The Boy with Wings by Lenny Henry review: this preachy tale for kids fails to take flight
Aged 63, the comedian Lenny Henry has become the latest celebrity to start writing children’s fiction. His debut novel, The Boy With Wings, is aimed at readers from nine to 12 – who may not appreciate the author’s huge cultural status. In the late 1970s, he became a household name on the children’s television series Tiswas, and his Lenny Henry Show ran for 19 years on the BBC. He co-founded Comic Relief with Richard Curtis; he has been the face of Walker’s Crisps and the voice of the Speaking Clock. Yet, despite being one of the most famous black figures on television, when he received his knighthood in 2015, ITV News mistook him for Ainsley Harriott.
In a recent interview, Henry commented that black authors are constantly asked about “race, diversity and inclusion”, rather than what they have actually written. But race is one of his novel’s central themes. The hero is Tunde, a 12-year-old black boy who lives with his adoptive parents, and is endlessly bullied. “Tunde got picked on a lot – at school, on the bus, even playing in the park – mostly because of the colour of his skin.”
Foremost among his tormentors is Quinn Patterson: “the kind of kid you wouldn’t want to meet down a dark alley. In fact, a dark alley had recently written an online article with the heading: ‘Quinn Patterson gives us a bad name.’” In scenes of comic-strip villainy, Quinn and his gang sabotage Tunde’s birthday party, spit in his drink and steal his bicycle.
But the tables turn when Tunde discovers that he has inherited superhuman powers from his half-avian birth parents, enabling him to grow wings and fly like a bird. Soon he finds himself tasked with saving the world and liberating the Supreme Leader of Planet Aviaan – while never forgetting that he is the boy next door: “Rescue him? Rescue who? I can’t rescue anyone! I’ve got maths homework!”
Henry, who grew up in a working-class family of Jamaican origin in Dudley, and was himself bullied at school, says that the book is “exactly what I would have wanted to read when I was 12”. One senses there is a strong personal narrative. As a young child, Henry did not know his natural father, and in the novel it is through his birth mother that Tunde finally discovers a sense of belonging: “Tunde mimicked her movements without fear; and as he performed these aerial miracles without even a second thought – a brightly lit neon sign appeared in his mind’s eye and it said simply: ‘I was born to do this.’”
But despite a highly innovative plot, there are times in this book when the magic feels swallowed by the morals. Children’s fiction inevitably errs towards didacticism. But in our most enduring books, the lessons tend to be deeply woven in the text. How many six-year-olds, for example, would read Dr Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! as a parable of consumerism? And countless children have devoured CS Lewis’s Narnia books while remaining blissfully ignorant of the Christian allegory. Here, in contrast, the lessons can feel rather too clearly spelt out. “Ruth looked a bit sad. ‘I know not everyone likes my baking, but it’s all made with love, Tunde, and that’s what matters the most,’” is the sort of point that readers might have worked out for themselves. And while there is plenty of larky humour (“It’s dog doo-doo, it’s dog doo-doo! I need hand sanitiser NOW!”), some of the jokes feel a little over-directed. “‘I’m going to give them a large piece of my mind,’ she said, adopting a complicated kung-fu stance she’d recently learned from a martial-arts-superhero-time-travel film, even though she knew nothing about martial arts, wasn’t a superhero and had never, as far as they knew, time-travelled,” reads a typical sentence.
Perhaps the reason so many celebrities write books for children is because they feel they have some wisdom to impart. Lenny Henry has more wisdom than most – but for all this book’s considerable merits, one sometimes wishes he had buried it a little deeper.
The Boy with Wings is published by Macmillan at ￡12.99. To order your copy for ￡10.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop
