Eve White: Literary Agent

Andy Stanton's Mr Gum and the Power Crystals was The Daily Telegraph Family Book Club choice for June and had a half page feature in Telegraph Weekend today: 'To call this book "deconstructed" would be too pompous a description of Stanton's writing method, which is to throw the parts of a conventional novel up in the air and then see where they come down. And it's this extra element of norm-bending that makes the book enjoyable for all ages, although from the outside you would think it was aimed at under-eights.

There is, it seems, no end to Stanton's wackiness. He thinks nothing of creating a one-sentence chapter ("Mr Gum had a cup of tea") or of running the same chapter seven times in a row (when Polly keeps getting drawn back to the magical windmill). In his first book, he absent-mindedly writes "The End" at page 12, before realising he hasn't actually started the story he was meant to be telling.

And the fun he has with words and language is nobody's business. He takes puppy-like pleasure in coming up with expressions such as "trouserface", "absolutely grimsters" or (his current favourite) "tungler" (he says it can mean anything you want). On top of all this, he has a narrative style that is positively stand-up-comedian-like (for example: "Mr Gum didn't remember much about the walk home. That's because he took a taxi.")

"If I sniff a joke, I'm off after it," confesses the author, who, as a medical secretary with the National Health Service, used to write up spoof reports for his consultants, such as the one for the Creature from the Black Lagoon ("severe case of flipper rot").'

Read the whole interview/review

Family Bookclub