Transcending the young adult genre, his work was as warm and perceptive as he was, writes Meg Rosoff
When Mal phoned to tell me he had cancer, I rebuked him sternly. “For Christ’s sake,” I said, “I have a long list of people I’d quite like to drop dead. You’re nowhere on it.”
“I know, darling,” he said. “I’m not on my list either.”
The fact that I can’t remember my first meeting with Mal confirms the feeling I have that I was born knowing him. There must have been a time before, as in 2005 when I read an amazing book called Tamar that had just won the Carnegie prize, and I muttered (a la Butch Cassidy), “Who IS this guy?” But the rest was a blur of after, of wonderful novels and dinners with many bottles of wine and hearing his voice down the end of a phone saying, “Are you depressed about the state of the literary world, darling, because I sure as hell am.” I don’t think anyone but my mother ever called me more regularly, just for a chat.
Nobody wrote like Mal. From his wistful, elegant novel of Norfolk in the 1960s, Life: An Exploded Diagram, comes: “History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. We wait, more or less patiently, for it to pause, so that we can get to the liquor store or the laundromat or the burger bar.” He had an extraordinary ear for language, a Google Earth perspective on humanity and a vast tolerance for the frailties of his friends, his characters and himself.
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“I know, darling,” he said. “I’m not on my list either.”
The fact that I can’t remember my first meeting with Mal confirms the feeling I have that I was born knowing him. There must have been a time before, as in 2005 when I read an amazing book called Tamar that had just won the Carnegie prize, and I muttered (a la Butch Cassidy), “Who IS this guy?” But the rest was a blur of after, of wonderful novels and dinners with many bottles of wine and hearing his voice down the end of a phone saying, “Are you depressed about the state of the literary world, darling, because I sure as hell am.” I don’t think anyone but my mother ever called me more regularly, just for a chat.
Nobody wrote like Mal. From his wistful, elegant novel of Norfolk in the 1960s, Life: An Exploded Diagram, comes: “History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. We wait, more or less patiently, for it to pause, so that we can get to the liquor store or the laundromat or the burger bar.” He had an extraordinary ear for language, a Google Earth perspective on humanity and a vast tolerance for the frailties of his friends, his characters and himself.
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