Greek legend still winning formula

By MARGIE THOMSON

An adventure story set among the heroes, villains and monsters of Greek mythology is the overall winner of this year's New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards.

Ken Catran's Voyage With Jason (Lothian, $14.95), in which a peasant boy named Pylos joins Jason's Argonauts in a perilous quest for the Golden Fleece, won the Senior Fiction Award and Book of the Year.

It's a coming-of-age story aimed at 13 to 17-year-olds which takes its readers far beyond the bounds and specific challenges of modern life, and certainly way beyond New Zealand shores. But, as the judges said, mythology is all about enduring stories that speak to something deep within us.

Catran, a well-known screenwriter with credits such as Under the Mountain, Children of the Dog Star, Black Beauty and Alex, enjoys the diversity and challenge of writing fiction for young adults.

In Voyage With Jason he has taken a no-holds-barred approach. Death, sex, blood, human strength and vanity are all part of the explorations undertaken by this legendary band of 50 great heroes.

And yet this is a modern rendering of the classic tale. Through Pylos, Catran demythologises the heroism of the Argonauts by making the boy muse on the behaviour of some of those heroes with whom he sails, obliquely concluding that at times they are little better than pirates and murderers.

He also says that what happened was not always as the bards have since sung. The Harpies of the prophet Phineas were mere scavenging birds bothering an old fraud, for instance.

Catran is not out to flatten heroes or belittle the deeds they did. He wants to introduce heroism as a more complex issue that is worthy of serious consideration, even in our own cynical era.

The children's book awards have become a major event on the year's literary calendar. Finalists tour schools and libraries to read their work and explain the creative process to crowds of awestruck and eager children (in the case of the younger categories) or the coolly disinterested (in the case of the older teenage readers).

Children are encouraged to vote for their favourite books and a stunning 35,000 have done so in each of the past two years.

In part a reflection of the enthusiasm of very young readers, picture books usually win the Children's Choice award, and this year is no exception.

Oliver in the Garden, by Margaret Beames and Sue Hitchcock (Scholastic, $24.95), won the Picture Book category and the Children's Choice award.

In this award, judges want to ensure the text and illustrations are complementary - it's no good having brilliant pictures if the text is only mediocre, or vice versa.

In Oliver in the Garden, the story of a cat who wants to stay out adventuring all night and doesn't come when his elderly owner calls him, the judges found a lovely melding of the two components.

Joy Cowley is one of New Zealand's most prolific and loved storytellers and her hundreds of children's books are well known all over the world. To add to her many awards over the years, she took the Junior Fiction award for Shadrach Girl (Puffin, $15.95), the stand-alone final in her Shadrach series, of which Bow Down Shadrach won the 1992 Aim Children's Book of the Year and Gladly, Here I Come was a finalist in 1995.

As usual with Cowley's stories, there is more in Shadrach Girl than initially meets the eye. On one level, it's a story about 16-year-old Hannah and her horse Gladly. On another level it's a non-moralising story about family values.

Animals were truly the winners in this year's awards, with the residents of Auckland Zoo sharing the success of Oliver the cat and Gladly the horse.

Colin Hogg's The Zoo: Meet the Locals (Random House, $24.95) was inspired by the top-rating television series The Zoo and carried off the Non-Fiction prize.

With this book, his first for children, Hogg makes a successful and possibly surprising sidestep from interviewing rock stars to writing about Snorkel the Hippo, Charlotte the Tarantula, lively tamarinds and an elephant with sensitive toes.

The runners-up in each age category who received an Honour Award were Pat Quinn and Philip Webb for Dragor (Picture Book), Jack Lasenby for The Lies of Harry Wakatipu (Junior Fiction) and Margaret Mahy for 24 Hours (Senior Fiction).

The judging panel was convened by Judge Mick Brown and included Christine Ross and Barbara Murison. The awards were presented on Thursday by the new Governor-General, Dame Silvia Cartwright.