Interview by Mary Hoffman
[Armadillo 6.3 Autumn 2004]
Well, actually, with half Zizou Corder because Louisa Young (who is the senior partner) guards the privacy of her daughter Isabel Adomakoh Young like one of their own fictional lionesses. Isabel doesn't give interviews but she is there at our meeting in the Wiltshire countryside, entertaining two Nigerian friends from her primary school in London.
Isabel is eleven and about to go to secondary school but her life is unusual enough without having it further complicated by the media. She is half a writing team with her mother, who already had a career as novelist and journalist when Lionboy was merely a joint literary twinkle in their eye ¨ a sort of cubtoddler.
The second episode of Lionboy (The Chase) is out this month and the books have, famously, already been translated into thirty-three foreign languages and the film rights sold to Dreamworks before publication. Isabel's friends are quite unfazed by this but it has been an irresistible headline-maker for the press. øTen-year-old and her single mum in million pound book deal!" is the sort of thing the redtops love.
But both mother and daughter are very down to earth about their commercial success. Louisa wrote a witty piece for the Guardian on ønot being the new J.K.Rowling any more" and Isabel says the only thing she wants money for is to buy books. Mother and daughter are very close; although Isabel's Ghanaian father is still very much a part of her life, the parents separated when she was small.
Charlie Ashanti, the hero of Lionboy, has a white mother and a black father too, though Magdalen Start and Aneba Ashanti are a research scientist and zoologist respectively. Another thing he and Isabel have in common is asthma, which means that neither of them can have a pet cat.
But there's clearly an attraction to animals: Isabel's pet lizard Zizu (named after French footballer Zinedine Zidane) in London and Andrew the gorgeous black, gold and white pheasant in Wiltshire. Cats seem drawn to them too in the way that felines will often seek out the one person in a room who has an allergy or doesn't like them.
And cats are the spy network and often the moving force for a lot of the action of the Lionboy novels. Charlie speaks Cat, as a result of an accident involving a syringe, a leopard cub and a scratch when he was a baby in Africa. This is what first entangles him with the circus lions, who want to get back to their own home in Africa. And it's what keeps him informed, sometimes wrongly, about the whereabouts of his kidnapped parents.
The books are a rollicking read, an exhilarating mixture of wild ideas: a floating circus, a formula for an asthma cure, a ride on the Orient Express, a snowstorm, the Doge of Venice, Morocco, Paris, estranged siblings ¨ the invention never flags. And you can imagine the two writers egging each other on: øLet's throw in a cloned prehistoric beast as well." øWhy not? Charlie's already got six lions to hide. He can manage a sabre toothed big cat as well!"
Their pre-publication success was phenomenal. Thirty three languages?, I thought; what can they all be? øWell there are two different kinds of Chinese," says Louisa. I wanted to know what effect it would have on her future writing, having had such a commercial success. øNot as much as it would have done if it had happened with my first book," she said frankly. øJust making a living from writing is a miracle. Anything more is jam."
The books are set at some unspecified time in the future ¨ øWhen you like," says Louisa ¨ after the oil has run out and there are strong environmental messages mixed in with the adventures. Lots of children suffer from asthma, as a result of the air pollution, and an unscrupulous pharmaceutical mega-corporation makes a lot of money from palliatives. That's why Charlie's parents are kidnapped for the asthma cure formula. It's a bit like The Man in the White Suit ¨ big companies don't want something that will bring an end to the need for their services.
So there is a big picture and it is drawn on a large canvas. Louisa had a cosmopolitan upbringing and is equally at home describing Paris, Venice or Morocco. Book three, just handed in, is set partly in Ghana and partly in the Caribbean. Louisa has always loved to travel ¨ her trilogy of novels was set in Egypt ¨ and now she, and Isabel are doing even more. They are just back from a trip to a book festival in Buenos Aires.
Music is obviously an important part of their lives too. Louisa's boyfriend Robert Lockhart is a composer of TV and film music and his tunes have found their way into the Lionboy books and on to CD. Both mother and daughter have lovely voices and there is a thrilling moment in our meeting when Isabel and her friends break into an African song, singing in close harmony. It's from The Lion King, appropriately enough, but their young voices turn it into something magical and rare in the Wiltshire countryside.
Isabel is a bookworm, her favourite authors being Philip Pullman, Malorie Blackman, Garth Nix, Jacky Wilson and lots more. Louisa was the same as a child, writing stories about a mouse called Wilfred who lived on a houseboat. So it was perhaps inevitable that, bringing up Isabel largely on her own, the two of them should have developed a complicated cycle of bedtime stories.
They began when Isabel was about three but Louisa didn't start writing them down until her daughter was seven. A lot has been forgotten and Charlie didn't originally speak Cat or have kidnapped parents. øI don't think he had parents at all to begin with," says Louisa. øThey were rather shadowy figures."
The present stories crystallised when Louisa fell off a ladder in the garden and hurt her leg. Isabel had been given a dipping pen and Louisa ¨ what a fun mother! ¨ dipped it in her blood and started writing. That's how Lionboy begins, when Magdalen writes out the formula for the asthma cure in her own blood and gives it to Charlie to keep safe, just before she is kidnapped.
One of the most evocative ideas in the books is the circus which takes place on a ship, the Circe. Louisa told me that she found it in Mark Twain's reports of circuses on paddle-steamers on the Mississippi. It's been transformed and elaborated in Lionboy, where the big top is actually raised over the midsection of the ship.
Louisa says the most original ideas tend to come from Isabel, perhaps because she isn't fettered by adult worries about how they might be worked out. Lots of articles have been written about how their collaboration functions. Louisa does the actually writing and reads it back to Isabel who suggests changes. But nothing is written until they have both talked about characters, events and settings, plotting and arguing as they go. It's an unusual luxury for a writer of fiction to have someone else who is equally involved with the nuts and bolts of writing a novel.
So Zizou Corder really has become an entity in his, or more properly her, own right. The original footballing Zizu has just announced his retirement. But somehow I don't think his namesake will be hanging up her pen any time soon.
See also Mary Hoffman's review of Lionboy 2: The Chase.
Photos in this article by Mary Hoffman.