- Emma-Louise Silva
From Natural Resources to Cultural Artefacts: Coming of Age in David Almond’s Clay & Bone Music
This blog post was written as part of the research project Constructing Age for Young Readers (CAFYR), led by Vanessa Joosen at the University of Antwerp. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 804920, 2019-2024).
I’d like to reflect on two YA books by the British author David Almond – Clay (2005) and Bone Music (2021) – and on how the protagonists in both books seek meaningful experiences revolving around forests and cities, nature and culture.
In Clay, a fourteen-year-old boy named Davie sees his world become shaken up when troubled Stephen arrives in the town of Felling in Northumbria, with plans to create life from clay. By means of sculpting a figure with clay from a pond by the quarry in Braddock’s Garden, Davie and Stephen become engrossed in their creature’s possible connection to the death of the bully Mouldy. The figure they create comes to life as a figment of their imagination and has intense repercussions on their coming of age.
Bone Music, then, sees fifteen-year-old Sylvia’s evolution from despising her stay in the countryside town of Blackwood, to becoming one with nature, and finding her voice to speak up about environmental issues once back in her urban home of Newcastle. Together with her newfound friend from the countryside, Gabriel, she creates a flute from the hollow bone of a dead buzzard found in the forest.
In both Clay and Bone Music, the characters’ development is intensely shaped by the creative processes they are engaged with. By crafting cultural artefacts – such as a clay figure and a hollow bone flute – from natural resources, the protagonists are depicted “thinging”. Lambros Malafouris describes “thinging” as “thinking and feeling with, through and about things” (“Bringing Things to Mind” 764). Davie and Stephen in Clay, and Sylvia and Gabriel in Bone Music experience what Malafouris deems intense forms of “mutual engagement” that evoke “thinging” happening “in-between humans and things” (“Creative Thinging” 150). To give an example, Stephen and Davie are depicted creating their clay figure as follows:
We kneel and turn the sticky sloppy clay into the shape of a man. And we become engrossed in it, and sometimes I forget myself and where I am, and I forget how crazy this would seem if someone else from Felling stumbled into the quarry tonight. (175-176)
The creative process takes the form of thinging, as Davie and Stephen become more and more absorbed in their engagement with the materials they are working with. During this “generative process” (Boutet 38), Davie is described as merging with the act of crafting the clay figure, forgetting himself and his surroundings, and becoming wholly concentrated on the shaping of the clay, or thinging “with, through and about” the clay (Malafouris “Bringing Things to Mind”). The artistic object Davie creates has a profound effect on his sense of self as he becomes immersed in the clay-sculpting process.
In Bone Music, Sylvia’s toiling at a buzzard’s hollow bone in Gabriel’s shed in order to make a flute has a profound impact on her: she feels that she has gained in confidence after she has made the instrument and learnt how to play it. During the creative process of transforming the hollow bone into a flute, Sylvia realises that she has, in fact, already learnt about the different parts of the buzzard wing that she is dissecting during a biology class at school:
“The wing is an arm,” said Gabriel. “It’s just like ours. It has an upper arm like ours, and the bone like ours is called the humerus. It has a lower arm and…”
She gasped. Second year biology with Mr Atkinson! She reached down to touch. (111)
It is as if Sylvia finally discovers that by doing “more than thinking” to use Gabriel’s words (84) – or by thinging – she is garnering valuable insights and putting what she has learnt at school to good use.
Both Davie and Sylvia’s experiences mark coming-of-age processes that consist of “metamorphoses” as “ongoing experience[s] of ageing through the life course” (Pickard 102; 238). Just like the ever-modifiable, ever-metamorphosing clay in Clay and the hollow bone in Bone Music with which Sylvia can create “ever-changing tunes” (199), Almond’s protagonists resemble the natural resources they engage with. Davie and Sylvia’s creative acts generate more nuanced understandings of their adolescent selves as they navigate their evolving minds, bodies, and worlds.
Works Cited
Almond, David. Clay. Hodder Children’s Books, [2005] 2016.
Almond, David. Bone Music. Hodder’s Children Books, 2021.
Boutet, Danielle. “Metaphors of the Mind: Art Forms as Modes of Thinking and Ways of Being.” Carnal Knowledge: Towards a “New Materialism” through the Arts, edited by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, I. B. Tauris, 2013, pp. 29-39.
Malafouris, Lambros. “Creative Thinging: The Feeling of and for Clay.” Pragmatics and Cognition,vol. 22, no. 2, 2014, pp. 140-158. https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.22.1.08mal.
Malafouris, Lambros. “Bringing Things to Mind: 4Es and Material Engagement.” The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition, edited by Albert Newen, Leon de Bruin and Shaun Gallagher. Oxford UP, 2018, pp. 755-771.
Pickard, Susan. Age Studies: A Sociological Examination of How We Age and Are Aged Through the Life Course. Sage, 2016.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Emma-Louise Silva is a postdoctoral researcher aboard the ERC-project “Constructing Age for Young Readers”, led by Vanessa Joosen. Within the project she focuses on age studies, cognitive narratology, genetic criticism and philosophy of mind in children’s literature. She combines this role with a lecturing position at the University of Antwerp, where she teaches the “Joyce Seminar”. As a member of the Centre for Manuscript Genetics, Emma-Louise defended her doctoral dissertation on James Joyce and cognition in 2019. She co-edited James Joyce and the Arts (2020) and Modernism (2021), and she has published in the James Joyce Literary Supplement (2018), the James Joyce Quarterly (2019), Genetic Joyce Studies (2020), and Joyce Without Borders (2022). She has also published in the European Journal of Life Writing (2022), and in Age, Culture, Humanities (2022).