Melvin Burgess:
Kill All Enemies Blog Tour
A few months ago, we linked you to a discussion from Melvin Burgess about his newest novel Kill All Enemies (you can find the post here if you missed it) and today we’re delighted to be participating in the blog tour for its release! Kill All Enemies just got a resoundingly good review in The Guardian which you can find here.
For our stop on the tour, we’re offering one book for giveaway. To win a copy of Kill All Enemies, please leave a comment on this post.
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Guest Post by Melvin Burgess
Bad Kids
We’re all aware of the recent riots, that brought so much opprobrium and loathing down on the heads of young people. How about you – did you have any sympathy for them? Now? What about the kids who disrupt lessons in the classroom, depriving other kids – maybe your child – of the chance to work hard, get an education and get on? After all, that’s surely what we want for all children; the chance to get on. Why should we have any sympathy for anyone, of any age, who stops that happening?
Bad kids. Who wants them?
I remember the story of one lad at my high school, a big lad – a huge lad, actually – who was a terrible bully. He did something bad – I’ve no idea what – and got sent to borstal. Some time later,
our headmaster came into assembly in a furious state. Apparently this lad had escaped from Borstal and been chased down by the dogs.
“Hunted down with dogs, like an animal!” he raged.
Wow! What a bad kid that was! You wouldn’t want him in the same class as your child, no way! We all lived in fear of him at school. When I look back now, he fills me up with wonder and wishes. I wonder what he did and how he did it. I wonder how he ended up there. I wonder what happened to him after? I wish he’d been different – for his sake, and for the sake of all his many victims.
Most of all, I wish I could sit down with him now and ask him to tell me his story. Not necessarily the story of that night he was hunted down with dogs. I’d love to hear it, but it’s not always the story of the event itself that tells you the most. I’d just like to get at the things that stick in his brain from his childhood. All these years later, he’d have a view on it. He’d have worked it all out into a story of some kind. It wouldn’t necessarily provide an explanation, or a theory; it wouldn’t be any kind of a reason an excuse. I just know this; that for him, it would sum up the things that happened in his life.
The stories that stick in our heads from certain seminal parts of our lives aren’t just memories. They’re myths – our myths. They express events and what they mean to us in narrative form. It’s what people do all the time. More to the point, it’s what novelists do as well.
There’s a lot of kids like that one – thousands, millions, perhaps, in most large towns and cities around our country. All of them have stories lodged in their heads and hearts, stories that describe, illustrate, illuminate, and clarify their lives. Somehow, amid all the clamour and theorising and policy and blame, those stories don’t get heard very often. In other words, these are young people who have no voice in society – no story, no myth. I think if we could, we would wipe them as thoroughly as we once tried to wipe out the myths and legends of aboriginal people the world over.
Of course, those youngsters do have stories to tell, and they love to tell them. All you have to do is ask. When you do ask, you get the whole thing there in front of you – voice, experience, people, character, situation – story.
Well, that was the idea of Kill All Enemies. I wanted to hear the stories of young people from deprived communities and try to get their voices down on paper. I went into PRU’s to talk to excluded students, and through youth workers to meet young people who’d had some really difficult backgrounds. I told them I wanted to write a book and would they tell me their stories. They responded with great generosity and pride, and told me all about what had happened to them.
Many of those young people were pretty dodgy. Most of them had been excluded form school at some time; all of them had been in trouble – some of them in serious trouble. They didn’t do well at school and most teachers would have been delighted to have them out of the class. They’re poor, disruptive and some, at certain times in their lives, had been actively dangerous. Many of them, I’ve no doubt, would have been out on the streets gleefully putting a foot through a shop window if they had half chance. And yet, so often, the stories they told me revealed a very different picture to the one you get from reading the papers. In fact, many of those kids were heroes. Real life, genuine heroes, who had been doing their very best for the people were important to them, the people who they loved and who loved them. The fact that it didn’t always leave them a lot of time for school was something anyone who knew their stories could relate to at once.
Kill All Enemies is a novel, of course, and there’s no pretence that the people in it are real, or that everything that happened in the book happened in real life. But behind each character there is a real person who set me off and inspired me to try and understand their life, or something like it, through fiction. I hope I did a good job – I’d hate any of them to feel I let them down.
Over the next few days on this little blog tour, I’m going to talk about the real people behind the stories, how I dramatised them and tried to give them a voice that they would recognise and that people would want to read. I hope you’ll want to follow it. So thanks to Bobby and Matt and Jamie and Callum, and to Deeta and Karen and Jen and Rob and Lisa and Joelle and all the rest of you. I hope you think it was worth your time!
- Melvin Burgess
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