Share the adventure of a lifetime in this incredible addition to the popular series, Reading with the Stars!
It’s almost Christmas and Jamie and his best publishing friends, Penguin, Random and House, are looking forward to selling lots of his latest adventure story, and discovering along the way just how much fun it is to make parents look silly!
Then the gang comes under attack from some angry readers in Australia, forcing Jamie to apologise for his book and his publicists to rush to the rescue!
But what do Jamie’s Australian critics really want? Could they be connected with real writers who would love to cancel him for ever? And if so, can Jamie and his friends shut them all up before the whole celebrity writing community is in danger once again?
A heartwarming story with a great human life message for publishers.
Spoiler: it really does look as if the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver and his publisher Penguin Random House have done enough to protect his Billy-themed children’s book series from objections that its latest instalment disrespects Australia’s First Nations people. To recap: Oliver was promoting a cookbook in Australia when some First Nations leaders complained his “superficial treatment” of Ruby, a minor First Nations character, “dehumanises” her and, by reducing her beliefs to “magic”, disrespects First Nations people in general. That Ruby is the object of the novel’s abduction plot compounded the offence, given the enduring pain of the real Stolen Generations: Indigenous children who were removed from their parents.
A contrite Oliver said he was devastated and upset because (notwithstanding its title and synopsis) Billy and the Epic Escape is “genuinely a love letter to the First Nations peoples”. His publisher, Penguin Random House, said its “publishing standards fell short on this occasion”.
It announced the book’s withdrawal and it is now unavailable on Amazon UK. We have yet to learn whether the Epic Escape is lost to the canon for ever or undergoing expurgation by specialist inclusiveness readers like the ones who last year sanitised Roald Dahl for the same publisher. Salman Rushdie called that “absurd censorship”. Free speech purists may feel, as then, that Oliver’s intact text still has historical value in showing readers what a publisher that prides itself on offence eradication could consider acceptable back in May 2024, when the book came out.
To deny Billy and the Epic Escape the faintest claim to literary merit is not to doubt, for those of us lucky enough to own a copy, its powerful cautionary value. Can it be wise, young Billy inadvertently teaches us, for a publisher like Penguin Random House to advertise its expertise in authenticity (“You owe it to readers to get it right”), while its editors can still look kindly on a racially stereotyping subplot in an overtly didactic text for children?
Some full-time writers may detect another message half hidden in the drivel about farting and friendship, about quality control in the celebrity – supposedly – authored children’s book industry. Would the carelessness that brought Ruby the cartoon abductee into stereotypical existence have been less likely if this fiction amounted to more than a child-focused addition to the Jamie Oliver food brand? In fact relentless food descriptions – bacon, marshmallows, “caramelized banana sticky toffee pudding” with “an oozy pool of melting vanilla ice-cream” – are another anomaly: hard to reconcile with his disapproval at one time of a mother he called, for feeding children junk, a “big old scrubber”.
As many copies of Billy and the Epic Escape are still circulating – last week it was a bestseller in the category “climate change books for young adults” – parents and teachers may be wondering if, with a bit of judicious censorship, it can be made safe. Just how harmful are Ruby and her fellow ciphers, none of them more than some check-listed attributes, to impressionable minds? Given the increasing concern about children who never read, maybe it’s better for them to consume 400 pages of derivative, celebrity-branded fantasy than to not read at all? Then again, if it puts them off books for ever, maybe it isn’t. Either way you might think it disrespectful, almost offensive, to offer children aged nine-11 something that reads as if written by someone aged nine-11, albeit by one with ambitions to reverse the mid 19th-century rejection of didactic children’s literature.
As if Lewis Carroll, E Nesbit and their successors had never happened, the Billy books do not scruple to interrupt the rudimentary make-believe and threadbare exchanges between child-caricatures, with inspirational learnings. “There’s only one way to love and that’s with a full heart.”
Top tip for the actor Hugh Bonneville, now a prospective children’s author with, he says, no ideas: moral edification, perhaps to balance their inherent cynicism, is a longstanding feature of celebrity children’s literature, from Madonna’s saccharine period through to Meghan’s whifflings in The Bench.
In 2014 even Russell Brand, already known for his obscene phone call, became a children’s author to change “the way children see the world”. Publishers who were probably spared this stuff now expect parents to subject their children to lines like Jamie’s “the family is like an atom, split it at your peril”; “looking after each other is what friends do”; “whatever you do in life, you should give 100 per cent”. Sound advice, admittedly, for the next woman he calls a scrubber.
Writing before the complaints about stereotyping, Oliver showed pride in his wisdom. He wanted, he writes in the now-withdrawn Billy afterword, “to help teach young people some lessons I’ve learned in my life. About being kind, being a good friend, always being open to giving people second chances, and finding your own way/place in the world.” He looks to have forgotten one lesson, but maybe he’s saving it for part three in his series, Billy and the Massive Insolvency.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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