Do you know the secret to making the best paper airplane in the world, how to grow a crystal, or how to find north in the dark?
Most of the time, writers don’t talk like they write. It’s no bad thing: watch Midnight in Paris, and you’ll realise how much of a prat Hemingway might have sounded.
But Conn Iggulden does – and if you’ve ever had the pleasure of flicking through The Dangerous Book for Boys, you’ll be glad to hear it. There’s a lot of common sense, a hearty dollop of nostalgia, a wonderfully romantic idea of what the world really ought to be like – and an infectious joie de vivre.
His practicality and his idealism have been playing off one another since he first started writing books at the ripe old age of thirteen. For all his mother’s sensible advice (“you need to know about people”), the young novelist proved stubborn: “Rubbish, I’ll write about dragons”.
Unsurprisingly, the first few attempts never came to much. “I tried a few dragons”, Iggulden recalls, chuckling particularly at the memory of a Catholic conspiracy thriller: “I was way in advance of The Da Vinci Code, by the way.”
His fervent conception of how things should work – and from the sounds of things, his general enthusiasm – were sorely tried by his university degree, in English Literature at what is now Queen Mary’s. Talking to friends elsewhere – “a Cambridge history degree is a hardcore history degree” – he was certain that he was losing out somewhat, but his experience seems fairly typical. “My English degree was very much the old-fashioned idea: you stick young interested people in a room with books and hope something rubs off. There was very little actual teaching.”
That last failing gets an extra rap on the knuckles, for good measure. “I saw my tutor twice when I was at university. Once when I met him … and about three years later when he drove past in his car and I said, ‘I think that’s my tutor’”.
The criticism is all in good humour, but one is hardly surprised that bad tutoring is one of Iggulden’s real bugbears. Like many an author, Iggulden supported his writing with teaching; heading the English department at the Haydon School in London (“it was seven years, so not quite man and boy!”) was another opportunity to spread that pulsing idealism.
We come to another of his passions: grammar. “It was still out of fashion – that was very annoying.” Perhaps not as thrilling as DIY crystals, but “it’s nuts and bolts, and there’s nothing wrong with nuts and bolts”. And so it was added to the Haydon syllabus, with no apologies: “you’ve got to know the rules – you’ve got to know right and wrong – so you can choose to use them or not”. Grammar became a key component of The Dangerous Book, along with a guide to tree-houses, important Shakespeare quotations, and the rules of football. Even the Classics got a chapter or two. “It is the worst horror that you can imagine: sitting next to Boris Johnson at a lunch and having him use a Latin tag that I couldn’t understand”.
If national curriculums wouldn’t let Conn teach what he wanted, then here was place where he could. Writing in tandem with his brother Hal, he included all the “things I wish I did know, and things I really did know and was being nostalgic about”.
The Book proved a success of titanic proportions; its delightful appeal to boys “from eight to eighty” launched Iggulden to the top of the UK non-fiction charts, selling half a million copies domestically; with its Just William-esque collection of knots, stories and magic tricks, it was only pipped to the top of Amazon’s online sales by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
But even more remarkably – and without precedent in the UK – Iggulden’s first novel in the Genghis Khan series, Wolf of the Plains, sat simultaneously atop the fiction charts. Before and since The Dangerous Book, historical fiction has been Iggulden’s primary hunting ground, charting the adventures of Julius Caesar, Khan, and, most recently, the Wars of the Roses.
“My father, as far as I could tell, had lived through most of history”; coupled with a childhood love of Patrick O’Brian, Iggulden was well-equipped for writing in the genre. His latest foray, into medieval warfare, is partly prompted by the scope to be creative: “the main characters are still pretty much a mystery to most.”
But, as ever, it is his indomitable enthusiasm that drives him forward. “The stories were there. That was the great joy, finding out.”
War of the Roses: Stormbird is available here.
