Last year, Frank Cottrell Boyce won the Carnegie Medal for his first novel. His second was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award. Here he talks to Elspeth Hyams about his comic treatment of the way children deal with bereavement, temptation and the consumer society.
There are many remarkable things about Millions, Frank Cottrell Boyce’s Carnegie-Medal-winning first novel. One is that it started life as a film script and this – extraordinarily for an award-winning children’s title – is actually almost the book of the film. Frank wrote it while filming was taking place, and modified it to take into account a problem that had emerged during filming.
Frank discovered that some people thought Damien, the younger, more idealistic, of his two young protagonists, was disturbed. They even wondered if he needed professional help – to get closure following the death of his mother.
Frank hadn’t intended Damien to be seen as mad (or even depressed) at all. Nor did he think Damien was unusually obsessive. This was no Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Mark Haddon’s book about a child with Asberger’s syndrome). It was true that Damien was very well informed about the saints: he saw them as role models and, rather usefully, there is an appropriate patron saint for almost every situation (he knows them all, after looking them up on a website called www.totallysaints.com).
Child psychologist
However, it seemed to Frank that Damien had developed ‘a really good solution’ to life’s challenges, quite logical in its own terms. So he included a scene with a child psychologist. She tries a simple test using word association. (‘Bell?’ ‘Leper!’ ‘Shirt?’ ‘Hair!’). The results alarm the adults, but are completely logical (and hilarious) for us because we see them from both points of view. ‘I don’t know where he gets it from,’ says his father, apologetically.
Damien, you see, is trying to be really excellent at school. He desperately wants to please his dad. He thinks a good way to do this is by emulating the saints. The new family house seems a bit unsaintly, so he builds himself a hermitage near the railway line, hoping for a few visions. When nothing happens, he decides the missing element is mortification of the flesh. Fasting for seven years won’t work ‘when your dad is obsessed with everyone eating five pieces of fruit a day’. So after a bit of experimentation with other methods, he puts holly under his shirt. That is how he comes to the attention of the teacher who makes the referral.
World views
A lot of the rather subtle comedy which sets the scene for Millions comes from the contrast between the world views of adults and children. Then, as if in answer to a prayer, temptation arrives in the form of a big black bag full of used sterling banknotes. It falls off the back of a train on the way to being pulped before switchover day to the Euro. There are only two weeks in which to spend £229,370, and Damien and worldly-wise older brother Anthony have quite different ideas about how to go about it. It’s especially difficult to get rid of the money so fast when you’re too young to have a bank account. That’s even though paying classmates generously in cash for services leads to horrific price inflation in the playground. In due course, both children get some rather unwelcome enlightenment. A number of saints do finally make appearances to Damien along the way. In fact, they seem remarkably straightforward in comparison with the deviousness of some in the adult world.
Comic turn
A lot of the tension in the novel arises from the two boys’ conflicting ideas of the best thing to do. Originally, Anthony was conceived as a foil to Damien, a comic turn. And the arrival from nowhere of a bag of cash has been used as a device elsewhere, notably in the Canterbury Tales. But while reading the book aloud to reading groups participating in the Carnegie shadowing scheme, Frank discovered just what a plausible character Anthony is. ‘You could make a really good case for him, about money, and how money provides the security that’s gone missing from his life.’
The comic contrasting treatment of both children’s protectiveness towards their father in Millions is also notable. It reflects Frank’s observation of the resilience of children in such circumstances. He was, he says, rather ‘rattled’ at the way fiction for children usually deals with bereavement in a very straightforward way. ‘What’s striking about kids who lose a brother or lose a parent is that they do seem to be getting on with it, incredibly well. Then they crack. How mercurial they are is really interesting. Actually, when people are having crises like that, there is an energy around, and an unpredictability to it, which is never there in fiction. I wanted to write something emotional, but in a quite upbeat way.’
Frank treats materialism and the children’s responses to it comically. In our society, children are consumers as never before, and Anthony’s grown-up talk about the soundness of investing in property (he sounds like a 30-year-old) is only a slight exaggeration.
Damien, on the other hand, is anxious to use the cash to do good, but there is a lesson for him – the charity you give to is not always quite the charity you think it is. There are other sobering messages, but the children are left to learn any lessons for themselves. There is no clichéd or didactic moralising here.
The saints
The saints, who provide a lot of the humour for adults, are real and there is a real website dealing with them, though it isn’t the one cited in the book. The idea of using saints to cast light on every situation reflects Frank’s childhood experience with a rather pious primary school teacher. ‘She did a saint a day – for two minutes at the start of every day. It took her into some very rocky territory. There are some completely mad stories. Also, for us, it meant that there was something completely off curriculum – it could be about 19th-century Africa, or Germany in the Middle Ages, or about Japan. There was no predicting what it would be, because it was in this one big, broad category. It stayed with me!’
For the children who read it and liked it, Millions is ‘charming’ or ‘scary’ (the money’s arrival isn’t just an accident, there are criminal elements involved). ‘There’s a whole different level that they aren’t getting,’ says Frank. Although he’s pleased that the book works for adults too (and it does – brilliantly, I thought) ‘I really wanted it to work for children. For me, children’s reading is a fantastic thing, and books that I read as a child had an impact on me. I was definitely trying to write a children’s book.’
Scriptwriter for Corrie
That there is a book at all is perhaps rather surprising. Frank’s first job was working for Thames TV in the Education Department, and he went on to work as a scriptwriter for Coronation Street, the nearest he ever got to a ‘proper’ job. As a screenwriter, he has been associated with very grown-up, successful films such as Welcome to Sarajevo, Hilary and Jackie, The Stranger, 24 Hour Party People, The Claim and Code 46.
Millions was directed by Danny Boyle. It was he who suggested, before the filming started, that Frank should also write the book. The encouragement was all he needed. He had spent nearly four years working on the script, and after all that refinement of the plot and the dialogue, the novel almost wrote itself. Even so, writing a book is a big responsibility – once it’s in print, you can’t make changes, and you cannot rely on the director to fill in the gaps.
Social commitment
Frank himself is tremendously socially committed. He is devoting a percentage of the royalties from his book to WaterAid and, in Millions and to a lesser extent in Framed, he satirises the consumer culture in the playground. The inflation in the value of relatively worthless objects of the children’s desire is in marked contrast to the plight of the billion people today who do not even get clean water to drink. Locally, he is heavily involved with schools, his local community, a twinning project with a town in Sierra Leone, and a scheme set up by the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture.
With seven children of his own in real life, family, perhaps not surprisingly, plays a prominent role in his novels. In Framed, his second book, the children struggle as a team to get parents who aren’t quite coping out of a financial and emotional hole.
Criminal intent to do good
In both books he plays with the idea that, with the right intentions, crime might be a force for good. In Framed, he bases his family drama on the true story of how disused slate mines in Wales were used to store paintings from the National Gallery during the Second World War. Sitting on a mountain full of treasure offers interesting prospects. Faced with temptation, the children do not pass it up.
But he could never be cast as a moral writer in the Victorian sense – he is just too subversive, and far too funny. Clearly, the possibilities offered by crime are just a bit too seductive. But it all goes well in that it all goes wrong, and ‘the fact that it doesn’t work out is quite funny. At the end of Framed, the little sister says “But I’m not a criminal mastermind. I’m a little girl!” and the insurance company’s investigator says “Oh God, yes, I hadn’t realised that, I’d completely forgotten!”’
Frank sees himself as working in the Just William tradition (of Richmal Crompton). You cannot judge the children as you would do adults, he says. ‘They’re trying to find what’s right and what’s wrong, just like William. William does terrible things, but he always thinks he’s in the right. It’s other people who are mad. He was always telling his dad he should be locked up.’
Oddly, the British seem more willing to let children push at the boundaries of social acceptability than their American counterparts. There has been some film interest in Framed too, but the Americans were quite worried about it. ‘The BBC just said “That’s great!”, whereas the Americans were saying “If he’s really trying to steal something, we’ll have to deal with it, because we’ll lose sympathy!” I’m not sure that we do, really!’
‘I adore being on the set’
So what about film versus the book? He loves film (‘I completely adore being part of the film and being on the set and so on’). For Millions, though, Frank has had ‘a good controlled experiment’. Two of his own younger children are ‘completely besotted’ with the book, and one, aged eight, accompanied his father to the Carnegie reading groups and can recite some of it by heart. Frank has been to many schools, and talked to lots of children. And he has found that, while lots of people really loved the film, there are certain children who have read the book on whom it has had a ‘massive’ impact. ‘It’s a much more profound experience… it’s had a much bigger effect, just because it’s taken them more time.’
So there will be more books (though he’s trying to keep crime out of the next one), because, he thinks, ‘You own a book in a way that you never own a film.’
Of the children, he says, ‘You know, they come up to me, with their chocolate stains, and their Ribena stains, and bits of gel-pen writing all over it. The film will never be your film, but that is your book, and if you find it in your house in 20 years’ time, it’ll take you right back to this time. It’s the physicality of the book, especially now, when everything is so tuned to the cyber world.’
Millions won the Carnegie Medal 2004 (awarded in 2005), and was shortlisted for many other book prizes, including the Guardian Fiction Award. It is available in paperback from Macmillan (ISBN 0 330 43331 8, price £5.99) and also as an audiobook. Millions the film, directed by Danny Boyle, is available on DVD. Framed is available in hardback (ISBN 1 405 04858 1, price £9.99) and will be published in paperback by Macmillan in July 2006.
The nominations list for the 2006 Carnegie Medal will be published on 3 March (www.ckg.org.uk). The bookies may not be on to it yet, but there is already speculation about whether or not Framed will be on it. Read it for yourselves and see what you think!
Updated: 20 February 2006