Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The author of Junk and Doing It tells us about the godfathers of thriller writing for teenagers, and why young people make the most demanding readers
On your website you describe yourself as not doing very well at school and getting into writing via journalism. But despite all that, did you actually enjoy reading children’s books when you were younger?
Oh yes, I did. Reading and writing were the only things I was any good at. I read huge amounts.
What kinds of things were you reading?
The very first one was The Wind in the Willows. I loved animals and wild life so I read a lot of wildlife stories and animal stories such as The Jungle Book and Gerald Durrell books – he wrote semi-factual books about travelling around the world collecting animals. And there was another book I liked called Finn The Wolfhound. My dad was a big reader so there were bits and pieces like HE Bates hanging around the place. And then I got into fantasy, with Gormenghast and those kinds of things.
You have already mentioned that The Wind in the Willows was the first book you ever read, but considering you have a reputation for writing about hard-hitting subjects like smack addicts and teenage sex, I am interested that your first choice is a gentle tale of river folk which was first published in 1908.
Most of the books that I have picked are really teenage fiction because that is my area but this is the very first book I fell in love with. I just adored The Wind in the Willows. It was first read to me and then I read it and took it into school to be read. I really loved the cosy chapters in particular.
There are two sides to The Wind in the Willows. There are the Toad chapters where he is out having adventures. But there is also a big theme in the book which is about home – for example, the chapter “Dulce Domum” where Mole finds his house again and when the little Otter gets lost and the great god Pan comes along and helps him. I loved them so much my parents actually had someone paint a picture of Pan for me on my wall. I was just really taken with those romantic, nostalgic, homely types of things at that time. It wasn’t until much later that I started becoming interested in the relationship between fiction and real life.
Why do you think you were so taken with those descriptions about home?
They were just so cosy and warm and snugly. The fiction that I liked when I was young was very much about cosy little adventures with animals and that sort of thing. I didn’t even really like The Famous Five by Enid Blyton because it was a bit too realistic.
What characters did you like best in The Wind in the Willows, because lots of people do go for Mr Toad, who is much more flamboyant – stealing cars, going to prison and escaping dressed as a washerwoman – rather than Ratty or Mole?
No it was the Mole and the Rat for me. There is a lot in the book that isn’t about Toad. There is one chapter when Rat is tempted to leave and go off travelling because the swallows are leaving, but in the end he decides home is more important. And, of course, all of Toad’s adventures end up with him trying to recapture his home, so that is very much a central theme to the book.
I saw a play of it recently that was lovely, but I was thinking twice about reading it to my children, who are seven and six. Do you think this book still works for today’s children?
I read it to my kids and they did enjoy it, although I am not sure they enjoyed it as much as I did!
So maybe it is more of a book for our generation, which brings back the nostalgia of childhood?
Maybe, but you can always try it on them. Read a short bit each night and if they get bored they get bored. It will be interesting to see how it goes.
Next up is another British classic and now a multimillion-dollar Hollywood movie, The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien. This book presumably was the start of you getting into fantasy.
Yes, I have always thought that The Hobbit was a better book than Lord of the Rings. It was tighter and better. I remember discovering it and it launched me off on a big fantasy thing. When I was a kid there weren’t very many Dungeons and Dragons books. But there were all sorts of other things. There was another book called The Little Grey Men, which was about three gnomes, and I really enjoyed that one. I think at that point I was enjoying fiction because it was escapist.
But there is still a cosy feel to The Hobbit. After all, it is rooted in England’s Home Counties around Oxford.
Yes, it is all very cosy and homely. Bilbo Baggins is the cosiest hero you could possibly imagine.
What are your favourite parts of the book?
The bit I remember particularly is the dragon, Smaug. I love myths – I could have put any number of them in my list of books. When I was a kid my dad worked for Oxford University Press and they published a whole series of myths and legends including Tales of the Norse Gods and Heroes by Barbara Leonie Picard. I read this book over and over again. Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and he had readings of the Icelandic sagas while he was there, so The Hobbit is full of that kind of imagery.
Many years after reading those myths I wrote a pair of books, Bloodtide and also Blood Song, which were modernised versions of the Icelandic Volsunga saga. In Barbara’s original book that saga was in there.
Melvin Burgess is a British author of children’s fiction. His first book, The Cry of the Wolf, was published in 1990. He gained a certain amount of notoriety in 1996 with the publication of Junk, about heroin-addicted teenagers. Burgess again caused controversy in 2003, with the publication of Doing It, which dealt with adolescent sex. America created a TV show based on the book, Life as We Know It. In his other books, such as Bloodtide and The Ghost Behind the Wall, he has dealt with less realist and sometimes fantastic themes. Burgess was a speaker at the Battle of Ideas in London, organised by the Institute of Ideas
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