HANDS UP, EVERYONE who’s had enough of fantasy and has been thinking for quite a while that magic is something to marvel at at 4, relish at 8 or 9, and to have pretty well grown out of by 12. (“What would they do? But then he suddenly remembered that in his pocket lay the Stone of Thorg!”) What is it that’s so unsatisfactory about these novels set in fantastical worlds? In part, of course, it is that all too often authorial energy and imagination gets derailed into invention. Too busy designing his time-warps, weird machines and magic amulets, the author cursorily dishes out a few skimpy personality traits to the characters: you can be the nerd, you be the sociable one, and she can be the pretty airhead who turns out to be brilliant at making radio sets out of tin cans and ends up saving the day.

To watch these pitifully one-dimensional creatures skitter through the plot becomes as tiresome as watching cartoons: it’s all about what happens next, and nothing about why, to engage and sustain our attention.

Why do we bother to keep on desperately pushing the world aside to find these moment of peace in which to read? Because books can go deeper. We can step into an author’s world and find out not just what her characters are doing but what they think and feel. Books can be reflective, exposing conscience and motivation, morals and inner concerns. In thinking about the story and the characters we find that, by extension, we have begun to think about our own lives and ourselves.

Children love reading this way. They may not consciously ask themselves, “Would I have been that brave? That inventive? That lippy?” or take the time to assure themselves, “He felt as crummy as I do. And yet he’s come up smiling. Maybe I can too”. But self-knowledge and optimism creep in all the same, and young readers are the stronger and the richer for it.

Real novels beef up the awareness of consequences. We learn that character gradually unfolds, and life’s not all that random. Jenny Diski once observed of the children she taught that, though they had a clear sense of historical periods and knew that the cry “Gadzooks!” went along with swords and puffy britches, and trenches came with men in khaki uniforms and gas and shells, her pupils had almost no grip at all on the order in which each of these periods happened, and thought of them more like rooms off a wheel that History simply stepped into in any old order.

We novelists fill the gap. I know I wrote The Road of Bones in order to explain to young readers how politics actually work: how, step by step, a country’s leaders can whip up the atmosphere of fear and defensiveness in which it’s all too easy to persuade most citizens to give up the very freedoms that government claims to be defending, and terrorise the rest into line. They read of a country similar to Russia but, as they identify with Yuri through his perils, I hope they will learn more about how things have come to pass in places such as Germany, Cambodia, China, North Korea — and more of the background to political debates that have opened up recently on their home ground.

So all power to those who put together this year’s Carnegie shortlist. Reality is back with a vengeance. And don’t its virtues shine! If there’s a better book about the Dutch Resistance than Mal Peet’s Tamar, (see interview below) which took this year’s prize, I’d like to read it. In Frank Cottrell Boyce’s Framed we get no further than a run-down garage halfway up a mountain and yet the droll good nature of this book could light a child’s life for months. The family members in Jan Mark’s Turbulence interact so similarly to our own that we might be watching rehearsals of scenes to come in our own life. Geraldine McCaughrean’s stunning The White Darkness sweeps us across Antarctica with people so vivid we’ll recognise them at once the day they move in next door or we meet them at a party. And though the story of Clay is in places fantastical, David Almond has made a fine stab at tethering his character’s lives to the plain earth of his beloved Tyneside.

It was an excellent shortlist, reminding us just how broad and exhilarating realistic fiction can be. Though Tamar took that coveted gold medal, this year there’s no doubt at all that it will be the children who will be the real winners.

Anne Fine’s novel for older children, The Road of Bones, is published by Doubleday. Her most recent book for adults, Raking the Ashes, is now in paperback

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