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“There is not a crueller species on the planet than nine-year-old girls,”
declares Anthony Horowitz. So it's somewhat surprising that the bestselling
children's spy'n'horror novelist is for the first time introducing a (gasp)
female lead to his boy's own domain. Horowitz, best known for the Alex Rider
series, has made a 14-year-old schoolgirl called Scarlett the star of
Necropolis, the latest book in his fantasy-horror series, Power of Five. It
proved a daunting task for Horowitz, 53, whose adolescence was marred by
spiteful girls: for the first time in his career he had to tear up a book
and start again.
There's much of the eternal boy in Horowitz: his age-defying physique is
accompanied by a bounding sense of enthusiasm and inquisitiveness - and fun,
too. A big, hinged bookshelf conceals the stairwell to the roof garden of
his duplex penthouse apartment in Clerkenwell, the heart of meeja-trendy
London. It's the teen-den stuff of Alex Rider, the reluctant adolescent
super-spy whose escapades have won multimillion sales worldwide since the
series' launch in 2000. Rider also persuaded swathes of book-averse boys to
read for fun and brought his creator fortune and fame after 25 years
chipping away in search of a successful formula.
Three years ago, Horowitz embarked on another series in parallel with the
gadget-tastic junior James Bond world of Rider; the dark fantasy quest of
the Power of Five books. This features five adolescents, each with magical
powers, travelling through time to save Earth from a malevolent race called
The Old Ones. The plot requires that, after assiduously avoiding strong
female characters for decades, Horowitz has had to perform a feat of
shape-shifting. “It was inconceivable that if you have five children, one of
them won't be female,” he says in his deep public-school timbre. “It seemed
time to challenge myself and produce a heroine. I was nervous. Normally I'm
writing about being a 13-year-old boy, which I know and understand, not
least because I have two teenage sons. With Scarlett, I have to ask all of
these questions: should she cook, should she cry? Are these normal or are
they completely wrong?”
Necropolis propels Scarlett through a series of perils in which the South
London teen learns that she is the reincarnation of an ancient heroine armed
with magical powers. Horowitz ruled one thing out of this tale of
initiation: any mention of emerging womanhood. “Puberty is the last thing I
would discuss with my sons,” he declares. “It's so ‘cringe', as the boys
would say. If I talk about periods and breasts developing, I would lose my
readership. Kids are smart enough to know all this stuff. But it's not for
my books: I would never have had Lyra and Will making love, like they do at
the end of the Philip Pullman trilogy. It's just not what I do. There are
the Jacqueline Wilsons out there doing a very good job of that subject, but
I am writing adventure fantasies. The books have a sense of innocence about
them. That's part of their appeal.”
This resolute innocence is perhaps rooted in the way Horowitz, as an
adolescent, developed an aversion to the mean contradictions of the young
female psyche.
His greatest ire is reserved for girls
He has frequently complained of his unhappy childhood: the son of a
multimillionaire who died effectively bankrupt, he grew up in a mansion amid
the antitheses of a stereotypical warm Jewish family. His remarkably
unpleasant grandmother appears in his excoriating satire Granny. But his
greatest ire is reserved for the other end of the age spectrum. “When I was
8, my parents took me to Sunday school to begin preparing me for my
Barmitzvah. The girls there tor-mented me for being fat and not being very
bright. They were spiteful, silly and mean. In response I gave up on
religion from the age of 9 or 10. Going to all-boy boarding schools from 8
to 18 didn't help. I never felt comfortable around girls until I met my
wife, Jill. I had never met a woman like her before; she was so determined,
ambitious and strong.”
Scarlett is similarly robust. “She has parents and a boyfriend knocking about,
but although she is a real girl, a Dulwich schoolgirl, it's a matter of
keeping her as a classic adventurer,” says Horowitz. “All the Power of Five
kids are mythical in part - they are five archetypes. Scarlett is a sea
goddess. My aspiration is to do myth and legend in the real world, so the
five kids must be recognisable as real kids. All kids dream at some time
about saving the world or destroying the world or dominating the world,
depending on their character. Every child believes that they are bigger than
the world.”
Although he professes himself happy with Scarlett, he is surprisingly keen to
know my opinion of Necropolis (“hardly anyone independent's read it yet”)
and is openly relieved when I confess that, even as a grown-up dodger of
fantasy novels, I found it a page-turner. It was, as Horowitz admits, “a
bloody difficult book to write. It's the first one I've ever torn up and
started again. But once I had found Scarlett, she dictated the way she
should be.”
He breaks off to laugh and say, “I hate writers who talk about characters as
if they had no control over them,” then adds: “It was completely relaxed
after that, with the way she can go from tearful to violent. She was based
on two girls I know, called Scout and Scarlet. I knew if I used the name
Scout, people would say I was really just writing another boy character.
Scout is only about 9; she is the granddaughter of a friend of mine in
Orford, Suffolk, where I own a second house. There is also a bit of Lyra
from Pullman, and a girl in Stephen King's Firestarter.”
Although Horowitz is a walking dictionary of spy novels, fantasy and fable,
and despite the fact that much of his psyche seems rooted in his young
teens, (he cites 14 as “this wonderful, golden age, just on the cusp of
manhood when everything seems possible”), he is also a successful adult
television and film screenwriter. He is responsible for the Second World War
detective series, Foyle's War, as well as Midsomer Murders and The
Gathering, a 2002 horror film starring Christina Ricci. This side of his
prodigious output is the fruit of collaboration with his wife, a television
producer, whom Horowitz met at his first job after leaving York University.
“We have always had a working relationship together,” he says. “She was the
account director and I was the copywriter at the advertising agency McCann
Erickson. It was difficult to know who was working for whom. Now that we
work together as TV producer and writer, it's the same situation.”
Exercise helps to improve his writing
He also attributes his slim shape to her. In fact, his urbane exterior betrays
no trace of the awkward, girl-tortured adolescent of his memory. “Jill has
been a positive force in terms of diet and exercise and lifestyle,” he says.
“I also have my labrador and we walk every day. Whenever I exercise I write
better. I walk a lot in the country, especially in Suffolk, around Orford.
Walking along the river exercises body and soul. Out there in nature you
can't look without believing that something's there behind creation, but you
don't have to get on your knees to thank it.”
Horowitz had even become something of a gym fiend, but an ill-advised spot of
adolescent exuberance has put a stop to that. “I stupidly went out with my
boys on a jetski, trying to be Alex Rider. The pounding of the waves through
the seat pushed out one of my discs. I underwent six months of chiropractic
and osteopathy. Ugh.” He rolls his eyes. “In the end it was fixed by
conventional medicine - one epidural injection. You need six months of pain
to make you realise every day, how grateful you must be that you are free of
it. I realised that the world is divided between people who are ill and
people who aren't.”
Physical frailty is the one subject guaranteed to make Horowitz taciturn.
While one might expect to find him basking in his late-blossoming success,
his pain-free existence and his multimillion-pound wealth, he holds an
unshakeable dread of turning into an Old One. “I don't like being over 50,
it's horrible. Someone told me that, to kids, you're old if you're over 25
whatever age you are, so in a way it doesn't matter. But nowadays I'm
meeting young adults who say they read me when they were small.”
Time's inexorable passage is marked by a human skull that sits on his writing
desk. It was given to him by his mother when he was teenaged. “That's my
memento mori. It tells me, don't play a computer game, don't sit mucking
about, just get on and write another chapter.
“You're here for a blink of time and that's it,” he says. “In your fifties,
you're suddenly aware that the world is being taken from you. It's good and
right, and you hope that young people will do better with it. But I now have
reading glasses. The eyesight's going and that pisses me off. Then I forget
where I have put them - that's the memory going, too, and that's upsetting.
I think about poor Terry Pratchett with Alzheimer's, and that's worrying.
This stage of life is not the most enjoyable. I did prefer being 18.”
Necropolis extract: Scarlett finds a portal - and is captured
Scarlett shivered. She was wearing a coat, but it was very cold inside the
church. A movement caught her eye. A line of candles had flickered, all the
flames bending together, caught in a sudden breeze. Had someone just come
in? No. The door was still shut. Nobody could have opened or closed it
without being heard.
A boy walked past. He was in the shadows at the side of the church, moving
towards the altar. Even his feet against the marble floor were silent. He
could have been floating. She turned to follow him as he went and just for a
second his face was illuminated by a naked bulb. She knew him.
It was crazy. It couldn't be possible. But at the same time, there was no
doubt. It was the boy from his dreams, one of the four she had seen walking
together in that grey desert. She even knew his name. It was Matt. The door
he had left through was in the outer wall underneath a stained glass window.
Scarlett guessed it must lead out into the street. There was something
strange about it. The door was very small, out of proportion with the rest
of St Meredith's. There was a symbol carved into the wooden surface: a
five-pointed star.
The door had an iron ring. She turned it and went through. She didn't find
herself outside in the street. Instead, she was standing in a wide, brightly
lit corridor. There were flaming torches slanting out of iron brackets in
the walls. There was a man, sitting in a wooden chair opposite her, facing
the door. He was dressed like a monk with a long, dirty brown habit.
Scarlett had already decided to turn around and go back, but before she
could move, he suddenly looked up. The hood fell back. She gasped.
Text © 2008 Anthony Horowitz. Adapted extract from The Power Of Five:
Necropolis by Anthony Horowitz. Reproduced by permission of Walker Books
Ltd, London SE1
The novel is available in hardback for £11.69, free p&p, from Times
Books First. Phone 0870 1608080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
