Oliver Twist

"Oliver is a boy who has escaped the workhouse and is adopted by a family of pickpockets. He’s the exception – because he’s being manipulated by the grownups, in his case Fagin. So his innocence is not being protected; it’s the exact opposite, although he is innocent. Nobody who wasn’t would have said ‘Can I have some more?’ in those circumstances. I think this is a completely different angle on childhood innocence. Because Oliver knows what he’s doing. I mean, if you said to him, ‘Are you stealing?’, he would say yes. He knew what he was doing but he didn’t have any choice from where he was. And he’s being used by adults; if you like, his innocence is being quite deliberately assaulted. Yes, I would. I would say that Fagin is exploiting the situation, which is somewhat different. And he’s exploiting the fact that people assume children are innocent."

"I’m going to go with Oliver Twist . I was raised on all of these books, but I loved Oliver Twist . I have always believed that people, no matter how bad they are, when they see a really good kid in trouble, they’re going to help. Absolutely. He ends up in an orphanage, but he doesn’t give up. He makes it to the people he’s supposed to make it to. I love it. My favourite thing is every morning when I finish my first cup of coffee, I say to my assistant, “Sir, may I have more please?” and he goes “More? You want more?”"

"You are right. In the case of Oliver Twist , I love the book mostly because of how he discovers himself—the discovery of inner strength, let’s say. He’s an orphan, he becomes used to suffering, being passed from hand to hand. There is a pivotal moment, when he is fourteen or so, and he’s taken to his orphanage, and the meal is so meagre that he’s eternally hungry. All he thinks about is food, “How can I get more food?” And then one day he had this radical idea, “How about I ask for more?” He has the idea that, if you want something, you can actually make a demand on life. That was what turned Oliver around, that is what makes him the interesting character he becomes: that discovery that he can make an enquiry into something. I believe that for a work of fiction to really succeed, it has to be based on a philosophy, or a couple of them. There has to be something about the deeper, subterranean knowledge of human life that the novel will explore. So what I wanted to do with The Fishermen was explore the idea that we can understand human beings through other creatures. I can tell you a story of a family, through the prism of how animals relate to each other, or from the bodies of other creatures. I also wanted to work on how I think children sometimes see the world—at least how I did when I was growing up—by associations. So Benjamin would see a bully at school as a lion. When I was a child, I’d tell my Mum, “This guy who beat me up was as ferocious as a tiger.” Or you see some teacher and you think, “This guy is a Super Man, this guy is a Robocop, or Batman.” That’s where the metaphors come from. I wanted Ben to be able to understand the world and rationalise things through the bodies of these creatures he’s fascinated about. “For a work of fiction to really succeed, it has to be based on a philosophy, or a couple of them.” Of course there are some deeper things that I do with it, like the metaphor of the father being the eagle. There’s actually a phenomenon with eagles: a mother eagle always gives birth to twins, and then she can only bring so much food back to the nest. So what happens is that there is a fight, a strife that happens in the nest, and 97% of the times, one eaglet kills the other, so that he alone can have the food. It’s called Cain and Abel syndrome. In my book, the father is the eagle who leaves to get food for the family, and the children kill each other by the time he’s back."