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 18th century picaresque. And the law case over a contested inheritance feels straight out of a 19th 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.
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