Exclusive:Morpurgo to write retelling of RLS classic Treasure Island
The author has shared his lifelong love of the Edinburgh author and adventurer
Children’s author Michael Morpurgo has revealed he is writing a ‘retelling’ of Treasure Island as he wants more children to become swept up in the Robert Louis Stevenson classic.
Mr Morpurgo, who is due to appear at the Boswell Book Festival at Dumfries House next month, told of his latest project in an exclusive piece for The Scotsman.
The author, perhaps best known for his poignant World War One tale War Horse, which was later turned into a film by Steven Spielberg, said he wanted to retell Treasure Island to bring it to a new audience.
“Not enough children read it these days. And I want them to. Hope RLS won’t mind. I’ve taken no liberties! Promise!”, he wrote.
The Treasure Island retelling follows a similar treatment of Black Beauty, which he will discuss at the book festival.
Mr Morpurgo, who lives in Devon, said he was drawn to Scotland “like a swallow, like a salmon” and that it was RLS, born in Edinburgh in 1850, who first brought him “over the border”.
The works of RLS “first opened my mind’s eye to the country, to the history of Scotland and its people, to the faraway hills and glens, a new landscape to me, and a new people to me”, he added.
The author said: “His stories were told in English, but in a voice and with a music and rhythm in his words I’d never heard before. These stories read off the page as if he was telling them to me face to face, in his own voice. Personally.”
Mr Morpurgo said he was “never a great reader” as a child, but ,while he read everything Enid Blyton wrote as the pages “rattled on”, he found a “truth” in the stories of RLS.
“His stories I live as I read”, he said.
He added: “Baddies were never entirely bad, and goodies were never entirely good. I learned that unpredictable was better, more interesting more complex than predictable, in fact more like life.
“I came first to Scotland in Kidnapped and in Catriona. And Treasure Island may not be a Scottish Island, but the Admiral Benbow Inn could be anywhere, and Jim Hawkins could be me, was me as I was reading.
“ I was hiding in the barrel of apples on the deck of the Hispaniola on the way to Treasure Island.
““It was there I overheard my erstwhile friend plotting murder and mutiny with his dastardly crew. I must have first read that scene when I was 9 or 10. I’m 82 now, and the thought of it still gives me and my timbers the shivers.”
He described RLS as a “story maker supreme” who could master adventure stories for youngsters, dark novels for grown ups, like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, iconic travel books, like Travels with my Donkey, as well as “countless wonderful poems”.
Mr Morpurgo added: “He was an adventurer, a traveller, who brought the world he knew and imagined into his writing, and gave it to me. And for me he became a mentor.”
Such was his influence, Mr Morpurgo ended up adopting the writing position favoured by RLS after seeing a photo of him writing from his bed when he was poorly and towards the end of his life in Samoa.
After seeing the author “looking so comfortable”, Mr Morpurgo tried the same approach and ended up writing War Horse and the island story Kensuke’s Kingdom while propped up on his pillows.
RLS had also encouraged him to “take risks”, with Mr Morpurgo “daring” to start writing poetry in his 80s.
“I owe him”,Mr Morpurgo said.
Michael Morpurgo appears at Boswell Book Festival on May 9.
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