Divided by a Common Language around The Silver Child

In his online summary of The Silver Child, British author Cliff McNish writes:

Six children leave the comfort of their homes far behind. They are drawn to Coldharbour--an eerie wasteland of wind, rats, seagulls and rubbish tips.

Emily and Freda, the twins, scuttle bright-eyed and insect-like in search of the others. They find Thomas half-starving on a food tip.

Rubbish what? A food what?

What British call a “tip” is what Americans call a “dump.” The origin comes from the same act: it’s where people tip/dump their rubbish/garbage. Similarly, a “dump truck” is a “tipper” when the steering wheel’s on the right.

Harder to explain is why an American “Dumpster” (a brand name obviously derived from “dump”) has the British equivalent of a “skip.” And why what young Thomas is doing to survive on that “food tip”--Americans might call it “Dumpster diving”--is called “totting” in Britain. But them’s the terms.

It looks like the editors at Carolrhoda caught on to those lingual differences. The US edition of The Silver Child speaks only of dumps.

Silver World Class

I read Cliff McNish’s Silver Sequence out of order, zipping through the second title, Silver City, as part of the Cybils Awards judging and reading the first, The Silver Child, some months later.

After those two books, I expressed some disappointment that McNish hadn’t shown us more about his young characters before their lives and their bodies are changed by some supernatural, extraterrestrial force. They change without intending to and often feel compelled to act in certain ways, so we rarely see these characters decide to do things. And tough decisions are key to understanding who characters are.

Now I’ve finished the third volume, Silver World, and found it a powerful ending to a haunting trilogy. We still don’t know much about the children’s lives before the novels begin (more thoughts about that someday). But we do see them struggle with tough decisions in this volume. Their long-threatened confrontation with the interstellar monster called the Roar becomes a strategic chess match, each side trying to anticipate the other’s moves and lull the enemy into traps.

McNish raises the stakes immediately by removing Hannah’s father, the only adult, from the little community of guardians. The Roar starts screaming louder. Animals join the children of the world in the little haven of Coldharbour. Millions of creatures on the other side of Earth perish. And now the kids have to find most solutions for themselves, with time running out. It’s a gripping read.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t still have unanswered questions: about the kids, about how those Unearthers’ drill hands are supposed to work, about how the enemy is ultimately trussed up, and so on.

Most important, I’m not sure who created the Barrier around Coldharbour. At the beginning of Silver City, narrator Thomas explains that it’s appeared since the last volume, excluding adults from the area where children feel compelled to come. The series offers four possible sources for such supernatural phenomena: the Roar, her underground child, Earth’s Protector, and the kids’ own evolving powers.

In Silver City a boy named Tanni says of the adults, “I reckon they’re being kept out for their own protection,” which implies the Barrier reflects a benevolent force. But later there’s reason to suspect Tanni’s judgment. The Barrier expands as more kids arrive at Coldharbour, implying it's linked somehow to their needs and powers. Yet as Silver World begins, mind-reading Hannah thinks the Roar has subtly moved the Barrier, implying that monster also created it--but why? Or does the Barrier arise from how all those unearthly forces push against each other? Do any Silver Sequence fans out there have an answer?

Starting in the Middle with The Silver Child

I read Cliff McNish's Silver City as part of the Cybils Science Fiction/Fantasy Award shortlist. I found it a haunting novel, but wrote: "As a novel Silver City suffers from what I call Empire Strikes Back syndrome. . . . it’s the middle of a trilogy. It doesn’t introduce its central characters or their situation, and it doesn’t resolve any of the stories."

At that time, I imagined that the first book in the sequence, The Silver Child, had introduced the main characters by depicting their previous lives and desires before the action heats up. I resolved to read the whole trilogy, writing:

One of the qualities I’ll look for in those other volumes is how well they portray the individual kids with their own personalities, hopes, and choices. In this volume, they act under some compulsion larger than any of us. . . . Over and over we read that the kids have to do this or that, though they don’t know why.

For the first volume, I pictured Milo, Walter, the twins, and others moving across the English landscape, gradually gathering, before they found their appointed spot in the blasted industrial wasteland of Coldharbour. I thought the book might show them deciding to take on their cosmic missions, or at least show us all they were leaving behind.

But no. The Silver Child plays out much like its successor. The action threads start with Milo suddenly leaving home, Thomas already living in Coldharbour, the twins and Walter having undergone their tremendous physical changes. The setting is already bleak, stormy, and claustrophobic. We see Helen and her father at home, but then her father is part of the group in Silver City, too. Thus, we learn very little about the children's previous lives.

Furthermore, I realized as I read this volume, the two children who alternate as first-person narrators--Thomas and Helen--are the two who change the least physically. The narrator closely follows Milo in the third person, but the twins and Walter appear only through the others' eyes. And in many ways those three are not only the most changed, but also the most self-sacrificing and perhaps interesting.

Once again, the characters are under supernatural compulsions to act in certain ways. For much of the book, Thomas doesn't want to help Milo--but he can't help doing so. The kids' compulsions scare them, rather they don't reveal or fulfill them. The result is a story that strongly emphasizes characters' reactions, but rarely offers decision points that test and illuminate, and I don't think the result adds up to a character-driven book. Or, as Matt Berman wrote on Common Sense Media: "That's not to say that the characters have much depth, but just that the changes they're going through are described at some length."

One detail of the young characters' backgrounds seemed more apparent in this first volume: their class differences. I've previously quoted Jonathan Stroud on how "all British books, certainly all British children’s books, you can look at in terms of the class system." (That's from this interview at the State Library of Victoria.)

Thomas drops hints in his early chapters that he's from the suburban middle-class, not used to the rough gangs of Coldharbour. Once the others come to look after him, he quickly falls into the habit of ordering them around. All in all, he's much whinier than he appears in the second volume. In contrast, the twins seem set apart not just because they crawl around like lizards and occasionally speak in rhymes, but because of their broad working-class accents. I suppose if I were British I might have picked up that detail right away.

The Silver Child is still haunting, though it held less surprise for me than Silver City; that's what I get for starting the story in the middle of things. I still plan to read the final volume, Silver World. But I can't help wishing that McNish hadn't started quite so much in the middle of things himself.

Cybils Nominee Silver City

Back in the early 1980s, Nickelodeon showed a ten-year-old British science fiction series called The Tomorrow People. Like Marvel’s X-Men, it gratified kids with the notion that they might have more powers than adults--psychic powers, in the TV show. But of course with great powers come great responsibilities, and the Tomorrow People had to fend off various supernatural threats and villains in such adventures as “The Thargon Menace” and “The Revenge of Jedekiah.” Part of the series’ ominous feeling arose from Thames Television’s limited production budget: each show had an odd sense of both claustrophobia and impermanence as the too-close walls threatened to tumble onto the actors.

Silver City, by Cliff McNish, felt to me like part of the strangest Tomorrow People series ever. As the story begins, a huge winged child whose eyes point in different directions is hovering over junky Coldharbour in England. His name, it seems, is Milo. A small group of other children who have developed lesser powers are gathered beneath his wings, wondering what will happen next. And other children from all over the world are trying desperately to reach that area, acting under a compulsion no one understands.

The book shifts among three narrative voices:

• Thomas, who has a healing power he calls his “beauty.”
• Helen, able to look into others’ minds.
• A third-person description of the Roar, an immense, interstellar monster speeding toward Earth, her bowels being devoured by the newborn creatures inside her.

Milo, Helen, Thomas, and three other exceptional children are “the beginning of the defense against the Roar.”

The scenes in Silver City are really scary. Scary not just because of the Roar and what destruction it might bring but because everything is so weird and so personal (kids turning into drilling machines!) that you really don’t know what might happen next.

As a novel Silver City suffers from what I call Empire Strikes Back syndrome. That movie, written by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan and directed by Irvin Kershner, is cinematically the best in the Star Wars sequence. But it’s the middle of a trilogy. It doesn’t introduce its central characters or their situation, and it doesn’t resolve any of the stories. In fact, it ends with Han Solo encased in carbonite. Therefore, as admirable as it is, The Empire Strikes Back doesn’t stand on its own.

Similarly, the main characters of Silver City were introduced in The Silver Child. This book doesn’t pause a moment to tell us about their previous lives, desires, and so on. They’re too busy trying to figure out what’s happening to them Right Now. And the book ends with the Bad Things coming closer, the kids rushing to find a Good Thing, and nothing resolved. So Silver City doesn’t stand on its own, either. Like Milo, it hovers, expecting the worst to come soon, in Silver World. I can’t say if the book truly fulfills its promise until I finish all the required reading.

One of the qualities I’ll look for in those other volumes is how well they portray the individual kids with their own personalities, hopes, and choices. In this volume, they act under some compulsion larger than any of us (except possibly not larger than the Roar). Over and over we read that the kids have to do this or that, though they don’t know why. I “allowed myself to be guided into Coldharbour’s northwest region,” Thomas says. Helen’s segment starts, “Someone’s nightmares made me scream.” As a result, McNish paints a vivid, frightening picture of their plight, but not of the kids as individual characters.

(A note about covers: McNish’s Silver Sequence was published by Orion in the UK, and then a couple of years later by Lerner in the US--an unusual lag in a time when almost any British fantasy gets snapped up quickly. Confirming my notion that I’ll never understand British publishers’ ideas of book design, Orion’s Silver Sequence covers are violet, orange, and blue. Lerner shows its roots in school-library publishing by marketing the series under the catchy slogan “Exceptional Reading & Language Arts Titles for Intermediate Grades,” but at least its dust jackets are shiny silver.)

Divided by a Common Language in Silver City

On the Cybils shortlist for Fantasy & Science Fiction are two British novels, as well as two American and one translated from the Italian.

Of course, British novels often also need some translation as well. I suspect that an editor at CarolRhoda carefully changed "bags of crisps" in the UK edition of Silver City, by Cliff McNish, to "bags of chips," as the phrase appears in my edition. Because in Britain, of course, "chips" are what we Americans call "fries."

However, the US text still describes boys arriving on the scene in "vests." One imagines children dressed like little waiters. And that image is even odder since the text makes clear that other children arrive in pajamas, nightgowns, T-shirts, and other casual dress.

And now what only seems like a digression...

A few years ago, my godson and his brother were going to be ring-bearers at the wedding of their longtime babysitter. I was privy to a conversation between her and their mother, both Americans, about what the little boys should wear. The boys' father, who's largely English, came in.

"Honey, we have an idea for the boys' outfits," his wife said. "Vests!"

"Riiight," he said.

I'm still trying to learn how to say "Riiight" the way this fine fellow can. With his excellent English education, he can make the same syllable mean either of these things:

• "What a fascinating and original idea; already I'm deep in thought about its implications."
• "You are an utter loon; excuse me while I go guard the children."

Of course, that same English training prevents him from actually expressing either response.

Fortunately, at that moment I happened to recall that what Americans call "vests" are what the British call "waistcoats" (pronounced "weskits," but that's another story). Once I explained that, it came out that what the British call "vests" are what Americans call "undershirts"--in particular, the sleeveless kind. That makes more sense in Silver City, doesn't it?