INTERVIEW:Eoin Colfer, who has written the sixth book in the 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' series, tells Anna Careyabout the perils of following in Douglas Adams's footsteps (and explains why he beheaded Zaphod Beeblebrox)
'MONTY PYTHON, Fawlty Towers, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy– they're like the holy grails of English popular culture," says Eoin Colfer. "You just do not mess with them."
Unless, of course, you're Eoin Colfer. Last September, it was announced that the Wexford author of the best-selling Artemis Fowlnovels was to write the sixth book in the late Douglas Adams's beloved Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxyseries. This month sees the publication of Colfer's And Another Thing. . . which takes up where the last Hitchhiker's book left off back in 1992.
The story of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox et al began as a BBC radio series in 1978, before moving to the printed page in 1979 and the TV screen in 1981. And with that, a cult was born. Thirty years after the first book, and eight years after Adams’s death at the age of 49, millions of people all over the world still get excited at the thought of towels, Pan Galactic Gargleblasters, and the number 42.
In fact, few authors have such an army of devoted fans. “They’re like a trade union,” says Colfer. “They’re the 1913 lockout of fans.” And he knew that many wouldn’t react well to the news that anyone was stepping into their hero’s territory. As soon as the news was announced, Adams fan sites were full of outraged devotees who had seemingly never heard of Colfer’s work, despite the fact that the magical adventures of teenage criminal Artemis Fowl are hugely popular. “I hope this Colfer guy doesn’t completely ruin the books,” said one poster on a site called Floor 42.
So why did this modest author take on the challenge? He’s quick to point out it wasn’t his idea. The project came about thanks to Douglas Adams’s agent, Ed Victor. Colfer is also represented by Victor’s firm, and his agent, Sophie Hicks, was lunching with Victor when the conversation turned to sequels.
Victor said that "the one sequel he wanted was the one he could never have" – a new Hitchhiker'sbook. Adams had said in an interview: "I suspect at some point in the future I will write a sixth Hitchhikerbook . . . I would love to finish . . . on a slightly more upbeat note." Hicks suggested that Colfer would be a fitting heir to the Hitchhikerthrone, but the author was unconvinced. "I was totally chuffed that my name had come up at all," he says. "But my second thought was, why is it necessary to do this? I didn't want to do something that would be seen as a pure money-spinner – I don't need to do that. If I'd been asked 10 years ago it would have been a great step for my career. But now I don't need that and it's not . . . trouble, exactly, but I know I'll get a lot of flak."
Colfer was eventually won over when Ed Victor told him that Adams's widow, Jane Belson, wanted to "bring Douglas to the next generation and bring Hitchhiker'sback to the forefront a little bit. And I was such a fan and it was such a surreal thing that I said okay. I never thought Jane Belson would say yes to me."
Belson and her daughter, however, were fans of Colfer’s work. “So it went from being a great idea in theory to me being locked in to doing it.” It is, however, a once-off. “I loved doing it and I think I did a reasonable job. But now it’s done.”
Writing a sequel to another author’s work can be a tricky business, especially when the original is written in such a distinctive style. Colfer wisely decided not to attempt to capture Adams’s voice. “I knew I would lose if I tried [to do that],” he says. “People do try all the time. You even see it when people write introductions to Douglas Adams – they go for that sort of upper-middle-class, absurd style, and it can be terribly tragic. So I knew I wasn’t going to do that. Instead, every now and then, I’ll drop in a sentence or two that’s kind of in his style – lots of double-negatives, saying something simple in a roundabout way.”
Indeed, Colfer found writing the book to be a liberating experience, especially after years of writing for younger readers. “This book was the most enjoyable thing I’d done in ages,” he says. “It felt like being let off the leash a little bit. In the Artemis books I have to censor myself a bit. I did find that uncensored me is pretty similar to censored me – I’m not very wild. But it was quite liberating.”
He says he couldn't imagine what future readers would think. "I always try not to think about the outside world when I'm writing a book – especially when doing Hitchhiker's. I can't start imagining what some guy who's a huge fan in Cambridge is going to want. There's no point."
He wasn’t afraid to tamper with some of Adams’s most beloved characters. The scheming adventurer Zaphod Beeblebrox, for example, now has one less head than he used to. Surely Colfer is aware that removing one of Zaphod’s two heads is sacrilege? “I know!” he laughs. “I giggled to myself when I was writing that bit because I knew I was going to be killed for this. But for Douglas the two heads is a gag – he doesn’t deal with what it means for the character. It’s just funny. I can’t write like that. If I have a character with two heads I would have to totally deal with it – I’d have them talking to each other, I’d have to deal with their trachea and spinal columns. It was just slowing me down. So I removed one head and made it a different character. And once I had done that, it totally freed me up.”
Worried fans, however, should remember the Guide'swise words: "Don't Panic." Because Colfer is, of course, an Adams fan. Like many others, he discovered the books as a teenager. Without access to the BBC, he had never heard of the radio and TV series when a friend's older sister brought back a copy of the first novel from London, which was quickly passed around his gang of sci-fi-loving Wexford schoolboys.
"I didn't expect too much when I got it," he says. "One of the criteria for the books we liked was that they had to be really big and thick – we loved the big fantasy epics. And for a book that has contributed so much to modern culture, the Hitchhiker's Guideis tiny – it's only 35,000 words. But I was immediately hooked." Colfer had never read anything quite like the Hitchhikers Guidebefore. "It was a revelation," he says. "It was fast and pacy, and I loved the way the plot turned on a tangent. It doesn't follow the usual story arc where everything's set up in the beginning. Something would happen with an ant, or a towel, or a paperclip and the story would go another way. And it's a good story – it's the standard 'planet is destroyed and lone hero goes off' scenario, but it totally subverts that."
Before the Hitchhiker's Guide, the teenage Colfer had never realised that fantasy could also be funny. "Adams brought comedy to a genre that wasn't exactly famed for its comedy. Fantasy and sci-fi were all very worthy – there were a lot of chosen ones and pale princesses and rings and there weren't a lot of people poking fun at it. And then Douglas came along, and he obviously loved it, but at the same time he could make jokes about it. I always wanted to be funny and I wanted to do fantasy. He showed you can do both and it can be very effective."
The response from fans has been increasingly positive since that first announcement last year. It seems that people are willing to give Colfer a chance. A few months ago, the book’s publishers, Penguin, released several hundred preview samples. When Colfer appeared at the huge Comic Con sci-fi and fantasy convention, those who had got their hands on the extracts seemed pleased. “The first thing one one guy said to me was, ‘I was very worried about this book – but . . . ’ And then it was over. Another guy said it best. He’d got a [sample] and said: ‘I’ve decided I’m going to read this before I hate it.’ I think that captured the mood. Most of the fans I meet remind me that they’re not all like the die-hard one-true-fan types. And they’re not.”
Colfer, of course, has plenty of his own fans. His first two books, Benny and Babeand Benny and Omar, were published by the O'Brien Press in the late 1990s. Unlike his later books, they weren't fantasy. "I made a conscious decision to write what I knew until I found my voice," he says. "It's a strangely methodical way to approach the creative process. [My third novel] The Wish Listwas my first step into fantasy and sci-fi." But it was the publication of the first Artemis Fowl novel in 2001 that turned Colfer into an international publishing sensation and allowed him to give up his job as a teacher to write full-time. The sixth book in the series, Artemis Fowl and the Time Paradox, was published last year. Between Artemisbooks, however, he works on other projects. "If I wrote one [Artemis] after another, I'd be totally sick of it by now. Sometimes, even now, I get a bit fed up and have to take a break for a month and come back to it. After every book I try to do about two other books, maybe a picture book and a full-length book, and then I come back to Artemis. And I feel great then, I want to be there."
Colfer has been working on film scripts with Jim Sheridan, writing a song with Eleanor McEvoy and working on a stage musical with musician friends in Wexford. " Artemisis what allows me to do all this," he says. "It's brilliant. I'm trying to support my wife and two kids, but because of [the income from the Artemisbooks] I can say I'm going to work with Jim Sheridan for a week and I probably won't get paid but we enjoy it. I can do these things that won't earn any money because I have the cushion of Artemis Fowl. I really cherish that freedom."
Colfer says he still works “teaching hours, nine to three. Which is nice. My wife [Jackie] and I try and go for lunch together every day. That’s our luxury.” The couple live in Wexford with their two sons, and Colfer works in “a shed” in the back garden. “Actually, it’s not really a shed any more because we’ve just moved house, and now I have a nice office out there with actual stone walls – I’m the envy of writers everywhere. It has a stereo and its own bathroom – this is the big time. It has occurred to me that me and Jackie could just sneak away from the kids and live in the office.”
He could be tempted to hide in the office for a while when the book comes out. “I’m starting to worry about it now because the publication’s coming up and I keep meeting people who say, ‘Oh, you’re a brave man’. And now I see what they mean, because when I was writing it in a shed in Wexford, the publication was all very far away and I really didn’t care about it. I just thought, ‘I’ll write a book that I like and if 60 per cent of readers like it, then that’s fine’. But now I’m thinking, ‘Oh Christ, why did I cut his head off?’ ”
And Another Thing. . . is published on Monday by Penguin, £14.99