Do You Hate Books As Much As Andy Mulligan?

Andy Mullligan’s Trash comes out today—it’s a fast-paced YA story about a boy who ekes out a bare minimum of a living by picking through the giant piles of garbage produced by an unnamed third world city, until one day he finds an item that is valuable not just to the police, but to other people in power as well. He’ll be talking about the novel, and the experiences that inspired him to write it, in a number of places (such as TeenReads.com or Random Buzzers, the Random House Children’s Publishing website) over the next few days; you can find out exactly where and exactly when from RHCP’s Twitter feed. First, though, Mulligan has something to say about the kind of story he set out to write.

Is reading important to you? Is reading important to anyone?

The answer has to be no—not if the books are boring. Being trapped with a boring book is like a long-haul flight, which I’ve been doing a lot of, lately… that ache in the stomach when all you want to do is land! It’s the same with reading—an inner voice screams, ‘Someone cut these tedious passages!’

Being a teacher, occasionally forced to teach awful books, I quite understand a child’s desire to chuck one in a river and run onto the football pitch. So when I was writing Trash I wanted it to be a page-turner. I wanted a plot that would grip by the throat. I wanted characters who spoke fast, and got on with it! The books I hated as a child were the ones where nothing truly dangerous happened, and everyone behaved responsibly. Even in the soft corner of South London I grew up in, I knew there were mean streets, and gangs, and bigger boys who could kick your teeth in. Being a child was, and is, scary—school is scary.

The boys you’ll meet in Trash work hard to survive, and smell death every day. That is life on the dumpsite, and it’s scarier than most lives. One of my guiding principles as I wrote was to try and present sheer, frightening danger. I met a street boy in Calcutta years ago who had been caught by the police loitering on the railway station. They jumped on his legs, breaking both. The kid ‘Rat’ is based on is a glue-sniffing 14 year old who was hit by a taxi while staggering across a green light: he’s a mess, but still begging. Should children read about such things? Should they be allowed into the world of dumpsite boys, where things aren’t pretty? Of course they should. Partly because it’s reality, and partly because it’s fascinating.

Sanitize the books our children read and you do two things: you make it less likely that they can deal with or face reality, and you make books so damn boring. I hope Trash will take you on a good, scary journey and leave you in a new place…

12 October 2010 | guest authors |