ILLEGAL Blog Tour

Here we go again. This month I am really excited to be hosting Miriam Halahmy on her blog tour to launch her latest novel, ILLEGAL.

I've known Miriam for quite a while now. She's one of those people who will come up to new faces at workshops and conferences and introduce herself, offering you help, support and advice or just simple friendship. I've attended one of her inspiring workshops at a SCBWI conference and I've just sat and chatted with her at social events. But we're here to talk about Illegal and I think it's about time I passed over to Miriam herself:

Karl, my second main character, is mute!

Illegal, the second novel in my cycle of three, focuses on fifteen year old Lindy who is in terrible trouble. Her family are too dysfunctional to support her and she doesn’t get on with either the kids or the teachers at school. 

They are doing Hamlet in English. 

The teacher tells them, “Hamlet’s uncle killed his father and married his mother. He had no-one left to turn to. Hamlet was a spiritual refugee.” A spiritual refugee. Lindy liked that. Just like me, I’ve got no-one left at home either. Lindy has been drawn into the shadowy and dangerous world of international drug dealing and with two older brothers in prison, she is terrified she will end up in a cell too. But support comes from a surprising quarter - fellow misfit, Karl, who is known in school as ‘the kid who doesn’t speak.’ Together they embark on a desperate race to ensure Lindy’s freedom.

I decided to create a mute character for this novel partly to challenge Lindy and partly to explore the problems presented by mutism to sufferers. As a special needs teacher for 25 years, I came across several cases of mutism, two in one school. 

Mutism is defined as a consistent failure to speak. Some people are mute for physical reasons perhaps because of severe hearing loss or a problem with the voice box. But Karl is mute for psychological reasons. He uses almost no form of communication, except occasionally moving his eyebrows. He became mute after a particular trauma which his parents ignored. As a result he ceased to speak until finally he spoke to no-one for over two years.

 Most young people who are mute do speak at home or perhaps to one school friend. However, if they cease to speak all together then this is classified as Progressive Mutism. They will need very specialist therapeutic input to start speaking again. In my novel, Illegal, I create a second trauma which shocks Karl into speaking later in the book. Not the ideal way to deal with the problem!

Mutism can become a phobia about speaking. Sufferers might be self conscious about the sound of their own voice, or simply speaking up for themselves, which Karl describes to Lindy in one very poignant scene.

It was quite a challenge to create a second main character who would not speak for such a long part of the novel. I wrestled with Karl and his different forms of expression for about a year. Karl doesn’t do mime or writing explanatory notes. Most of the time his face is quite impassive and Lindy actually comes to enjoy his silence and learning to guess what he wants to say. The silence becomes a very beautiful part of the book, right to the final page.

Lindy doesn’t accept Karl’s mutism immediately and throws insults at him, calling him ‘dumb’, ‘deaf’, ‘thicko’ and ‘retard’. But she learns to regret her meanness as their relationship develops. By putting these terms out there and then challenging them, I hope that my readers might reflect on how inappropriate they are.

Writing Illegal gave me a chance to develop characters which have emerged from the many young people I taught who came from difficult backgrounds or who had emotional and behavioural problems which were holding them back in life. I believe with the right support every young person has a future, as Lindy and Karl demonstrate in my novel.

Miriam Halahmy

 The London launch of Illegal is taking place on 13th March. I'll be there. Maybe some of you will be too.

Thanks Miriam for a thought provoking post.