Writing backwards has its own rewards

Those of us conditioned to expect disappointment whenever a treat seems too good to be true, will already have felt some apprehension. Part of the charm of the original novel was its child-eye view. I'm not sure I want to see what maturity, and life, have done to Scout. I'd prefer her to remain forever at the age where dressing up for Halloween is thrilling, her father is an unalloyed hero, and the barbarities of racial prejudice are understood only in starkest outline. Am I alone in wishing that the tale did not continue into the future, but had delved into the past, to reveal more of Atticus Finch's origins, or those of Boo Radley or Tom Robinson?

When Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, the word prequel was almost unknown. It only came into common parlance in the 70s and 80s as film directors discovered the commercial benefits of giving a hungry audience more of what they liked. In the world of books, however, prequels already existed, although they were surprisingly rare. I remember the unsettling feeling when, half-way through devouring the Narnia series, I discovered that The Magician's Nephew ¬ published in 1955, five years after The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - took the story back to the childhood of the professor in whose house the Pevensie children find the wardrobe that leads to Narnia. Though enjoyable, it gave a strong sense of the narrative taking a breather while an inessential footnote was filled in. To my young mind, it did not have the propulsive energy of the novels that described the children, and Narnia, hurtling towards their various fates.

The idea of revisiting a character some years before we first met them has been on my mind lately thanks to watching Better Call Saul, the prequel to Breaking Bad. A brilliant piece of scriptwriting, it depicts the earlier life of the off-beat lawyer Saul "I can make it legal!" Goodman, one of the show-stealing characters in the first series. The story is so sure-footed, you'd think the writers had known every detail of Saul's origins before they gave him a part in Breaking Bad, but in fact, once the new series had been commissioned, they made it up one episode at a time, to explain the sort of man he is when by the time he and Walter White meet.

A back story in fiction - or film - has so many advantages over a sequel, I can't think why more writers don't take advantage of it. Remaining true to the known facts is the only obvious hurdle to be cleared. Thereafter, there is something psychologically satisfying about getting a richer perspective on a tale we already love, adding layers of meaning and depth. A sequel, by contrast, has greater potential to disappoint, characters changing or distorting with time in a way that risks diminishing the pleasure of the first book. There is also the dramatic certainty in a prequel that the reader knows how the story ultimately ends before they start, so that the element of surprise and revelation it must contain is of an entirely different, subtler kind.

Countless novels have had memorable sequels, either by their own author or those who purloin their characters. But, with the exception of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, where she takes Charlotte Bronte's "madwoman in the attic" in Jane Eyre and creates a politically electrifying account of who this woman was, I can't think of many outstanding prequels. It's a pity. Novelists in search of a good idea might do worse than take their cue from the creators of Saul, and go back to their own work. Those of a magpie disposition are free to mine other people's books for inspiration too.