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Anthony McGowan was born in a stable in a small town where his parents had gone to take part in a census. At the age of seven he was sent to sea to work as a cabin boy on a whaling vessel, before returning to spend two years in an all-girls convent school. He has worked as a camel jockey in Arabia, as an overseer on a banana plantation on the west coast of Ireland, as the editor of the prestigious Hackenthorpe Book of Lies, and as a nightclub bouncer. He is a Doctor of Philosophy, and once wrote an academic article claiming that Stephen Hawking is an evil puppet.
(Only three of those facts are true.)
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Interview with Anthony McGowan
It's not every day you get to meet your creator, so I was delighted when Hi! magazine asked me to do a feature on the famous author Anthony McGowan in his glamorous North London apartment. You see, I am the product of his fevered imagination. In fact, I have the starring roll in his new book named Henry Tumour, after me. And I don't want to give anything away, but let's just say that there are issues between us, issues I'd like to sort out.
I rang the bell of the imposing mansion block in which McGowan lives. Rather than just buzz me in he came down to meet me. He was unshaven, and was wearing pyjama trousers and a T-shirt with a large stain on the front, the shape and colour of a squashed frog. After an embarrassed silence, he embraced me.
‘Hey, pal, long time no see.’
We shared the rickety lift up to the fourth floor.
‘What’s that smell?’ I asked.
‘Smell? I can’t smell–’
‘Fish, there’s a smell of fish.’
‘It might be the cats.’
‘Cats?’
‘They, er, get loose. In the ducting. People feed them.’
I looked quizzically at the Great Author.
‘No, sorry, it was me. Fish-oil supplements. Omega-three fatty acids. They make you more, er, intelligent. But half an hour after you take one you do a really foul fishy burp. Oops, there we go again. Excuse me.’
I edged as far away as the cramped lift would permit.
We got into the apartment, and I have to say it wasn’t looking too good. Pizza boxes, beer bottles, scrunched tissues, empty drums of athlete’s foot powder and carefully rolled tubes of Rectalease pile ointment were scattered around. I didn’t want to linger, so I got down to business.
‘OK, Tony – can I call you Tony?’
‘Sure – I only use Doctor McGowan when I’m trying to impress people. Girls, mostly.’
‘Does it work?’
‘Listen, pal, this pad has seen some pretty hot babe action in its time.’
Just then I got another hit of the fish oil and, reeling, I put out a steadying hand, only to find that it landed on one of the tubes of Rectalease, which squirted its contents in a white arc across the room.
‘Yeah, I bet it has. Babemungus. But as I was saying, um, Tony, can you give us a quick summary of the plot of the new novel?’
‘Well, it’s about a teenager, Hector Brunty, who starts to hear voices. There’s obviously something seriously wrong with him. That’s where you come in.’
‘Yes, I know. A brain tumour.’
‘But not just any old brain tumour. You talk to Hector, become a kind of mentor to him.’
‘And boy does he need one!’
‘Right. He’s a bit of a nerd. His whole gang is a . . . a . . . What’s the collective noun for nerd?’
‘A swot of nerds? A minge of nerds? A–’
‘Doesn’t matter. You know the type – computer boffins, chess maestros, history obsessives, the usual losers.’
‘Were you one of those? I mean, back at school, not now, because of course I can see you’re at the absolute cutting edge of coolness.’
‘Was I a nerd? Sort of. No . . . well, a bit. At school I was pretty brainy, but I was good at sport back then, and that sort of carried you into a different zone. I’m not saying I was always cool, but I wasn’t uncool. And I wasn’t really bullied, but a lot of my friends, the little misshapen geeky ones, were.’
‘You may as well tell the fans what else happens in the book.’
‘Sure. So, you, Henry Tumour, you sort of help Hector become a bit less nerdy. Help him get a girl. Help him stand up to the bullies. You and Hector become friends, but then there’s also the knowledge that basically you’re killing him. And so at the end there’s this choice – saving Hector means killing Henry.’
‘OK, that brings me to one of my main questions. Hellbent – a book about a boy who gets knocked down by an ice-cream van. Now a story about a boy with a brain tumour. Why are your books so depressing?’
‘Depressing? I thought they were funny! No, but I get your point. And I suppose it’s my philosophy, my vision. Life is tragic. Jokes are the scum that floats to the top of this sea of misery. And even humour reveals the tragedy. Take my two favourite jokes (one of these is in Henry Tumour). How do you titillate an ocelot?’
‘I’ve heard it – you oscillate its tit a lot.’
‘Yes, now, on the surface it’s simply a play on words, a sort of spoonerism. But underneath that you have the image of a beautiful and defenceless creature – the ocelot – being subjected to terrible tortures, you know, having its nipples forcibly oscillated, which, I have to say, is unlikely to titillate an ocelot, or any other member of the cat family, although personally I quite . . . Never mind. My other favourite joke is the one about the man who goes to the Wailing Wall, you know, in Jerusalem, and laments the fact that he wasn’t able to harpoon a single whale. Again, on one level it’s a simple play on words – the wail/whale confusion. But who could hear those words without thinking of the tragic slaughter of millions of whales, massacred to make lipstick and margarine and whale and bacon flavoured crisps? But I’m drifting off my point. Life is tragic. Jokes reflect that, even when they appear to be a way of escaping the infinite sadness of things.’
‘OK then, you’ve explained why your books are so morbid, but why are they so mucky? I mean, why all the disgusting things? It’s an illness with you.’
‘I think you’re missing the point somewhat, Henry. You’ll find that there’s nearly always a point to my filth, even if it’s just a kind of showing off.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, one example from Hellbent. My hero, Conor O’Neil, is being subjected to various indignities in Hell. One of these is that terrible things happen to him while he’s on the toilet. A creature lives in the bowl and keeps coming up to bite his nether regions. And then there’s a long, er, passage about the awful things he has to wipe his bum with – a hedgehog, a jelly fish, the tracing-paper stuff they give you in the school bogs, etc., etc. Well, that’s all an allusion to one of my heroes, a sixteenth-century French writer called Rabelais. He has a character who goes on a quest to find the gentlest thing with which to wipe his bottom. He tries all kinds of things – silk petticoats, cushions, curtains and various animals, but finally hits on the delicately feathered neck of a goose. So, you see, my little chapter was a way of showing how clever and well-read I am, whilst also providing some low-level entertainment involving bottoms and so forth.’
‘But that is all burlesque, at best. What about your tragic vision of the human condition?’
‘It all ties in. What better embodies both the heartbreak and the comedy of life than what goes on in the typical lavatory? What miseries, what pain, what olfactory assault. And yet what mirth – ultimately all comedy is surely the comedy of the body. And so only in that place are we fully human; human in our vulnerability, and yet angelic also in our suffering. It is why all great writers have produced their finest work on the loo. Shakespeare, Dante, Keats–’
‘So, is that where you write?’
‘I’m sorry, but I refuse to answer such personal questions – I have my dignity to consider. In fact I’m thinking that maybe I’ve already wasted too much of my time on this so-called interview.’
‘Before we finish, there’s something else I have to ask. About me. At the end of the book Hector goes under the knife . . . What next? What happens after that? Does he make it? Do I? In the book, I mean – obviously I’m here now, in your flat, in your, ah, head.’
‘If I give the ending away, who will buy the book? This isn’t cheap,’ he said, holding up a carton of anti-fungal ointment.
‘Please. I need to know. I won’t tell anyone.’
‘You swear?’
‘I swear.’
And at that he leaned over to me and whispered in my ear. And now later, on my own, the answer is still resonating. So that’s what happened. Yes. Yes.
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