Themes in Shadow Town by Richard Lambert
Richard Lambert shares the themes from Shadow Town, his gothic fantasy novel. Read on for a brilliant blog!!
My gothic fantasy novel Shadow Town follows thirteen-year-old Toby who travels through a tunnel from our world into the land of Balthasar with his cat, Alfred. On arriving in a firestorm and unable to find their way back the way they came, they have to journey the castle of the Regent to get home. On the way they meet a mysterious girl named Tamurlaine, who has lost her memory and who joins them in the hope of learning who she is. The central conceit of the novel is that in Balthasar certain teenagers, trained and controlled by the Regent, have the power to turn their dreams into reality and while the Dreamers will be able to dream Toby home, their dreams are damaging Balthasar – causing the kingdom’s fires, floods and storms, and opening up holes into other worlds.
Most important for me when writing Shadow Town was to create an adventure story that would be fun for children to read. When I was a child, my greatest pleasure was reading – and when there was peril and adventure, and a fantastic world, those were my favourite stories. Having said that, I wanted my story to have a background of deeper themes, and while there are several in Shadow Town – about how much pressure we put on children in education from a young age, about the dangers of political power – two of the most significant are children’s relationships with difficult parents and guardians, and ecological catastrophe.
Toby’s relationship to his father is one-sided. His dad is a selfish man with little interest in his son but Toby hero-worships him. As for the amnesiac Tamurlaine, she remembers, bit by bit, who she is: recently orphaned, the man who became her guardian controlled her life. Both Toby and Tamurlaine at the start of the novel are unhappy and lost – literally and metaphorically – but through their adventures, their courage and their friendship, they discover the flawed natures of Toby’s dad and Tamurlaine’s guardian and gain control over their own lives. So one of the significant themes of the novel is the psychological one of forming one’s own identity in relation to one’s parents.
A second significant theme is ecological disaster. Toby’s mum is a climate activist and once Toby arrives in Balthasar, he discovers the land is similar to ours – in the throes of environmental catastrophe, with forest fires, floods, and storms, and even holes in the fabric of the universe. As the novel progresses, Toby and Tamurlaine learn that the cause of these disasters is dreaming. The Regent is forcing the Dreamers to dream what he wants – mainly luxury items – but this is draining energy from the world, and damaging it. Here I was thinking of how our pursuit of economic growth and of manufacturing vast quantities of consumer goods, and all the associated pollution, has damaged our planet. I was taking that idea to ridiculous extremes, imagining a world where a tyrannical ruler forces people to dream up colossal amounts of junk for him and his courtiers. I wasn’t trying to write a polemic, I wanted that central idea of being able to dream things into reality to be a conceit that had many associations – but certainly one of the most important associations for me was climate change. It’s a central theme of my novel.
More important for me, however, than any of the big themes, is that the novel succeeds as an adventure story, with peril and bravery, danger and friendship, and a hero, his friend, and of course his cat. For me, Shadow Town needed to have a strand of silliness and humour. I think humour and fun are hugely underrated in fiction and if I had any ambitions with Shadow Town, the one that I wanted most to succeed was an enjoyable silliness.
Shadow Town by Richard Lambert is out now in paperback from Everything With Words.
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