{"id":366,"date":"2015-02-27T09:56:46","date_gmt":"2015-02-27T09:56:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/?p=366"},"modified":"2015-03-13T15:22:47","modified_gmt":"2015-03-13T15:22:47","slug":"does-this-bomb-cross-your-boundary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/does-this-bomb-cross-your-boundary\/","title":{"rendered":"Does This Bomb Cross Your Boundary?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"innocents250\"<\/a><\/p>\n

My novel \u2013 The Innocent\u2019s Story<\/em><\/a> \u2013 is a dangerous book. (This article written on first publication of Innocent’s Story 2005)<\/em> I didn\u2019t know that when I wrote it. I thought it was a serious and moral attempt to contextualise terrorism for children. If the idea of talking to children about suicide bombing makes you want to turn the page, you\u2019re not the only one. When they received the manuscript of The Innocent\u2019s Story<\/em>, my American publishers set about cancelling my contracts with immediate effect. So much for the Land of the Free. I thought things might be different here, not least because I had a good track record: my first book for children Feather Boy<\/em> won the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award, was made into a TV series which won a BAFTA for Best Drama and is currently published in 18 countries. Wrong again. The British publisher, having said initially that the book was \u2018interesting, intelligent, provocative and important\u2019, declared, six months later, that it didn\u2019t work and asked me to lay it aside. But I couldn\u2019t because, more perhaps than any other book I\u2019ve written, The Innocent\u2019s Story<\/em> represents everything I believe in: open-mindedness, robust no-holds-barred debate and, yes, pushing at boundaries.<\/p>\n

The most obvious line I crossed was the \u2018wanting to open a discussion with children\u2019 one. Although, with suitable innocence of my own, I have to say it wasn\u2019t so obvious to me. My father died when I was a scant fourteen and that\u2019s when my mother began to treat me as an adult. I\u2019ve replicated that in my relations with my own children and talking openly about challenging subjects is one of the delights of my family life. But the wider world, apparently, doesn\u2019t see things this way. The gatekeepers are very nervous about what is said to children.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a schizophrenia here: as parents, or even simply as decent-minded adults, we like to think we can protect our children from some of the worst horrors of the modern world, but actually they are exposed all the time. When our media culture beams the horror into our living rooms it also, willy nilly, beams it in to our children\u2019s lives. There will be no child on earth with access to a television who did not see pictures of the twin towers falling; no child in London unaware of the July bombing. What do they do with this knowledge, who speaks to them about it, how does it affect them?<\/p>\n

The least our children deserve, I believe,\u00a0 is a context for the events they witness around them. If we say nothing about the bombs to our young people it gives terror a kind of legitimacy, makes it ordinary, not something worthy enough to be remarked upon. The usefulness of fiction in this process is that it can offer a \u2018safe space\u2019 for that discussion. Terrible events can be realistic but not real. Love and morality can sit alongside difficulty and grief. And the experience of a book and the issues it raises can also be shared at school, or among a peer group.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s my scary story about? Well it opens (bear in mind I finished this book over 18 months ago) with a suicide bomb going off in a London train station. The narrator of the story is a 13 year old child killed in the explosion. She becomes a \u2018para-spirit\u2019, only able to survive if she holes up inside a living human\u2019s head. As luck and fiction would have it, she ends up in the head a bomber, because that\u2019s what the book is, an attempt to get inside the head of a bomber. Now here\u2019s the next line being crossed: if you try to get inside the head of a terrorist, you can be accused of sympathising with terrorists, as the Lib-Dem MP Dr. Jenny Tonge was when she made her remarks about the Palestinians. But, for me, there is a world of difference between sympathy, where you agree a person\u2019s premise, and empathy where you attempt, for a moment, to stand in that person\u2019s shoes and wonder whether, if you\u2019d walked their path, you\u2019d have ended up where they ended up. If, as nations and people, we lose our grip on empathy, then we are lost indeed. And people includes kids.<\/p>\n

Next frightening line: religion. All sides of the religious divide currently appear to wish to legislate \u2013 sometimes violently \u2013 about what can and can\u2019t be said artistically about their faith; witness Sikh outrage at the Birmingham Rep production of Behzti<\/em>, or Christian Voice\u2019s attacks on Jerry Springer the Opera<\/em>. My research on suicide bombers turned up two basic types, the politically motivated who use religion as a fig-leaf and the genuinely religiously motivated. I didn\u2019t see how I could write a book about the inside of a suicide bomber\u2019s head without inquiring into the role of religion. I didn\u2019t want my readers bringing any baggage to the religion I chose but it seemed disingenuous to settle upon a radical sect of Icelandic Quakers. I decided to make up my own religion. I needed something close enough to the truth to feel real, but far enough away from reality not to demonise or offend. Enter the T\u2019lanni religion with its radical Haliki sect. The gatekeepers said it was thinly disguised version of\u00a0 Islam. But \u2013 despite a millennia of religious conflict which would have you believe otherwise \u2013 all religions are to some extent thinly disguised versions of each other. Take for example Christianity, Judaism, Islam, they all have their single deity (whether it be God or Allah) their Holy book (whether it be the Bible, the Torah, the Koran), their principle witness (Christ or Abraham or Muhammad). I used this basic structure: My god is J\u2019lal, my book the Holy Desert Scrolls, my witness the angel Ingali. Now here\u2019s a thing the grown-ups don\u2019t get: children do not think like them. When I gave the manuscript to my eat-books-for-breakfast 12 year old friend Hannah, she said: \u2018It\u2019s brilliant \u2013 except, well, I\u2019ve never heard of the T\u2019lanni religion and we do Comparative Religion at school.\u2019\u00a0 Game on.<\/p>\n

The other advantage of an invented religion is that you can draw parallels. My religion has an equivalent of \u2018jihad\u2019 but only to make it clear that, far from being exclusively associated with \u2018holy war\u2019 (which you would think by reading the western press) the predominant meaning of \u2018jihad\u2019 in the Koran is the literal Arabic one \u2018to strive hard\u2019 and it\u2019s used, for instance, to mean the attempt to get closer to god by overcoming bad desires. I didn\u2019t know that before I began my research. I wonder if you did.<\/p>\n

On a lighter note, the gatekeepers had a problem with the book\u2019s humour. If it\u2019s about a serious subject then it should be serious, they intoned. I mentioned, only a tad defensively, that the gravediggers\u2019 scene in Hamlet isn\u2019t there because Ophelia\u2019s death doesn\u2019t matter but because human beings can\u2019t bear very much reality. Adult ones anyway. My friend Hannah likes a good laugh.<\/p>\n

Finally, and very seriously, what I aimed for in the book was complexity and that I realise (again rather late in the day) is another line I\u2019ve crossed. Our increasingly complex world is increasingly simply\u2013 and inadequately \u2013 described. Take, for example, the phrase \u2018The War on Terror\u2019. That has no more meaning than a war on \u2018shooting\u2019 would. because terror is not the thing, it\u2019s a symptom of the thing. The political useful \u2013 but deluding \u2013 thing about the term War on Terror is that it lumps everyone together: religious fanatic, Palestinian, Chechen. All of them conveniently characterised as The Other, The Enemy, as in Them and Us, Goodies and Baddies. Disney stuff, \u2018kids\u2019 stuff. But these are not the same peoples with the same grievances. If we are going to address their problems \u2013 which have become our problems \u2013 we need to ask deeper questions. We need, I think, to know what the \u2018thing\u2019 is, the driver behind the anger that would bring one human being to believe it is appropriate to blow up another. And you know what? I think the kids may be able to go this place more easily that we can because, as yet, they are the ones with the open minds.<\/p>\n

I hope my book The Innocent\u2019s Story<\/em> can contribute to keeping it that way. And I\u2019m very lucky that my new publisher \u2013 Oxford University Press \u2013 with it\u2019s 527 year tradition of research, education, scholarship and free speech, believes so too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My novel \u2013 The Innocent\u2019s Story \u2013 is a dangerous book. (This article written on first publication of Innocent’s Story 2005) I didn\u2019t know that when I wrote it. I thought it was a serious and moral attempt to contextualise terrorism for children. If the idea of talking to children about suicide bombing makes you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":269,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[17,16],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-366","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-articles","8":"category-books","9":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/innocents250.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JE8T-5U","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":689,"href":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions\/689"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}