Happy Ever After?

For some time I have been intrigued by the stories not told in books written with children in mind (I’ll use the shorthand “children’s literature” from now on): the author (and sometimes the reader) consider what happens before a story starts, what happens alongside and afterwards. In some books these “beyond the text” narratives are hardly dealt with at all, and characters emerge like Athene from the brow of Zeus, fully formed. It can work well: the child reader particularly perhaps invests in a child they might assume to be like themselves. Often the characters are introduced and then bits and pieces of their lives are dropped in. This too works well (if done sensibly), fleshing out details of the character as needed. Rarely, however, do we see this detail in the minor characters, and we are often left at the end of a book with “that’s all right then:” justice is served, wrongs put to rights and “all manner thing shall be well.”

Folktales, because the characterisation operates on a very different level, can sometimes have a sudden ending that is unsatisfactory in terms of modern structure: characters are set up, have an adventure or resolve a crisis and go away, go home, marry a prince or princess and live happily ever after. It seems to me that these stories have broadly the themes of return and resolution (often retribution). This kind of traditional tale may raise eyebrows as we read them today, but the point is that the curtain falls on a happy scene.

But what about afterwards? How long is “happy ever after” anyway? Ever strikes me as the problem here: per omnia saecula saeculorum is not how mortals live.

Sometimes, when picking up the “afterwards,” stories end with a challenge: The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff ends with the responsibility laid on the protagonist (and by implication the reader) that it is “for us to keep something burning to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind. (I have blogged about it here); similarly Susan Cooper’s sequence The Dark is Rising ends with the charge “you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you.” So it is ip to survivors and their descendents to make sense of it all, to take on the lessons learned. Peter Dickinson’s stories of the development of the first humans in Africa, The Kin, ends with a similar message – but of course the “for ever” includes us as readers, knowing the “hopes and fears of all the years” of humanity.

C S Lewis has it right, I think (and hence the title of this blog) in his sharp-eyed if rather wordy poem from The Pilgrim’s Regress:

Whom Thy great Exit banishes, no after age Of epilogue leads back upon the lighted stage.
Where is Prince Hamlet when the curtain’s down?
Where fled Dreams at the dawn, or colours when the light is sped?
We are thy colours, fugitive, never restored,
Never repeated again. Thou only art the Lord…

Although fiction of a very different kind, there is something of a parallel with A A Milne: at the end of The House at Pooh Corner, Pooh’s world does come to an end: Christopher Robin has the burden of knowing that he is growing up and away from his nursery companions (the “Lords of the Nursery” in the poignant Milne poem Forgotten) “looking out over the world and wishing it wouldn’t stop” (NB: this was an uncomfortable issue for Christpher as he grew up, as he records). Yet here, too, the author steps back from complete loss: Pooh Bear becomes the icon for a childhood largely lost, yet retained in a parallel world of memory, so that “in that enchanted place on top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.” It may be a fond wish of the author that his imagination will continue to colour his child’s life or a plea from the author to adult and child readers to retain something of the imagination and innocence of the Hundred Acre Wood – but whichever it is, in Milne’s world destruction is never that total.

While death is present in challenging, even nihilistic ways (compare Ehrlbruch’s meditative Death Duck and Tulip and Brooks’ brutal  Bunker Diary), it is rare for a book to deal with the end of all things explicitly. One book, Hiawyn Oram’s  Angry Arthur does so – or at least uses the imagery of destruction to describe a child whose emotions are raging: at the end, he is in bed, alone on a fragment of earth floating in space, his violent emotions subsiding, but unable to remember what caused his tantrum. Parents gone, world shattered. While it might be read as comic hyperbole, this has always struck me as an imperfect way to look at children’s uncomfortable emotions: almost completely destructive, with no way back. It does, however, raise the question of what will the end of my family look like? What will the end of the world be like – and what comes after it?  The issue is addressed in school and in popular science, but the probable absence of a human audience makes it an unlikely topic. 

In the book that first let me encounter the idea of total destruction, Comet In Moominland, the whole world is threatened with a fiery comet that will hit the earth on the seventh of October. “Mamma will know what to do,” Moomin comforts himself, although it is plain that a comet’s impact will be cataclysmic in a way that no Mamma will be able to lessen. In the finale, the cast of characters are gathered and are kept safe in a cave as the comet passes close by but does not hit Moominvalley. The threat of the comet (which may stand in the Moomin world for the Bomb?) passes away, and the horror of its near-destruction of the world is replaced by a restoration: a world back in the order it should have, an invitation to explore it. Mamma did indeed know what to do, although there is a concerted effort by everyone to bring them to safety. It is not the animals that keep themselves safe but a natural disaster that does not come about. The story therefore ends with an opening of a new view: “I think everything is still there… Come with me and have a look.” The new view takes Moomin, his family and friends into new adventures: total destruction has not come about, and the world is full of possibility.

or

And When Did You Last See Your Father?

Fictional child is called upon to display courage, loyalty and maybe moral leadership as a Puritan Government official questions him about his father, whom Cromwell’s officers are pursuing. Family watch anxiously from the left of the picture, while on right, the table, the gentlemen facing back into the room, the wall behind them all put a stop to the narrative continuing. The young boy is at the extreme of the crisis, facing stern authority without his dad. The tearful big sister is going to be next, and the hand of the soldier on her back suggests she is being pushed forward: all rests on the boy.

And yet the father is present, in a way: the firm gaze of the boy confronting his inquisitor, his hands behind his back. He has learned what it is to stand firm.

The awkward irony of this post is that the dads I will be discussing are very much in evidence, and the children are not the immaculately turned-out boy in pale sky blue (or indeed the tearful girl who we might assume to be his [?older] sister), but the children at the heart of the swirling emotions of books by Anthony Browne and Ian Eagleton/Jessica Knight. And they are not firm of purpose, but children in flux. I contend that both families are labile, and face challenges just as the wrong-but-romantic Cavalier family I started with. But while the when-did-you-last-see-your-father brigade propose an image of weak and tearful females as opposed to the firm chin and still form of the boy, the boys and men I want to discuss are survivors becaue of their openness to change.

There is a tangible absence in Ian Eagleton and Jessica Knight’s story of little Rory; his dad has moved out (or mum has moved out), and Rory, his lookalike son, lives with mum and mum’s new boyfriend, Tony. Rory misses his dad, although they meet up for an archetypical Saturdads time together in the park. In Rory’s Room of Rectangles Tony, nervous of the responsibility, takes Rory to an art gallery. They don’t see And When Did You Last See Your Father? or Käthe Kollwitz‘s unbending, grieving Father (I’m rather glad to say) but rooms of art which nevertheless challenge and move the little boy. They find nightmarish pictures, shimmering shapes and bright, loud, fierce art before coming to Tony’s favourite room. Tony is clearly not just joining in with Rory’s delight in painting: he gives something of himself in the room full of vibrant blues. This self-disclosure is key to the narrative: Tony is giving up something here. This is a risky day for all of them.

There is an unwelcome presence (as I see it) in Anthony Browne’s story where the dad – who uncomfortably dominated his family’s trip to the Zoo – similarly tries to assert himself in the hallowed halls of a London art gallery. In The Shape Game, his being there does not make for an easy read. Boorish, ill-at-ease when he is not the centre of attention, Browne seems to me to have created a figure of whom every dad reading the book would ask, anxiously, “Is this me?”

In Rory’s case he does find something new about his dad (does he, in a sense, rediscover his father?) and Tony’s sensitivity hints at a healthy relationship beginning here. What transformations of a father do we see in Anthony Browne’s Dad figure in The Shapes Game?

Here they are at the start of the book: dull tones, and a heavy border indicate a sense of entrapment. Maybe even Mum, leading the way for her birthday treat, senses it, with her three males slouching behind her.

This is not the footie match Dad and older brother are missing: there is little sense that today will be even mildly pleasant, let alone transformative.

Someone is going to have to give something up if today is going to be worth anything.

If he is confronted with motives to change, it is the art he encounters which forces Dad to become more open.

So here they are at the end of their visit. There is no frame to suggest they are trapped; the architecture across the river is transformed; the sky has a cloud-dove (a dove of peace?); Mum and Dad are walking together and the graffiti hints at the eponymous Shape Game the boys will play on the way home. The experience of the gallery has changed them all – and the autobiographical note at the beginning suggests it was this trip to the art gallery “that changed my life forever.” Mum had wanted to go “somewhere different,” and this has a deeper significance than simply a different physical location: the family are moving into a different place, and even home will be different.

Rory, in the Eagleton/Knight story experiences a transformation. But, like the family in Browne’s trip to the art gallery, is it only the little boy? Under Tony’s guidance Rory moves from room to room in the gallery, seeking something in all these forms of art to help him make sense, but outside is were he meets his father again. We get a hint that maybe he is on his mum’s boyfriend’s territory – or at least their common ground – with art, but the adult reader will maybe supply the conversations about how the three adults – mum, mum’s boyfriend, and dad – see Rory’s problems and propose a solution. In other words (to make the comparison between the two books), Dad and the boys in The Shape Game change by exposure to the art they encounter, whereas Rory comes to terms with his emotions in the gallery, while his three parenting figures have transformed their relationship “off-stage.”

What has changed?

Rory’s loyalty to his dad remains unshaken: he is, in this, like the boy who begins this blog post for us. But he has undergone something in the art gallery – and in the rage before it, and the reconciliation that follows it.As two American authors have put it* they – the males in both stories – are seen “developing and reclaiming their own fundamental human capacities.” It was in all four characters confronting their discomfort that they, like Anthony Browne’s family, move to “somewhere different.”

*Di Bianca, M. and Mahalik, J.R. (2022) ‘A relational-cultural framework for promoting healthy masculinities’, American Psychologist, 77(3), pp. 321–332

Some thoughts on picturebooks about death.

In my Twitter bio I often have some mention of my interest in picturebooks along the lines of looking for answers to big questions in small books. The review of Yumoto and Sakai’s The Bear and the Wildcat that I did recently for Just Imagine raised more questions about maybe the biggest of big questions, or at least the biggest in terms of what can be depicted in picturebooks: how do we deal with death?

For me, at any rate, The Bear and the Wildcat stands as one of the greats. Plain text, subdued artwork, and just enough raw emotion to take the reader somewhere uncomfotable. Why is the discomfort important?

Compare the two images here: the little bird from The Bear and the Wildcat and the family saying goodbye to their cat in Viorst and Blegvad’s The Tenth Good Thing About Barney. Both sparse in their own way, but the impact of the image in Barney is more muted because of the lack of the cat. Because Barney is really about the burial and what happens afterwards, Erik Blegvad focuses on the family (and the argument about heaven and decomposition). This is not an easy text, but it is the ideas in the dialogue that stand out for me.

A number of writers discuss death in picturebooks. Kelly Swain, for example, in the Lancet Child and Adolescent Health writes of her neice asking rather literally whether Great-Grandma Nancy had gone up to heaven or into the ground. The same question occurs in Barney. In the debtae about whether the cat is in heaven there is real impatience and ambiguity. Not so for the little bird in The Bear and the Wildcat, whose dead body is shown starkly but without sensation: the focus here is grief.

We meet bereavment in Varley’s classic (and in its time quite daring) Badger’s Parting Gifts, and we have also a desctription of death from Badger’s point of view: a “strange yet wonderful dream” yet going down a tunnel (a sort of good place for a Badger to go, and actually not unlike the behaviour of some Badgers).

The book that still feels to me raw and angry as well as deeply felt is the great book by Michael Rosen, his Sad Book, where Quentin Blake’s artwork walks hand-in-hand with Rosen’s pain.The lone figure in the evening rain, hands in pockets; the single candle of a painful solitude. In many ways the turning-point picture in The Bear and the Wildcat seems to me to be much the same: despairing loneliness, and the overarching bleak dark. Painful to read, but beautifully told, and certainly chimes with my own experience. In discussing the Sad Book Maria Popova in the gobsmacking Marginalian blog puts it so well:

What emerges is a breathtaking bow before the central paradox of the human experience — the awareness that the heart’s enormous capacity for love is matched with an equal capacity for pain, and yet we love anyway and somehow find fragments of that love even amid the ruins of loss.

Michael Rosen’s Sad Book: A Beautiful Anatomy of Loss, Illustrated by Quentin Blake https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/08/25/michael-rosens-sad-book-quentin-blake/

Other stories are possible, too. In Maia and What Matters we have a true-to-life complicated story of a grandmother losing her words and mobility, a grandfather dying, and little Maia, caught by all sorts of adult pressures being the one who knows what matters. True-to-life text here stands in tension with dreamy artwork where symbol and tone show Maia growing and loving and getting angry and taking charge in page after page of real days and might-have-beens until we are at the final denouement of grandma beside her husband’s coffin, stroking his hair. (As an aside I decided only to show the cover, because the large format of the book would be given no recognition by a small picture or excerpt of a larger spread)…

I have mentioned the companionship of death in Duck, Death and the Tulip – like The Bear and the Wildcat, another triumph from Gecko Press – and the picture here shows tenderness – and comedy? The incongruity of their friendship [until a cool wind ruffles Duck’s feathers] does allow for a wry smile:

Actually he was nice (if you forgot for a moment who he was). Really quite nice.

Wolf Ehrbruch, Duck, Death and the Tulip.

In The Bear and the Wildcat we look hard at grief; but in Thomas and Egneus’s Fox: a Circle of Life Story it is remarkable in its absence. The vixen is hit by a car, the cubs watch and then go their way. The fox is part of the autmnal decay –

Back to earth, to plants, to air flow the tiny particles that were once a fox.

Isabel Thomas, Daniel Egneus Fox: A Circle of Life Story

And so we come to a couple of books that do not look at grief, or at the possibility of an afterlife, but at a stark reality – only to find that in neither book is it particulartly harsh. The fox dies (quickly: no agony; no hunting horn) and in this last text, Lifetimes by Bryan Mellone and Robert Ingpen,

Nothing that is alive goes on living for ever… Sometimes, living things become ill or they get hurt. Mostly, of course, they get better again but there are times when they are so badly hurt or they are so ill that they die because they can no longer stay alive.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/113067/lifetimes-by-bryan-mellonie/

I might raise an eyebrow at the over-comfortable “Mostly,” but the book is clear about what will happen, and that this is part of they way things live “and that is their lifetime.”

So there seem to me to be ideas here worth disentangling. I have had to cut out for brevity Oliver Jeffers’ wonder The Heart and the Bottle in which grief is the key driver of the narrative – or, if not grief, then the love that engenders sorrow – and Glenn Ringtved’s Cry, Heart, But Never Break where again a personification of death imparts some wisdom, and so many more. But these stories deal with two principal themes: bereavement, and inevitablity/natural cycles. Maybe the “inevitability” books are ones that any child will be intrigued by; the bereavement books may have a particular audience. And this was where I stumbled in my review for Just Imagine. When asked “Who is this book (in this case, The Bear and the Wildcat) for?” it is often hard to pick an age range or educational context. Does this mean, however, that we must restrict children’s reading? Not for me: but it does mean that it is incumbent on educators (including the wonder that is a good school librarian) and parents to approach books with respect and something like humility. There are books for children and among them ones that will move adults to tears as well, and sometimes, even in the heart of their own sad time, the grown up needs to see which book a child might like, be interested in, be comforted by. It’s not easy.

I have met educators and parents who have said, of Duck, Death and the Tulip, that they would “never let a child have that book.” It clearly stirs something in us of a desire to protect children from the ultimate monster under the bed; yet there is even in that book a sense of hope. Death is not something to fear. And in the book that sparked this blog post, the sensitive and beautiful story of a bear who has lost his best friend, there is hope. Not some great afterlife hope – even though we are in Easter Week as I write – but simply that friendship helps, and that life goes on. |It can be painful and crazy as in Sad Book, and it can look like the comfort is illusory as in the discussions around Barney the cat, but there is this: compassion and friendship.