On Characters That Talk Back…by Tom Ellen

Tom Ellen has written a piece for the FCBG about Characters coming to life while reading! The Cartoons that Came to Life is about Arley and Tapper, from Finn’s comics, as they are left hanging when Finn decides to stop drawing them.

At 14 years old I was a devout reader of fantasy, horror and science fiction – the weirder, the better. So it was probably with some trepidation that I picked up the novel Puckoon by Spike Milligan – a slim book on what sounded like a deeply mundane topic: border management in rural Ireland.

Sure enough, the book began decidedly un-weirdly: a third-person narrator describing an idyllic patch of countryside in which a gangly-legged man was snoozing. But then something odd happened. Something VERY odd. The gangly-legged man began speaking directly to the narrator:

‘Who are you?’

‘The Author.’

‘Author? Author? Did you write these legs?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I don’t like dem. I could ha’ writted better legs meself… It’s a dia-bol-ikal liberty lettin’ an untrained leg writer loose on an unsuspectin’ human bean like me.’

I was used to seeing strange things in books – spaceships, monsters, talking animals – but all these strange things existed within a conventional format. They obeyed a proper set of rules. And in this book, apparently, the rulebook had been flung out of the window. Absolutely anything could happen. It was the first time I remember being properly shaken by the power of what books could do. Never before had I encountered anything so chaotic, so thrillingly boundary-shattering as a character talking back to their own narrator!

As I grew up, I discovered that Spike Milligan was far from the first writer to dabble with this kind of joyous absurdity. In my twenties, I fell in love with another Irish writer – Flann O’Brien – whose 1939 masterpiece At Swim-Two-Birds goes even further than Puckoon. It’s the tale of a perenially dishevelled Dublin student who is trying to write three different books at the same time, all of which gradually become intertwined, so that characters begin hopping freely from one story to the other until, ultimately, they kidnap and overthrow their creator. I was knocked out by it on my first read and it’s since beome one of my favourite books. I love O’Brien’s straight-faced insistence on treating fictional characters as if they have minds of their own – like they’re naughty kids you can’t control:

It was undemocractic to compel characters to be uniformly good or bad or poor or rich. Each should be allowed a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living. This would make for self-respect, contentment and better service.

Put simply: I love it – absolutely love it – when characters break loose from literary conventions and run wild. And it’s this trope – coupled with my long-time love of comic books – that sits at the heart of my first Middle Grade book: The Cartoons That Came to Life.

Packed with illustrations and mini comic strips (courtesy of the brilliant Phil Corbett), TCTCTL is the story of Finn Morris – a shy 10-year-old aspiring cartoonist who decides to quit drawing when bullies rip up his sketchbook. The very next morning, his own comic creations – the madcap duo Arley and Tapper – come to life in his bedroom, and he’s faced with getting the rather tricky task of keeping them hidden from everyone until he can find them a way back home to Toon World.

Arley and Tapper are characters I invented when I was around Finn’s age, so I still can’t quite believe they have made into an actual published book. Like Flann O’Brien’s unruly characters, it seems as if they’ve hopped out of my sloppy primary school comics and somehow ended up in a genuine novel for kids!

There are many themes in the book – humour, friendship, family and the importance of believing in yourself – but if I’m honest, the parts I enjoyed writing most were the parts directly inspired by Puckoon and At Swim-Two-Birds: the parts in which Arley and Tapper snipe cheekily at their creator. I’m particularly pleased with the chapter where the Toons follow Finn to school, and – on learning that he is their ‘Artist’ – begin blaming him for all the wild and naughty things they do. Tapper cocks his leg up, lets rip an ENORMOUS fart and shouts: “Finn! You, sir, are DISGUSTING!”

I hope The Cartoons That Came to Life will grip young readers, give them some laughs and perhaps move and inspire them, too. But my biggest hope is that one or two might experience the same joyful shock that I felt reading Puckoon all those years back. That glorious feeling of: “Hey! This isn’t supposed to happen in a book…”

THE CARTOONS THAT CAME TO LIFE by Tom Ellen, illustrated by Phil Corbett is out now in paperback (£6.99, Chicken House)