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BOOKS
Jolly good read, old thing! Author of the Famous Five parodies Bruno Vincent actually relates to the most recent in his series, on solitary confinement
F
rom the start, the most challenging part of writing new Famous Five books was pretending to be normal. I didn’t struggle with the characters themselves for long. Going back and reading the books again with an adult’s perspective, I found the Kirrin cousins rather unpalatable. I felt I’d been just as bad myself at that age, so I made them grow up to be like me too: bumbling, wellmeaning, clumsily enthusiastic, and mostly wrong. But it was being normal that I really struggled with. The new Blyton adventures were aimed at the foibles (if you’ll excuse the word) of modern life, and were nearly all based on experiences I’d never had, or pursuits I had no interest in. Going on a fad diet, for instance, or becoming a parent. Going on a strategy away day; visiting the garden centre; the pursuit of a ripped beach bod; being sober; Brexit... These, I was told, were the preoccupations of the modern individual. I had no interest in any of them. (If they were based on my life, the new Famous Five books would have been called things like Five Have A Secret Fondness For The Films Of Jean Claude Van Damme, or Five Recently Discovered Chives And Now Put Them In Everything, so the publishers were wise to cast the net further.) In each case, I had to very quickly find out what was the universal aspect of each of these things, and make it funny. I had to ask all my friends with babies (which was all my friends) about the terrors and tribulations of parenthood. Or get them to explain the moronic inferno of team-building exercises. It was only after I achieved my dream of becoming a professional writer that I realised with a feeling of pure horror that I’d effectively removed myself from society, that my job from now on was to sit on my own and not talk to people. The feeling of being an outsider, which had led me to write in the first place, had become self-fulfilling. So in writing these books it was a pleasure to reach out to others and ask about their lives – a process that has continued on Five Go Absolutely Nowhere. We’ve all had slightly different lockdowns, of course – but I tried to make the Famous Five’s experience as universal as possible. The chaotic Zoom meetings, the terrifyingly carefree pensioners and the ubiquitous sourdough starter. When the pandemic hit, it sentenced us all to the bewildering solitude I’d previously known so well. But when it made us all lonely outsiders, it meant we weren’t alone. And now restrictions are gradually easing, and we are beginning to go back to something like our old lives, we are learning to be normal again, together. Now we genuinely all have something in common. Which is roughly the message we wanted to give in the new book. Plus jokes about toilet paper, of course. It is a comedy after all. ■
• Five Go Absolutely Nowhere is published by Quercus Books, £8.99 46 THE BRISTOL MAGAZINE
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SUMMER 2020
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No 191
