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 Joe Craig |
Camden books | Joe Craig's Jimmy Coates books| review | Kentish Town
Sara Newman talks to Joe Craig, creator of a young secret agent whose most recent mission is played out in
Kentish Town
Jimmy Coates: Survival by Joe Craig order this book
ACCIDENTALLY kicking a snooker table leg when aiming for a football is the closest Joe Craig has ever come to the torture he has put his fictional character, Jimmy Coates, through.
The 27-year-old author, who lives with his fiancée in Huddleston Road, Tufnell Park, is embarking on his sixth book in a series whose hero is Jimmy.
Jimmy is a 12-year old assassin trained and genetically mutated (he’s just 38 per cent human) by the fictitious NJ7 – the most technologically advanced secret service in the world.
Craig’s young hero has so far survived an industrial shredder, been blown up, nearly run over and drowned, throttled and tortured.
Inhabiting a “brave new world”, where money and power override morality, Jimmy must save his family and stop the imminent war between Britain and France.
What better place than Camden, with its narrow cobbled alleyways, canals and disused industrial estates, as a setting for this sinister scene.
In the recently released fifth book in the series, Survival, Jimmy’s mother and sister are being watched by secret agents camped out in the pub opposite their flat in the Denton estate, on the corner of Prince of Wales Road and Malden Road.
Making himself known to the French secret services, Jimmy strikes a deal. He will use his immunity to toxicity to retrieve a precious radioactive compound, called actinium, from a French-owned mine in West Africa. In return Zafi, his French female counterpart, is sent to secure the safety of his family.
There’s a delightful scene where, to fit in with the streetscape, Zafi starts a fight with group of youths on bikes armed with knives.
She uses their orchestrated hostility towards her as a decoy to gain access to the flat without detection, unflinchingly ramming the handlebars into the groin of one of her bike-riding aggressors and stealing another’s hoodie.
Zafi’s raison d’etre is to kill, but her time near Queen’s Crescent is filled with laughter, console games and banter, so when she gets the message to clean up, she chooses instead to lead Jimmy’s loved ones to a hide-out behind a fake pub in a newly furbished empty retail outlet at St Pancras International.
Craig weaves together reality and fantasy with dexterity.
Although he claims not to hold any particular political ideology, he is clearly fascinated by morality and judgment and the notion of taking a physical risk for the sake of principle.
“I’ll be pleased if after reading Jimmy Coates kids are urged to think about philosophical issues for themselves,” said the former full-time pianist and Cambridge philosophy graduate.
He controversially offered two of Survival’s most immoral characters’ names up for auction at a charity event at his former secondary school.
Teenagers Josh Browder and William Lee from University College School in Hampstead won the bid and are now immortalised as the namesakes of an international criminal and a murderous secret agent in the book.
As the son of a lawyer and a poet, debate has been the cornerstone of Joe Craig’s upbringing. “In my family, if you couldn’t tell a good story at the dinner table someone else would talk over you.”
Perhaps Craig’s main ambition is to entertain but with serious ambitions to become world snooker champion by 2015 it is clear this man is on a mission of his own.
Jimmy Coates may be a commercial endeavour designed to catch the teenage market but Craig’s depiction of the daily struggle with human frailty under the shadow of a rather familiar elective dictatorship is not only imaginative and fast-paced, it also informs.
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