In writing a children's book dealing with sexuality, Paul Magrs breaks an unspoken taboo in the publishing world. But the word gay is never specifically used in the book, he tells Arminta Wallace
Can a 10-year-old be gay? Even - especially - a 10-year-old so innocent he believes he's a superhero out of a Marvel comic? Such questions are raised by novelist Paul Magrs, in his 12th published novel, Strange Boy.
The book is many things - wry, poignant, affectionate, sassy - but above all, it's a children's book, and we can't have children's books putting dodgy ideas about sexuality into the heads of 10-year-olds. Can we? Actually, says Magrs, yes we can.
"The word 'gay' is never explicitly used in the book," he says. "David is . . . well, he's having an interesting time. And the stuff about sex is in the midst of lots of other stuff that he's wondering about. It's just the same as being different in any way: too clever, too sensitive or too quiet."
But, he adds, the book is based very closely on his own experiences - and at 33, Magrs (pronounced "Mars") is adamant that he hasn't forgotten how he felt at 10. "This is the sort of book I wish had been available to me when I was that age. The way kids talk about sex, especially in the north-east, is something that's never covered by children's fiction. And it ought to be. On the other hand, I hate that thing of 'tackling issues'. That's terrible; it has to be in the context of a life, and a whole community with lots of other characters."
Characters are certainly not in short supply in Strange Boy. Set on a council housing estate in the northeast of England, which is, according to Magrs, startlingly similar to the one on which he grew up, the novel features a family split by divorce, with the feuding sides led by David's paternal and maternal grandmothers, Little Nanna and Big Nanna. There's a father who cries on his son's shoulder every Sunday evening come the end of weekend access, and there's his mum's new boyfriend Brian, who never speaks to David and his brother if he can help it - though, as David notes shrewdly, "that might not be disgust. That might be how he is anyway".
Is this untidy family grouping also based on Magrs's own experiences?
He chuckles down the phone. "The Nannas are pretty accurate," he says. "In fact, Strange Boy is probably 95 per cent accurate in its depictions of my family."
David being too young for self-censorship, the picture he paints of his father's family isn't exactly a flattering one. "They had a white leatherette bar in the corner of their front room. When the telly wasn't on full blast, they'd have a cocktail music LP on the stereo, or a Themes from the Great Movies record playing, and they'd be whizzing up cocktails and spirits and the soda siphon would be whooshing away and everyone would have to have a drink."
Has Magrs's own family been amused by the portrait? Another chuckle. "Come to think of it," he says, "there's been a funny run-in with my stepfather over the past few months or so, but no . . . well, I mean, half the family's either not speaking anyway, or, you know, they've died."
Life on a council estate in the north of England is - gay 10-year-old or no gay 10-year-old - the kind of topic from which literary fiction tends to steer resolutely clear. Is that why Magrs decided to write Strange Boy as a children's book?
"Well, there's always the list of ambitions that you tick off," he says, "and I've wanted to do the children's author thing for ages. I needed to find the right tone for it, so it seemed best to use some of the stuff that was really close to home for me. Of course, I want to go off and do macabre fantasy stuff as well - I've always been interested in adventure stories as a genre, and there's not much scope for that in adult fiction."
He is, clearly, interested in popular culture as well. Strange Boy boasts a 1970s glossary in which such arcane items as "Etch-a-Sketch", "Ford Capri" and "Mull of Kintyre" are explained to the uninitiated.
Meanwhile, his most recent adult novel, All the Rage, features the decade that taste forgot, as it traces the rise and fall of a 1980s Eurovision band and its transvestite manager, Roy. In a passage which - apart from Roy's cocktail dress and silver slingbacks - might have come straight out of a boy band memoir, he rounds on his disgruntled protégés who, having been pipped at the Eurovision post by a trio of underdressed Greeks, are talking about reinventing themselves as a soul act.
"Look," he snaps at one of the girls. "I don't give a gnat's twat for soul. You're not black. You're not a frigging Yank. You're a girl with a big arse and you're in a cheap pop outfit. We'll have no more talk of soul or integrity or anything like it. I don't want any of you hankering after Art. Art's got nothing to do with it. You're pop. Just pop. Stick with that and you'll be fine."
In real life, Magrs - as befits a man who has both had his literary fiction praised by A.S. Byatt and written four Dr Who books for the BBC - is unfazed by talk of high and low art. "I do think," he says, "there's something particular about a generation of novelists who watch as much TV and film as they read books. Those TV shows are as much part of your life and your cultural memories as anything that happened to you - especially if you grow up on a council estate.
"In Strange Boy, the Marvel comics and Mr Spock and Dr Who are all as much there as the aunties or the uncles or the Nannas - they fill the interior landscape. That's quite marked in my generation of novelists. So it's slightly dishonest not to take it on - especially if you have three literary degrees and you teach creative writing at the University of East Anglia, you know? To choose high culture over the kind of trash you've been immersed in all your life. It would look a bit suspicious, wouldn't it?" The reference to academia is no joke. Magrs is indeed a lecturer at UEA, with a range of interests he describes as "a ridiculous jumble".
"Four weeks ago I was doing PhD vivas on Angela Carter; last week it was The Arabian Nights and Islam; and then you'll get somebody popping in to talk about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or modernist fiction. I've always been particularly interested in literary writers who go off and do genre stuff, like Kingsley Amis doing James Bond, or Iris Murdoch having bits of Dennis Wheatley turn up in her 1960s novels. Of course, as a writer I have gone one step trashier, in that I'm doing franchised fiction based on TV shows. I've been doing it for five years and now, suddenly, there are conferences about this stuff, and people writing critical books about it. Which kind of makes me smile, because I've always been a bit déclassé, you know, in the department."
It would be difficult, perhaps, to be anything other than déclassé in the company of such distinguished colleagues as Lorna Sage and Max Sebald - both now, alas, deceased.
"They were my pals on campus," says Magrs. "And Bradbury as well. It has been a difficult time." Still, when he needs to write he leaves what he calls the "frantic" environs of East Anglia, and takes himself to leafy Manchester, where his partner lives. Is he joking again?
"Oh, no," he protests, the northern vowels making the words rhyme with "straw". "It's very noisy and busy here, with hordes of writers knocking about and going out for dinner and generally being a gang. In Manchester, I sit quietly in cafés."
Paul Magrs will take part in a workshop at the Dublin Writers' Museum on Saturday, and give a reading on Sunday, as part of the Children's Books Ireland Summer School (see below). Strange Boy will be published by Simon and Schuster on June 3rd, price £6.99 in UK, and a new paperback edition of All the Rage will be released by Allison and Busby in July, price £6.99 in UK
Stories for boys
The central theme of the 12th Children's Books Ireland Summer School is books with boys as their main characters. J.K.Rowling's Harry Potter isn't the only fictional lad who has become famous in children's literature lately: the brave and inventive Will is a hero to Lyra's fiesty heroine in Philip Pullman's truly marvellous Dark Materials trilogy.
There are 12 writers and speakers lined up for the event at the Dublin Writers' Museum to debate, read, discuss, argue and sign autographs. Diana Wynne Jones, author of more than 40 fantasy books for children, is this year's main speaker, with a paper entitled "A daring attempt at the truth". Paul Magrs will discuss his much-publicised first book for young readers, Strange Boy (see main piece), alongside first-time writer Nicky Singer. In Feather Boy, Singer's character, Robert, is the victim of class bullies.
The other participants in Dublin this weekend are: Pete Johnson, Larry O'Loughlin, Michael Molloy, Tina Hickey, Katherine Roberts, Tony Watkins, Anthony Horowitz, Celia Rees and Philip Ardagh.
Children's Books Ireland Summer School, "Daring Deeds and Sacred Truths, runs from this Friday to Sunday. Tel: 01-8725854 or e-mail childrensbooksire@eircom.net
Rosita Boland
