In honor of the release of his fifth book in the Enemy series (read our reviews of the first three books here), author Charlie Higson stops by with a tour of two locations from the novel-- M4 and Heathrow Airport-- plus a chance for you to win an Enemy prize pack!
For me, the M4 represents escape. I live in London and the M4 is the main motorway (freeway) heading out of town to the west. It covers a lot of ground, physically and metaphorically. It starts in the residential area of Chiswick and then rolls out past office blocks, small industrial parks, then green parks, then more open land, Heathrow airport, the M25 (a huge motorway that circles London – when it was first built people often get confused, some still do. One little old lady was rescued once, severely dehydrated. She’d been driving round and round it for nearly two days), past Windsor castle – the queen’s main residence - which overlooks Eton (where James Bond went to school), and on into the countryside. If you keep going you pass through the west country, Wiltshire and Somerset, traditionally the most rural, laid-back, part of Britain, associated with country bumpkins, hippies, the Glastonbury music festival, Stone Henge and cider. Then you get to the huge suspension bridge that crosses the Severne estuary, and, having paid the toll, you find yourself in another country, Wales. The signs are now all bilingual, in English and in the indecipherable, unpronounceable, ancient Welsh language (In one of the four adult crime thrillers I wrote in the 90s, Full Whack, my protagonists make this journey, and the guy driving, off his face on dangerous chemicals, can’t work out why they keep passing signs to somewhere called Gwasanaethau, until it’s pointed out to him that Gwasanaethau is the Welsh word for motorway services). You pass Cardiff, (or Caerdydd as the Welsh call it) the Welsh capital and where all the Dr Who episodes are filmed (it’s cheap), then hit the south coast of Wales, go through the old industrial area of Port Talbot with its huge steelworks (nowhere near as huge and impressive as it used to be, sadly) and the motorway eventually peters out in the heart of Wales, which feels a million miles away from London. That’s a five-hour drive. Insignificant by American standards, but in Britain you’ve gone from one world through a second and ended up in a third. In some parts of American after five hours you’d still be driving past the same field!
There are some roads that you end up driving down a lot more than others. I have many friends and family in the west and my wife’s family owns a small cottage in west Wales, so I know this drive very well and must have been up and down the M4 hundreds of times. To drive westwards on it is to leave dirty, crowded, bustling London behind and journey into old, Celtic, Britain. If I ever left London I’d probably go west. In fact I was actually born in Somerset in a small town called Frome, so it would be a bit like going home.
I've also flown countless times from Heathrow airport, the 5th busiest in the world and a key location for book 5 in my Enemy series, The Fallen.
I always planned that in one of the books I would show what was going on in the world outside London. London is in many ways a different country to the rest of England, it feels different, the people are different, the pace is different, the economy is different. I suppose it’s like the difference between New York and the mid west. This means that most of the kids in my books wouldn’t dream of quitting the city, but a small group of them, led by Maeve, the girl who acts as their doctor, head out for what she hopes is a better life.
This meant that I could widen the focus, show what other kids are up to, how they’re surviving in the countryside. It also questions whether my main characters have made the right choice staying in London? The thing is - London is full of stuff, a great place to scavenge; the countryside, if you don’t know what you're doing, can be very harsh and unforgiving. Who among us knows how to grow food? To live off the land? To keep livestock? To be completely self-sufficient. Not me. I have two vegetable beds in my garden that produce enough food during the year for maybe three meals.
But for some kids, like this adult, the west is a dream of escape. The kids in my books only get about twenty-five miles out, but it’s far enough to see a different world and different ways of living. Airports also offer us a dream of escape, and, as I say, I've flown in and out of Heathrow many times. Airports are weird places if you think about them. Not like anywhere else. They’re like small towns, with shops and restaurants and bars and chapels and doctors, but they’re magic towns – if you walk through that door, and across the little bridge and go into the big steel tube and sit down, when you stand up again a few hours later and walk back out again you're in another country.
We’re kind of used to airports so don’t give them a second thought, but look out of the windows and there are all those crazy looking vehicles buzzing about that you never see anywhere else, and there are some huge, wide-open spaces, dead spaces that you will never walk across. And then there are the planes themselves. Impossible to believe these things could actually fly! I have one of my characters wander out into that open space at Heathrow not understanding where he is. He’s losing a lot of blood and is hallucinating – he thinks the abandoned planes are huge white birds. And then he realizes what they are and remembers coming here before and has a dream of escape. That’s what airports do to us, we’ll put up with all manner of indignities because we know we’re going somewhere else. To another country. On a holiday. They are a fantasy portal into another world.
Want to experience Higson's London for yourself? Leave a comment with your favorite spot in London (or the place you'd most like to visit) for a chance to win copies of all five newly re-packaged books in The Enemy series. (U.S. addresses only, sorry!)
Check out the rest of the tour over at these sites!
June 9: MyFriendAmysBlog.com
June 10: MyBookishWays.com
June 11: AliceMarvels.com
June 12: TheBookSmugglers.com
June 13: BittenByBooks.com
June 14: Chapter-by-Chapter.com
Visit The Enemy series on Facebook
Follow Charlie Higson on Twitter