FCE WB Unit 4.pdf - 4 A good story Reading FCE Part 1 Multiple choice 1 You are going to read a newspaper article about a writer. For questions 1-8

26Reading FCE Part 1 Multiple choice 1 You are going to read a newspaper article about a writer. For questions1–8, choose the answer (A, B, CorD) which you think fits best according to the article. 4 A good story J K Rowling may be responsible for the revival offantasy fiction. But her contemporary rivals, manyof whom have benefited from her success, seemreluctant to give her credit for starting a trend.Philip Pullman, for example, points out thatNorthernLights, the first volume in his trilogyHis DarkMaterials, was published a year before Harry Potter’sadventures began. So it comes as a surprise whenG P Taylor concedes that he only wrote a novel because of the enormous popularity of Harry Potter. Taylor is the Yorkshire vicar who sold hismotorbike to self-publish 2,000 copies of his firstnovel,Shadowmancer, a book that was subsequentlypicked up by publishers Faber & Faber and got tonumber one in the New York Times bestsellerlist. His novels conjure up dark,chillingworlds inwhich the supernatural threatens to take over, yet he describes his life as a writer in flatly functional terms. For example, he is able to name the exact day that he became a novelist: March 21, 2002. ‘It was one of thoseseminalmoments in my life. Harry Potter was becoming very popular. And I thought, “This woman’s written a book. I might write one.” ’ ‘I got a copy of Harry Potter, counted the number of words that were on the page, measured the width of the margin, counted the number of chapters in the book, how many pages were in the book and set my computer screen up so that it would have 468 words on the page. My chapters were the same length as the Harry Potter chapters; I thought, “This must be how you write a book.” ’ The Harry Potter formula has its faults, of course. Stephen King was once asked what he thought of Rowling’s novels. Were they ‘thought-provoking’? King thought not. But did that matter, he wondered, in a ‘fantasy-adventure aimed primarily at children and published in the heart of the summer vacation’? His conclusion wasunequivocal: ‘Of course not. What kids on summer vacation want – and probably deserve – is simple, uncomplicated fun.’ Shadowmanceris a simple and uncomplicated fantasy – and Taylor, who is his own most effective critic, makes few further claims for the novel. ‘It’s a great story, but if I’d written it now, it would be a completely different book. In many ways, it’s a clumsyclassic. There are a lot of things in there that I would get rid of. And yet, I think that’s the big attraction. It’s because it’s an incredible adventure story, written by a non-writer, just a storyteller.’ Taylor returns to this distinction between writing and storytelling a number of times, distancing himself from grand andloftyideas of the novelist’s purpose. He describes himself as a ‘fairly uneducated, council-house kid’ who ran away to London as a teenager, ‘a bit of a chancer, with ideas above his station’. He read Dickens, lots of Orwell – ‘they weretrendybooks to read’ – and Kerouac.