Long John Silver sails again, with a poet at the helm for adventure sequel

THERE are some books that we feel we know, even if we haven’t read them. One such book is Treasure Island.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s swashbuckling tale of pirates, parrots and buried treasure has fired the imagination of generations of youngsters since it was first published in 1883. It has inspired everyone from William Golding to the Muppets and now Sir Andrew Motion has written a sequel to this children’s classic.

In Silver: Return to Treasure Island, Motion moves the story forward to the start of the 19th- century and the eastern reaches of the Thames where Jim Hawkins runs an inn, The Hispaniola, with his son. The young Jim spends his days roaming the mist-shrouded estuaries, running errands for his father and listening to tales of adventures on the high seas, of murder and revenge, buried treasure – and of a man with a wooden leg.

It might seem an odd choice of subject for somebody better known for writing poetry, but Motion disagrees.

“It’s not such a big departure, I’ve written fiction as well as biographies and it’s continuing something I’ve been interested in for a long time,” he says, full of praise for the original book.

“Excitement, mystery, intrigue, suspense, pathos and human sympathy – Stevenson combines all these things, and I wanted to write an exciting story that hooked readers in just as Treasure Island did.” Although he believes Stevenson’s novel is more than just a ripping yarn. “It’s about the relationship between children and parents, imperialism and the colonial footprint and it’s also about evil and what we do about evil in the world.”

So what prompted him to pick up the story? “Stevenson himself was interested in sequels and he wrote a sequel to Kidnapped, although it wasn’t a book many people read. But I thought he had left sufficient doors and windows open for someone to write a sequel, because Long John Silver escapes at the end of Treasure Island and three people are left marooned. He might have written it himself had he lived and I thought it would be interesting to do.”

But writing sequels to famous novels is a risky business. “There are plenty of bad examples of sequels out there and where they fail is when they try to take on the original classic text at its own game and that’s a game you’re bound to lose. But there are also some good examples, like Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, so I decided I wouldn’t try to follow the heels of the original, I would have fun with it instead.”

He started writing the novel after stepping down from his role as Poet Laureate in 2009. “I got up early and started writing before breakfast and that became a ritual,” he says. “As Laureate I’d had 10 years of being looked at and all of a sudden there was this great burst of excitement. I really can’t remember writing something that has given me so much pleasure.”

This surge of creativity also coincided with a period of emotional upheaval in his life as Motion was knighted, lost his father and got married in a short space of time.

“My dad had died and there was a potent mix of sadness and this odd sense of release. People say you can’t really become yourself until your parents have died and that seemed to be the case with me.”

Motion spent a decade as Poet Laureate and, three years after relinquishing the role, his views on the laureateship are “finely balanced,” as he puts it. “On the one hand, I’m extremely pleased to have done it and I would do it again. It was an extraordinary and fantastic time, I wrote certain things I would not have otherwise written and I stood in places I wouldn’t have otherwise stood and I was listened to in a way that I wasn’t before.”

He is proud, too, of the pivotal role he played in creating the Poetry Archive, the world’s biggest collection of online recordings of poets reading their work, where more than two million poems are listened to each month. “That’s something I wouldn’t have been able to do had I not been Poet Laureate because no-one would have given me the money.” But he admits there was a negative side to the post that he doesn’t miss. “It does take your life over completely and you take a lot of buffeting from some people which becomes silly, tiresome and annoying. So by the end I was very pleased to have done it and at the same time very pleased to have given it up.”

He was pleased, too, that his “old friend” Carol Ann Duffy was given the role. “I was extremely pleased and I think she’s doing a great job.” Despite the difficulties and criticism Motion sometimes encountered, he doesn’t feel the laureateship has become redundant and should be scrapped, it just needs a change of emphasis.

“I tried to loosen it up a bit so that it was more about national life than the Royal Family.” Not that he has any intention of telling the current incumbent in the post what to do. “I think the best thing to do in these situations is wish people well and then quickly disappear and get out of the way.”

During his tenure he regularly visited schools and colleges in a bid to turn on youngsters to poetry and he continues to support the Poetry Archive. He also believes that rather than slipping off our culture radar, poetry is flourishing.

“Those who go looking for poetry in the review pages of newspapers and magazines will probably come away thinking it’s a very much a minority sport, but if you’re talking audience figures then it isn’t. The Poetry Archive has been a huge success and there are more people reading poetry now than ever before in the history of the human race. Strangely enough the internet has been a good friend to poetry, it is oddly intimate and that suits very well.”

But Motion admits that poetry still has an image problem with many youngsters. “There are a lot of school kids who say: ‘Oh God, not poetry’ and that is something we need to address. We need to look at how poetry is presented and the zeitgeist we create around poets, because the kids who say they hate poetry are the same kids who lie on their beds reading lyrics to Arctic Monkeys songs. It’s just a question of joining up the dots.”

Although he’s widely-regarded as one of Britain’s best-known literary figures, Motion didn’t come from a “bookish” family.

“My mother read a little, but near the end of his life my dad said he had only read half a book in his entire life. So there was no expectation I would lead my life in the way that I have.

“None of this would have happened had a brilliant English teacher not shown me, when I was 16, that poems were beautiful and powerful things you could take with you wherever you go. So you could say he gave me my life.”

It’s a life he’s enjoying with renewed gusto. He is already working on a new book and his moving sequence of war poems, Laurels and Donkeys, is shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. “I’m in the grip of an explosion of new energy,” he says. “I turn 60 this year and it feels like I’m getting a second bite at life.”

Silver: Return to Treasure Island, published by Jonathan Cape, is out now priced £12.95. To order a copy through the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call 0800 0153232 or go online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing costs £2.85.

Sir Andrew Motion will be reading excerpts from his new book at St George’s Hall, Bradford, May 4, the Take Over Festival, York Theatre Royal, May 30, Square Chapel Centre for the Arts, Halifax, May 31 and Harrogate’s Theatre Royal, July 11.

Poetry and Motion

Andrew Motion was born in 1952.

He studied English at University College, Oxford.

From 1976 to 1980 he taught English at Hull University, where he became friends with Philip Larkin. Motion says of him: “He had a reputation for being grumpy and fierce, someone who didn’t suffer fools gladly. But he was also incredibly good company, amazingly gentle and capable of great acts of kindness.”

In 1994 Motion’s biography of Larkin won the Whitbread Prize for Biography.

He became Poet Laureate in 1999 following the death of Ted Hughes and set up the Poetry Archive, the world’s biggest collection of online recordings of poets reading their work.