The Golden Age of Children's Fiction (1)

I was in such a hurry to grow up. At least in some things. By about 9 I was reading The Lord of the Rings and haunting the adult fantasy/science fiction shelves of the library. I wanted to read adult books, or so I believed. Like many, for a long time I confused adolescence with maturity. Of course, I now know that there are many books written for children which are far more mature, more literary, than many of the books I must have found in that library section. I know that I read all ten volumes of L. Ron Hubbard’s ridiculous Mission: Earth books. The one positive I can take from those is that it meant I knew who L. Ron Hubbard was when a scientologist approached me in the middle of Brighton attempting to recruit me.

Consequently, I know I missed out on many of the classics of children’s literature. Several writers I came across in childhood have been renewed discoveries in my late teens or adulthood: Rosemary Sutcliff, Alan Garner. I can remember my father reading The Weirdstone of Brisingamen to my brother and me. I must have read it and reread it by myself. We saw a theatre adaptation at the little local theatre. Yet I never got more than a few pages into the sequel. That and everything else Garner wrote was a discovery made at university.

One of the qualities that I think makes both Sutcliff and Garner great is that neither of them seem to be writing down to their audience. That their work is marketed to children feels largely accidental. These are the books they’d be writing whatever category their work was placed in. Of course, they also come from a generation when the commercial categories for children’s fiction, although some way along, were still partly in a process of formation.

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Susan Cooper, Over Sea, Over Stone. That sense of a genre still in formation is similarly present in the first of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence. The sense of the fantastic is present almost from the start, lurking in the background of an apparently realistic account of a family holiday to Cornwall, in which a middle class family who all speak in complete sentences are dropped into a rural landscape in which everyone speaks in dialect. Even the discovery of a fantastic treasure map doesn’t immediately trip things into the fantastic, and by the finish the supernatural elements have only started to emerge into what was an essentially realist narrative, if verging on the fantastic. I assume later books in the series have more magic, but this is still a wonderful depiction of what magic is. Not a violation of the material world, but a subtle adjunct to it.

Clearly, Susan Cooper had no plans for a series when she started the novel. She says herself it was only as she began the second in the sequence that she knew it would be a series of five books. That uncertainty gives the storytelling a wonderful looseness. A feeling that the narrative could spin off in any direction if only they hadn’t found that map… And like Garner and Sutcliff, she doesn’t write down to her audience. There’s an insistence on the detail of the landscape in which the story takes place, likely the product of a writer living in America and looking back with fondness to the place she’s since left, which also creates a wonderful sense of solidity to the place in which these fantastical goings on are occurring. The portrait of the small seaside town and its inhabitants, the hills and lanes, is one of the things which lingers most. It grounds the fantasy, and enhances the feeling of magic in the story. Which is enhanced by Michael Heslop’s scratchy illustrations.

Yes, I would have loved this if I’d read it as a kid. It’s exactly the kind of fantasy I loved. A holiday and a treasure hunt turning into a real adventure. The past as a source of mystery and danger. Of course, as an adult, there’s the odd element I could perhaps do without. The scene early on which leads to their discovery of the map, where they’re playacting a narrative of explorers in a jungle rehearses every racist cliché of fearsome natives you could hope to find. Even this almost feels innocent though. That’s exactly the sort of game we did act out when we were kids, isn’t it? We didn’t know enough to know we were being offensive.

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Phillip Pullman, The Scarecrow and His Servant. Almost in a reverse to Susan Cooper, where the supernatural emerges into the real world, in Phillip Pullman’s ‘fairy tale’ the real world emerges into the fantasy. According to Pullman, this is the fourth of his stories he designates ‘fairy tales'. All of them take place in a landscape which is already familiar from fairy tale, but personally I felt this at least was closer in spirit to an 18^th century picaresque. And the law case over a contested inheritance feels straight out of a 19^th century novel. That might be the point though. Pullman’s fantasy never really takes us that far away from the real world.

I seem to remember when it came out that someone had absurdly suggested that the characters in the story could be read as a parody of the relationship between George Bush and Tony Blair. The scarecrow is obviously foolish, but essentially loveable. The relationship with Jack, his servant, is surely the model of the wiser underling and his master which ultimately derives from Roman comedy. It’s a fictional trope. And what they’re faced up against are commerce and political corruption which would destroy the landscape and drain its wells because they can only see it as a material thing to be exploited. It’s the real world we’re all faced with, a tragedy which we’re all to some extent implicated in. This is a comedy though, so here there is ultimately a happy solution.

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Despite my rush to grow up (which in any case ended up taking rather longer than it does for many people), I don’t think I ever quite stopped reading children’s fiction, especially if writers I liked – Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville – would write books for children as well as adults. Obviously, I haven’t read that much modern children’s fiction. I’ve read Harry Potter and (clearly) Phillip Pullman, but then everyone has read them, Lemony Snicket and Holly Black.

If I’m currently more interested in reading books that I could have read as a child, this may only be the product of nostalgia. Certainly, when faced with the hideous computer generated art on the covers of the most recent reprints of Susan Cooper’s books, I opted instead to track down older copies from the 1980s, the copy I could have read when I was a child, with painted covers which are far more suited to the narrative’s charms. I also fell prey to one of the problems inherent in some old books. About half way through reading it, the spine broke and the first half of the text broke away from the glue attaching it to the spine. It upsets me that this damage should have occurred from reading it, but since I refuse to acquire any form of electronic reading device such as ebook or kindle (even if I could afford one), then I’m going to have to accommodate myself to such accidents.

Quotes...Rabindranath Tagore

But life does not cease to flow. It goes on as usual. The sun will rise tomorrow, and even the smallest of chores will not be overlooked.

Rabindranath Tagore, Choker Bali

A (by now, somewhat belated) New Year's Resolution

I was going to say I'd try and write a post for this blog once a week, but by this point I've already failed that one. I've never been very good at making (never mind keeping) New Year's Resolutions. When I look at some of the bloggers I follow, I feel genuinely impressed by the amount they manage to write for their blogs, and can't help wondering where I'm going wrong. No, I think if I am to make a resolution, it should be to stop stressing when I don't have the time or the energy to write something. I've no idea if anyone is even reading this. Even my wife seems to have lost interest! Nobody is putting any pressure on me to write anything for this blog. I'm not going out of my way to get attention. And I've got enough challenges in the rest of my life away from this blog. So really, I should just concentrate on writing when I can, and enjoying it when I do.

Still, there are a few things I wanted or meant to write about last year:

Marina Warner, The Lost Father: A truly magnificent historical fiction which, in it's final few pages undermines the very notion of historical fiction, of history as a stable narrative. The romantic fiction of an Italy which was still mired in a peasant culture, or a politically committed narrative of left wing agitation? In trying to tell her a story of her family's history, the narrator finally ends up stranded between the two, uncertain if everything she's written, which constitutes the bulk of the novel's telling, is just gilding a fiction, the story her mother preferred over what may have actually happened. It was one of the best novels I read last year, and these few words barely scratch the surface of what makes it so great. Even if it is a romantic fantasy, it still contains plenty of the changing social history of the lives of ordinary women in Italy over the 20th century, as well as Felliniesque fantasy, and a language which is as stoical and resilient as the lives of the characters it describes. The past feels more real than the present day framing sequences.

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Alan Wall, China. I actually started a post on this, back in September, and I still intend to finish it. Soon, I hope.

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Caryl Phillips, A New World Order & Cambridge: The introduction to Phillips' collection of journalism is fascinating, seemingly as it is coming out of a cultural moment before the twin towers fell in New York. Looking over the various events and cultural figures covered in his book, Phillips imagines a future when the migrant, the stranger, the other is instinctively accepted and acknowledged as an equal. The 'New World Order' of his title. A cautiously optimistic vision of the positive side of globalisation. Without digging it out of the pile I can't check the exact reference, but I hope I'm not misrepresenting Phillips. He doesn't seem like a writer who ever settles for the easy or complacent answer, and I'm sure he expressed what I'm trying to express with more nuance than my clumsy attempt at paraphrasing. Thinking about the last decade or so, it's hard to escape the conclusion that things haven't quite worked out like that. Certainly in this country migrants have become the favourite bogeyman of the right and a fair chunk of the left. Married to an immigrant who was born outside the EU, I know from first hand experience just how hard the political establishment wants to make it for such people to settle here, even if they're married to a British citizen. We're probably (hopefully) in a far more fortunate position than many, and yet it still feels like we're currently running along a bridge as it crumbles behind us, desperate to reach safety.

Another theme which emerges from a number of these pieces is that of identity and its relationship with roots. Phillips rightly objects to a British cultural identity which would exclude him and others from a similar or parallel background. The book is organised in a way which reflects his own personal sense of his divided roots, slpit between Africa, the Caribbean, Britain and America. It's a neat retort to a British national identity which is in any case so often unstable. The only point I found myself wanting to make in response is that it is possible to feel excluded from a British identity even if you're white and come from a family which has lived in Britain for centuries. For whatever reason, I've never had a sense of roots or continuity within my own family. If I look at the photos of my grandparents in middle age for instance, I only feel a distance of the historical moment they were formed by and lived in. I've finally reached a point in my life where I feel I could actually speak to my parents and both sides would be able to hear the other. Only one of them is already gone, and the other very ill.

And if I look to literature for a cultural identity, I still feel excluded there, even if literature is really the only home that I have. Perhaps it's simply because I've lived in the North of England for most of my life, and perhaps its because of the books I happened to bumped up against as a reader, which is always partly down to chance. My first loves were science fiction and fantasy, but whatever genre you read, the bulk of our literature here, whether popular or literary has come from the South East of England, particularly London. Yes, I know we've had regional fiction since at least the 18th century, but that in itself makes my point. In the ways in which it's produced and sold to a reading public, its structured and related to its opposite, the metropolis, London.

Of course, this is a white man's lament, even if I may have an ancestor who came from Ethiopia. I couldn't compare whatever sense of loss or absence I possess with the far more challenging experience of growing up in Leeds as a black man of Caribbean descent in the 1970s. I grew up in a later decade, part of the dominant culture.

Cambridge is the fiction to go alongside the non-fiction, colliding a young woman out of Jane Austen with the degrading reality of slavery, the exploitation on which much of prosperous British 18th century society was built. It's mostly narrated from her perspective, but also in the voice of the educated slave Cambridge who comes to fascinate her but whose fate ultimately alienate her from any chance of seeing the slaves as fellow human beings. It was probably impossible for a woman of her background in the 18th century to make such a leap, but you can see the beginnings of such a struggle between the lines of her writing. Phillips is scrupulous fair to both his narrators. His Austen-like protagonist isn't uniquely horrible, although she can be unpleasant at times, and Cambridge isn't unrealistically heroic. They're both people living in circumstances not of their choosing, trapped by the attitudes bred in them by their historically contingent experience. This isn't a fiction which looks back on the past merely to moralise about it, because what would be the point of that? I think most people who might read a literary fiction about slavery have probably already made up their minds on the issue. The climatic moment of violence employs EM Forster's Marabar Caves device to depict the clash between the two cultures, left deliberately vague. Neither perspective allows us a clear view, so we're left suspended with a vision of people who have all been brutalised by a cruel social reality.

It's probably not ironic that I remember Cambridge's name over hers when his name is the title of the book. Of course, Cambridge isn't his name. Or rather it's only one of the names he possesses during his narrative.

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The Box of Delights. Appropriately, I rewatched the BBC adaptation from 1984 in the run up to Christmas, this time in the company of my wife. When I first watched it as an adult a few years ago I was a little disapointed, able to see all the faults, but perhaps because I was watching it with my wife, this time I found myself enchanted anew.

If I had to make a list of the half dozen or so things that formed me and my tastes when I was growing up, this would be on my list. You see what I was saying above? It's English, and despite the exterior scenes being filmed in Scotland, it's cultural setting is clearly the South East of England. As a child I was enchanted. As an adult I can see the story doesn't really hang together, being a jumble of magical scenes and stuff which never really coheres into a consistent plot. It's full of this 'stuff which kids will like'. A car which transforms into a jet. Magical flight and transformation. Mythical beings. All of which makes sense of the ending which so many people seem to see as a disapointment. If it feels like a dream then perhaps it's only right and proper that Kay Harker should awake at the end. It's the second of two stories John Masefield wrote about the character (the first, The Midnight Folk wasn't made into a radio and TV show that marked the imagination of generations, and I've not read it either), so perhaps his awakening from at the end is also a waking into adulthood, leaving magic and wonder behind.

But does the lack of coherence matter? For me as a child (and now as an adult), what holds my attention is the feel of the magic. His brief meeting with the Roman soldiers adds nothing to the plot, but its necesary because Kay is encountering the matter of Britain in his dreams and travels, and you wouldn't have had the British Empire without the experience of the Roman one. The fact that the police inspector is so unrealistically useless is simply part of the charm. The special effects may feel clumsy and dated, but that's all to the good. If they really are remaking it as a film, then you just know the special effects will make extensive use of CGI, and they will almost certainly fail to capture the ellusive quality of the magic which they managed in 1984. The animation has a painted, even sensuous quality. The talking animals, the existence of which Kay accepts without much surprise, are clearly people in cumbersome masks. It all points towards the theatrical quality which so much British TV used to have. Dressing up and putting on a play. I rather miss all that. And Patrick Troughton is Cole Hawkins. They can't improve on that.

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Edmund De Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes. A friend was raving about this a few weeks before Christmas and then the following week at work I had to catalogue about 60 or so books relating to Japanese art and culture. I lost count of the number of times I must have typed the word 'netsuke'. So clearly the world was pushing me to make this the book I read next. And it really is worth raving about, a beautifully written account of the different times and places this collection of 250 netsuke occupy as it is passed through five generations of the Ephrussi family. I was impressed by his refusal of nostalgia, the easy miteleuropean fantasy of a lost inheritance which the story could so easily have been. Yet a real anger still comes through in the account of what has been lost and stolen.

The narrative repeatedly bumps up against antisemitism. First, it's Charles Ephrussi's experiences in turn of the century Paris, when all his former friends turn on him following the Dreyfuss affair. Even the fact that Charles is apparently viewed as the lesser of the two models for Proust's Charles Swann from A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu by some scholars starts to have the whiff of anti-semitism once you see the evidence laid out. The story then moves to Vienna between the wars when the collection is given as a wedding gift to Victor. And we all know how that story eventually ended. The collection was only saved by an extraordinary act of bravery performed by one of their former servants under the very noses of the Nazis. By this point in my life I've read and seen more than enough about the Nazi period of twentieth century European history. I've even visited the Holocaust museum in Israel. And reading about it yet again still has the power to shock. Even in the present, when De Waal arrives in Vienna to carry out his research he notes that the synagogue is being guarded because of feared attacks following the recent election in which the far right party did well. That story didn't end in 1945.

De Waal completely transforms his family saga through his attention to objects, these beautiful things which passed through so many hands, and which have survived the destruction wrought by history. its a privilaged family, both in the fantastic wealth they once possessed and the rich objects they owned, and in the artistic links to poets and painters, the references in Proust and Musil. It's a form of privilage, art, which is never lost even when the wealth is gone. His grandmother may have lost everything, but she still had her correspondence with Rilke, her knowledge and taste. These are the things which make privilage feel innate.