The Bookseller.com

8th September 2008

Anthony Horowitz’s new novel, The Power of Five: Necropolis (Walker Books) is out on 30th October.

Whitewash

05.03.08

A publisher asked me an interesting question a short while ago. What would it have done to my sales if I had made Alex Rider black? I thought about this just before Christmas when I was invited into 10 Downing Street to meet Gordon Brown as an ambassador for the 2008 National Year of Reading. Brown was surprisingly affable and seemed genuinely fired up about the subject. Hard to believe that he was one of those charming folk who brought us "shock and awe" in Iraq, rendition flights, detention without trial and all the other things that have made literature seem almost irrelevant. The only question he ducked was: "What was the last book you read?" My guess is that it probably had more figures than words.

The delegates were unfailingly polite. Not one of them mentioned that, after 10 years of Labour, one in five of our children still leave school functionally illiterate. Nobody talked about dumbing down or political correctness which have driven so many shared texts off the shelves.

And all the time I was thinking about a black Alex Rider. Or even a Mohammed Rider. So many weeks on the bestseller list? So many thousands of copies sold? I wonder.
What surprised me is that nobody states what to me is blindingly obvious—that literature/literacy still represents the biggest demarcation in 21st-century society. That dreary old question-—why don't boys read?—is an enormous red herring. Come to one of my book signings and, I'm afraid to say, you could easily imagine yourself to be in one of those southern states of America before Martin Luther King. Where are the black kids? Boys and girls from ethnic minorities are so rare that when one turns up, I almost want to sweep them into my arms.

Malorie Blackman and Benjamin Zephaniah may entice a more ethnically mixed audience, but the answer can't be black writers for black kids and white for white. The NYR has somehow got to knock down these barriers. We cannot be cosy about the debate any more.

On my recent US book tour I had an encounter I won't forget. At a Barnes & Noble on the edge of a rough area, a black teenager came to the front of the line. He looked hard and battle-scarred. He shook hands with me and said: "I just want to thank you. My kid brother reads your books. You've kept him out of trouble." And he walked away.

That's why I was at Number 10. Literacy and the love of reading is a bigger answer than we might think. We just need to be more ambitious with the questions.

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