Pas Devant Les Enfants

A spat of sorts came and went in the Guardian and places where they tweet last week over A Song for Ella Grey, and Lynne Reid Banks’ reaction to its marketing – or placing it among “children’s books:”

In the first five pages there is lesbian love, swearing, drinking, and enough other indications that, once again, this is not a book for children. Children are people up to the age of 12. They are not grownups of 17. The books are going straight back to Waterstones.

Woe to us who really do write for children! No prizes for us. Publishing is not a children’s world any more.

I can sympathise with her to some extent, in that I feel that better categories and prizes associated with them might actually lead to a celebration of quality that is more discernible. I am less sure about the tone she adopts, which has an acerbic tone of distaste reminiscent of Joyce Grenfell‘s “George! Don’t do that!”

I have to ask myself if there are stories or parts of stories that I would avoid reading with children. I do find Roald Dahl’s casual racism hard to get round – unacceptable even in the dates of publication, something that I have always edited out. Even this isn’t perhaps a reason for editing them out of children’s experience completely. C S Lewis is not immune from this either, and his views on how young women grow up strikes a sour note at the end of The Last Battle to say the least. But then we have the Junk shouting match from the 1990s, and a pious Christian asking me if I would “let” my teenager at much the same time read His Dark Materials. There is debate here about childhood, agency and censorship.

However, what it raised for me, in discussion with my colleague Mat Tobin today was something about the transferability of children’s narratives. Is one of the marks of whether a story “holds water” as to whether it might be told to adults or from the adult perspective?

Two brief examples:

What might The Children of Green Knowe be like if written for adults and from the perspective of Mrs Oldknow? Mrs Oldknow’s comfortable magical realism is disrupted by the (welcome) intrusion of her great grandson, whose curiosity forces her to come to terms with a series of horrific deaths. I think this could work.
Or what of the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness? Torak’s path through adolescence (which takes, in its physical form, a few weeks and is described in the present books in terms of a change in his smell) and his struggle with evil might become precisely the kind of literature Lynne Reid Banks would take back to Waterstones.

I wonder whether the complexities of narrative – and particularly the complexities of the unspoken in “children’s books” – are what make good children’s narratives effective. Is it the every coyness that makes for the complexity? And in which case what would we want to have that makes that coyness work for the intelligent, critical reader, whatever age they are? How explicit does the tension between characters have to be? How explicit the violence, the sex, the drinking?

I’m not mocking here, but wanting to point out that these would both be valid stories. So my first thoughts are around whether this is true of all good stories initially envisaged for children – and if that is (or even might be) the case, then what about stories that perhaps are not? On whose authority do we age-band stories? And what are the markers that show narrative A to be on one side and narrative B to be on the other?

At any rate, the translation of children’s narrative into adult perspective can provide a bit of a parlour game. Anyone for the Moomins from The Groke’s point of view? Or Where the Wild Things Are in the voice of Max’s mother?

Red Riding Hood’s Reality Check

I’m due to give a talk next week, and someone – not unkindly – asked if it would be my “Jack Zipes Shitck.” And actually I’m rather hoping not. What I will be doing is looking at

Werewolves – and why children are still scared of wolves in England
Red Riding Hoods – and why authors and illustrators love them
The Great Wood – and why it exists in our minds (hearts?) if not for Ordnance Survey

So, Jack Zipes (see his work here) and Perry Nodelman (here’s his enviable staff page) will hang over this as my tutelary spirits, but I hope, even in something fairly light, to go deep into the dark wood.

And out.

In an hour.

Fatherhood I

One of the joys of the team here at the moment is the real energy there is towards research. and looking outwards to more fluid forms of communication such as blogging.
Mat Tobin, for example, has recently blogged on why picturebooks matter, and it’s our shared interest here that has made us gravitate to each other on a shared project around fatherhood and children’s picturebooks.

Very often in books in which children have adventures, the parents are absent, and in some the very absence of the parent exacerbates the crisis (I’m thinking of Sendak’s Outside Over There, particularly, but there’s the gentler story of Joe’s Cafe – and for older children we might consider the death of Torak’s father, and in YA fiction Patrick Ness’ A Monster Calls or the complexities of Dacid Almond’s Billy Dean).

So just to kick me off on this (next stop looking in detail at Tina Miller on Fatherhood and exploring her ideas of the masculinisation of the home !), I’m posing three questions:

Why do parents have to be absent for a “good” story?
Are weak parents a substitute for absent parents?
What about the unlikeable parent – the buffoon, the bully?

Ancient Darkness and other landscapes

Sitting at the end of a hectic day in the prestigious John Henry Brookes building at work, having handed in the exam paperwork and completed another piece of documentation for the treadmill of quality assurance, I am looking forward to immersing myself, after tea, in the final book of Michelle Paver’s Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, the wintry denouement (perhaps) of the hero Torak’s six-book confrontation with the evils of his Neolithic northern European world. I have loved these books – and may come back to them after they’re finished for further exploration and comment.

It is in some ways a perfect escape from the worries of my present work: a young man pits himself against cold, and dark and the fear of death. The trivial round, the common task is not a quest. Torak’s Neolithic Scandinavia is as far as I could get from my life as an academic: I am not young, not a hunter in the antiqua silva, but sitting with a coffee in front of me, having had too much screen time, thinking not about arrow heads and tracking in the forest but about deadlines, learning outcomes, emails. It would be foolish to see me as having a part in this story, however attractive the three main characters are. It would be self-aggrandising, too, to envisage my struggling to make sense of quality assurance as the lone battler against the dragon, or whatever. I don’t want to do that: Beowulf, Frodo and Torak did not have to prepare a report for Faculty Executive, any more than I have to find Grendel’s mere, or Mordor, or the Mountain of Ghosts.

Instead, spare a brief thought today for a little-remembered medieval saint: St William of York. He is an ideal for me today. Essentially an administrator born with a whole box of silver spoons, William gets all sorts of political and ecclesiastical preferment which are often not quite the gift one might expect. However, he is reported as undertaking them with a singularly assiduous charity. The darkness he fought was against the temptations of what today we would call class and background, against the uncharitable fight for power which denies the underdog.

I can’t see a children’s story in something so unheroic, any more than I can see any kind of ripping yarn in chairing a meeting or filling in a tedious pro forma. But I do feel like some of what I have done today has been at least useful. Maybe I’m admitting that traditional tales of the outdoors quest are all very well, but they can only stand as an allegory for the everyday lives we live, or which we are preparing students and children for.

I’m not sure whether Torak and his wolf pack brother would understand any of that, of course, but it raises any number of questions for me:

Why do we need physical range in a narrative? Why does the sea journey or the vast forest appeal?
And what does landscape add in terms of danger?

Are we lacking in stories about real kids?

Abigail makes a good point in Like a Real Life where she asks “why are children’s picture books hardly ever about children?” She raises the issue of anthropomorphism in a slightly different way: are real children really “soooo thirty years ago”?

I suspect I have an answer of some sorts, but before we go that way, I’d like to echo the idea that Like a Real Life explores: there are good books with animals standing in for humans, and there may well be some decline in humans as main characters – although I think a really effective bit of time-sampling would be needed to make this claim securely (just to play Devil’s Advocate, for example, I might cite Charlie and Lola, and the great Bear Hunt itself).

But no: alongside Charlie and Lola, as Like a Real Life suggests, are the Julia Donaldson brigade, great stories, massively well marketed and brilliantly produced, with frogs, and mice.

Where I think the animal stories succeed is in blurring limitations of time, space and culture. That’s not to say they are bad because of this, but that Room on the Broom, for example, may be “about” sibling rivalry or how people learn to get along but is not boundaried by portrayals of a period of time, class, ethnicity &c., as (perhaps) the work of Mary Hoffman or Shirkey Hughes might be. This might, the cynic in me argues, come down to marketing, although you could argue (see my post on Diversity) that this is a weakness: that a frog cannot ever really stand in for a marginsalised child, for example. If this comes down to identification then we have to develop a much more acute sense of what is being signified by this mouse, that badger, good and bad wolves, so that we can “leave in the magic, leave in the bizarre and the adventure” and still let the children be in on the game.

Expect scuffles

The short but clever blog post from Gareth E Rees http://www.unofficialbritain.com/the-united-kingdom-of-the-remembered-dead/ raises some interesting questions about public landscape and memory, using the insights of memorials.

I won’t spoil the impact by citing the neat ending, much as I’d like to share it, but the notion of memory is an important one. “Jodie” and “Duncan” – or Mrs A, Mr B, Chris and Deb, Ena, whoever – being remembered brings with it a certain appropriation, Gareth maintains. He may be right: I sit on a bench in this park and know that the view was appreciated by someone else.

Of course, I don’t mind that. Lucy Boston’s Green Knowe series of books are meditations on her house and its history, and are built on just this point, for example.

The bigger questions around landscape and myth, however, that I’ve explored before, impinge here, particularly when we think of landscapes as mutable. Can we alter this view, when Fred loved it so much? And more particularly, can we acknowledge the manes, lares et penates of previous inhabitants?

There is a bench I know that overlooks an old gravel pit and a railway siding. In the misty moisty, mornings of September it is beautiful: quiet, with grebes, mallards, the occasional plop of a fish or the silent flight of a heron. The bench has a commemoration on it. The commemoration does not, I presume, remember when the gravel pit was in full operation, or when a local railway line ran through what is now the park. It remembers Mrs X “who loved this spot” for much the same reasons as many people do now. Her ghost, if you like, resonates with current feeling.

Another ghost, perhaps, of the Neolithic marsh dwellers of South Oxford, or the Normans who built their Grand Pont across the wetland might want to contest her view, our view. Where does our conservation stop? Whom do we recognise? Where does conservation of a nineteenth or twentieth century landscape become a matter of public interest? How do we represent landscape as mutable without laying in open to any and every change – or recognise that change is not always bad?

And can [children’s] literature represent this mutability and beauty at one and the same time?

Diversity?

A personal post to acknowledge the repulsive skirmishes around what Malorie Blackman may or may not have said about diversity and representation in children’s literature.

Her point that there is “a very significant message that goes out when you cannot see yourself at all in the books you are reading” is what I’m thinking about. Wise words, and I want to explore three examples of books: “classic” books, modern children’s books and modern children’s picture story books. I’m going to make this post confessional, rather than dispassionate.

When I as a white, middle-aged man read Narnia, for example, I can “be” (in the sense that I strongly identify with) at least eight human children. When I was a boy, reading Dawn Treader I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was Eustace, and from C S Lewis I understood that this was not a good person to identify with (There were all sorts of reasons I couldn’t possibly do more than hero-worship Peter, but apart from Lucy, I think I found the posh and very familial Pevensey children a bit difficult; Lucy was most like an only child, and I got that). I also thought some of the animals were closer to my aspirations, especially in Prince Caspian: Reepicheep, for example, was a bit over-the-top, and Bulgy Bears sucked their paws, &c., &c. But the children were posher than me, had brothers and sisters and a lifestyle that left me cold, by and large. I loved the Narnian Chronicles, but Lewis’ judgmental attitude gave me a very clear message about how far I had to go to be a Narnia child. Getting to be an undergraduate at Lewis’ old college, Magdalen, was probably it.

Narinia is problematic in its depiction of race, and even in sixties Essex I found that puzzling. I got the notion of the allegory, I suppose, but why are all these Calormenes either bad or good-looking? I’m not arguing for a children’s edition of Said’s Orientalism, but it was what I lacked: someone to talk me through the puzzles of identity that these engrossing stories threw up for me.

As a young teacher I joined (for a while) the enthusiasm for Roald Dahl, but even then (late eighties, early nineties) I found I had to Bowdlerise his texts, getting rid, for example, of the casual side-swipes about foreigners. Like Lewis, he was “of his time,” but there was a difference here: colleagues liked the things he did (as did I) but didn’t seem to think there was much of a problem with his depictions of race, or class – and anyway it was softened by Quentin Blake’s illustrations. There were, at any rate, some clashes around what status Dahl should have; I edited as I read aloud.

In terms of identification, I confess I didn’t pay much attention to how bad so many of the women were; when they were bad, they were so mythologically bad they seemed unreal, and there were good strong female characters, too, and atrocious men like Mr Twit. My class were not slow to point out how my beard made me look like Mr Twit. Is there, however, a challenge to identity in the books of his I read with the children? I think it came – and came positively – in Revolting Rhymes. By turning the stories around (Cinderella rejecting the psychopathic Prince; Red Riding Hood being nastier than we had exected), the chidren were invited to think again about the messages of traditional tales. I remember an uncomfortable afternoon retelling, with my Reception Class, the ending of Rumplestiltskin: why would the miller’s daughter want to marry the king? I think, in the end (and in Roald Dahl fashion) they got the goblin to steal the king away…

In young children’s picture books, identification is an important part of the business of becoming a reader. While race can be sidestepped by anthropomorphic animals (I have in front of me Mr Wolf’s Pancakes by Jan Fearnely and Emily Gravett’s Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears) or by pure fantasy (Shaun Tan’s books, or Raymond Briggs’ Fungus the Bogeyman), many books have got representations of children and childhood in them that demand “real” children. Ian Whybrow’s Harry, with his dinosaurs, engages boys in narrative while playing with a reader’s understanding of technical names for dinosaurs: we have some identification possible here.

Of course, there are other kinds of representation too: my own thinking about representation of landscape might also extend into why we sell the pre-mechanised farm as an ideal, or why do we sell the countryside as wallpaper for delighted town-dwellers or a place where we can have adventures away from parents. Misrepresentation, coming, sometimes from hidden “should” statements; we should be out in the countryisde, and farmers should keep their farms pretty, small-scale. &c. In the case of how we create possible worlds in the imagination, the “should” I’m unearthing might be a warning.

Here, for me, is the difficulty with diversity of representation. Blackman, as children’s laureate, highlights a problem about how race, gender, sexuality are avoided by failure to represent characters from different groups. She is quite right to do so. However, she is also a first-class author; those of us who consume children’s literature (teachers, parents, children – even down to academic study [the least important group for an author to consider]) also know – as doubtless she does – the perils of depicting people specifically so that readers can identify with them. This worst kind of didacticism leads to clumsy storytelling, tokenism, writing from outside an author’s genuine understanding or empathy. This is as much of a turn-off from leading a child to identify with – or be challenged by – a character as ignoring the issue and writing about the Pevensey children in a different guise. We need diverse books; we also need publishers and creative writing tutors to nurture those writers and illustrators who can deliver writers who can produce characters we can identify with.

So, although it doesn’t really connect with the above, a last bit of confessional self-disclosure.

I was Mole in Wind in the Willows, and learned it was OK:

not to be cool;
to be inspired by my wittier, more able friends;
to have a part to play.

But I also learned a lot more from children’s literature; that’s probably why I’m still here.

Feral

I am as deep into George Monbiot’s Feral as he is in ling, or wrack, or any other dense vegetation he encounters as he travels through the book. His view of nature and landscape is only dwarfed by this vision of what might be or what might have been in the “re-wilding” of Europe, of Britain in particular:

The sward on the verge was an exuberance of colours as rich as the Lord Mayor’s Show. Here were dropping red spikes of sorrel, golden bird’s foot trefoil like Quaker bonnets, the delicate umbels of pignut, heath milkwort – some pink, some blue – red campion and cut-leaved cranesbill. Here were little white flowers of eyebright, with egg yolk on their tongues, dark figworts, which released a foxy smell when I ran my hand through them,, purple knapweed, pink and white yarrow, foxglove, mouse ear, male fern, deep cushions of bedstraw, wild raspberry, heath speedwell, hogweed and willowherb…

It is as lyrical a use of plant names as any poet might employ.

His wrath at the violation of his vision employs the poetics of the fire-and-brimstone preacher, and while he is at home with the humour of black cat spotting, and has an eye for the quirky detail when talking about beavers or woolly rhinos, he reserves a particular distaste for the “sepia-toned” conservationist who seeks to preserve rather than rewild. Monbiot hits out at the Nazi sympathies of Konrad Lorenz and the “strong suite of what might have been psychopathic traits” of Joy Adamson. This is a not a man to mince his words.

And it is this keen sense of how poor our vision of landscape is, how bound up in the artificialities of the pastoral that is the most intriguing thing for me. The imperialist and imperious “assemblage of species” that Monbiot attacks is at the heart of young children’s literature; the re-presentation of the desired, the nostalgic landscape that provides setting but also instructs the reader: this is where the narrative happens, but also this is how the outdoors should be.

Reader beware, therefore: if Red Grouse are a “key indicator” (a view challenged by Monbiot at one point), I worry that so are the small, mixed woodlands and rolling hills and small fields of the Each Peach Pear Plum, or the quiet country lanes of Joe’s Cafe, or the magnificent spread of scenery in Bear Hunt.

Addendum, Easter Tuesday

The latest in the Guardian from George Monbiot. I may come back to this.

Do they all live in the same wood?

Building on the real question posed by a four-year old reading Red Riding Hood, I would want to explore the nature of the landscape in which ‘fairy tale’ characters from Western European traditional tales have their adventures. Some of this landscape is represented in older versions by clear topographical features which root the story to particular places – the chalk pits of Tom Tit Tot , or the Blackdown fairy markets discussed by Katharine Briggs. In more recent representations of the landscape in children’s literature, authors have used intertextuality to play with the notions of place. Using insights from ecocriticism, from historical landscape studies such as those by Oliver Rackham, and the study of folk tales from writers such as Jack Zipes and Sandra Beckett, I propose exploring the landscape(s) of Janet and Allan Ahlberg (Each Peach Pear Plum; Jeremiah in the Dark Wood and the Jolly Postman), Lauren Child (Beware of the Storybook Wolves) and other works such as Nicola Smee’s Finish the Story Dad to see
• Whether there are discernible features in the ‘fairy tale’ landscape that suggest a common understanding of that environment;
• Whether an intertexual approach from modern re-authoring of traditional stories enlightens the reader or impoverishes the stories;
• What the agents in the stories do to interact with their environment.

Calleva Atrebatum and all that

It hardly seems worth putting links to the claims and counter-claims that have followed Michael Gove’s irascible statements about Blackadder views of World War I. Perhaps the best (and genuinely critical) précis of the [can I call it?] debate, is to be found here, in a blog post on the Imperial and Global Forum from Marc-William Palen at Exeter. In any case, it’s not the argument I’m really interested in, and Dave Aldridge’s work on remembrance (see his blog for a taste) already goes way beyond what I could say.

What prompts a blog post tonight is a quotation in Charlotte Higgins’ book Under Another Sky, which I was given at Christmas and which I am really enjoying. In exploring Roman Britain she has moved from messy Londinium to the quieter and more ordered Silchester – Calleva Atrebatum – only to reveal it, too, is a site where tangles of Romano-British religious practices, loyalties and rivalries do not make for a straightforward narrative. She contrasts this with Rosemary Sutcliff’s vision of Calleva in “The Eagle of the Ninth,” and quotes Sutcliff saying that she is “happiest…in Roman Britain:”

“If I could do a time flip and land back in Roman Britain, I would take a deep breath, take perhaps a fortnight to get used to things, then be all right… I have a special “Ah, here I am again, I know exactly what they are going to have for breakfast” feeling…”

One way of looking at this is to say that it is part of our own spiritual and cultural identity that we construct a world we feel we would like to be at home in; Rosemary Sutcliff had a great gift for portraying that home, and giving flesh to long-dead bones, stories to long-forgotten artefacts. I could feel the same about some parts of the Middle Ages – but I know (as I suspect Sutcliff knew) that this is fantasy, really. Sources help us do history better than stories do – although stories have a part to play.

I am less sure that some of the voices raised are clear about this themselves, when we/they discuss World War I. I suppose I can claim to have had a Grandpa in the Boer War and in the trenches – I still have the touching and eye-opening letters he sent the young woman who was to become my Grandmother; I have met people who were there, listened to the way they avoided talking about the enemy as a group of people, only as a single, dehumanised Enemy. I guess there are quite a few people who have similar experiences. I guess most of them, like me, will not claim, on the strength of that, to pontificate about what it was “really like” in the trenches.

My worry is when politicians, rather than historians, start telling us what must be taught in schools about how things were. Myth-makers with the power to wreck history?

Tim Whitmarsh’s review of Charlotte Higgins’ book in the Guardian makes an important point:

The temptation to retool our Roman heritage so that it looks the way we want it to can be overpowering.

Perhaps the “Great Times in WWI” story is a rewrite that seeks to up the patriotic flag in history; I think it has badly backfired. I think at the heart of Whitmarsh’s caveat is something that historiography always seeks to explore; the temptation to which he refers is something that perhaps the Secretary of State and some of his opponents have succumbed to. A group of people want World War I to be glorious sacrifice, or the noble and legitimate struggle for freedom; another group want it to be mindless, a massive slaughter of young, uncomprehending men rising from lousy, mud-swilling trenches to their deaths.

In some ways, now-quiet Calleva stands as a very good warning to people seeking to make history fit their view of what it should have been. It is not only ancient history that makes myths. Higgin’s chapter ends with an example from a schoolboyish copy of a scene from the Aeneid (itself, of course, a reworking of an imagined history – but let that pass) where the guests at a feast are hushed:

But for me the clamour of the people of Calleva Atrebatum is forever stilled. I will not – I cannot – hear them. The silence is not the hush of expectation, but the chill of secrets.