AL Kennedy: ‘It is all terrible but that’s when you can’t despair’

AL Kennedy was once described by fellow Scottish writer Ali Smith as “the laureate of good hurt”. She is the author of seven novels, seven short story collections and three works of nonfiction. Born in Dundee in 1965, she has lived in Glasgow and London, but has now settled in Essex. She has appeared twice in the Granta best young British novelist list and in 2007 won the Costa Book of the Year award for her novel Day. In the last couple of years she has published stories for children. Her latest book, The Little Snake (Canongate, £9.99), is a novella written to mark the 75th anniversary of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.

What was it like to return to Saint-Exupéry’s much-loved classic?
If you read The Little Prince as a grownup it is pretty bloody sad. You think: “Oh shit, it’s about death.” There’s a funny snake and a snake that kills him. So I thought, I’ll do the snake because I quite like snakes.

The Little Snake is incredibly moving, yet joyful. It made me cry. Has it had that effect on other readers?
It does make people cry. It came out in Germany first and 50% of the time, during readings, we’d have to stop because too many people would be crying. It is about the inevitability of losing everything you care about. The rest of it has to be quite joyful otherwise you couldn’t read it. I hope. With some subjects, such as death, you can’t look at it directly, you have to look at it out of the corner of your eye. You have to have a balance, you have to have the salt and the sweet.

Did you intend it to be for both children and adults?
It’s for very young people up to old people. I don’t have any children, but it is all the things I would have wanted to say to a child, without completely burdening it and screwing it up. In Germany, the woman who is my German “voice”, whose husband has died, said she was going to buy it for her young daughter. I don’t want there to be children with bereaved parents, but there are and maybe it’s a way of talking about that.

Would you describe it as a modern morality tale?
It probably can’t not be moral, which is always going to be political, unless your political world is really out of whack. I always write about the left-out people. Most people who are in a war situation are in the background, getting shot at ... but they’re not the book, the movie, the story. Hopefully, it’s [also] quite fun and you can discuss anything off the back of it: where’s Grandad gone? Where have these people come from? How would we manage if we had to leave our country? The challenge of writing a fable is you have to go down to fundamentals; you have to avoid your own bullshit, which is interesting as a writer.

It is, in part, a refugee story. The references to kite flying from rooftops, rose gardens and the beautiful decorative cover design suggest a Middle Eastern country. But the human characters are called Mary and Paul. Is it set in a real place?
No, it’s not set anywhere. The Land of Perditi doesn’t exist. Lots of places fly kites: it’s a joyful thing children do, a joyful thing adults do. The city is basically London: a once beautiful city that’s falling in half with increasingly empty beautiful towers, possibly containing crocodile pools, as Mary assumes.

The Little Prince is a parable about retaining a childlike openness to the world. Apart from his victims at the moment of their deaths, only the children can see your little snake. Is the importance of imagination something that appeals to you?
You’ve got to have it. If you can’t imagine a different political situation, you can’t change anything. We couldn’t imagine that the status quo – which was fairly balanced and reasonable and civilised – needs constant maintenance. It does. You can’t empathise if you can’t imagine being somebody other than yourself. So imagination is at the bottom of democracy, at the bottom of civilised behaviour and at the bottom of not behaving like a sociopath.

The Little Prince was published in 1943 and in many ways is a response to the crisis facing Saint-Exupéry’s native France. It was also a comment on 20th-century greed and consumerism. Did this give it added resonance, rewriting it today?
If you prioritise money over preventing people drowning, starving, catching fire – that can’t go well. We can all be stupid, but if you make a stupid mistake, fix it – don’t repeat it. If everybody in charge is in Putin’s pocket, bought by demagogues or the fossil-fuel lobby, that’s unfortunate in 360 degrees.

And yet the ending is, if not hopeful, consoling. Do you feel optimistic?
It is all terrible but that’s when you can’t despair. You can maybe despair when everything is wonderful. If you despair now, you’ve surrendered when we need you. Particularly if you are in a relatively comfortable position. So crack on!

You’re a standup as well as a writer. You concede to your reputation as a bit of a “miserabilist” on your very funny website. How do you get to be so bleak and so amusing?
They are the same thing. They come from absolutely the same place. It’s that decision – are you going to scream or laugh?

Saint-Exupéry would start work at 11pm and write through the night. Do you keep similar working hours?
Left to my own devices, I would sleep until about 11am, do the admin stuff and emails, and start a little bit of work before dinner. And then get about five good hours in.

How would describe yourself as a writer?
A freak looking for a circus. Usually.

Which books and authors have stayed with you since childhood?
I read everything. I still go back to The Hobbit before I start writing a new novel or one of those other classic, communicative books – it’s a kind of good luck thing and a way to remember the reader. And I’m with Ratty – messing about in (very small) boats is the way to be chilled.

What books are on your bedside table?
Miss Pook et les enfants de la lune by Bertrand Santini – I’m trying to renovate my French.