Melvin Burgess, author of Junk, Bloodtide and Doing It!  He never writes about easy subjects; HIs novels have tackled drug addiction, homelessness, sex, plastic surgery, hunting and witchcraft. Burgess writing is powerful and his characters are full rounded and sensitively depicted. His latest novel, Nicholas Dane, deals with what may be one of the last taboos in writing for young people, child abuse. Here he talks to Noga Applebaum about writing for teeenagers and the importance of facing up to the most difficult of subjects.

Often when I talk to authors about writing for teenagers a recurrent phrase is ‘Well, Melvin Burgess can get away with it, but I can’t’ – how do you get away with it in terms of by-passing the gatekeepers of children’s literature?

I was thinking about this one just today actually. Normally the criticism is that it’s too much or too risky or something like that, but I was thinking ‘I suppose they just trust me’.

 You never had to tone down anything, or change anything?

Never. It is strange. I think it was probably because of Junk. Although there was a lot of criticism of that book when it came out, it was popular, which counts for a lot in the world of gatekeepers and publishers. Although it was kicked around by the right, educators liked it, young people liked it – they felt it was hard-hitting but real, and also it received positive critical reviews from a literary point of view. Interestingly I think that by and large my books are appreciated for their literariness and their insight, which also helps. It is true that there are places that will not take my books, and it probably damages my reputation but it’s also true that I’m trusted. I hate to blow my own trumpet, my books do go in there feet first, I don’t beat around the bush, and some claim they are sensationalist, but I suppose I must be trusted to handle these issues in a sensitive or authentic way.

You’re also very lucky…

I have been lucky with Andersen Press and Puffin, they do take what ever I chuck at them. It’s a funny one - I am allowed to do it, and in a peculiar way it makes me feel that I have to write these books, because if I don’t write them no one else will.

You have written about drugs, sex, incest, abuse – are there any topics that you consider inappropriate or irrelevant for a young audience? Should there be boundaries to children’s literature?

I don’t think there should be any boundaries, particularly with teenagers. People persistently underestimate what actually goes on in between their ears and what they are capable of understanding. Most of us, if you go back to when you were fourteen, what went on between our ears would be an 18 rated film. There’s a peculiar sort of hypocrisy about what teenagers are capable of. I think it’s all in how you pitch it. There are plenty of irrelevant topics – you wouldn’t write about your second marriage, or your third divorce. Most books for teenagers have teenagers in them, although it might not be necessary either.

In that case, how would you define the difference between adult literature and children’s literature?

I would say it’s a very fine line. Teenage literature as a published genre has mainly teenaged characters, I would say.

But there are books with a teenaged character that are not aimed at teenagers...

Yes, like The Lovely Bones, or Catcher in the Rye - teenagers still like to read those. Another one is American Psycho which is very popular among teenagers, although there are no teenaged characters in it.  Teenaged literature is a relatively new phenomenon and it has certain roles that are associated with it. It tends to think about what it’s like to be at that age, the internal and external experiences teenagers go through. But it’s a mistake to think that teenaged fiction is all there is for teenagers, since teenagers do read a lot of adult fiction as well.

Critics of your work say that you are out to shock and cause controversy – is there any truth in this statement? Do you choose some of your subjects with this in mind?

As I said, I do feel as though there is hypocrisy towards teenagers and I have made a bit of a career out of dealing with those areas that adults feel uncomfortable talking to teenagers about. To that extent it’s true. Sometimes I do enjoy the controversy. I did enjoy it with Doing It because it was something that I believed should be written. I knew it would cause problems but I like a good argument.  Having said that, I would never pick any subject unless I felt it was worth talking about.

 I suppose all these things might be true, but I’d like to say that I do it entirely without any cynicism. I  insist on making that point. If I was cynical I would be on Doing It 3 by now. I would have sold more books and would be richer than I am. But I don’t, because I’m not interested in revisiting the same issues. I always loved books that investigate the gaps that people miss, and it’s true that I have a taste for the surprising and shocking, but it’s only in as much as life can be shocking. Sometimes everyday life, and sometimes, as in Nicholas Dane, unusual bits of life, but shocking is not an end in itself.

Your most recent novel, Nicholas Dane, is based on a true story – how did you come across the subject of abused children in care? How did you research it?

 It’s not based on a true story; it’s based on true stories. I interviewed some of the survivors – men who have been through those experiences. There have been stories about abuse in children’s homes in this country and right across the Anglo-Saxon world since the 1990s. From the 60s to the 80s this sort of abuse has been happening in care homes in practically every major town and borough on a huge scale. It really is the most dreadful, hopeless scandal, massive failure of care, and something that we will be living with for generations.

The link between people who have been through these places and tremendous violence and repeat abuse later on in life is very well established. Prisons are full of people who have been in  care homes. It’s a devastating failure of society and as such needs to be written about.  I knew I wanted to write this book years ago, but I found it a really difficult subject to approach. So many people’s lives have been devastated; it’s hard to think about making it into ‘a good read’.

It was only after a long time  of thinking that I felt able to do it. There was a case in Manchester, as there were in other boroughs and cities, and these cases are typically handled by one lawyer. What happens is that someone complains, the police then go fishing and get in touch with other people who were in the same homes over the same period, and if they get more complaints they compile a case and it would be put into the hands of one lawyer. So I got in touch with the lawyer handling the case in Manchester, where I live, and he very kindly spoke to me and circulated my name to his clients, some of whom got in touch with me and I interviewed them. People do like telling their stories.

 How closely did you stick to the facts?

 It’s a kind of montage technique. It’s a way of working that I like. You interview people, montage it, get the bones, and fictionalise it. There is nospecific  Nick Dane out there, although his character is loosely based on someone. Most of the major incidents happened. The Bunker’s Lane incident happened, the whole story of the night run, breaking the window, the cold baths – all these are true. Mr Toms and the snooker table, James the headmaster, Mr Creal - they are based on a report that came out about a children’s home in North Wales. Most of the abuse that takes place inside Meadow Hill is based on true facts.

 Did the people you interviewed read it when it was finished?

They’ve been sent copies. I assume I’ll be getting responses soon. Actually, one of them is not living in the country anymore, one got the book but I haven’t heard back from him yet, and one I don’t know how to contact at the moment.

Are you anxious about their responses?

I’m intrigued, and I suppose I am a bit anxious but the story is not based on anyone’s life. However, I’m hoping they will be pleased. In my experience, people are usually flattered when you weave their exerpiences into a stoy.  I do it quite a bit.

What do you mean ‘I do it quite a bit’?

Well,  interviewed people for Doing It and Junk.

You interviewed boys for Doing It?

Oh no, I wouldn’t go and interview young lads about their sexual experiences! I didn’t think that would be appropriate, but  we’ve all been teenagers. All I did was let everyone know that I wanted their early knobby stories – rude, disappointing, touching or sweet. I asked the men and women that I knew, and I actually had people come and volunteer stories.

 I thought this is your first book which is based on real events and was going to ask how the writing experience differs from writing stories out of your own head.

No, Junk was also done like that – the five main characters in Junk were people I knew. I didn’t interview them, but they were people I knew from those days. Doing It was a bit more fictionalised. For Nicholas Dane I really did have to go out of my way to uncover the stories.

Did you find it restricting, or liberating?

 These people are out there, you sort of owe them something. I guess I found it a bit daunting; because in a way you owe the people who have told you their stories something.The process was a bit more deliberate, but surprisingly similar because you always start from a point and build on it. You end up with a bit of a skeleton, it may have no legs or the top of its head may be missing. Nick never existed, I pinched his mum’s death from a little story about someone who nearly died from an overdose, and the second half of the book is based on Oliver Twist. It’s an interesting process.

The novel’s eponymous title reveals the Dickensian element that runs throughout the book – can you tell me about the choice to use Dickens’ classic formula as the basis for Nicholas Dane?

Two things about this issue: first, I get stories from everywhere – from Norse mythology to real people’s lives. I wanted to base something on a book of Dickens’ for a long time - a) because he is a master and b) because he is writing right at the beginning of the Industrial age. Many of his preoccupations are quite modern.

Second, it’s really difficult to turn these kinds of events into a good book, and of course Dickens did it. He wrote about dark circumstances for children, and he wrote about it in such a way that by the end of the book you’re not just lying depressed on the floor. I wanted to use him as a model. That worked out in two different ways. One was making the characters almost larger than life - vivid strong and colourful. And the other is to do with Bill Sikes – I reread Oliver Twist and realised that Sikes was probably abused. Then the reports of abuse in children’s homes in Manchester came through and I thought – ah! So the two ideas collided.

The novel is set in the 80’s, not ancient history, and although there are certainly still many neglected and abused children, we’d all like to think that the system and attitudes have changed. What do you feel your novel has to offer to a 21st century teenager?

Two things. The first one is that novels are about understanding things and they can lead you to understand what’s going on and how it works if you’re a victim or even a perpetrator, perhaps. Fictional explorations of such events have all sorts of influences and it’s not always possible to put your finger on them. It’s about understanding and empathising.

The second is the ‘lest we forget’ issue. As you say, it’s not ancient history, and these events in children’s homes have been cleared up a lot, but this is not to say that it doesn’t happen anymore. Professionals say that there is undisclosed, unknown amount of abuse taking place in foster homes, for example. The issue of abuse is swept under the carpet on a massive scale because people don’t like to engage with it. This is how it occurred on such a scale in children's homes – these men were sent on to the next school, or the next seminary,  to carry on their abusive practices. That’s how one person could sometimes abuse hundreds of boys throughout his life and cause a huge amount of damage on all sorts of levels. Even now people still don’t want to engage with it. If you engage with it, it’s much harder to forget about it.

It is, however, unlikely that teenagers who are being abused now would get their hands on this book.

Probably not, that’s always the case. But teenagers today might be less likely to push it under the carpet if they came across it. It may not happen to them, but it may happen to their kids or grandkids, unless they are asked to engage with it. They need to understand the consequences of it, the extent of the damage in the form of violent, dysfunctional people. Besides, as a novel, it’s always worth writing about any issue you wish to write about because investigating things in that way gives you a sort of understanding which is bigger than the subject. I’d say that about this novel, and other novels.

The novel closes with Nick making some sort of peace with his past, but this process takes place in his adulthood after he’d become a parent. Putting aside the true facts underpinning this story, it is usually customary in teen literature to let the young protagonist achieve some sort of closure while s/he is still young – why did you choose the current ending?

For the reason that it is  nonsense that people achieve closure about childhood abuse when they’re young.  The dramatic climax of the novel is when Jones kills himself,  the end bit wast, in a Dickensian tradition, tying up the loose ends.

When you talk to people who have been abused or people who know them, the catalyst for bringing it out into the open is quite often when the victim sees his abuser with another boy.  The damage  takes years to deal with, and nobody expects it to happen overnight.  There can be instances – one action towards healing which take place in the teenage years, like speaking up about rape, for instance. However, that would not have happened in this period and in these circumstances. Dickens had the kindly old gentleman appear at the end of Oliver Twist and clear everything up. I did provide a kindly old gentleman, and he did try his best, but it was never going to happen. The point is that children complained about abuse for years, and nothing ever happened. They were stigmatised as bad kids – they ran away, they were lying. Nick complained to the headmaster, hadn’t he? And what happened? He got beaten and locked away.

 I guess I’m just wondering how a teenaged reader would relate to this ending.

It’s just a book; it’s not your whole life. You don’t read it and see it as a final verdict. I disagree with this formulaic response that enforces positive action or hope. Sometimes there isn’t one, and if you’re trying to write something authentic you can just undermine yourself.

 In a recent TV adaptation of Oliver Twist, it is implied that the Artful Dodger will eventually become a Sikes because of society’s neglect – is this the motivation behind the characterisation of Ben Jones?

I didn’t see that adaptation. The whole point is that the damage done to such people is that they can become abusers themselves. There’s a tremendous link between serious violence – murderers, rapists, armed robbers – and going through such experiences. Jones is what Nick could have easily become. We are all responsible.

Your Nancy equivalent, Stella, returns to her abusive partner and is violently killed by him – Jenny is also not great when it comes to boyfriend choices, and Mrs Batts still believes in the innocence of the paedophile Tony Creal even after the evidence against him – all your major female characters are misguided about men - is there a message here?

No, no. There are only a few female characters because most of the people in these situations are male. You could say the same about the men, couldn’t you? There’s Michael Moberley, but the rest of them are not great guys, are they?

What about Shiner, your Fagin equivalent?

 Shiner is a very dodgy character. He’s a monster.

He does have redeeming qualities, as a reader, you don’t hate him.

I always liked Fagin. He’s a monster and takes advantage of you, but at the same time he is likeable. But back to the women, I wasn’t trying to pick on them. There wasn’t a particular message I was trying to get across. Men like Tony Creal, as I was given the information, are very charismatic and attractive to middle aged women like Mrs Batts, and the situation whereas she just would not have it is very commonplace. Jenny was getting it together in the end despite her boyfriend problems. As for Stella, you don’t know her history. It’s been very well chronicled that some women getting beaten up find it very difficult to stay away, and if they do manage to break away, they often go back to someone else who beats them up or rapes them. It’s not a surprise that she is like that, but I don’t think it is a healthy response.

Although your book is inspired by Oliver Twist, you chose to name your main protagonist Nick, and gave the name Oliver to another character, one of the most memorable and tragic children in the novel – why?

I didn’t want to draw too many comparisons; Oliver in Oliver Twist doesn’t have that much of a character. He is this blond cipher of innocence and childhood beauty. I did put little Oliver in the book really because Oliver in Dickens comes from good middle-class stock, so he’s alright and he can respond to good middle-class treatment. But of course he was in care from the start, he was in the workhouse. He wouldn’t be a suitable candidate just because his granddad is a gentleman. I wanted to show that you can get lost. The earlier in life that the abuse starts, the harder it is to make the decision not be a victim. Oliver in my book is hopelessly done over. This is what Oliver would probably be like in real life, I’m afraid.

Nicholas Dane is a harrowing read – one reviewer said she wouldn’t want her children to read it – were there any scenes or characters that you yourself found difficult to write?

 Not really. During the actual writing you are immersed in it as a story. Characters are not people, so I don’t find writing upsetting. Hearing it was fairly mind-boggling, and getting up and talking about it I find quite harrowing. I did it for the first time in Sheffield, about a week ago, and I was really anxious. Partly because normally I get up and you can share a bit of a joke with the audience and have a laugh, but you can’t have a laugh about this material. There’s also something about talking about this sort of stuff. For most of my adult life it’s been pushed under the carpet, and even now, it goes in the news, but people don’t talk about it.

In Junk you highlighted the damaging results of drugs, but also the fun element involved in taking them. In Nicholas Dane you talk of the damage caused by abuse, but also describe the reciprocal dynamic between the abuser and the victim – as exemplified by the relationship between Creal and Oliver and Stella and Jones. Do you view pleasure and self-destruction as interconnected?

Not in general. However, one of the big points about this sort abuse is partly that the sexual sensations are pleasurable, but also that you confuse on a very basic level affection and love with being taken advantage of and doing things against your will. This is what is so damaging about this abuse, not being raped, although it is of course very damaging in itself, but the whole grooming process, being drawn into it and the bit of you that wants the affection and the pleasure. That’s why people come out feeling guilty, thinking that they somehow wanted it.

What is interesting about the book is that you try to get into the mind of both the paedophile and the victim.

It’s really interesting. When you get into victims’ minds there is very often that sense of shame as if they had a role in it or that there was a part in them that wanted it. Nick wants affection, and Creal is the only one that shows him that. Creal wants affection too. We can’t go into the past of everyone, but he feels terribly betrayed when Oliver tells him.

You seem to suggest that Nick’s survival, as opposed to Jones and others, had to do with his positive experience of parenthood in the early years of his life – this could be seen as quite conservative, ‘family values’ orientated message, which is quite the opposite from the one brought forward in Lady My Life as a Bitch, where Sandra prefers the freedom of being a dog to the constraints of being a human member of a family – did your views on family issues change in the years that passed between these novels?

But Sandra is a bitch, isn’t she? Lady was a kind of comedy, mixing up stuff for fun. Sandra went off the rails. She finds it’s easier to be a dog than to be human. I wouldn’t have a great deal of respect for Sandra’s priorities, although I can sympathise. She ends up making a stupid choice, but she is true to her character. I almost had her decide otherwise - to stick it out as a person - but it didn’t really work because she never was.

Seriously, Nick comes from a single parent family; I don’t think it’s necessary to come from a nuclear family to turn out alright. I do think it’s undoubtedly true that children need strong relationships, and there is a variety of ways of providing that. Families are probably not enough. I think perhaps children would be happier if they lived in three or four groups of families.

 A commune? It didn’t really work when they tried in the 60s.

I don’t think our society supports communes. I have, however, seen them work very well; kids running around, it’s like a tribe. I think probably we all evolved in tribal rather than familial units.

Adults are often scandalised by your novels, but what responses do your teenaged readers have? Did you get any feedback about Nicholas Dane in particular?

It hasn’t really been published long enough, so I haven’t yet. By and large the feedback I get is almost invariably good. The feedback I get from adults is also good, I have to say. I don’t know if this is because the people who write to me are always interested or whether it’s because most of the scandal is cooked up in the press. When I find myself interviewed on radio or television about, say, Junk, the people they bring in to argue against it are really out on a limb. When they talk to representatives from the drug organisations, there’s no difference between my view and their view. It’s perfectly boring mainstream stuff actually. It’s not unusual. The people they being in are usually from bonkers pressure groups.

The scandal about Junk was definitely misguided, and I think many people see exactly what you were trying to do there, but I wonder if you’d get a slightly different response about Nicholas Dane.

 It might possibly be the case. There probably is an issue with this one about age. I mean 14 up seems fine, but you wouldn’t want younger kids to read it, while with Junk or Doing It I wouldn’t mind if they read it. I can understand people may be worried about it. It does say on the back that it’s for older children. I’d defend the book, and I think it was right to write it. The question is whether the feeling that it may have gone too far is because it did go too far or because of the urge to sweep in under the carpet again. I think teenagers can deal with the book and have the right to read it. I am happy with it. The only thing I sometimes wonder about is the ending, but not because of the closure issue as you suggested, but because it might be hurried, tying the loose ends like Dickens, and maybe that affects its value as a book. In terms of what I was trying to do I think it’s probably alright, but we shall see.

What are you working on at the moment? Should we be shocked?

 I’m not terribly interested in shocking people. I’ve been doing some stuff for television. The videos that promoted Sara’s Face got me interested in multi-platform storytelling, and so I’ve been doing a little bit of that and it led me to do a treatment for Channel 4, who were at the time interested in doing something for teenagers. It’s about how stressful schools are these days, partly because of the economic crisis, competition and profit, and partly because of the system of constant exams. I decided to do another researched piece in PRUs (Pupil referral units) talking to kids who haven’t got on well in school and their parents. Live Studio who created Hollyoaks gave me a researcher, and in the contract there is a book as well. It’s a montage following three kids through school, getting excluded, visiting the PRU and so on. I’m also working on a ghost stories project which involves both broadcasting and online bits.

Thank you Melvin Burgess for talking to Write Away