Shadowmancer - Press

Last Update: 31 March 2004 (You need a browser capable of viewing tables to see this page properly)

 

The Guardian

The good book

Graham Taylor (salary £16,000 pa) had to sell his motorbike to get his

first novel printed. This week an American publisher paid him more

than £300,000 for it - and said he was 'hotter than Potter'. Martin

Wainwright meets the Yorkshire clergyman turned literary sensation

 

Thursday July 24, 2003

When the Rev Graham Taylor finally put his talent to use he socked the

biblical parable way beyond all previously known boundaries. Virtue

didn't come back 10-fold. Or 100-fold. As he put his signature to a deal

on Monday with American publishers Penguin Putnam, the Yorkshire

vicar (salary £16,000 plus free tenancy of hideous 1960s parsonage)

banked more than £300,000.

The deal, less than 24 hours after his vicarage garage sale raised a

couple of hundred quid for church funds, puts the debut novelist, an

ex-policeman with a grand total of four GCEs (the vanished, sub-O-level

exam for thickies) straight into modern story-telling's major league.

Hotter than Potter, say the adverts for Shadowmancer, Taylor's

Rowlingesque 300 pages of occult, wizardry and teenage daring. More

than 80,000 copies have tumbled from bookshop shelves in the

past month. The Putnam deal is five times bigger than the Americans

paid for the first instalment from Hogwart's.

"It takes a bit of getting used to, but no one's famous in Yorkshire," says

Taylor, a big, fair-haired, open-faced 43-year-old, surrounded by children

at his parish in Cloughton, north of Scarborough. "If you need your feet

keeping on the ground, this is the place. We just carry on as we are."

"Daddy, we got the swimming pool!" interrupts Lydia, the youngest of his

three pre-teen daughters, dancing into his study. Is this Mammon

creeping into the virtuous life of the suddenly very rich church mouse?

"No it is not," says Taylor, with the authority learned during his time as a

beat officer with North Yorkshire police. "She's just talking about a very

cheap paddling pool for the garden."

Even so, Taylor shows a self-confident acceptance of his amazing change

in fortune. His book is good, he says frankly, quoting a fan letter from a

couple of lads: "Did you read that BFG, Mr Taylor? Because you write as

excitingly as what Roald Dahl does." The book also reached publishers in

London, after being privately circulated among parishioners, because one

churchgoer is a retired Faber reader, for TS Eliot among others, and she

recognised quality.

The inspiration for the story was inevitably "The Boss", although God acted

through a Yorkshire coast deputy, the Anglo-Saxon poet Caedmon. "I

believe it was Caedmon's story which made my book happen," says

Taylor, who was brought up in an unusual home: his cobbler father was

stone deaf and sign language was used as much as English in the

family's Scarborough home. Caedmon, famously, was a shepherd boy at

St Hilda's great abbey in Whitby, ignored until he suddenly gave song to

some of the most beautiful verse in the childhood of the English language.

"One of my previous churches was right on the site of Hilda's village," says

Taylor, who had a useful lesson in the ways of the media in that late

1990s time. Goths and witches and disciples of Dracula, who came ashore

beneath the cliffs at Whitby Abbey in Bram Stoker's novel, held an annual

gathering in Taylor's graveyard. First he welcomed them, then he

denounced them, inevitably making headlines each time.

Dracula is one influence on Shadowmancer's story of the indescribably

evil Rev Obadiah Demurrel whose plan to take over the universe, starting

with Scarborough, is challenged by four tough 14-year-olds (eagerly

endorsed by Lydia and her sisters Abigail and Hannah). Another is the

extraordinarily numinous atmosphere of the North York Moors. This is a

well-trodden literary landscape and one with a dark side which Taylor,

like Roald Dahl, CS Lewis and the great fairytale writers of Germany and

Denmark, unerringly aims at children "who want to be frightened, who

need to learn how to deal with fear".

"I use the landscape all the time in Shadowmancer - I saw some awful

things in a lovely place when I was a policeman. You don't forget that

combination of beauty and cruelty," says Taylor, who writes rapidly,

"10% from my own experience and 90% from my imagination." The

latter is the key to his sudden, fortysomething eloquence. "It's

amazing what lies in our imaginations - it's like Malcom Muggeridge

said: if people knew what was going on in my mind, they'd think

I was a monster of depravity."

Out it all pours, influenced too by Taylor's late teens as a runaway in

London. This period, after he left home, further education college and

his job as glasswasher at Scarborough's Penthouse nightclub, informs his

second book (the Potter pattern is well under way with more lucrative

advances and great glee at his publishers). It's called Wormwood and tells

the story of a girl called Agatta coping with the real horrors of London's

18th-century streets. "It's halfway finished," says Taylor, who is currently

pounding Soho and the East End in his Yorkshire hiking boots on days off to

get the landscape right. "I wanted an opportunity to get a lot more of the

world's evils and violence into a story."

He knows these evils from his time as a teenager in London and from the

vicious attack which ended his police career. Set on in Pickering by 35 drunks

after closing time, he was left deaf in one ear and with a growth in his throat

where he was kicked senseless. His attackers, five of whom were later jailed

for long terms, knew that he was training to be a vicar at the time. "Where's

your God now Graham?" one sneered as a leavetaking.

Taylor bears no resentments and not just because of his wonderful turn of

fortune. His priesthood is thoroughly New Testament and therefore

embraces such issues as gay priests and ecumenical fellowship.

"We've doubled the congregation at Ravenscar by joining up with the

Methodists. As for gay priests, I was led to ordination by one. We should

be interested in what goes on in a man or woman's heart, not their bed.

Anyway who did Jesus mix with? He says nothing about gay people or

women priests. He was concerned with much more important matters."

Not surprisingly, Taylor's success is very good news for the church and

charity who have always received a tithe, or 10th, of his income. As from

Monday, that ceases to mean £1,600 and swoops - with sales and all the

other deals that are pending - into six figures.

"Things can still go amiss, though," he says, pottering among the

gravestones in his cassock and white trainers. "I asked our church treasurer

to sell some of the last copies of the original edition (self-published with

the proceeds of the vicar's petrol money and sale of his motorbike) at

our bring-and-buy. He cleared 12 - at the original price of £5.99. I had

assumed he knew that they are now worth £1,000 each."

 

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