But every now and then, I'd suddenly go… It became just fractionally unreal. But every now and then… It didn't let up with its charm - I loved it, and with its humour. I find it absolutely delightful and I love the teenage boy's voice. I read it when it was very first… hot off the press. The nice thing in Jasper Jones is… that tradition's there on the page.Ĭover of Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey appears on screen I remember I read a review of the Harry Potter books that was complaining that none of the kids in those books read other books, they don't belong to a literary tradition. Yeah, it has a big debt to it, but what it does is it wears that debt on its sleeve, so Charlie's dad - Wes, is it? - Charlie's dad is steeped in literature rather than in the law, so he's not Atticus Finch but, instead, he's making available in his house the books of Faulkner, the book of Harper Lee, one-hit wonder, um… and so there's that really lovely thing. similar concerns about race and small towns and prejudice and that kind of thing.Īnd the structure of it, the structure is very similar too. I think that's one of the nice themes of the book, actually, is that it's clearly a book that has a… It references overtly To Kill A Mocking Bird a few times and it clearly has similar… JENNIFER BYRNE: A few times?!. Here is a 13-year-old boy who's reading the novels of William Faulkner, which I think is pretty remarkable, actually.

There's an awful lot of literary references. But the discovery of the body is… terrifying for Charlie, and… Charlie has to help Jasper deal with this body. But the book in itself is extremely funny, I think.

There's a body but it's not as grim as it might sound, is it, Jason? OK, it's 1965 in a small mining town in WA, and Charlie Bucktin is visited one night by the town outcast - Jasper Jones. It really kind of took hold and almost wrote itself. I was really just along for the ride with this book, you know. It became so much more than I'd originally intended, and I'm so glad that it did. It's also a, you know, very tentative little love story as well - Charlie falls in love for the first time, very nervously and very badly. And instead, it became a book about coming of age but it also… addressed themes of, uh, the nature of friendship and the nature of towns' secrets and myths and traditions and how they're allowed to flourish. I set out to write an Australian gothic mystery novel, but it soon became so much more than that once the characters developed and the story unfurled for me.

Jasper jones the book