Skip to main content

The Supreme Lie

The mind of Geraldine McCaughrean is one of the great natural wonders of our universe. Ever since I first discovered her books in the early 1990s I have been eagerly awaiting each new one, like an astronomer watching for radio bursts from a distant nebula, eager for clues about what’s going on in there.


In her previous novel, the Carnegie Medal winning Where the World Ends, Geraldine restricted herself to a small cast and a single location - not even an island, just a storm-scoured sea stack where her characters were marooned. The Supreme Lie takes the opposite approach, creating a whole imaginary country and cramming it with people and animals. 


We are in Afalia, which I visualise as being somewhere in South America (there are snakes, fire ants, and mighty rivers) and somewhere in the Twentieth Century (there are cars, planes, and telephones). The charismatic ruler, Madam Suprema, is somewhere on the Eva Peron/Servalan border, but even she is unable to cope when terrible floods arrive. The disaster wreaks havoc in the countryside and threatens the walled capital, Praesto City, and the fragile Afalian economy (nickel ore in: cutlery out). As La Suprema flees, her abandoned husband, improvising frantically, persuades her 15-year-old maid Gloria to impersonate her.


As often happens in these cases, the impersonator turns out to be a better and kinder ruler than the one she is impersonating. But although Gloria is one of Geraldine McCaughrean’s most sympathetic and engaging heroines, and her story forms the backbone of the novel, she is far from being the only protagonist. The narrative divides like the swollen river, splitting into different channels, rushing off in unexpected directions, and following all sorts of people whose lives have been disrupted by the flood. Several of its heroes are not humans at all, but dogs - loyal mongrel Heinz and dim, adorable golden retriever Daisy. I think this is a new departure for Geraldine, but she knows how dogs work, and their thoughts and feelings are as believable as those of her humans. Their adventures are quite harrowing at times - parts of Heinz's journey, as he seeks his young master Clem through the flooded landscape, read like a doggy Empire of the Sun.


And as you'd expect it's all told in beautiful prose, and packed to the gunwales with inventive metaphors and similes. A dog shaking itself dry looks like a Catherine wheel; the reflection of a bomber as it flies up-river to destroy a dam resembles a huge salmon swimming upstream to spawn. As with all Geraldine McCaughrean novels, The Supreme Lie will need reading at least twice: once in a rush as you’re carried along by the twisting narrative, and again at a more leisurely pace so you can fully appreciate the writing.

 

The Supreme Lie is published in the UK by Usborne Books and available from all good bookshops. If you have a local independent bookshop I'm sure they'd be glad of your custom, and if you can't get there in person most offer quick mail order services, or have a page on bookshop.org. Here's the page for one of my locals, Crediton Community Bookshop: just type the name of your nearest into the search bar to find their page. 

 

Cover artwork is by Leo Nickolls.


Comments

Anonymous said…
A hair detox can aid in the removal of heavy build-up that may be holding your hair down throughout the day. Unlike body detoxes, which can take weeks, you may start detoxing your hair right away by adding a few hair products to your hair care routine. Using a cleanse will be beneficial in boosting your hair color and its health. Testing for the presence of drugs in the body has gotten more advanced as science and technology have progressed. The hair follicle is one of the most effective methods to detect the presence of an illegal chemical in your body. Here is another detox shampoo from Testclear that is just as effective in removing THC from your scalp and hair Visit: https://www.urineworld.com/

Popular posts from this blog

Lord of the Rings 7: Minas Tirith

'This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,' claimed the historical novelist Alfred Duggan, reviewing The Lord of the Rings when it was published. But I've read it through LOADS of times and now I'm blogging my latest re-read, so what did he know? And so we come to Minas Tirith, Tower of Guard, citadel of Gondor, seven tiers of fancy white fortifications built against a buttress of Mount Mindolluin, with the Tower of Ecthelion rising a thousand feet above the plain. It seems to me the template on which a whole genre of knock-off fantasy cities has been based - I guess Robert E Howard and people wrote about such places before Tolkien, and perhaps there were cities of equal grandeur on Barsoom, but when concept art threads on Instagram throw up unlikely gold and marble castles built on mountaintops and over waterfalls they always look distinctly Minas Tirithy to me. I'm wondering now if London in Mortal Engines was subconsciously echoin

Thunder City

This September Scholastic will be publishing my new novel set in the world of Mortal Engines . Here’s the cover, created (like all the others in the series) by Ian McQue . The rule I set for myself when I was writing this one was that it shouldn’t feature any of the people or places from previous Mortal Engines books. So  Thunder Cit y takes place just over a century before the original book, when the town-eat-town world of Traction Cities is slightly less ruthless than it will become later, and none of the characters from the original quartet has even been born yet. (I suppose Mr Shrike must be bimbling about somewhere, but he’s still just yer basic implacable killing machine at this point so there’s not much point in paying him a visit). So hopefully this new take will be accessible to people who’ve never read Mortal Engines , and hopefully people who have read it will enjoy an adventure set in the same world. My pen and ink drawing of the Traction City of Thorbury,  after a painti

Railhead A-Z

In order to save my website it became necessary to destroy it. Before I pulled the plug I rescued the longest post on my old blog. Here it is, like the lone survivor of a shipwreck: my A-Z guide to the ideas behind my novel Railhead. At the time it was written, Railhead had just been published. I'll be putting up some posts about the sequels, Black Light Express and Station Zero , in the coming days. Railhead cover art by Ian McQue A  is for Alternative Forms of Transport ‘What I need,’ I thought, when I’d been struggling on and off for a few years with my space epic (working title, ‘Space Epic’) ‘is an alternative to spaceships…’ I’ve always enjoyed space stories. I first started reading science fiction back in 1977, when the original Star Wars film made me realise that outer space could be just as good a backdrop for fantasy as Tolkien-esque worlds of myth and legend. (Actually, I didn’t see Star Wars until 1978, but its bow-wave of publicity hit these shores the p