Tom Moorhouse
About Author
Tom Moorhouse is an ecologist at Oxford University's Zoology Department, as well as an author.
He studied for a degree in general biology, before doing a masters and then a PhD researching the reintroduction of mammals into the wild, focusing on water voles. He spent another four years with a project reintroducing water voles into an area in Norfolk, where he spent a lot of time in a tent studying the water vole population.
Tom's first book, The River Singers, was published by OUP in 2013. He lives in Oxford and enjoys hiking up mountains, walking through woods, climbing on rocks and generally being weather-beaten outdoors.
Author link
tom-moorhouse.com; www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMJO6GRS5UE
Interview
RIVER SINGERS
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
JULY 2014
Following a tradition rooted in Wind in the Willows and Watership Down, Tom Moorhouse's The River Singers (for readers aged nine years plus) takes us on a journey along the river banks of England, following a small family of young water voles as they embark on a dangerous and epic journey to find a new, safer home.
Moorhouse, an ecologist at Oxford University, had been trying to have an earlier novel published when a conversation with an agent ended with her suggesting that he write what he knows about, animals. At that time, Moorhouse was working as an ecologist studying the reintroduction of water voles to British waterways and, with water voles his subject matter, The River Singers was born.
As a child Moorhouse enjoyed "a constant supply of books" thanks to his writer mother, Sue Moorhouse. She was also very much into fantasy, says Moorhouse, "intelligent books where you're creating another world to make a comment about the world you live in", so he grew up on books like A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin, the Belgariad books by David Eddings and The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper.
Writing about water voles wasn't too far away from writing traditional fantasy, he says. "When you're writing fantasy you're inventing new worlds but when you're writing about wildlife, you already have a fantasy setting; the world for the River Singers exists but we don't see it like they do, it's a world we're not familiar with."
The subject matter also comes with ever and present dangers so Moorhouse didn't need to work too hard to develop a sense of jeopardy for his characters. As he explains, "There is lots of danger in the story but that's a water vole's life and that's the nice thing about writing about animals: you don't have to lie about any of the dangers they have to confront, they are all already there.
"Most of us get up and don't worry about facing a gun or some kind of life-threatening situation that day, whereas these guys know that each and every day, something could kill them." Put another way, "Everything wants to eat them."
Moorhouse also had to decide how he would present his characters and how anthropomorphic to make them. "I needed to have characters in the story who would need to be able to speak. If you see a spider in your bath you're quite likely to flush it away or hit it with a newspaper, but the minute you give it a name, say 'Arnold', and if you're told that it's spent the whole night trying to find a way out of the bath, then you've given it a voice and a personality and it's become more human."
The next thing is to work out how far to go with this process for characters; do you put them into waistcoats and allow them to drive cars, as in Wind in the Willows, so they are essentially human? In the end, Moorhouse's chosen route was much closer to another wildlife drama, Watership Down. "I decided I wanted to keep my characters in the world of animals and that it would be enough if we could just understand them."
So we follow the action through the eyes of the water voles in the story as they leave their home, following the death of their mother, to find a new and safer home. The water vole siblings are all named after plants that grow in the river except for Sylvan, the lead water vole, whose name means 'woodland'. "I wanted him to have a name that implied he'd be more adventurous and would go off and look for danger," says Moorhouse. "He starts out as a very impetuous character who is thoughtless and has boundless energy, but during the course of the story he learns to be responsible for his siblings and that's the biggest journey of all, the one into adulthood. He does his best even though he comes in for a lot of abuse from his siblings!"
Moorhouse also uses Sylvan to introduce a mythology to the story, with the river taking on a mythical status as Sylvan communicates with it to help guide his siblings to safety. The idea followed a conversation Moorhouse had had with his mother, when she asked if he was going to give the water voles a mythology? "I thought that they would need one and as the river is the focal point of their lives it became the focal point of their 'religion', so to speak," he explains.
"The river is the one constant in their lives and is there when they are lost, scared or need protection, it governs their lives. The gurgling sound of the river is a song to them and they sing with it." Sylvan's ability to communicate with the river 'spirit' means he can prophesy what is going to happen and that takes the story further into the realm of fantasy.
It took Moorhouse just six months to write the book, partly thanks to his indepth knowledge of his subject matter. "It was a joy to write because I had all the information I needed to write about a water vole's life, the dangers it faces and its habitat," Moorhouse says. "I'd been studying it for eight years and it was great because I actually got to share some of the information that I'd spent a lot of my life finding out. I had to work on the tone, as I'd never thought about writing for children, but it was a simple, linear plot - the young water voles' mum goes missing and they set off to look for somewhere safe to live."
During the course of the story we see the water voles grow from being very young to being nearly adult so in the next book, the story will focus on the new generation of young water voles. "In the next story, perpetual rain turns their waterway into a vast lake, so I will explore what happens to the water voles when their world is destroyed by natural phenomena." His writing turned out to be quite prophetic; "When I started writing the second book, that was when it began to rain and that led to the floods of 2013/14."
Moorhouse's writing also draws attention to the very real plight of water voles, whose numbers have been declining steeply especially in the last few years. Moorhouse attributes the decline to a combination of factors. "The first is agricultural intensification since World War II. We wanted to be self-sufficient for food and a lot of wetlands and water vole habitats were lost during that process. We also have more sheep now that will wander about, go to the river and eat the plants that water voles need and create a quagmire of mud alongside the river."
However, it was the introduction of the American mink that created the biggest threat to water voles. "For the last 10,000 years water voles have inhabited this country and everything wants to eat them, which they overcome by breeding ridiculously quickly," says Moorhouse. "They escape predators by either swimming away or running down their burrow, but the mink got a foothold in this country in the 1950's and unfortunately for the water vole, it hunts well on land and swims better than a water vole can, and it can go into their burrows."
Today, water vole populations are still declining and if we do nothing, Moorhouse warns that the once-common creature from our river banks will disappear altogether. "It used to be quite normal to see a water vole as part of the river life but not any more. It's hard now to go out and spot them because there aren't that many places where you can see them. Where they do exist they live in a high density population so you can spot things like their latrine and feeding site. You can put down an apple, wait a few hours and you'll see one."
Despite the problems, Moorhouse adds, "You can't start telling children how terrible it is that we have lost so much of our natural heritage but you can take them into woodland and other natural areas and get them covered in mud and make it a fun part of their childhood, so that when they are older they value it."
The River Singers
