INTERVIEW:Charlie Higson reinvented James Bond for a younger generation and now the comedian and author is upping the gore ante with his latest book for boys. JOHN BUTLERcan barely contain his enthusiasm
BEING WITHOUT CHILD, the last time I experienced a young-adult book I was a young adult myself, scanning my sisters’ Judy Blume books for references to sex during wet summer days of near-homicidal boredom. A couple of decades on, I don’t even have to crack the skull-festooned, none-more-black cover of Charlie Higson’s latest to understand that the landscape of children’s writing has changed considerably.
The Enemyis a story of a post-apocalyptic London in which a global pandemic has transformed all adults into hideous zombies, and the streets of London into a battleground for every kid left behind.
The cover makes Nine Inch Nails’ album art look like a Hallmark card, and the blurb promises that every grown-up “will chase you, rip you open, feed on you”.
I loved it. But with a theme as weighty as this (not to mention an impressive body count in every chapter), the question must be asked: What, these days, is a kids’ book and what is for adults?
Sitting on the terrace of a Greek restaurant outside a shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush under a cloudless sky, it seems incongruous to discuss whether kids are interested in the end of the world as we know it. A tanned, youthful Charlie Higson spears an olive. “Obviously, there are things kids are interested in and not interested in. They’re not interested in mid-life crises and marriages breaking up, but that still leaves a huge range of human emotions they are interested in. You’ve got to take a subject that is going to be relevant to them. I don’t think there necessarily has to be kids in it for them to like it, but it helps for them to have someone to identify with. I didn’t approach it differently to the four adult thrillers I wrote in the early 1990s. You have to watch the language, of course, but that’s it.”
Higson is best known as a comic actor and producer of the landmark sketch show The Fast Show(of which more later), but even before then, while working as a plasterer with his college friend Paul Whitehouse, or as a singer in his band The Higsons (they were signed to 2-Tone Records – "we helped to kill them off"), he always self-identified as a writer.
“As a kid, if I read something I liked, I tried to write something like it. I enjoy the process of writing – the idea of creating something that wasn’t there before. In my teenage years, I’d be writing big, long fantasy books instead of doing my homework. Back then, there was very little of that kind of Tolkien-style medieval romance around; it hadn’t taken over the world like it has now. I loved myths and legends, King Arthur and Robin Hood. I used to like to read things where the hero had a sword. That to me was a good book.”
Higson points out that, thanks to JK Rowling, the dynamic of the publishing world has been neatly inverted. “The children’s book chart was originally created because books for children wouldn’t show up in the bestsellers’ list. They created their own list, and now they have to keep the children’s chart because if they put them back together there would be no adult books on it – apart from people like Dan Brown. All of us kids’ writers are eternally grateful to JK Rowling for opening the eyes of publishers and of the media generally. Now, kids’ books are respectable.”
Higson’s career as a children’s author really began with his re-imagining of the James Bond brand, and to date, Puffin books has published five hugely successful instalments of his Young Bond series, in which the future spy is a whelp at school. Is it hard to maintain the whiff of danger that accompanies the older spy with the younger iteration?
“Children’s publishing is run almost entirely by women, which is by no means a complaint, but occasionally they can lose sight of what it is boys want in fiction. I had early meetings with Puffin, and they’d say: ‘It’s quite violent. Does it need to be?’ I’d say: ‘It’s James Bond!’ Even a 10-year-old is going to come to it with certain expectations about violence. You have to give them that or they’ll be bored and won’t accept it. And when [Puffin] saw the effect it had, and the fact that boys loved them, they relaxed. They were concerned that the teachers, parents, librarians and booksellers were going to say ‘We’re sorry but these books are too violent.’ But because boys did like the books, they all got behind it.
“Since I started, a lot more people have come into the boys’ action-adventure field and now you get guns on the cover, which was absolutely forbidden before.”
Higson acknowledges that the signposting of the fate of a character can destroy the narrative tension in any book, and that this was particularly problematic with Young Bond. “Kids would always know he would be all right, would grow up to be alright. So I wanted in The Enemy to make it clear, right from the start, that some of these kids weren’t going to make it to the end of the book, and to keep pulling the rug out from under the kids’ feet. It makes it much more tense and scary.”
Although I run the risk of sounding like an utter maniac, it must be said that the most enjoyable and confounding aspect of The Enemyis that in it, kids die also. But isn't introducing the idea of mortality to child characters somewhat radical?
“Kids’ fiction is a lot tougher than it used to be. I suppose during the Enid Blyton years, kids tended to be alive by the end of her books. And kids still like the sense of adventure in Enid Blyton, but you know, with my kids [Higson has three sons], the films and TV they watch and the games they play . . . if you try and do a scary thriller for them and nobody gets killed, they would be bored.”
Does any sense of evangelism motivate him to write books for young boys? “I don’t know about a need to get people reading. Yes, reading lots of books will help with your school work, you’ll have a better understanding of the world and people’s emotions, but that’s not why I read and not why we should be pushing kids to read. I read because it’s fun and a type of pleasure you don’t get from other media. The most rewarding thing is parents coming to events and saying: ‘This book is the first my son ever read and now he’s hooked on reading.’ That is brilliant. But I don’t know how to go out there and get all those kids reading.” Apart from writing good stories? “Well, that helps, but not if that book doesn’t come into their world. If you make a TV series, then a kid can accidentally go through channels and find it. With a book, you have to physically make an effort to go somewhere – a bookshop, a library. It’s that much harder to get books into people’s hands.”
Given that the BBC is located across the road, our restaurant is located in a reasonably starry, if not upmarket, borough of London. At this juncture, the portly BBC mandarin Alan Yentob stops by our table to offer his respects.
This brief interruption calls the success of Higson’s parallel career in television to mind, and my unabashed fandom demands that we talk about Ralph and Ted. My cover is blown, and one half of television’s most beloved comedy couples responds to the giddy fandom with a benevolent smile.
"Of course! I am eternally grateful to [ Father Tedcreators] Graham [Linehan] and Arthur [Mathews] for creating those characters. We were putting together the first series, [they] had been giving us sketches. We were getting quite close to production, and we met up with them in a pub and asked had they any other sketches we could use, and they said, "We've got this one idea, we're not really sure where to go and what to do with it," and they started to do it in the pub, which is why Ted ended up being Irish.
“We had no idea what was going to work and what wasn’t. We’d do audience recordings and they wouldn’t really laugh at Ralph and Ted. In fact, if you listen to the first series, the only people you can hear laughing are Graham and Arthur in the back of the room. And although the audience wasn’t laughing, you could tell they were kind of interested, and quite liked them. And when we were editing, we were debating it, you know, ‘Should we put these characters in, will people like them.’ We stuck with them. Of all the characters in The Fast Show, they are the least ‘fast’ and the least catchphrase-y, but people get involved with them.”
Next up for Higson is a new comedy series with his old mucker Whitehouse, which will air on BBC next January.
Once more, the two are writing, acting and co-producing together. “I’ve known Paul since 1977, and this is the first time we’ve been working together properly since The Fast Show. Quite a lot of the things in it are not meant to be screamingly funny, so it will be interesting to see how people take to it.”
With that, Higson eyes a pornographically good-looking glass of beer at the next table, before deciding that it is time to go back to work. But having speculated on how the new comedy series will be received, this multi-hyphenated talent leaves with an interesting thought about how best to tell a story to man or boy: “You can’t sit down and write a book on how it works.”
You can’t buy that book either. I’ve checked.
The Enemyby Charlie Higson is published by Puffin, £12.99