The Golden Age of Children's Fiction (4)

Susan Cooper, Silver on the Tree

The final book in a series that I could have read as a child. Frankly, I really should have done, but for some reason I never came across this series. It's exactly the sort of thing I liked though, ancient mystical forces appearing in a rural English landscape. Welsh landscape in this case, which is oddly appropriate to me now that I actually live in a Welsh landscape myself. Not that I had any inkling about that move when I was reading the Susan Cooper's series throughout what is now the year before last.

It being so long since I read it, this post has obviously been hanging around unfinished for some time.  It's one of several, and my current plan for the blog is either to finish or else give up on this handful of unfinished posts, and then hopefully start posting a little more regularly. As here, more recent reading will likely intrude. Like most plans, it will no doubt prove to be unrealisable.

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But I really did want to write a final piece about this series, and the last book seemed to the right place to do so, since it's where all the characters introduced throughout the series are finally brought together. As satisfying as the ending is with a resolution the supernatural conflicts between the 'Dark' and the 'Light' which stretches throughout the series, it's not perhaps the strongest entry. Although the first book was published in 1965, with the following volumes taking place over the following seasons/year, yet it feels as though time has moved on in other ways, and we're now in the mid-70s. Or at least that's the way it feels to me, with an encounter early on with a moment of everyday racism in the tormenting of a Sikh boy Harry Singh that seems to belong more to 1977. That period which encompassed the immigration of Asians from Kenya as well as economic/industrial decline, coming after Enoch Powell's infamous 'Rivers of blood' speech in 1968, and after the 1973 oil crisis.

Once again, we have the ambiguity of precisely what the nature of the threat is that the dark represents. At times it's equated with the nationalist fear of historical attacks on England, yet elsewhere it seems to a more general sense of evil. Equally, as I've said before, the supernatural is never an excuse for human evil. The ignorance and racism of Harry Singh's tormentors as well as their bigoted father is only a means for the supernatural to enter and influence their lives, rather than being the source of their evil.

This is also in keeping with a fantasy in which magic is not only something kept apart from the world, but also kept to strict rules. This is most obvious in the climax to The Grey King where Bran and Will Stanton are tested by representatives of the Dark and the Light, balanced by a member of the 'High' magic, one of several forces which exist apart from the warring factions of the Dark and the Light. Similarly there is a long section in which our heroes are travelling through a magical landscape - the 'Lost Land' - in which they are occasionally threatened by a representative of the Dark. Yet there's something lacking in his threat. The Dark is as bound by the rules of this world as is the Light, and with so much of the action seemingly foretold, there's never any real feeling of a convincing threat. Of course we know with a story of this kind that 'good' will eventually triumph, but if there is no sense that the opposing force could ever achieve victory, then it can ultimately feel rather hollow.

In contrast, the earlier novels, perhaps because they aren't intended to conclude anything, are rather more effective in portraying the Dark as a credible power. They also have more space to investigate more human concerns. The Grey King, the fourth book, with it's depiction of the relationship between King Arthur's son Bran and his adoptive and overprotective father Owen Davies in contemporary Wales, is possibly one of the most emotionally powerful children's novels that I can remember reading. Despite it's supernatural elements, with a hunt for the golden harp which will wake the magical Sleepers in preparation for the final battle, at it's heart it's a very human story about their relationship.

There's a similarly human, and very touching, moment towards the end of Silver on the Tree. The character John Rowlands is offered the choice of whether he should remember the horror of what his wife Blodwen became in the service of the Dark. In fact, all of the human characters eventually choose amnesia. Bran ultimately decides to remain with his adoptive father, rejecting his immortality. Magic is ultimately banished from the world. Whilst the Dark is ultimately defeated, the victory of the Light is ultimately to free humanity from supernatural influence, which also includes the workings of the Light. Although the forces of the Dark are clearly evil in their intent, those of the Light are not always wholly admirable. It gives a real sense of the cost of this conflict, as well as an implicit judgement that it is ultimately quotidian human experience which is most important.

An important message for a children's story to provide. And by 'message', I don't mean anything that's didactic in intent. By it's nature, the 'quotidian' has little moral force. It's - merely, if you like - the experience of the lives we live. One consequence of the use of fantasy is that perhaps part of it's appeal can implicitly denigrate the ordinary lives we lead when we close the covers of the book. After all, what child wouldn't want to discover they had inherited mystical powers as part of magical elite? Or else, find themselves caught up in an exciting adventure? Well, that's the kind of child I was, at least!

So fantasy is given up for the realities of (eventually) adult life, but not until after we've thoroughly enjoyed the adventure.

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On final point. A contemporary review of Silver on the Tree, helpfully quoted on Wikipedia, compares the series to Narnia, and makes the point most of the assembled heroes are ordinary children who 'do not seem up to the task' of defeating the Dark. Whilst it could be suggested that this a rather condescending view of what are, after all, fantasies intended for a readership of children, it's worth thinking through a bit more deeply. Simply because, in today's world, we have a real world example of children pressed into service in real world wars. Child soldiers are one of the moral horrors of our time (not that children weren't involved in warfare in the past, of course, but was it in quite the same way?). I don't think I'm stretching a point here to find a metaphor in the roles imposed on characters who are children in these kinds of stories.

Of course, this is surely part of the attraction to a young reader, the identification with child heroes who can take on such roles. Yet, is that not a danger it self? I'm reminded of a criticism by A.S. Byatt, that Narnia is dangerous because it embodies an uncritical and solipsistic over involvement with fantasy, in which the child protagonist is literally swallowed up by the product of the imagination. Put like that, such fantasies do clearly embody a worrying model for reading. Byatt's complaint is also part of her general distrust of the imagination. It's a distrust she shares with figures as disparate as Alan Bennett and - going further back - Flaubert. I can't help feel that such distrust of the imagination is Protestant in its inspiration. Children - most readers in fact - are for the most part perfectly able to distinguish between the imagination and reality. Part of the attraction of fantasy is precisely the fact that it is fantasy.

Yet that isn't to deny that there is something troubling here in the figure of a child pressed into service in a supernatural conflict. And we do now have one novel which confronts precisely this issue. Alan Garner's Boneland shows how profoundly traumatic it might be to survive such an encounter with the supernatural as a child in its portrait of the deeply troubled Colin Whisterfield. For all that the psychotherapist Colin meets is also a magical figure, and the service she provides seems remarkably quick in it's effects, it's still one of the most convincing portraits of the therapeutic process that I've come across in fiction. Boneland is a novel I'm glad I read as an adult.

The Golden Age of Children's Fiction (2)

Rosemary Sutcliff, The Silver Branch

The second book in the trilogy 'Three Legions', which I can still remember coming across more than once in my school library. I think I may even have tried to start reading it, but didn't get very far into the first book. It was a copy of the third book in the sequence, The Lantern Bearers, a present in childhood which for some reason I held onto and finally read either during or just after university. So I've encountered them out of order, but really that hardly matters. This isn't much of a trilogy at all, each book taking place at different periods in Roman British history, with little to connect them other the odd subtle link, members of the Aquila family and a silver dolphin seal ring. In fact, if you look at Wikipedia, you can see the series carries on well past this supposed 'trilogy', past the departure of the Roman legions from British shores, up until the Norman conquest, and elsewhere even spinning off into Arthurian fantasy. I shall enjoy following this saga further, as Rosemary Sutcliff really is one of the finest historical novelists I've come across.

It was a rather pompous review of Hilary Mantel's recent Thomas Cromwell novels by James Wood which helped me put my finger on just why Sutcliff's fiction is so successful. I say the review is pompous, because historical fiction, in his words, 'a somewhat gimcrack genre not exactly jammed with greatness', is a genre he clearly looks down upon. This is his accounting for Hilary Mantel's success:

Where much historical fiction gets entangled in the simulation of historical authenticity, Mantel bypasses those knots of concoction, and proceeds as if authenticity were magic rather than a science. She knows that what gives fiction its vitality is not the accurate detail but the animate one, and that novelists are creators, not coroners, of the human case. In effect, she proceeds as if the past five hundred years were a relatively trivial interval in the annals of human motivation.

But that surely, is the measure of success of a great deal of historical fiction? Having so little time for the genre, Woods compares Mantel's achievement to the work of Peter Ackroyd and Susan Sontag. Now, I'm unfamiliar with Susan Sontag's fiction, but I've read a lot of Peter Ackroyd's work, and it seems to me that he is engaged on an entirely different project, his approach to historical fiction being that of a lively pastiche, enjoying the feel of the language. They are entirely literary games, but then he, like I imagine Susan Sontag, is writing historical fiction post-The Name of the Rose, which might be seen as the marker for the new type of historical fiction which started to be written in the 80s. I wish I'd kept a link to the academic book I found online which delineated this tradition of a 'new historical fiction'. The point I think is that it encompassed a new self-consciousness about narrative, and particularly about language. Hence the profusion of literary pastiche. Of course, this development occurred alongside the development of modern 'literary' fiction, with which it shares many characteristics.

Which isn't to say that people didn't carry on writing the older type of historical fiction, particularly in the genres. We even had the creation of the historical crime story. It's just to note that there's nothing 'mysterious' about Hilary Mantel's achievement. It's exactly the same kind of achievement you can find in a novel published for children in the late-1950s. I've no idea if Rosemary Sutcliff's fictional representation of Roman Britain is true exactly, even if I went through and checked every little detail against the known archaeological and historical facts. But it feels true, as if this must be how it felt to be alive at the time, because all of the human motivations and feelings feel wholly recognisable.

What I also recognise is the time in which it was written. These 'Roman' novels are a portrait of an empire in decline written by the subject of another empire also in the process of decline. A theme which becomes more prominent in The Lantern Bearers is the need to preserve the 'light' of civilisation against the darkness of the surrounding barbarism, is introduced here through the character of the self-proclaimed British emperor Carausius, whose motivation for his declaration is precisely that: a self-conscious attempt to halt, if only temporarily, a slide from civilisation into barbarism. It should come as no surprise that Rosemary Sutcliff wrote a book on Rudyard Kipling, and counted him as a major influence.

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Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising

When my wife read the Over Sea, Under Stone, she described it to me as like The Famous Five crossed with The Lord of the Rings. A description I loved. She then proceeded to read the entire series over the course of the last week.

In contrast to the first book, here we're thrown into the magic world underpinning the real one within the first twenty pages or so, as Will Stanton, seventh son of a seventh son, quickly learns that he is in fact one of the 'Old Ones', a secret society of immortal beings who protect the world from the forces of the 'Dark'. The main action of the book can easily be reduced to a kind of 'schooling of a sorcerer' as Will learns of his secret heritage through a series of infodumps and collects a series of plot-coupons which will preserve the world for the forces of light until the next time the Dark attacks. That it doesn't feel shcematic is entirely to the credit of Susan Cooper's ability both to tell a story and root it in a richly imagined world.

Whilst the Light is characterised by a patchwork of characters drawn from myths which have attached themselves to the British land - Merlin, Herne the Hunter, Wayland the Smith, even Arthur (or so I assume; he isn't named here, presumably to reappear later in the sequence?), the Dark is largely amorphous, a mysterious threatening entropic force. The characters we meet who are on the side of the Dark only serve it, they don't embody it in the way that those of the light appear do. The character who comes closest to such a role is the mysterious 'Dark Rider' who appears as a Mr. Mithothin (or, 'Myth'-o-thin, embodying the entropic quality of the Dark).

As with the earlier book, there's a wonderful sense here of another world existing behind the cover of the world we see in front of us every day. Here though, we get to see what that world actually looks like, with it's surreal trips into the past. Again, it's not just myth, but the presence of the past which is impinging on the present. I love how so much of this sense of the numinous appears to be conveyed through music. There's so much music in this book: carols (it is set at Christmas), church music, a setting of A.E. Housmann, Greensleeves (which seems to be related to the mysterious tune Will hears at moments of greatest significance), even the Hunting of the Wren. The use of music matches the way in which, whenever magic appears in the narrative, Cooper's writing becomes diffuse, in contrast to the rootedness in a realistic sense of place and character she employs elsewhere. The picture of what's going on becomes a little unclear, like a half remembered song.

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I know from a piece I read in Alan Garner's essay collection The Voice That Thunders, that one of the common experiences shared by all of the writers who came to prominence in the golden age of children's fiction in the 60s and 70s is that of having grown up with the experience of the Second World War. Certainly, there is something of the spirit of the Blitz in the way in which the Dark is presented:

He saw one race after another come attacking his island country, bringing each time the malevolence of the Dark with them, wave after wave of ships rushing inexorably at the shores. Each wave of men in turn grew peaceful as it grew to know and love the land, so that the Light flourished again. But always the Dark was there, swelling and waning, gaining a new Lord of the Dark whenever a man deliberately chose to be changed into something more dread and powerful than his fellows. Such creatures were not born to their doom, like the Old Ones, but chose it. 

...He saw a time when the first great testing of the light came, and the Old Ones spent themselves for three centuries on bringing their land out of the Dark, with the help in the end of their greatest leader, lost in the saving unless one day he might wake and return again.

My wife (the medieval historian in the family) tells me that the imagery of waves of ships comes straight from Bede and Gildas. I don't doubt that you're right about that my dear, it's clearly an echo of the popular image of the Viking raids, but I also think that such imagery must have seemed particularly apt to someone who had lived through the Second World War as a child and to a readership growing up in it's aftermath (and in Britain the aftermath of the Second World War lasted well into the 60s; in fact, in some ways, culturally we're still living in that aftermath). The evil that the Dark represents is never explicitly defined, allowing it carry a multitude of metaphorical possibilities.

As well as World War Two, they also belonged to the generation which grew up celebrating Empire Day, before it was superseded by Commonwealth Day. They belonged to the last generation for whom the British Empire was an inescapable fact, part of the furniture which made up the cultural background. Will's older brother Stephen is in the British navy, stationed out in the West Indies, where he meets a magic foreigner who gives him one of the essential items Will needs to complete his quest. It's a very odd moment. I mean, what on earth is an avatar of Herne the Hunter doing there? It feels like a somewhat clumsy attempt to make a story which is otherwise intensely focused on the matter of Britain a little more universal.

In the imagery Susan Cooper deploys above, she's also using essentially the same symbolism as Rosemary Sutcliff. Civilisation is the 'light' which has to be protected against the Dark. And these quasi-aristocratic Old Ones are born not made, defending a light which is centred on this island nation. It's appropriate that there's a degree of Royal symbolism floating about the narrative. Which is not to say that it doesn't also complicate and simple assumption about the definition of the British nation and forces of the Light. Arthur, assuming it is he, is described by Merriman as 'part-Viking', suggesting a mingling of the native and foreign. And the forces of the Light aren't always kind. The figure of the Walker, condemned to walk through the centuries because he betrayed his master's trust, is hugely sympathetic; his actions, his choice of the dark, the result of the way his trust had been abused by his former master.

That ultimately, is what is so refreshing about Cooper's conception of the Dark. It is, ultimately, always a matter of choice, not something which is intrinsic to an invading race or person. In time, the invader's settle down. Evil is contingent.

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.