Laughing in the face of danger
The Dangerous Book for Boys has recently celebrated an extraordinary year in the top ten of the bestseller list. One of its authors Conn Iggulden talks to Jon Watt about the book’s incredible success and where it came from
Above: The Dangerous Book for Boys is published by Harper Collins
Why do you think the book has been so successful?
It really has been totally unexpected. In fact, the whole book has been an amazing experience for me. This was a very personal book that my brother and I thought no one would be interested in and was pretty much an indulgence for us, and to find out that hundreds of thousands of people in this country feel the same way is so uplifting. Clearly there are a lot of people who really care about how their kids are brought up and that’s a great hope for the future. I think it’s also a result of the pendulum of political correctness swinging back towards sanity. Playgrounds have become too safe and boring. Kids like danger it’s as simple as that and if we don’t give it to them they’ll go and find it elsewhere. I’m not setting an agenda, I’m responding to society.
Are kids in danger of losing the ability to entertain themselves?
I was at a christening the other day and it was a lovely day but the kids were all inside playing on the computer. I acted like an old granddad and sent them out in to the garden to play. They grumbled a bit at first, but then after ten minutes they were happily playing football. You won’t always be popular when you turn the computer off but it’s going to take moral authority to change children’s reliance on them. Computers are very addictive and I think it’s dangerous to give them to young kids. This isn’t a new concept either, Roald Dahl was saying this stuff about TV in Charlie and Chocolate factory – do you remember the umpa-lumpas singing about reading instead of watching TV?
Why is it specifically a book for boys?
When I began teaching in the 90s you couldn’t say boys were difficult from girls. Today people are appreciating that there’s no harm in saying that in general boys and girls do have different interests – boys do want to know about urine being used as an invisible ink, girls generally don’t. To be honest, I’m not sure that boys shouldn’t be taught separately from girls in certain subjects. I’m not saying girls should be told they can’t do maths because their brains will overheat or for boys to be told that poetry is somehow feminine, but boys are often said to be unwilling readers and I think that’s just because they’re not interested in the reading matter they’re being given. They want to read about adventures and heroes.
How did you decide on the content?
I think boys have this geeky interest in factual information, skills and competencies. When my brother and I were kids we had wide ranging interests. No door was ever closed to us and we wanted to express this in the book. Boys don’t specialise they have a thirst for lots of different new experiences. I actually tried making water bombs and paper aeroplanes, and playing conkers and marbles with my own son who’s six, and he loved it. Part of that’s because kids want to do whatever their dad’s doing, but then that too is something we hope the book promotes. I remember a letter I got from someone saying that they’d given the book to their 15-year-old son and he hadn’t liked it, but for me that’s too late. If that child has had ten years of playing on a Playstation then it’s probably too late to share with him the pride in skills and competence. One of the nicest replies I received was from a divorced father who said that when he saw his kid, rather than take him to fast food and a film, he would do some things from the book. It’s enormously gratifying to feel that we’ve changed lives even in these small ways.
When it came to the history and heroes we were worried that kids weren’t being taught the great stories any more, like Douglas Bader and his remarkable courage or Robert the Bruce and the spider in the cave. History is not taught with stories any more and as a result it’s often failing to capture kids’ imaginations because. Kids who like science fiction are often mocked, but essentially they are just expressing a genuine love of stories and we should be nurturing that. It’s the same with the British Empire. It’s full of great tales – stories of courage, achievement and national pride – which we’ve somehow become embarrassed to teach. Hopefully, that’s changing now.
So what’s next?
Well, the pocket book is on sale now (instead of a paperback), then there’s a year book coming up which will give facts for each day and things to do at certain parts of the year. I think that’ll be essentially a very British book – then again, I thought the Dangerous Book would have a limited market and yet it’s been popular internationally also. I think that says something very positive about the image of the British, and perhaps the changing attitudes to parenthood, around the world.
www.dangerousbookforboys.com