecca’s short film, Operator, for which she won a BAFTA (!) for best British short film. (Trigger warning: it’s about a 999 call during a fire. And it’s VERY tense.) And here she is talking about it to an Edinburgh journalist after the BAFTA win.
And now my grandchildren are starting to read my books. Not Fleshmarket (yet!) but at least my Thomas the Tank Engine books! I do have a photo of me reading one of those to a grandson but I don’t put images of my grandchildren online, so…
Finally…
Here is a description of a Fleshmarket talk I did when I amputated the leg of someone in the audience. Excellent fun!
Finally finally
Massive thanks to all Scottish schools who study Fleshmarket. I couldn’t survive without you!
