The Unnaturalists

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Many things inspired this novel, among them a lifelong fascination with the Victorian naturalists and their propensity for collecting anything and everything from all over the globe during the late nineteenth century. Baroque fashion and sensibilities, as demonstrated in movies like The Duchess, Dangerous Liaisons, and Marie Antoinette, also shaped the culture and customs of New London. Tesla, while he isn’t a main character here, is definitely so fascinating that I couldn’t help at least making him responsible for everything. Not to mention the City of London itself. I’m indebted to the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) for making possible a trip to London as part of their Work-in-Progress grant. My visit to the British Natural History Museum was foundational for this and other books.

There are also many authors who inspired this book. I would be remiss not to mention Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn in particular. I only recently saw the movie again, not having seen it since I was twelve years old. Those images must have been burned into my brain; we share a very similar mythological aesthetic. And of course there are also echoes of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, the tales of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, and, of all things, Dr. Who.

I’m certain people will assume that the Tinkers are lifted from Rom or Gypsy culture. While perhaps there is a little of the Gypsy in the Tinkers, the true progenitors of the Tinkers are the Baima people of the Sichuan highlands in the People’s Republic of China.

The Baima, or Duobo as they call themselves, are a Tibetan ethnic minority who live on the very edge of the Tibetan plateau. I spent a summer with the Baima and other Sichuanese while living with my husband at Tangjiahe Nature Reserve. I will never forget the kindness the Baima showed us when we visited their village. I was most distressed (though not surprised) to discover that the simple beauty of their culture was disintegrating under the weight of modern progress; only one ancient shaman still knows how to read their religious language and no one else is interested in learning. Their young people are fading away to the big cities in hopes of work.

In my own small and perhaps strange way, I hope at least to preserve some of their beauty in the pages of this book. While my Tinkers speak Chinese as their sacred language, it’s only because I was never fortunate enough to learn the Baima language or alphabet.

They gave me a song that summer about the green hills of their homeland because I was missing my own. This is the song I give back to them.