Angry Arthur

"Yes, the point is: you might press The Button for realpolitik reasons but then not even remember what those reasons were when you’re living in the wasteland that you have created. Me and my brother loved it, and bonded over how much we loved it, because we were angry boys. There was something about Angry Arthur that just felt so spectacularly truthful and straightforward. And I love that about picture books now, too, that you can do so much in such a short space of time. My favourite page – probably in any book – is where Arthur causes a universe quake with his rage and you get ten fractured Arthurs. The illustrations, by Satoshi Kitamura, are just amazing. There are these wonderfully dated bits, too, where, for example, this cigarette packet gets blown off a billboard – out of the picture and into the street – and these cigarettes just start floating off around the place. I just thought that was so unfashionable and wonderful. And it felt like it joined all the picture books of my parents’ generation and my grandparents’ generation, like Curious George . It seems of the “Old World”, with all the tongue in cheek charm that those books had. There are loads of in-jokes about the conventions of picture books, with things spilling out of the frame – there’s a whole meta-ness of picture books – like when the soldiers he’s supposed to be watching on TV end up as scattered toys on the floor in front of him. The membrane between his imagination and the seriousness of his anger and the conventions of the printed picture book are being played with, and it does that in such an unshowy way that is just about right for children – it’s not all for the adults. “I have friends who think the Space Race is humankind’s greatest triumph, but to me the whole Elon Musk philosophy of escaping the planet is just disgusting” I also felt there was such a clarity of purpose about it, particularly as a boy and around that particular time in my life – my dad had just died and me and my brother were very angry boys. The book is a kind of love letter to frustrated males, to when you get into one of those moods when you’re a kid and there’s just no turning back; it has its own internal logic and the more people try to get you out of it the more it becomes red hot. So, back then, I thought it was a really sympathetic book, but as I’ve grown up it’s stayed with me because of the economy of it – the ease with which it does so much with so little space. It just nails the futility of male rage beautifully, and you have this whole cast of other characters – like the grandma who floats past saying ‘Enough already, Arthur,’ – but for Arthur: ‘It’s not enough until I say it’s enough.’ Your rage is ring-fenced according to your own predetermined logic and no matter how many people sit you down and say ‘enough now,’ you’ve got to go further and further. In the book, Arthur’s rage has cosmic dimensions – because kids are so interested in space – which now as an adult I see in terms of the space race. And I think all that is ludicrous and grotesque. I have friends who think the space race – which to me is basically the arms race – is humankind’s greatest triumph, but to me the whole Elon Musk philosophy of escaping the planet is just disgusting. Exactly. And what is it about the technological elites? What is it about these men who are obsessed with the size of their dicks, these men – or these people – who since Icarus have been so ashamed by their bodies, so disgusted by the human condition that they feel they must escape it? It’s just gross. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Arthur coasts straight up and breaks the whole thing – breaks space – with the sincerity of childish rage, and this is before his anger has become politicized, before it’s become adult anger, to do with sex or gender or whatever; it’s just pure boy rage, and I feel like that’s such a nifty thing for the book to have got so right. It feels like a beautiful piece of music. I’d love to make an opera of it."