You need to be able to see through the eyes of the hero, smell what he's smelling, hear what he's hearing." Interest is also maintained by non-stop plotting. This presents no problem to a writer with such an extraordinarily fecund imagination.She does more research now than with A Little Lower than the Angels, which - astonishingly - was written off the top of her head. Adventures that start as comic end up as darkly threatening but, all through these fraught times, Sym remains in conversation with Oates.McCaughrean always avoids the didactic authorial voice and allows readers plenty of room for their own imaginative input. Outwardly diffident, 14-year-old Sym has a rich, inward life largely composed of imaginary conversations with her hero and soulmate Captain Oates, who famously gave up his life on Scott's doomed Antarctic adventure. But she does remain caught up with her discontented teenage self, a version of which also features in the unforgettable The White Darkness. Best job in the world, and apparently I'm still too eaten up with self-hatred to look an interviewer in the eye."Not this interviewer: I have met McCaughrean many times before without ever guessing there were bad moments as well as many good ones in her writing life.
"Do let me assert what a blithe, happy, skipping, carefree, laughing, hair-tossing, type of bon viveur I really am. That's the image I am now going to cultivate, since I am so sick of reading what a maundering, dismal, paranoid, suicidal, manic depressive I am. "I always thought writer's block was something that prats used as an easy excuse for not doing any work But suddenly I literally could not put pen to paper. It was horrible." Battling through depression, strengthened by the slogan "Not a day without a line", embroidered by her mother and pinned to the wall, she finally finished the book after a pause of three years.She also regained her peace of mind, and wants everyone to know this.
Daughter Timna, and the two children she saves from drowning, escape to build a better world than anything that her deluded father seems likely to create. As in all McCaughrean's books, reaching a more or less happy ending is part of the package. She has no time for unresolved gloom.Not the End of the World is still a dark novel, possibly reflecting the fact that, half way through, McCaughrean found she could no longer write. Biblical themes recurred in McCaughrean's 2004 Whitbread-winning novel, Not the End of the World. Set on the Ark, it portrays Noah as a bigoted cultist, with Ham and Shem his ruthless henchmen. It takes Noah's wife Ama to understand that no genuinely loving Deity could ever countenance the carnage caused by the great flood, described in pitiless detail and with strong overtones of the recent tsunami.