Anthony Horowitz on his latest Alex Rider book and why children’s authors have a responsibility to be optimistic

The Alex Rider author is hosting a virtual book launch of his new novel, Nightshade, this morning 
Katie Law @jkatielaw2 April 2020

“Coronavirus would never appear in an Alex Rider novel because I can’t see anything amusing about it,” says the writer Anthony Horowitz. We’re talking about Nightshade, his latest book about the reluctant teenage spy — think a pubescent James Bond — whom we first met twenty years ago in Stormbreaker.

“That’s one reason why fantasy is so much easier to write about than reality”, he continues. “We don’t even know where we’re going to be in two weeks’ time, there’s so much uncertainty and lack of knowledge, and the fear that engenders, whereas if a villain from Nightshade had invented a virus, at least we’d know it’d be solved by the end of the book.” Indeed.

Since Stormbreaker, there have been eleven more Alex Rider books in the series, 21 million copies sold, a film of Stormbreaker in 2006 starring Alex Pettyfer and Ewan MacGregor, and a generation of young boys growing up in thrall to the Bond mini-me and his high-octane fantasy world of chases, rescues, gadgets, guns and villains. Later in the Spring, an eight-episode series based on the second novel, Point Blanc, starring Otto Farrant and Vicky McClure, will hit our TV screens — Sony is gearing up to announce the release date.

Enthusiasm for young Alex’s adrenalin-soaked adventures clearly remains undimmed, even if Horowitz, prolific screenwriter and author of more than fifty novels (including two Bond novels for the Ian Fleming estate) is about to turn 65, and Alex’s original fans are pushing thirty. He believes that consistency of character is the key, and while he and the rest of the world may be two decades older, Alex remains fifteen, and having weathered a brief “dark and introverted” period caused by the traumas in his life, he is back, “cheerful and light on his feet.”

On reflection, Horowitz regrets having made Alex’s character so sad, even briefly, because children’s authors have a responsibility to be optimistic. “We have to say to young people who are going to inherit the world that it’s their world and a good world, but that they will have the opportunity to make it better.”

So he was upset when the headmaster at Kings College School, Wimbledon banned the books from the school library in 2017, for being “monochrome and limiting”, although he concedes that the headmaster had a point about the need for literature to “engage and do more than simply pander to young people.”

He also believes in what he calls the unchanging, abstract quality of childhood, “an essence of being young that remains the same throughout time”. This means being consistent not just with the character but in language, clothes and attitudes, otherwise the work dates quickly. “I never use words like ‘wicked’ or ‘cool’ or ‘sick’ and only one gadget, a portable CD player that turned into a circular saw, has ever become redundant.”

And while he allows the occasional environmental or anti-smoking message to creep into the stories, Horowitz keeps his political opinions to himself, mostly, although he couldn’t resist casting one of his new villains in Nightshade as a grey-lipped Old Etonian civil servant who wants to blow up all “our useless, vain and self-interested politicians” and start afresh.

“What’s interesting is to create a villain who has an absolute belief they are right, and doing good. We see a lot of people now in politics like that.” Social media exacerbates this. “Twitter teaches us that something is either right or wrong and that there’s no grey; people’s opinions have become increasingly entrenched, which is great for a kid’s book, because you’ve never yet found a morally ambiguous James Bond or Alex Rider villain. Their absolutism is what makes them such good villains.”

But living in an age of absolutism also means Horowitz has to tread carefully. “For years I’ve skated on thin ice when I’ve created baddies. The classic Bond villain would have some kind of disability or something peculiar, even if it’s as absurd as having a third nipple [like Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun]. But these days you’ll be called out on it, probably correctly. So now when I’m looking for something that makes them evil, it can’t encompass their ethnicity or looks. One has to be aware of moving social mores and the ease with which one can give offence, and that’s the last thing I want to do. I just want to tell stories.”

Still, when writing the Bond books, Trigger Mortis and Forever and a Day, he was determined to keep Bond as a cigarette-smoking womaniser. “If you don’t do that, then he stops being Bond in my view, at least in the books.” And he agrees “100 per cent” with film producer Barbara Broccoli that Bond can’t be female, even if Lashana Lynch who plays Nomi, the 00 agent in the long-awaited No Time to Die (the film’s release is now expected on November 12), has hinted she would be up for it.

“Bond could be any ethnicity. But he can’t be female, because there’s already a female James Bond called Modesty Blaise. But it’ll be interesting to see where they go with the next one. The great thing is how the films adapt themselves to the age in which they’re made. The times change, but the contents remain the same; like Alex Rider. Not I hasten to add, that I’d ever compare myself to the genius of Ian Fleming. The novels are wonderful and one of the reasons I love writing the books is that it brings me back to the original source material. Fleming!”

Anthony Horowitz will host a virtual book launch of Nightshade (Walker Books, £12.99) at 10 am on April 2. Tune in at alexrider.com/live

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