Teenage Kicks
04 November 2009
This interview was done for the Teenage Kicks event organised by Random House and the Crawley Headspace group.
1. What inspired you to start writing?
As with most authors, it all began with reading. A teacher called Miss Mahony gave me a copy of the Lord of the Rings when I was 8, and that set me off. From my mid teens I began to write terrible poetry in the mistaken belief that it would impress girls. Sadly, the kind of girls I wanted to impress were exactly the sort that would laugh in your face on being presented with a sonnet. But from then on I pretty well knew that I would write books, and the only question was whether or not I could persuade anyone to publish them. After university I had a very dull job, and I found that boredom was a great aid to creativity. I used to sit at my desk thinking up the scenes that would one day coalesce into my first book, Hellbent.
So, to put my inspirations in order, we have: reading, impressing girls, and boredom. We can also add in the desire for fame and glory, and the vague hope that I might one day get to play tennis with Martin Amis.
2. The ideas in your books are quite strange (in a good way), where do they come from?
My ideas emerge from the murky waters of my subconscious. Those waters are fed from a variety of sources – books I’ve read, old memories, philosophical theories, random associations, pub conversations, half-remembered jokes. But, ultimately, it’s just my job to sit and think up stuff, so that’s what I do.
3. ‘The Knife that Killed Me’ is very gritty with a bleak ending; what would you like your readers to take away from this book?
I don’t write books with a straightforward moral. Obviously, you could read The Knife That Killed Me as a warning against getting involved in knives and knife culture, but I’d prefer readers to see it not as a series of messages, but as an organic whole. I’ve tried to show how complex teenage life can be. Every day young (and not so young) people are faced with countless dilemmas, and seemingly insoluble problems. I’ve shown my characters caught in the web of subtle causation and sly determinism. We are all free to make choices, but the consequences of our choices are unforeseeable. I suppose the bleakness in the book comes from the fact that good doesn’t win in the end, that sometimes evil triumphs. That’s a bitter pill to swallow, and usually fiction sugars it. The Knife That Killed Me is all pill, and no sugar.
4. Do any of your books reflect a past experience?
All of my books are based pretty closely on my own school experiences. I went to a pretty tough comprehensive in Leeds, and anyone who went there would recognise it in the schools I write about. In suppose you could say I’m haunted by my past. The friends I made (some of whom died tragically young) are still there in my head, alive and kicking. Each day was filled with violence, excitement, fun, misery, lust, hope and desolation. It always seems faintly eccentric to me that anyone writes about anything else.
5. What’s your favourite word?
My favourite word is too rude to spell out here – but it appears in all of my books (there’s a clue in the name of the dog in Hellbent). My second favourite word is spurt.
6. A lot of your books are darkly funny; is your own sense of humour quite dark and what makes you laugh?
I don’t think my sense of humour is especially dark. Or rather, it’s not exclusively dark. What makes me laugh most is the human body and the bizarre, unexpected, embarrassing, squelchy, awkward, lovable things that it does. The stuff that comes out of it and the stuff that goes into it. If it’s any help, the three funniest books I’ve read are: Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais, Unreliable Memoires by Clive James and Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.
7. Who’s your favourite character from your books?
Probably Conner O’Neil, the hero of my first novel, Hellbent. And Henry, the Tumour in But I’m actually fond of most of my characters, except perhaps for Roth in The Knife That Killed Me, who is the embodiment of evil. Mr Boyle, the well-meaning but hapless teacher in The Knife, is another favourite. He’s what I imagine I’d have been like if I’d had the guts to be a teacher.
8. Can you give us any clues about your next book?
I can give you more than clues! It’s a comedy science-fiction novel about a group of useless teenage super-heroes who have to save the world from two different deadly perils. It’s called Einstein’s Underpants, and it’ll be out in the spring of 2010. It’s much less dark than my other novels, but it still has an edge. It’s really about friendship, and sticking together and learning to value the weird mix of qualities that all humans have. There’s also quite a lot of body-comedy of the type referred to above!
8. In ‘Henry Tumour’, Henry seems to know things that Hector doesn’t; is Henry somehow real or is his voice just a symptom of Hector’s illness?
I suppose I wanted to keep both possibilities alive. The reader can see Henry as a real entity – a sort of ghost in the machine – or you can just see him as a symptom of the disease eating away at Hector’s brain. I saw him as the darkest part of Hector’s mind – what Freud called the Id. He says lots of clever things – about half his words are direct quotes from Shakespeare and other poets – but that’s all supposed to be stuff that Hector has heard and forgotten.
9. What do you like to put on your toast?
Dolphin pâté.