Some say his teen fiction would suit Playboy or Hustler, but Melvin Burgess believes his books have a moral core, writes Kate Holmquist
To some he's the dirty old man of teen fiction, to others its guiding light. Melvin Burgess's controversial and unnerving books have made the Carnegie Medal short-list five times - winning in 1997, for Junk. This ground-breaking novel about heroin addiction also won the Guardian Fiction Prize and was short-listed for the Whitbread.
But, as he says himself, adults can deal with teenage drug use - underage sex is more threatening. In 2001, his comic novel Lady: My Life As A Bitch, told the story of a girl transformed into a dog in heat on the eve of her GCSEs. Doing It, Burgess's "knobby" novel published in 2003, was so frank in its portrayal of teenage boys' attitudes to sexuality that it was condemned by then children's laureate in Britain, Anne Fine, who said it belonged in the pages of Playboy and Hustler.
There's really only one way to find out what motivates Burgess and that's to turn up at his door in Manchester. The heady scent of a lovingly tended wisteria vine knocks you back on the front steps of his Edwardian red-brick semi in a student quarter of the city. He explains that wisteria needs careful pruning if it's to bloom in satisfying clusters and not erode the brick on which it climbs. Which is why he keeps an eight-foot tall, red metal pruning implement inside the front door this time of year. The potential violence that could be wrought by such a device is, in its way, the perfect metaphor for Burgess's pen.
He's also mildly obsessed with his clematis vines, which form an arbour above a table in the back garden. His constant pruning, when he's pottering around after a morning's writing, seems fitting for a writer who ruthlessly edits his own work, writing and re-writing, playing around with points of view.
"Anything up to 40,000 words takes two months, but more than 40,000 takes two years," he says.
Within view of the arbour there's a goldfish pond, and a line of washing - Burgess's own jeans and shirts - drying in the sunshine.
The grass hasn't been cut, giving the garden a wild air, despite the attention paid to the climbing vines, and there is something about the house that you can't quite put your finger on, until he explains that he and his wife of 14 years have split. Now a single father, Burgess shares the house with his 14-year-old daughter Pearl.
"One of the nice things about finally making a bit of money is that I can afford to send my daughter to the best fee-paying girls' school in Manchester. The ordinary Manchester schools are crap, frankly," he says.
School, in general, can be demotivating and alienating, he thinks: "Classes should end at mid-day so that students can spend their afternoons doing other things."
But the importance of education was instilled in him by his Irish Protestant father, Chris, who grew up on Lower Churchtown Road near Rathmines in Dublin. Chris Burgess worked in educational publishing until his sudden death at the age of 80.
"Dad was very literary, with the gift of the gab and the Irish taste for good company," says Burgess.
His grandfather worked in Jacob's and ate Jacob's Cream Crackers before bed every night of his life. His grandmother was "a ferocious monster of an Ulster woman." Chris Burgess joined the RAF during the second World War.
"My dad said he joined the RAF because he wanted to fight Hitler. But was the biggest urge to fight Hitler or get away from his mother?" Burgess asks.
After the war, Chris Burgess married a Lancashire gamekeeper's daughter and the family were soon comfortably settled in the English middle class. Born in 1954, Melvin Burgess completed secondary school in the early 1970s, then retired to life on his parents' sofa. His father pushed him toward an interview with a local newspaper, which gave him six months' training in journalism, which he thought was "crap". He then declined the offer of a job, prompting the editor to comment that his only regret was that young Melvin had deprived someone else of an opportunity.
Inspired by Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, Burgess spent the next 15 years hanging around with a group of like-minded friends in Bristol, smoking hash, learning the new sexual politics of the 1970s in the company of strong women, collecting the dole and writing.
"I lived for long time without very much money. . . and life was a lot simpler. But middle-class educated poverty is very different from being working-class, uneducated poor," he says.
In the late 1980s, he met and married a German dancer and the first of the couple's two children was born - a son who is now an 18-year-old martial artist.
Fatherhood improved Burgess's concentration and he produced his first published book, Cry of the Wolf, in 1990. "To be an adult, you have to be ready and steady. I'm not all that good at being ready and steady, but you have to be," he says. Cry of the Wolf nearly won the Carnegie Medal but for the fact that some judges thought the book was too distressing for young readers. It was a glimpse of themes to come.
THE SEXUAL, THE bloody and the grotesque fascinate Burgess, whose sensibility could be described as Berthold Brecht meets Roddy Doyle meets Gormenghast. His social realism may have got the most attention, although the two books often cited as classics, apart from Junk, are Bloodtide and Bloodsong. These are fantasies set in a future dystopia with stories based on the ancient Icelandic Volsunga Saga, which has powerful female characters.
Burgess's Volsunga Saga series shows the deep influence of Angela Carter, who reworked fairy tales for their essential human stories, and who reinterpreted the Marquis de Sade as a "moral pornographer" in her non-fiction book, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. When Burgess writes about teenagers having sex, he does achieve a kind of "moral pornography" in which girls struggle for power through sex. But no teenager could come away from Doing It or Lady: My Life as a Bitch, believing that impersonal, casual sex is fulfilling. Doing It exposes the meaninglessness of casual sex, while Lady argues that if you want sexual thrills, rather than relationships, you might as well be a dog. Burgess's subtle message is that exploitative sex is dehumanising, but he wants young readers to come to this conclusion themselves.
"My books have a moral core and I have carefully thought through my arguments," he says.
Not everyone sees it that way. "Journalists always want someone to argue against me. So they have to get someone barking mad to say children should only be reading Dickens. The approach is always antagonistic - and it's crap journalism. One person who they got to speak against me claimed that 'our mental institutions are full of young psychotics that have read your books!' The people who talk about my books like that have never bloody read them!"
He thinks his books threaten adults because "most people hated themselves when they were teenagers. I felt that way too. I had not enough friends, I felt like a prat, like a fool. Teens are always making asses of themselves but that is because they are prepared to make mistakes. Why do they make us so uncomfortable? I don't think we have a very high opinion of adolescents. They have great qualities that we lose in adulthood - idealism, a slowness - spending time just being, talking, laughing. Playfulness is so important."
Adults prefer to see childhood as an escape, rather than a time when people are experiencing intense and confusing feelings, he thinks. "Children are sexual from an early age. But we don't like to associate children with sex. It disturbs people. Our vampire that stalks the night is the paedophile. People say 'you are writing things to sexually excite children', and that's ridiculous."
Burgess pauses to watch a nuthatch walk head first down a tree trunk, then points out the row going on between the nuthatch and a blue tit over the mealworms he has laid on for them on the bird table. Watching the life of the garden is part of his daily routine.
"Writing is a kind of subconscious thing. The imagination thinking directly about something doesn't necessarily get quick results. It needs a bit of composting," he says.
HIS NEW NOVEL, Sara's Face, is a satire of the MTV-driven culture that encourages teenage girls to see themselves as products. "I hate that whole MTV thing. It puts terrible pressure on people and adds to the feeling of being ugly and stupid. It's a commercial vision of beauty," he says.
The evil witch figure in Sara's Face is a male rock star whose face has disintegrated after repeated cosmetic surgery - not unlike Michael Jackson. Sara, the doomed princess, is a beautiful, thin teenage girl who thinks she's fat and wants nothing more than plastic surgery to make her perfect like a piece of modern art. "She's taken by Jonathon Heat into his castle, where he says he is grooming her for celebrity, but maybe he's just trying to steal her face," says Burgess.
"Dieting, cosmetic surgery and self-harm are modern phenomena. It's not a question of women being oppressed; women are doing it to themselves. It's a fetish of some sort because it takes on a life of its own. It's about controlling one's appetites and becoming someone else."
Burgess says that his books, being literary, tend to be multi-layered and miserable with ambiguous endings, but that he'd love to write a "happy book" for adults. "I think maybe I've got all I can from adolescence. I'd like to write fairy tales for adults, maybe based on myths and classic stories, such as Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince - perfectly crafted, small books that you can hold in your mind beautifully."
Burgess's daughter Pearl comes in from school and confidently joins the conversation while Burgess, who loves to cook, serves up a light meal of poached rhubarb and fresh strawberries. The birds in the garden are still fighting and the wisteria continues its attempts to set suckers into the bricks. Somewhere, a teenager is reading one of Burgess's books and having his mind blown. And no, Burgess is not a dirty old man, but more like an adolescent who has taken his time growing up.
A bit of Burgess
"Okay," said Jonathon. "The choice is this. You either have to shag Jenny Gibson - or else that homeless woman who begs spare change outside Cramner's bakers." Dino and Ben recoiled in disgust. Jenny was known as the ugliest girl in the school but the beggar woman was filthy - her teeth! . . .
"At least they're both female," said Dino.
"I'd take the homeless," said Ben, after a moment's thought. "She wouldn't be so bad once you'd cleaned her up." Jonathon shook his head. "You have to take her as is."
. . . Ben squirmed as he took in the delicious horror of it. You had to make a decision. You had to consider it yourself. . .
"Can I shag her from behind?"
"No, from the front, with the lights on. Snogging and everything. And you have to do oral sex on her too."
- Extract from Doing It
Melvin Burgess speaks at the opening of the Children's Books Ireland summer school in Belvedere College, Great Denmark Street, Dublin, Fri 7pm. Booking required: 01-87274751
