Kids are evil little swines and should be treated with extreme suspicion at all times. Sure, they’re innocent in many ways, but leave them to their own devices for a second and they’ll like as not strap a cat to a giant firework to see if it can fly. And not just the feral kids who make the front page of the Daily Mail: all of the little sods. Eoin Colfer plainly recognises this essential truth, having been menaced by barely-civilised but cunning little brothers when he was a child himself. Venturing out of the house wearing only underpants, his Stig of the Dump siblings would return in the evening, wearing what looked very much like completely different underpants. They were stealthy raptors, distracting him before mugging him of his pocket money, and took joy in finding ways to knock themselves unconscious. Revenge came later for Colfer, as he put his brothers in his novels as feral goblins to be gleefully slaughtered. His older brother, clearly a more sophisticated delinquent, was the inspiration for his most popular character, whose final adventure Colfer energetically publicised at the Broadway Cinema.
Artemis Fowl, a juvenile Bond villain, was inspired when Colfer caught sight of his older brother in a confirmation suit that looked like something the lovechild of Ron Burgundy and Bond-era Roger Moore would wear. Eight books, graphic novels and, apparently, a film in the offing later, and Colfer has decided to close the book on Fowl. And now that he’s done so Colfer is probably in a position to write whatever he likes: he’s an enormously saleable name in children’s fiction, and he’s also managed to make a significant mark in mainstream adult fiction by doing what many thought was well-nigh impossible: writing a sequel to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker books that pleased both the critics and a legion of sceptical fans who thought such a thing sacrilege.
Plainly a magician of some kind, Colfer managed to do the impossible by making a cinema full of children (and parents and almost adults who’d started reading Fowl’s adventures over ten years ago) shut up for almost an hour while he dealt out well-honed anecdotes and stories about his childhood, his own sons, and the children he’d come across while teaching. All have become grist for the mill of his books: from the teenage son who interrupted a bout of crippling airsickness that saw Colfer laying on a stretcher to sullenly complain that his headphones weren’t working to the flatulent little brother who became Mulch, the grotesque dwarf who remains one of Colfer’s most beloved characters. If John Le Carre was right when he said that childhood is the bank balance of the writer, and that a full one could supply many years of literary spending, then Colfer has added to his own plentiful account with an overdraft by drawing on the young lives of those around him. But if that supply of inspiration ever dried up Colfer confided that he’d just start going through Phillip Pullman’s trash.
Eoin Colfer’s appearance at the Broadway Cinema was organised by Waterstones and the Broadway Cinema, and the final Artemis Fowl book, Artemis Fowl: The Last Guardian, is out in hardback now.
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