Behind The Boy On The Bridge – An Interview with Mike Carey
Behind The Boy On The Bridge After Hotel Echo is overrun by junkers (survivalists) using hungries (humans infected by Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis, whose new big thing is to eat flesh, and who do so quite indiscriminately.) to batter down the fences, Sergeant Eddie Parks manages to escape with a single soldier (Kieran Gallagher, whose main motivation for enlisting was to escape the brutal overcrowding of England’s last human enclave, Beacon), two female staff members, and Test Subject Number One.
At Echo, Dr. Caroline Caldwell has been studying and dissecting anomalous specimens: feral children infected by the hungry pathogen who retain higher reasoning abilities and behaviors. Helen Justineau was one of the teachers to this group of test subjects.
And of course, Test Subject Number One: Melanie.
Melanie is–well, firstly, she is the titular GIRL of The Girl With All The Gifts. She is a hungry, aged about ten. Miss J sees her as a gifted child and feels intensely protective towards her; Dr. Caldwell sees her only as Test Subject Number One. Sergeant sees them all as unpredictable liabilities, and Gallagher as a green soldier who means well but is more vulnerable than useful.
After a few days on the run, they are getting fairly frazzled. They are low on e-blocker (which negates the smell of endocrine sweat, making you invisible to that part of the hungries’ radar), and Caldwell is grievously wounded.
So when they stumble upon one of Beacon’s hermetically-sealed research-rovers–the Rosalind Franklin–they’ve been handed a deus extra-large machina in the shape of a science-tank leviathan.
Aside from a corpse in the cockpit (gunshot to the head), the place is clean. The engine needs work, and there’s no e-blocker, but its heavy armor, rotating airlock (designed for the contingency of the hungry pathogen becoming airborne), state-of-the-art mobile lab, and eclectic CD collection (comprising “Simon and Garfunkel. The Beatles. Pink Floyd. Frank Zappa. Fairport Convention. The Spinners. Fleetwood Mac. 10CC. Eurythmics. Madness. Queen. The Strokes. Snoop Dogg. The Spice Girls.”) are far more than they could hope to have found in their dire situation.
Parks suggests a what-happened scenario, but there are more urgent things to do than scrutinize the teeth of this massive gift horse. So the body is quickly chucked, Parks goes to work on the engine, and Melanie continues growing out from the box in which the story begins.
The rest of the novel takes place in and around Rosie, but the mystery of how she came to be where this curious quintet first find her is never again questioned or especially relevant to the plot.
Until last year, that is–when The Boy On The Bridge hit shelves.
In this sequel-prequel, Mike Carey brought us back to the world of Melanie–and Rosie. Set two decades before the first novel, BOY tells the story of Rosie’s original crew and its mission to find the Hungry Cure. Six scientists and six soldiers, in that same vehicle (which Miss J feels trapped in when she’s sharing it with just four other souls)–their own desperate journey, and the path which led Rosie to the waypoint at which we find her in TGWATG.
So if you’ve read the first book (or seen the movie), reading THE BOY ON THE BRIDGE is implicitly a locked-room mystery, with the fate of its crew unknown but unlikely….
When I reread the duology a few months ago, I always left the book(s) face up on the table. As Mike notes below, “The very bright mustard yellow…makes the book leap straight to your eye when you see it on a shelf or a display table.”
They say (wrongly) that you can’t judge a book by its cover…..but the silhouetted figures, the bright backgrounds, and sparse text on the inside/back covers don’t help much. Fr’instance:
Once upon a time, in a land blighted by terror, there was a very clever boy.
The people thought the boy could save them, so they opened their gates and sent him out into the world.
To where the monsters lived.
So, when he kindly agreed to answer some questions about the creative process behind the books, I wanted to begin by taking away the covers…..
question one: How did the covers come to be? What was the design-process like, behind those bright iconic final images? And: were there earlier or significantly different designs? 
There was an earlier version of the cover for The Girl With All the Gifts, which was photographic. In fact it was a close-up shot of a girl’s face – striking in its way, but I think carrying less power and poignancy than the final image. What changed everyone’s mind was the similarity, which we noticed quite quickly, between that cover and the cover to Cronin’s The Passage.
So Duncan Spilling, the in-house designer at Little Brown, went back to the drawing board and came up with the image we actually used. As soon as I saw it, I was completely sold. The girl’s stance is wonderfully ambiguous, full of emotional resonance but hard to parse. Is she throwing open a door? Asking for a hug? Declaiming something out loud to the whole world? All three work, in different ways, and the combination creates a kind of leitmotif for the novel as a whole.
The very bright mustard yellow was the finishing touch, making the book leap straight to your eye when you see it on a shelf or a display table. I’m sure it got
GIRL picked up and looked at uncountable times. We kept with that theme when it came to BOY, using a vibrant red for the hardcover and orange for the paperback. Fellside, which came in
between the two, was a cooler but still emphatic blue.
Duncan is amazing. He’s going a very different route with my next novel, Someone Like Me, but once again he’s found an image that’s powerful and intriguing and demands to be interrogated.
question two: On my second time through TBOTB (knowing how the early interpersonal frictions develop), I found myself wondering about Colonel Carlisle and Lieutenant McQueen. Specifically, wondering:
Did you want there to be chain-of-command conflicts in the novel before you came up with your crew, or did you discover the animosity between Carlisle and McQueen after the characters were decently conceived?
I felt it was important that the chain of command should become muddied. In fact, that every possible authority figure should be compromised in one way or another. Inside Rosie and outside, there’s nobody to turn to – no agency that can take control and deliver a strategy. They’ve just got to make it up as they go along, and inevitably that means the various crew members making decisions that are radically incompatible with each other.
So I conceived McQueen as someone who would see himself as a good soldier even while he’s doing the one thing that soldiers are supposed to see as the ultimate sin, which is questioning and ultimately going against the orders of his superior officer. I was hoping that I could make both men sympathetic to some degree, even while showing both of them as flawed and sometimes making the wrong call. Of course, Carlisle’s worst mistakes are behind him when the story starts, so he’s got the higher ground – but he’s also got blood on his hands, and that’s important too. Especially given the last thing we see him do in the story, which is to kill an unarmed man.
question three: e-blocker was a crucial plot-device in TGWATG (which takes place ten years after the main events of TBOTB)–it masks endocrine sweat, and (quite importantly) keeps Melanie from trying to eat any of her companions.
In TBOTB, we discover that this highly useful substance was created by Stephen Greaves (when, y’know, you aren’t obliged to give us more than a scientist saying “rub this on any exposed skin, it’ll make you….”).
And not just cuz ‘someone had to do it’–Greaves is motivated by a pathological fear of touch, which informs his life’s purpose in trying to fight the hungry plague.
Was Greaves a character before you had the e-blocker, or did he emerge after TGWATG had been published?
He came later. When I delivered GIRL, I had no intention of writing a sequel. I knew what life in Beacon was like in general terms – it’s crucial to Gallagher’s motivation – but I hadn’t populated it in a more specific way.
Having said that, Greaves and Khan came early in the process of planning and writing the second novel. Just as I built GIRL around the relationship between Melanie and Justineau, I built BOY around Greaves and Khan. And there are parallels, of course, in that in both cases you’ve got someone who isn’t a parent taking on some of the responsibilities of one – for a child who is far from typical and who is more capable in some ways than the adult.
I honestly hadn’t thought about the symbolic significance of e-blocker – that it’s putting a film over your whole body to shut it off from the world. It’s a fascinating point, though. I can see where Greaves was well placed to find that solution.
question four: The original ‘Girl With All The Gifts’ was, as you explain through Melanie right at the start of her book, the mythological Pandora (whose name comes from pan (‘all’) and dora (‘gift’).). It’s a title loaded with vague significance, which readers can attribute variously as the novel progresses.
Aside of the appeal of alliteration, how did you come to the similarly simple yet loaded title of The Boy On The Bridge?
Again, it was a case of working by analogy. I wanted the title of the second book to have the same layered symbolism, if possible, as the first.
There are three bridges in the story, and two boys. Greaves is found on a motorway overpass, where his parents and their entire community has just been slaughtered. The psychological impact of that massacre has stayed with him ever since.
Later, when he makes the fateful decision to pick up the body of the child shot dead by Lutes, he stands on the bridge at Invercrae waiting for Rosie to come – and it’s there that he takes the child on-board. Everything that happens after that in the novel happens as a direct result of that decision, so there’s an irrevocable line that’s being crossed here in another, causal sense. Like a crossing of the Rubicon.
And the final bridge, which only gets mentioned once, is purely metaphorical. John Sealey’s view of Greaves is that he’s standing on the rickety rope bridge between sanity and madness – and that all his strange behaviour is a sign of pathological trauma.
question five: What other post-apocalyptic, plague-ridden-planet, or hungry/zombie/walker/undead stories influenced you, in writing these novels? Did you set out to create something which was particularly like one thing, or pointedly unlike something you’d seen done elsewhere?
I think my biggest influences came from outside the zombie genre. John Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic novels were definitely in the mix. He casts a long shadow over both the novel and the movie of GIRL, just as he does over 28 Days Later (which borrows a lot of its structure from The Day Of the Triffids).
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Spits poison; kills.
To tell you the truth, this was one time when I started from character – the way you’re always supposed to – and it really worked. Melanie came first, and I built her world and the entire story around her. In that sense it was its own thing, and it grew in quite an organic way.
But inevitably there are stories that inspire you and become part of your mental landscape, and sometimes you can see those influences showing through. Camille Gatin, who was the lead producer on the movie, called GIRL “I Am Legend told through the eyes of Ruth”, and I think that’s a very cool way of looking at it. I wasn’t consciously inspired by Matheson, but I love that book and it had obviously stuck with me on some deep level.
What I’m always drawn to, in zombie narratives, are the moments of ambivalence. Most zombies are depicted as animalistic, empty shells, but occasionally you see the remnants of a personality, and that’s when the horror modulates into tragedy. I’m thinking of the dead wife in the first episode of The Walking Dead, who comes and stands at her own front door every evening. She dimly remembers a connection, but there isn’t enough of a consciousness left to understand what that connection is. The opening of Romero’s Land Of the Dead affected me in the same way. The zombie musicians clutching the instruments they played in life, and occasionally trying to get a sound out of them.
Also, more tenuously, there’s a scene in Gene Wolfe’s Torturer Quartet involving an animal called the Analeptic Alzabo. When it eats you, your memories are incorporated into it and it speaks with your voice for a while. The scene where Severian meets the Alzabo and fights it left an indelible mark on me.
question six: Can fans of the series look forward (or….backwards?) to another prequel? And are there any other projects you’re working on that you would like to drop a hint about?
I don’t think it’s likely that I’ll write a third novel set in Melanie’s world. What I might do, though, is to write a short story or novella. And just as BOY jumped ten years backwards in time, this would do the same – taking us back to the Breakdown, and telling the story of how Cordyceps came to be loose in the world and able to infect humans.
Having said that, you don’t always know where you’re going to end up. When I wrote GIRL I didn’t have any idea of there being a sequel. I just kept thinking about the world, and came up with the idea for another story. It’s not out of the question that that might happen again.
question seven: And lastly: a question about the puzzler which binds these two books. The abandoned, hermetically sealed Rosalind Franklin, with its gunshot final occupant and disabled engine.
How did you come around to the idea of weaving a story which creates that experience, in people who read the series in publication-chronological order?
It was actually hard to resist doing that, once the first inkling of it hit me.
My background is in comics, and it was in comics that I first became aware of a kind of diastolic-systolic rhythm in long-form stories. In ongoing comic books, I mean, or in novels and sequences of novels.
First of all there’s a period or movement of expansion. In the early chapters, or the first few arcs, you’re defining the world and the characters – painting in the landscape, nailing down the rules, making all the furniture that will be pertinent to how the story unfolds. Your imagination can be as profligate as you want it to be. You’re generating ideas and throwing them down in a kind of ferment.
And then at some point you reach a point where you have to start doing the opposite. The furniture is mostly there and the story is off and rolling. As it closes in on its climax, there’s inevitably a kind of narrowing to a point. You’re focusing more and more on the beats that will build, inexorably, to the ending you’ve got in mind. If new ideas occur to you in this second phase, you may have to discard them because they’re distractions from the story’s forward momentum. So every story has a negative space around it, composed of all the untold stories that were left by the wayside.
One of the attractions of going back into Melanie’s world to write BOY was that I could go into that negative space, pick up some of those dropped threads and weave something new out of them.