The world’s most overrated book, according to the UK’s newly anointed children’s laureate, is William Golding’s dystopian Lord of the Flies. It is “an enjoyable romp that people have taken as a revelation about human nature, which could not be more wrong”, wrote Frank Cottrell-Boyce.
This opinion might sum up the aura of sunny optimism that surrounds one of the country’s most versatile and successful writers, who made the comment on publication of his own most recent novel for children, Noah’s Gold. But to insist that humanity is not innately bad is not to deny that urgent work is needed to enable it to release its potential. And the project starts with reading, said Mr Cottrell-Boyce at his investiture in Leeds. It means addressing the invisible privilege and inequality which give some children a bright future that is unimaginable to others.
Mr Cottrell-Boyce is the 13th children’s laureate since 1999, when the role was introduced by the reading charity BookTrust to provide champions for children’s literature. Unlike their adult equivalents, these writers are not required to honour royal occasions or incentivised with a butt of sack. Mr Cottrell-Boyce’s predecessors have included Michael Morpurgo, Julia Donaldson and Malorie Blackman. Each has chosen a project that is close to their heart, and for the new laureate, who is a father of seven as well as an award-winning author and screenwriter, it is to encourage, facilitate and agitate on behalf of the youngest readers.
There could not have been a better choice for the start of this political era. The new government will have its work cut out reversing the damage caused by a pandemic and years of Tory austerity, during which school libraries have closed and syllabuses have been stripped of the principle of reading for pleasure. But while Mr Cottrell‑Boyce is furious about the suffering inflicted on a generation of children, he is not one to subscribe to the politics of defeat. “Scratch a pessimist and you’ll find a defender of privilege,” he said, quoting William Beveridge, who laid the foundations for the welfare state.
Significantly, at a time when opportunity often appears to be distributed by postcode lottery, Mr Cottrell-Boyce still lives in Merseyside, where he was born and raised. Before turning to children’s books in his 40s, he made significant contributions to the depiction of northern lives as a regular writer for both the Liverpool-set Brookside and Manchester-set Coronation Street. But he also sent Queen Elizabeth on a helicopter mission with James Bond, as part of the team who scripted Danny Boyle’s 2012 Olympics opener. Later, he sat her down with Paddington Bear in a joyous tea party video released as part of her platinum jubilee.
After the death of Margaret Thatcher in 2013, he displayed his gift for combining levity and seriousness in a valedictory article that rejoiced in the pop culture classics inspired by opposition to her government, while pointing out that there was nothing more subversive than a definition of happiness involving a vision of how things could be better. His laureate speech expanded this idea into a theory of reading as “the apparatus of happiness”. It was, he said, an invisible privilege that those who have it don’t think about – harder to read than other outward signs of poverty but just as real.
What children need now is people willing and able to make this case on their behalf. They could have no better champion than Mr Cottrell-Boyce.
