‘Ferrymania’
Scottish author's teenage novel takes off in China, Hollywood
Asmalltown Scottish schoolteacher has become an international literary sensation with more than a million sales in China and a Hollywood movie deal – but remains relatively unknown in her homeland.
Claire McFall has signed over the rights to her Ferryman series of teenage novels to Legendary Entertainment, the US production company behind blockbusters such as director Christopher Nolan’s Batman saga and Jurassic World. The 35-year-old mother has also been mobbed in China, where her debut novel Ferryman, first published in 2013, has been a top 10 bestseller for more than two years. “My agent calls it ‘Ferrymania,’ which is slightly cringeworthy,” she told AFP. “It’s mind-boggling how successful it’s been in China. They seem to be astonished that I would want to come to China to see them, and I was like, ‘Are you kidding? You love my book!.’” McFall was teaching when her agent called in November to say she had been offered a film deal. “He didn’t actually drop in the name ‘Legendary’ for about five minutes,” she said. “That is when I realized it was actually quite a big deal, so I did a bit of embarrassing dancing round the classroom.”
Despite being a hit in China, Ferryman had sold a mere 30,000 copies in Britain by June last year.
Scottish landscape inspiration
Ferryman, and its sequel Trespassers, published in September last year, follow a teenage girl on her journey to the afterlife following a train crash.
She is accompanied by a guide inspired by the Greek mythological figure Charon, who carries souls across the rivers Styx and Acheron.
The desolate wasteland between life and death was inspired by the sparsely populated landscape around Lesmahagow, a small town around 35 kilometers southeast of Glasgow, where McFall grew up and worked as a teacher.
“The idea came to me in a dream about waking up on an empty train,” she said. “My commute to Lesmahagow was just fields, sheep and the occasional tractor.
“It is an absolutely beautiful, gorgeous landscape but it’s also very rugged, it’s quite dangerous and the Scottish weather can change at any moment, so for me it was actually quite a threatening environment.”
Chinese appeal
Ferryman has been translated into simplified Chinese for the Chinese mainland market, traditional Chinese for Taiwan, Turkish and Vietnamese. She said she believed the afterlife theme found particular resonance with Chinese readers. “In China they have a belief called ‘The Black and White Impermanence,’ two ghosts that take the spirits of the dead to the afterlife, and that has parallels with the themes in the books,” she said. In China, the book was marketed to adults – unlike in Britain where it was targeted at teenagers – and a large part of the Chinese readership are women aged under 25, she said.
“The people I spoke to at signings also had a real love for British culture, the books and the landscapes, and they were really attracted to the male lead. He’s handsome, he’s charismatic, he’s brave, what more do you want?” McFall said.
Rowling comparisons
The afterlife also has echoes of the Christian belief in purgatory, but the ebullient author stresses she is no theological scholar or historian.
“I’m not an expert in Greek mythology – I literally know as much as I needed to write the book,” she said. “I’m not a religious person and I’m agnostic in that I’m not quite sure what I believe. My idea for the book was that the afterlife would be like coming home – somewhere that you feel safe, but that you should also have to earn it.
“I’m not much of an outdoorsy person. I don’t like climbing. It’s wet, it’s cold, it’s hard work, so being forced to hill march, first of all by the school and then by my husband, just gives me bad memories, so when I was thinking of something tough and grueling to go through, that was in my head.” Her second novel, Bombmaker, set in a dystopian independent Scotland, raised a few eyebrows when it was released at the height of the independence referendum campaign in 2014.
“A lot of people asked me if that is what I thought would happen if we got independence,” she said.
“My answer was no: I was just taking it to an exaggerated degree. I just fancied the idea of writing something in a dystopian Britain that was still recognizable.” The final novel in the Ferryman trilogy is due in 2019. Success has inevitably invited comparisons with J.K. Rowling, whose Harry Potter series began in a Scottish flat and grew into an international phenomenon.
“I wouldn’t even hope to pin myself to her,” McFall said, “but I think she is someone who is really inspiring to show what you can achieve.”