Jon Courtenay Grimwood

10. Come to think of it, you do have a lot of teenagers, too. Especially girls, who are struggling and fighting for room and respect. Is that how you view youth or is it something completely different?

People say you always have teenagers or old men or old women or cats or priests or policemen, but the world is a mix. I’m really annoyed by novels where everyone is 20-30 or 30-40 and no one seems to have children or parents or the complexities that go with both. I want to tell a story honestly, and that means having a wide range of people who can look at the world through different eyes. And that means different ages and different sexes and different classes and religions. Otherwise it’s like always eating the same kind of porridge. Boring.

I use elderly characters because they bring experience, and children because the world is fresher and its pleasures and pains more extreme when you are a child, and adolescents because they inhabit, briefly, a pivotal role that looks back towards childhood and forward to adulthood simultaneously. No sees the world more clearly or more honestly. We spend the rest of our lives mourning that we’ve lost that clarity when we’re not congratulating ourselves for no longer having to see with those eyes.