Irfan Master: A Beautiful Lie

Irfan Master is project manager of Reading the Game at the National Literacy Trust. His father is from Gujarat, India where the novel is set, and his mother is from Pakistan. Irfan grew up speaking both Urdu and English.

A Beautiful Lie is set during Partition. The first thing we want to know is, why did you think this was an important story to tell?

I’d grown up reading lots of stories about England and Britain, coming-of-age tales about boys together and I wanted to read a story about where I was from. I looked around and hoped someone had written something about partition. There was lots of books for adults, like Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, but there was nothing for two generations of young people who haven’t got an idea of what partition was about. I spoke to young people in my family, and they couldn’t even point to India on a map. I wanted to do something about that.

Did you wish that this book had been around for you?

Yes I did. But then, I had such a great experience of reading when I was growing up, I escaped a lot.

Do you feel like there was a gap in the market for this type of book?

If you told me two years ago, that I’d be published by Bloomsbury for a story about Partition, set in India 1947, I would have laughed you out of the room. Why would anyone want to publish it? There’s not a wizard or a vampire in sight. It was very niche, I thought, and if anyone published it, I’d be lucky. So I thought I’d have a go.

The beauty of the book is that this history has been covered so much for adults but not for children. How did you go about writing it so that it was accessible for children?

I wanted to make it a story about a gang of boys, about brotherhood. You could lift the story and take it to the Troubles in Ireland or Israel and Palestine. Any young person reading that story would identify with the idea of making your reality true to yourself at that time and age, to have the will to say, this is what I’m going to do, I don’t care about fate or consequences or history or politics. I wanted the central character to be very wilful.

Each character occupies a different archetype in a typical group of friends, meaning it’s very relatable to children. At the same time, the book packs a huge emotional punch. Did you worry it would be distressing?

I did consider for a minute that it could be distressing but I didn’t want to pull any punches. Anybody who reads the book will realise by the end that everything has been lost, in a way. I couldn’t soften that. Partition wasn’t a time where things were softened; realities were harsh. People lost everything. I wanted that to be a central theme, as depressing as that is. When it comes full circle at the end, I couldn’t be too sentimental. I had to go for it. That was hard to do.

Once you strip away the distractions of robots, dinosaurs and wizards, these books do all tell very emotional tales with big themes. Your book is grounded in reality that did happen and cause a lot of pain and anguish. What’s nice is that at the end of the book, you contextualise a lot of the history with extra facts and maps. Are you hoping children will go on and explore this period of time further?

I hope this is a jumping-on point for children, adults, teenagers, teachers and librarians to talk about this time in history more. There must be millions of people in the UK with histories going back to India two generations ago, which is not long ago, and that makes it important. I know this is overly ambitious but I hope it might end up on a curriculum on a more expansive level. It needs to be talked about because it feeds into a lot of the reason why we’re here. The country became too big, too economically unstable, too disparate and too divisive so people started migrating.

We are all intertwined and combined and mixed up and I wanted that to be pivotal to the story, separate from religion and politics. One of the reasons I wrote the story was when I went to India and spoke to people, I realised the ‘transient nature of the Indian’ – who has thought about the past and ignored it to work and carry on, grafting and building a life going forward.

How did you research the novel?

I have family in Indian and in Pakistan. My mother is from Pakistan and my dad is from India. My mother’s father was a great storyteller and was very well-read. He used to retell The Count of Monte Cristo to me and would quote passages from it. He was taught by the British, went to a British school, learnt his metric and at the height of the troubles, he decided he was going to go to Pakistan. He had had enough. He was being harassed. There was too much trouble going on. He had only the clothes on his back and he caught a steamer and went across. My father’s father decided to stay. I always thought that was odd. There was this land that was whole and then one day this line appeared and this country was one of the most ancient countries in the world! This was the biggest travesty in the world for me.

The beauty of the story is that these major historical events are a background noise in these kids’ lives, that starts as a hum and builds to a cacophony. But actually, the events in the book are framed around bonds and family ties and their primary concerns – like food, health and shelter – are more important.

I wanted to take it down to a ground level where people weren’t aware of the news on a regular basis because they didn’t have access to a newspaper or a wireless. Daily concerns become food, school, health – basic day-to-day stuff. When I went to India, I tracked down people who were 13-14 during partition and that was the kind of thing they told me, that they didn’t know it was happening until it happened to them.

It’s great how you describe how, despite the limited access to news, people can become polarised so quickly. It becomes very us and them.

The messages filtering through were divisive. A lot of people had lived side by side for hundreds of years and so when it exploded, it was absolutely brutal. People who called each other friends and brothers quickly became enemies on a scale probably not seen before in history.

Reading the book, you can’t help but think of films with similar themes – of protecting loved ones with ‘beautiful lies’ in times of war – like Life Is Beautiful and Goodbye, Lenin. Were these films influences on you?

It’s funny – with Goodbye, Lenin, a lot of people made that comparison when they read early versions of the book. I hadn’t seen it but I knew the plot. When I watched it, I did notice similarities, especially with the desperation of the boy to keep it all together, which was key. Life Is Beautiful I re-watched recently – and the tender relationship between father and son is so important. I love films and they inform how I write. I think in scenes. It’s almost storyboarded.

We know what happens to Bilal. What do you think happens to the other boys?

I think they’re all pretty savvy. I think Manjit would be okay. He was a fighter who could look after himself. The only one who I couldn’t tell you was Salim, because he has to disappear. If we’re looking at history, he could be anywhere. He might not even have made it out alive. Chhota was a scrapper and a survivor and would have been alright.

How did you go about writing this?

I went to India for five and a half weeks, came back and then went to Morocco for two months. I had a friend who kindly lent me his place. It was in Fez, this amazing ancient city. It was a dark room with a desk. I arrived at night, had a panic about what the heck I was doing, and the next day, I woke up with the birds and the light – two weeks later, I was 20,000 words down. I’d been thinking about this story for so long, dreaming bits of it up, writing chunks of it and so I pieced a lot of it together. Everything came from the first two words: ‘Everybody lies…’ I had that in my head, and once I had that, I knew where the story would start and end. Now I’m writing my second one, I realise it’ll never be as pure as thinking up those two words and everything flowing from there ever again.

What were your favourite books as a child?

Because of my granddad and our shared reading, I always loved The Count of Monte Cristo. I loved the themes in it, of revenge, and I always wanted to be a hero. Although, when you’re a kid, you think he’s a cool guy but when you’re an adult, you realise that actually he loses everything, is incarcerated for a long time and when he comes out, wants to kill everybody! The Iron Man by Ted Hughes too – poetry was always my first love. I wanted to write poetry and it’s such a beautiful, simple book.

What is the best piece of advice you’ve been given about writing for the age you write for?

It’s very difficult because you have to be precise. You have to pair it down to a beautiful simplicity without losing the power of the words, without making it so simple, it means nothing. You can still be lyrical and poetical but some of the greatest writers might tell you, if you have 15-20 words in a sentence… get it down to 10, get it down to eight. It makes you very disciplined.