The Monster Odyssey series is the ongoing story of Prince Dakkar, son of an Indian rajah who has been sent to England for an education. It is 1814 and what few schools there are find Dakkar’s rebellious spirit too much to cope with. Finally, Dakkar is placed with the mysterious Count Oginski, a genius inventor with a dark past. Dakkar soon finds out that Oginski is waging a war against an evil organisation called Cryptos, who are set on ruling the world. But nothing is as straight forward as it seems and Dakkar is drawn into a world of monstrous adventure.
The inspiration for my series came, in part, from the works of Jules Verne. Verne was a French writer who first published his work in the middle of the nineteenth century. His books are still in print and have inspired countless other books, films, TV programmes and comics to this day.
It was through the films that I first became aware of his work. I loved Journey to the Centre of the Earth with its monstrous lizards, and the giant crab in Mysterious Island that terrorises the poor castaways. But it was Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea that really caught my imagination.
In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Professor Arronax finds himself a prisoner of the mysterious Captain Nemo, on a remarkable submarine called the Nautilus. Nemo is one of Verne’s most memorable characters. He’s a man who has turned his back on the world, and his name – Nemo – means ‘No Man.’ He has vowed never to set foot on dry land ever again. He’s a genius, an engineer, an artist, an athlete, sometimes a pacifist, sometimes a righter of wrongs, sometimes an out and out villain, he hates Empires and he invented the Nautilus.
There was a copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues lurking around our house and, having seen the film, I had a go at reading it. This proved challenging. Verne was a stickler for detail and an eager student of scientific theories. There are pages and pages of discussion about various molluscs and where they live, and paragraph upon paragraph about world sea currents.
It was a tough read for a small boy and I’m not sure that I fathomed it all. But Nemo fascinated me. I always wondered how he learnt all these things, and how he came to be so disenchanted with the world.
Nemo appears again in Mysterious Island and tells us of his past. On his death bed, Nemo tells us that his real name is Prince Dakkar and, as a boy, he was sent to Europe for an education. That nugget of information gave me the idea for the Monster Odyssey series; Dakkar is a young Captain Nemo. The inventiveness and genius of Jules Verne gave me the inspiration to write it.
Jon Mayhew’s Monsters Odyssey: The Curse of the Ice Serpent is out now at the Guardian Bookshop.
