"I've been with the settlers… and I think they are living in a world of complete fantasy." I'm taking the cliche and turning it upside down," he says. "What's happening in this book is a kid living in a complete fantasy, who discovers a portal to reality. He's also playing on another familiar children's literary motif – that of the portal from the mundane to a world of fantasy. The dystopian vision his own book presents will, he believes, be familiar to children who have read the likes of Patrick Ness and Suzanne Collins, while for adult readers "it's reportage – which is why I went out of my way with the two research trips". It works for both in different ways," he says. My model was Animal Farm – for younger readers it's a farmyard story for adult readers it's obviously about Stalinism. "I was trying to write two different books at the same time. He always intended The Wall to be for young adults, but found as he was writing that he was doing it for two audiences. "The physical reality is almost like reportage, but the story is fiction," says Sutcliffe, who is married to the novelist Maggie O'Farrell. He found a tourist company that arranged for him to stay with three different Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and the novel's setting became "almost entirely literal". Then he realised he needed to see how the Jewish settlers were living.
When he came home, he rewrote, with "the setting a bit closer to the West Bank", the geography more aligned, the city named Amarias, an anagram of Samaria. Seeing a military occupation up close, seeing a small number of people with guns telling a large number without guns what to do… it was so much more brutal than I thought it could be." He'd been to Israel before, but after experiencing PalFest, "everything I thought I knew about Israel was shattered. Then he heard about PalFest, Palestine's annual travelling festival of literature, and decided he needed to travel to the region. But at first, he wasn't sure if he wanted to make his wall so easily identifiable. It's an idea that had been rumbling in Sutcliffe's head for years, "that the story of our era is the divide between the haves and the have-nots, and it seemed the wall in the West Bank was very specific to that situation, but also symbolic of other things happening elsewhere". Without making it explicit, it soon becomes clear that this is the West Bank, that Joshua, 13, is Jewish, and that Leila, the girl who saves his life on the other side of the wall, is Palestinian. On the other live the desperate, the occupied, and when Joshua, hunting for his lost football, discovers a tunnel that leads under the wall, he sets in action a series of dreadful consequences. On one side live the privileged, the occupiers – and our hero Joshua. Pitched as a fable, his crossover novel is set in a city split in two by a vast wall.
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