The Kite Rider

"The Kite Rider was one of the books I began knowing only what my first page was going to be – nothing after that. By chance one day I saw a poster for an exhibition at the V&A showing man-carrying kites in Japan. I thought, “Wow, amazing.” But I was in the middle of doing six other jobs at the time. By the time I wanted to start, the exhibition was over, and I couldn’t find out anything, anywhere about man-carrying Japanese kites. All I kept finding and reading about was Marco Polo, the first Westerner to see kites – in Cathay. Marco Polo witnessed a superstitious ritual performed before a ship set sail, in which a member of the crew was taken and lashed to a hatch cover and flown like a kite. (The man with the horse-shaped eyes at the beginning is supposed to be Marco Polo watching it.) I thought, “There’s my first page. Now where? What else was happening in China at about this time?” Kublai Khan was happening. A foreign occupying power. So, then I thought, “All right, what do we know about Kublai?” “For those days Kublai Khan was a very enlightened despot” He was extraordinary. For those days Kublai Khan was a very enlightened despot. When he invaded didn’t just kill everybody but would take the cleverest ones and incorporate them into his government. He had this quaint idea that, since it would dishonour a king to have his blood spilled on the ground, rather than cutting his head off, you should wrap him in a carpet before galloping your horses over him and killing him. It was a mark of respect. He also had a white tiger and lived in a yurt. Here was truth offering so much colourful material to fictionalise. He sort of wrote bits of the book for me old Kublai! I could only assume the V&A’s Japanese man-carrying kites had been used as weapons of war. Anyway, despite it being set in Cathay, I moved that idea into Kite Rider . The hero ends up being used as an aerial weapon."