Guest post: Being Tom Rendall – PAYBACK by M. A. Griffin

Being Tom Rendall – PAYBACK by M. A. Griffin

PAYBACK is my first (published) novel in which I write using a first-person perspective. The protagonist of the book, Tom Rendall, is a boarding-school kid back home for a hot and listless summer awaiting exam results. Tom’s still got some growing up to do; an extrovert risk-taker with his own bonkers YouTube channel, he’s an aspiring actor who fast finds himself embroiled with a famous anti-capitalist group, Payback, who accidentally acquire him during a break-in.

I had to write my way into Tom’s head; try and capture some of his wide-eyed, lunatic decision-making, his comic ignorance (Georgian furniture was made during the reign of Queen Georgia, right?) and his growing awareness of his own power and responsibility. His voice began to emerge as I went and was wildly inconsistent to begin with. Beta-readers pointed out bum notes by the hundred. Whole sections got cut. Now it’s been drafted and re- drafted, I hope Tom’s voice feels fully formed to the reader. It does to me, but as I’ve learned, I’m not often best-placed to judge…

If PAYBACK isn’t on your TBR (It should be, I promise. But I know you’re busy,) here are two YA novels whose first-person perspectives have recently impressed and delighted me.

Karen McManus’s One of Us is Lying had me from the first page. Four high school students witness the death of a fifth, and each tells their story in turn. One voice was hard enough for me… MacManus does four. And she executes each with real panache. We leap from point-of-view to point-of-view, and the voices are consistent, clearly differentiated, and imbued with personality, rich in a set of implied attitudes and values. Unlike PAYBACK, whose narrator admits to regularly lying but is too guileless for any artfully extended deception, MacManus plays with our perception of each narrator’s reliability. All of them have something to hide, it’s clear. But what?

I’ve had a blast with Andrew Smith’s Grasshopper Jungle. A conflicted protagonist struggling to identify his sexuality is caught in a love triangle of sorts. Austin is a wisecracking, sex-obsessed razor-sharp cynic, feverishly recording his history and that of his small town, Ealing. His perspective alone is worth the price of the book. An added bonus – for me at least – is the predatory-grasshoppers-invasion-apocalypse plot that serves to barrel the book forward. A weird and wonderful read.

I enjoyed writing PAYBACK more than anything else I’ve done so far, and part of the reason, I think, has been the opportunity to get inside Tom’s skin and see the world through his eyes. Now that I’m working on another book, I miss Tom. I’ve enjoyed dipping into PAYBACK to read aloud to audiences. Anything to be Tom Rendall again, even for a moment!

PAYBACK by M. A. Griffin out now in paperback (£7.99, Chicken House)

#Payback

Follow M.A. Griffin on twitter @FletcherMoss and find out more at

http://www.chickenhousebooks.com

About Caroline Fielding

Chartered School Librarian, CILIP YLG London Chair, Bea-keeper

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