A Q&A Interview with Kenneth Oppel

What inspired you to write The Nest?

I’d been writing notes on The Nest for ten years. Initially I just had a set of unusual ingredients I wanted in the story. A toy phone with which a child talks to a ghostly and silent character called Mr Nobody. A grinder’s van that goes around the streets offering to sharpen people’s knives. And a wasp nest that’s growing a human baby.

What is it about wasps that fascinates you and what drew you to write about them in The Nest as you have?

Wasp nests are fascinating things to me. When wasps make a nest, they scrape their mandibles over a wood surface, like a fence post or a picnic table, and then mix the fibre with saliva to form a kind of paste. And from this paste they build their nest. There’s something frightening about a nest to me – and not just because I know what’s inside. The papery material looks grey and dry and crackly — it looks like something mummified. It looks like something dead. And yet inside the nest is teeming with life. Hundreds of newly hatched wasps emerging from their cells. Really, if you look carefully, a nest can be rather beautiful. It can have all sorts of different colours, depending on the colour of the wood the wasps chewed up, and often it has different textures, too. Even decorative swirls. Amazing to think of these tiny insects as master architects and craftspeople, making this complicated structure. Because a nest is very orderly and complicated, level upon level of cells where the queen lays her eggs. It’s a bit like humans building a wonderful skyscraper. Except the purpose of this particular structure is just to make more and more wasps. And there’s this too about a wasp nest. Whenever I look at one, I can’t help thinking, ‘You know, I bet you could fit a baby in there.’ And then of course, my writer’s mind asks, Well, what kind of baby would it be, this wasp baby? What would it be made of? The same material as the nest? What would it look like? What would it be for?

The Nest could be described as a modern fairy tale – how did you think of it when you were writing it?

I saw it as a changeling story but I also saw it as a story of temptation. The conversations between the boy Steven and the wasp Queen, to me, represent a kind of internal struggle between the worse and better angels of our nature. Steven must decide whether to say yes or no to the Queen’s offer to replace his baby brother with a ‘perfect’ replica. It’s a terrible dilemma for him.

The book deals with disability, did you find the nature of the queen and wasp society made it easier to discuss ideas of physical perfection?

Wasp society is very rigid and hierarchical and ruthless. The Queen is the only fertile female. All her workers are female, but sterile, so they’re job is to enlarge the nest, bring food to the new larva, and then die. In my book, the Queen promises a perfect baby – and by extension an utopian civilization — but really what she’s advocating is a terrifying kind of eugenics, in which the ‘abnormal’ are weeded out. Our First World society, I believe, has a very unhealthy obsession with perfection. Perfect houses, and cars and bodies, perfect partners and perfect babies and children. People, especially kids, feel a lot of pressure to fit in, to measure up, to ‘be normal’ and it’s a terrible thing to feel like you’re abnormal. It’s one of the loneliest feelings possible. This, in part, was why I wanted to address special needs in the book — not just the baby’s condition, but Steven’s anxiety and obsessive compulsive tendencies. The more I thought about, in the context of my story and my own life, it seemed to me that the word ‘normal’ was not a very useful term. Which one of us can honestly fit into such a rigid set of parameters? As individuals we’re too much, too diverse, to be contained like this. But because Steven sees himself as ‘abnormal’, he has a unique and powerful bond with his disabled baby brother. And Steven is terrified by this perfect baby that’s being prepared for his family. How could this ‘perfect’ person ever understand him? His weaknesses and fears and sadness? How could it ever develop empathy for the flawed creatures we all are. Surely it could only look at us like ants.

The story is told in very short extent, did you set out to write it at that length or was that the shape the story found?

Stories just seem to find their ideal length. After ten years of mulling the idea, the book came in a rush, in just six weeks. It was a very intense birth, and I think the pace and atmosphere of the book reflect that. The story is very personal, very tight and even claustrophobic, it has something of the feeling of a nightmare.

What did you think when you saw Jon Klassen’s illustrations for the book, and do you have a favourite?

Jon’s incredibly talented, and I was very fortunate he agreed to do the artwork for The Nest. We decided to avoid showing characters, or illustrating scenes. Jon’s approach was more atmospheric. He told me when he read the book it reminded him of watching The Shining. He actually heard a noise in his head – a kind of sonic harbinger of dread. Jon’s images are very still, sort of like stage sets before the actors enter, or right after they’ve left. You get the sense something terrible is about to happen, or just has. The images seems still, yet they’re filled with mystery and sometimes menace. I love the one of the father with one sock on, one sock off. But I also love the double page spread where the wasps are torrenting into the house!

Bats, wasps – are there other unlikely animal heroes you would like to write about?

Just watch me.

The Nest is published by David Fickling Books, 978-1-9102-0086-5, £10.99 hbk.