The follow up to the double Carnegie nominated The Song That Sings Us was published in hardback by Firefly Press on 14th September and it is a great pleasure today to kick off the blog tour arranged to coincide with the publication of Skrimsli, a prequel tracing the early days of the sea captain tiger who shone so vividly in the first story.

Compelling, multi-layered and bearing Nicola Davies’ knowledge of and love for our natural world within every page this is an epic adventure weaving together lives and stories in an outstanding work of fiction. Skrimsli is the sort of book one hides away with in order to savour and enjoy both the wonderful characters and its thoughtful themes. It is quite simply unforgettable. The wonderful cover illustration by Jackie Morris, alongside her beautiful chapter headings and, best of all, a map are just perfect for the story.

We follow Skrimsli and his friends Owl and Kat as they endeavour to escape from the evil circus owner, Korbut Majak, stop a war between neighbouring peoples and save an ancient forest. They are helped in their mission by various other people and animals including a desert princess and a tiny dog with a huge heart. There is danger and excitement but also love, loyalty and bravery in abundance. Running through the adventure are the ideas of belonging and purpose, communication and understanding and these combine in an immensely thought provoking read. There is so much to admire and to love about this story as the narrative told from several different characters’ point of view engages the reader and adds to the depth of meaning. The world building and the relationships are both vital to the complex plot and this is an extraordinary tale.

Skrimsli leaps from the pages into readers’ minds and I was struck by the way in which Nicola Davies conveys his fascination with the ocean and with the tiger’s perception of the ship as a living thing. Now reading Nicola’s guest post for the blog tour this aspect of the book means even more!

THE CALL OF THE SEA – Guest Post by Nicola Davies

 

Skrimsli, the tiger sea captain who first made an appearance in The Song that Sings Us, now has almost a whole book to himself. It feels as if I didn’t invent him at all, but discovered him, fully formed when he leapt into the story in The Song That Sings Us.

 

Skrimsli is a particular kind of tiger. In our real world there are nine different subspecies of tiger and the biggest is the Siberian or Amur tiger. It’s this one that Skrimsli is based on. Amur tigers are not creatures of steamy tropical jungles, but of cool, boreal forests where snow falls thick in winter. In the far east, where Amur tigers share their forests with the biggest owls in the world Blakiston’s fish owl (more of them in another post) their forests bound the Sea of Japan and tigers there will walk along the sea shore. But although tigers are competent swimmers, they aren’t creatures of the sea.  So how did Skrimsli end up as the captain of a ship?

 

The answer to that question I’m afraid you’ll just have to read the book, which recounts Skrimsli’s early life until the moment when he becomes captain of the Ice Maiden. But I can answer a different question here, which is why; why have an animal character which ends up doing something which seems against its nature? Why have a creature who’s made for a forest, live on the sea?

 

One of the answers lies in my own life. My parents came from working class families in South Wales. They grew up between two wars and never knew anyone who even owned a dingy. My father always claimed he was the only person to have got sea sick in the canoe sequence of How The West Was Won. I had no experience on anything floating until the moment in my 20th year when I stepped aboard little sailboat called Firenze owned by a young biologist called Hal Whitehead. I was part of the whale studying team that Hal had put together and our job was to survey and study the humpbacked whales cruising the coast of Newfoundland in Eastern Canada. 

 

The weeks I spent aboard Firenze shaped my life ever after. Like Skrimsli, there was something about the sensation of floating on deep water that I found utterly beguiling, magical. Even though I was hideously sea sick almost all the time there are moments from that time that shine like jewels in my heart; the feel of a taut sail at your back stretching white in the sky above you; the moment when the chaos of flapping canvas and flailing ropes resolves into a new course and silent forward motion; the sea sculpted shapes of ice bergs, their feet showing bright turquoise though the water. We sailed though long nights of stormy seas, steering towards the tiny distant light of a harbour whose arms enveloped us in the dawn; we anchored in deep fiords where the rolling backs of porpoises were the only break in the mirror of the surface; we rode giant swells driven by Arctic storms and goose winged our way, hardly moving, over the silk of the ocean under a procession of constellations.  

 

Since then I’ve worked on Hal’s small sailing research boats in the Indian Ocean, the Sea of Cortez and in Dominica. Although I’ve worked on much bigger boats too, expedition cruise ships, there is nothing like being close to the skin of the sea dependent on the wind, under the dark sky at night, in a small sailboat.  

 

Nowadays, my husband and I have a small fishing boat and in summer we drop crab pots and catch mackerel and pootle around the coast within a few miles of our harbour. And even that feels like an adventure; yes, adventure, I think that’s why the sensation of floating on the sea is significant to me because the sea is wild; on it, you are riding on the back of wild beast and it might do anything, you have to keep your wits about you. Also, in theory, once you are on the ocean, the ocean connects everywhere and everything you could go anywhere (although I doubt our little tub Kittiwakewould make it as far as Dublin). So every floating outing is an adventure and I love it.

 

I don’t know where this love of being on a boat came from. No one in my family has it and just like Skrimsli it would seem to be against my nature. So there’s the other reason why I have a tiger seafarer in my books, because we don’t have to do what our background, or our family, or even our own bodies, would seem to dictate. I want my readers to know that we are the makers of our own stories and of our own selves, and we can choose to have adventures.

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Thank you Nicola for your inspiring and interesting post and for writing Skrimsli a book that will linger long in my memory.

Please do follow the rest of the blog tour to read more from Nicola Davies and to learn a little about this beautiful creature’s story. I should like to thank the publishers, Firefly Press and Graeme Williams for providing my proof copy and for their assistance in preparing this post.