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High in the Clouds
Paul McCartney, the greatest living rock icon is 63 but has the puckish energy of a schoolboy. "I still have a childlike wonder of the world," he says. "I never liked the idea of becoming a standard grown-up." How fitting, then, that this overgrown kid has written an ecological fable about the dangers of pollution, overpopulation and urban sprawl. It concerns Wirral, a young squirrel forced out of his pristine forest home and into the filthy city of Megatropolis when bulldozers come calling. Together with a host of woodland friends, Wirral goes on a quest to find the much-talked-about land of Animalia, where creatures live in harmony, far from encroaching evil forces. In the process, he finds himself on a larger mission to liberate animals everywhere. High in the Clouds is, in many ways, a natural outgrowth of McCartney’s child-like enthusiasms, interests, and signature voice. He has been a voracious reader of poetry and literature all his life, too. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and the Captain W. E. Johns’s Biggles series, he says, were childhood favourites: "They transported me from Liverpool. Cheaply." Golden Slumbers from Abbey Road is based on a Thomas Dekker poem. And, as he has said, Eleanor Rigby was patently Dickensian, while Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds could have been a scene from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland . High in the Clouds is a rich, meandering, often funny tale. While the illustrations feel somewhat wooden and the ending slightly pat, young audiences will delight in the clever wordplay and smartly-drawn comic characters like Alfredo, the weightlifting flea. The story abounds with literary references: an allusion to James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small, a fat, bowler-hat-clad rat named Wackford (after the eponymous headmaster from Nicholas Nickleby), and an animal assembly scene straight out of Kipling’s The Jungle Book. McCartney has no ambitions to become the next Beatrix Potter. He is uniquely equipped to write for children, however, given his live-in focus group: his two-year-old daughter Beatrice, who, he says, loves the pictures but is too young for the words. And although High in the Clouds ends with the rather quixotic The End/ Of the beginning, McCartney has no plans for a sequel - although a feature-length film based on the book is on his radar. This project actually began 10 years ago, as a song. The story and many characters are drawn from Tropic Island Hum, a song McCartney wrote in the late 1990s. Later, he developed it into a short animated film with Linda and his long-time collaborator and friend, Geoff Dunbar. McCartney and Dunbar first joined forces in the early 1980s on the animated short Rupert and the Frog Song. Their Daumier’s Law picked up a British Academy Award and Director’s Choice Award at Cannes. The pair had always dreamed of turning Tropic Island Hum into a feature-length film. McCartney turned to Suzy Jenvey, who heads the children’s division at Faber, which published his verse collection Blackbird Singing. She helped flesh out the story, saw its potential, and suggested a book. The story is filled with idyllic nature imagery that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Dylan Thomas poem, but it doesn’t shy away from darkness. The city, Megatropolis, is pictured as a rubbish-strewn hell full of "hungry, dirty and desperate" inhabitants with "dull eyes". Animals toil in a factory under abhorrent conditions. In a poignant scene, the young squirrel protagonist buries his mother. Not exactly Teletubbies. McCartney thinks that kids need to know certain things about the world. That "knocking down a forest is a bad thing... and that sweatshops are a bad thing. Anti-cruelty, anti-oppression, it was always important... to infiltrate with those messages." The trick to effective infiltration, though, is slipping the message by children, so they don’t know there is one. Kids, he says, have to feel that they’re "just reading a story," not being preached to. McCartney has been promoting green values most of his life. As an activist and outspoken vegetarian, he has been linked to countless environmental causes. On the cover of Chaos and Creation, there’s a photograph of McCartney as a boy, strumming a guitar at home in Liverpool. Whether he’s writing songs or children’s books, that boy is ever-present. Miraculously, he never went missing. "Childish?" he ponders. "Yeah. I hope I am. I wouldn’t want to lose that." — By arrangement with The Independent |
