KEY POINTS:
British children's writer Philip Ardagh revels in his own creative authority. His mad, bad and downright silly stories crackle with the adrenalin charge of being the one in control.
Ardagh makes the most of the power he exercises over his characters. If he wants to take the plot in unexpected directions or buck convention, he reminds the reader that this is his authorial privilege. He'll wander off down byways and be just as loony as he pleases because, well, it's his book and he can. He even writes his own book-jacket blurbs: His physical beauty is matched only by the beauty of his prose.
"I do go off on terrible tangents," he says, having just proved his skill in the field by kicking off this phone interview with a lengthy diversion into his fondness for Aussie soaps Neighbours and Home and Away. "Philip Pullman watches Neighbours, so it must be respectable," the 46-year-old notes, before he agrees that perhaps we should talk about his work and his visit to the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival next month.
Ardagh is prolific, pounding out dozens of non-fiction children's books with catchy titles such as The Hieroglyphs Handbook: Teach Yourself Ancient Egyptian and Why are Castles Castle-Shaped? before switching to fiction with his Eddie Dickens, Unlikely Exploits and The Further Adventures of Eddie Dickens trilogies. The facts, it seems, were getting in the way of a good story.
His move into fiction writing came about when publisher Faber & Faber asked him in to deliver a motivational talk about The Hieroglyphs Handbook for their sales staff. The pitch, he recalls, was a joint effort between him and another hairy writer. "It was terribly nerve-racking. There was another author there who had a long, bushy beard and we pretended to be members of ZZ Top and so we mimed to a ZZ Top song. Afterwards, I was all sweaty and nervous and everybody felt terribly sorry for me." Now hang on a minute, is this true?
"There are different versions of the truth," he says, "but this is my version."
The sympathy turned to awe as he addressed the crowd, waffling on, getting sidetracked and being hilarious until the audience was eating out of his hand. "I was carried shoulder-high, and then everybody threw off their gold jewellery and melted it down to make me a throne."
According to his colourful and faultlessly self-promotional account, the Faber & Faber gurus were so impressed with this performance, they suggested he write fiction, saying, "if you can talk like that, we'll take anything you've got."
What they got was a series of letters he had written to his nephew, Ben, at boarding school, comprising the first Eddie Dickens adventure, Awful End, and introducing his young, put-upon Victorian-era hero, victim of outrageous circumstances and a dysfunctional family.
Eddie's father is the kind of aristocrat who pays his bills in dried fish, his mother is stuck in some terribly troubled oral stage, his Mad Uncle Jack and Even Madder Aunt Maud live, respectively, in a tree house and hollow cow carnival float on the family estate. Another major character is Aunt Maud's stuffed stoat Malcolm, which receives fan mail in its own right.
Ardagh finds it mind-boggling that his books have been translated into more than 30 languages and wonders at the challenge his pun- and joke-filled prose must pose.
In one case he has some hard information. His Japanese translator told him she had originally translated the book as if it were by one of his literary heroes, the great Victorian novelist Charles Dickens. But after she'd met Ardagh, she'd changed the style. "I made it more stupid," she told him.
That seems a little harsh for a writer so unafraid of the big bold gesture that in the first Unlikely Exploits book his young hero falls out of a window and is killed on the first page. In the final instalment of that trilogy, The Rise of the House of McNally, Ardagh goes to town with his authorial bag of tricks. It has characters readers have met before but with different names, it revisits events from a different perspective and it's not told in order, he says.
Perhaps its understandable that among many memorable audience responses to his work was an inquiry from a young, Scottish,writers festival-goer: "What time of the day do you have your first drink?"
The only reactions to his work which Ardagh finds tiresome are the suggestions by some in the United States that his deliciously lugubrious settings and titles Awful End, Dubious Deeds, his latest book, Final Curtain are a rip-off of Lemony Snickets: A Series of Unfortunate Events. The Snicket books came along well after Eddie Dickens was first penned and they are not similar at all, he says, suggesting that here I insert the line: "At this stage, Philip Ardagh burst into tears."
To cheer him up, I ask whether he's written his entry in online encyclopaedia Wikipedia himself. Well, yes, he has tweaked some biographical details. His embellishments are not hard to spot: In the six-week radio serial Secret Undercover Vets on Ice, Ardagh played himself and also pigeon on a ledge.
His incurable habit of spinning tall stories might have something to do with his great height. He is 6ft 7in, or two metres and two millimetres, to be metrically exact. "I do get rather creased", he says of the long-haul flight Downunder for the festival. "It'll take me a few days to unfold."
But let's not get charmingly diverted: can we trust those glowing recommendations on his books covers, such as that quote from a Guardian critic describing him as a scrumptious cross between Dickens and Monty Python?
"All genuine," he declares.
However, in the interests of transparency, perhaps he could write his own poster line for his Auckland festival appearance. "Hooray and hurrah for Philip Ardagh," he suggests, which works if you know that his name is pronounced "Ah-dah," with the stress on the second syllable.
On the other hand, he's not above pitching it straight: "Please like me. I need friends."
An Hour with Philip Ardagh, Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, Sunday, May 27, 11am at the ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre
- Interview by Frances Grant for Canvas
