There’s a quote at the very beginning of my new book Fire Colour One. My husband Alex took a photo of some graffiti on the Falmouth seafront and a clever friend told us it was from The Iliad so that’s what it says underneath, all highbrow and literary. Check me. I read the classics. Except I don’t. Turns out it’s actually from The Iliad, via a movie in Hollywood, via a wall in Falmouth, which is much more my style and in so many ways, makes me love it even more.
Alex didn’t take the photo until after I’d finished writing Fire Colour One but it struck me as the perfect companion to the book.
You can read the blurb (even my kids read the blurb). Fire Colour One about a girl called Iris, a pyromaniac by the way, whose filthy rich, estranged, art dealer father is dying, whose only friend is miles away in LA, whose mother and stepfather are, in the words of one genius pre-publication blogger, a pound shop Brangelina (loved it). It’s about dysfunctional families, that father-daughter relationship I suppose, about losing people, to life as well as death, and carrying on without them, finding ways to somehow keep them with you (a split infinitive that my own dad, no longer with us, and to whom this book is dedicated, would be appalled by. He’d like the “whom” though.)
Fire Colour One is also about Art (with a capital A). It’s the name of an Yves Klein painting, and I have Alex to thank for introducing me to Yves Klein too, a long time ago.
For me, this story is about the power Art has to save and change us, sometimes forever, sometimes for less than a second, and that in the end both forever and less than a second are as good as each other when it comes to being changed. It’s not about money or the market. Art belongs to everybody. It is generosity itself. It’s about the magic energy that comes with making and taking Art, in all its forms. Iris’s friend Thurston is an artist who lives and breathes for that magic energy. He offers up impossible to repeat moments, he communicates with strangers on tube trains, he plants seeds, he stages scenes, he spray paints walls and empty swimming pools.
I couldn’t help thinking that the graffiti in Falmouth had something of Thurston in it. It’s about living in the moment, and celebrating the very fact that it won’t last. It could well have been his manifesto. I am working hard at making it mine.
When I write, when I read or watch a film or listen to music or stand in front of a painting deliberately trying not to think, when I see things that stay with me just in passing, in the street, when I’m doing a workshop and I can practically see ideas sparking between people like fork lightning, I am joining in with that magic. We all are. It’s fleeting, but permanently available.
Like Orpheus singing his way into the underworld (a Greek myth this time, via David Almond’s A Song for Ella Grey) Art is our best and only way of laughing in the face of death. Given that we are not allowed to live forever, that we are finite and nobody is getting out of it, let’s make as much magic as we can.
So here it is, from The Iliad, via Hollywood, via Falmouth.
The Gods envy us. They envy us because we are mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.
Thank you to the person who felt the need to write this on a wall. I don’t know who you are, but I’m going to call you Thurston and I’m very, very grateful.
Fire Colour One by Jenny Valentine is available from The Guardian bookshop. Jenny Valentine won the Guardian children’s fiction award in 2007 with Finding Violet Park, and she is one of the judges (along with Piers Torday and Natasha Farrant) forthe Guardian children’s fiction award 2015. We announced the shortlist last month, find out who the winner is on 19 November at 8pm - watch this space!
