Award: Next Thursday sees the announcement of the winner of this year's Bisto Book of the Year Award. Victoria White assesses the form
'You looking forward, me now looking back", writes Michael O'Siadhail, struggling to empathise with a nine-year-old friend in his poem for the collection Something Beginning with P (edited by Seamus Cashman, The O'Brien Press), which evokes the act of imagination it takes for an adult to write for a child. It is one of nine books shortlisted for the 15th Bisto Book of the Year Award, which carries a €3,000 prize for the best children's book by a writer and/or illustrator born or resident in Ireland.
The collection's illustrators Corrina Askin, Alan Clarke and Emma Byrne are shortlisted for the award, but although the individual illustrations are beautiful and the overall production is lavish, the book doesn't work. Young people see books as visual objects as much as texts, see object and text as inseparable. If they hold a book in their hands they feel it is all theirs to hold in their mind too. This anthology is so diverse it appeals to all ages, and so also confuses all ages. The use of the illustrations, which are sometimes stretched over two poems, confuses further.
In a way, the Bisto Award (all the shortlisted books are also eligible for three Bisto Merit Awards while the Eilís Dillon Award is for a first children's book , all of these prizes worth €1,000 each ) itself presents the same difficulties as this poetry anthology: how do you compare works as diverse as picture books and novels for teens? Olwyn Whelan is shortlisted for illustrating Oscar Wilde's The Star Child (Chrysalis) with stylised medievalist images, flavoured with art nouveau and ultimately lacking power. Oliver Jeffers's child isn't a star, he catches one in How to Catch a Star (HarperCollins), a beautiful and original tale of a dream coming true.
Sam McBratney and Anita Jeram's formula, worked out in Guess How Much I Love You, is to evoke and quiet tiny children's huge fears of losing their parents' love. Children will adore You're All My Favourites (Walker Books) but still I wonder is the formula losing a smidgeon of its potency.
An Bhó Riabhach, written by Siobhán Ní Shíthigh and illustrated by Seán Seosamh Mac an tSíthigh (An Gúm), is an utterly magnificent journey into an old story about a cow dying on a mountain, which explains that all things must die as the seasons turn but that their spirit remains. If you look into the blue pool on Cruach Mhárthain you will see the cow's horns still gleaming "chomh bán leis an mbainne". As writer and illustrator are of the same family, so the ancient words retold and the wild, vibrant effusions of oil are one, spanking new and yet aboriginal.
The only work in Irish among the work for teens is Ré Ó Laighléis's collection of stories Goimh agus Scéalta Eile (Móinín). He gets much better than these short pieces which mostly explore racism in Ireland through tales told rather than shown.
The remaining three teen novels all draw young people on the terrifying edge of adulthood, questioning and often breaking with their parents. Kate Thompson has won the Bisto Award twice, but she shouldn't win again with Annan Water (The Bodley Head). It is constructed around the magnificent folk song of the same name and you can see the scaffolding. The characters of the young lovers are not deeply drawn and their absolute break from their inadequate parents begs too many questions for young people to answer.
Oisín McGann's first novel, The Gods and Their Machines (O'Brien), has a fantastical setting on the war-torn faultline between Altima and Bartokhrin. Once I picked up the clear links between the scientific, air-borne Altimans and the religious, traditional Bartokhrians and the western and Islamic worlds, I was gripped. Sadly, McGann doesn't yet command the emotional depth to carry off the drama, death and destruction of his conclusion: "Riadni was distraught" is surely putting it mildly for a young girl who has just seen her brother murdered.
Kate Mac Lachlan's Love My Enemy (Andersen Press), easily my favourite of the teen fiction, is another first novel set on the faultline of hate, this time in Belfast. But this time the emotional depth seems endless. Zee and her family have seen their father murdered in front of them, "arterial blood" pumping all over the sitting-room. The "grief-tiger" stalks the family, forcing Zee's mother in one heart-breaking scene into a lay-by to cry over her steering-wheel. Zee learns both to confront the beast as, Mc Lachlan hints, the whole society has to, because only then can it learn to love.
Is it fair to compare this narrative with Seán Seosamh Mac an tSíthigh's joyous oily yellow on the page when February comes to save the cow in An Bhó Riabhach? No, but I'll do it. Let the cow get the gravy.