Archive for ‘children’s literature’

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June 13, 2013

Lucy Boston, The Children of Green Knowe

This is not a Rasa of Yearniness post, or not really, Kip.

From this week’s column.

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The haunted house is such a classic (and effective) trope in literature because we believe that places matter. Ghosts wherever they are, mean history; that a place is supposed to be haunted is a constant reminder that it has had a past. Things have happened here. Quite apart from the inherent uncanniness of spirits that can move things around, the idea of ghosts is a reminder that we cannot entirely control our surroundings. We will never be the first to experience a place.

One house that can lay claim to a long history is The Manor, in Cambridgeshire, England. It is supposed to be one of the oldest continually-habited houses in the country, having been built almost a thousand years ago. The Manor was also home for many years to the author Lucy Boston, who used it as the setting for the six books in her “Green Knowe” series.

I don’t know if there are any stories of ghosts that haunt The Manor, but its fictional counterpart certainly has them in abundance. The first book, The Children of Green Knowe, has seven year old Toseland (“Tolly” for short) arriving for the first time at his great-grandmother’s ancestral home. Almost immediately he begins to sense the presence of other children, though he cannot yet see them.  Green Knowe continues to be the home of three children who lived during the 1600s; Anthony, Linnet and Toby (another Toseland). As Tolly learns to see these distant relatives in more definite ways than out of the corner of his eye, he also learns more about the history of this house and of his own family.

Some of my favourite books, particularly children’s books, have as their background a feeling of quiet yearning. It’s in invoking this feeling that Boston’s great achievement lies. Not much actually happens in The Children of Green Knowe, but something about this book is pure, distilled childhood. It’s in Tolly’s immediate acceptance of the very strange world he has come to live in, in the elusiveness of companions who cannot always be directly looked at, the equal parts of fear and longing. Death exists in this world, and so do curses, and sadness and fear are inevitable even for adults. But above and around them exists a sense of safety, of being in the right place.  To read The Children of Green Knowe is to remember that “nostalgia” is from the Greek for homecoming—Tolly comes home to family, history, even to his own name. For this alone it might just be the perfect children’s book.

There’s also something rather special happening with time. Play that involves companions who might disappear at any moment may seem transient; and read from my (now) adult perspective so may this whole business of childhood itself. But on a larger scale things stay remarkably unchanged in this little world. Children’s play appears to have stayed constant across centuries so that Tolly is able to communicate immediately with these distant relatives. The house is unchanged. Even the faithful retainer is the descendant of his predecessor in the position—apparently the Boggis family have been content to be loyal servants for centuries. (One wonders if the Boggis children get to have similarly nostalgic adventures). Green Knowe is also known as “Green Noah”; the house is surrounded by a moat and we first see it during a flood. It’s tempting to see Green Knowe as a sort of time-ark, carrying within it the past, and preserving it into the future. Is it even really a haunted house when the past, present and future exist together in this protected space? I’m not sure.

As a child I was terrified of ghosts—to the point that a single nightmare could have me in tears regularly for months after. But as a child I had not yet read The Children of Green Knowe, and I wonder if that could have changed things.

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May 5, 2013

The monster and the children’s book

The Monster in Anushka Ravishankar’s Moin and the Monster requires Moin to draw it in order that it may have a corporeal form. Its giant nose, hideous face and fearsomely purple skin turn out to be a bit too much for Moin’s weak artistic skills. Much to its disgust, the Monster must go about looking like this:

I did a very silly interview with Anushka at the Duckbill blog when the second Moin book came out. I asked her a couple of over-inflated, “serious” questions about the book: about the monster’s self-identification as a monster, about its lack of a name and a gender, and so forth. I’m not sure what it says about me that I now think my parody questions focused on an aspect of the book that I think is rather important.

Another recent children’s book (though for younger readers than Moin’s audience) is The Pleasant Rakshasa by Sowmya Rajendran and artist Niveditha Subramaniam. It’s about Karimuga, a rakshasa whose beauty causes the other rakshasas to feel jealous and insecure. Being a saintly sort of person, Karimuga arranges it so that his numerous assets are  distributed among his peers.

There’s already enough in this outline of the plot to suggest that this book is very deliberately doing a couple of interesting things. The rakshasa as “pleasant” and unselfish, for one. I don’t think any twenty-first century children’s book (insert hollow laugh, because you just know there are some authors and publishers who will still enthusiastically prove me wrong) can still disseminate seriously the idea that entire races of sentient beings are fundamentally “bad”. The redistribution of assets, if not property (though beauty is itself a kind of currency); if this blog had very different politics I’d be writing an outraged Are Tulika Books Indoctrinating Our Children With Communist Propaganda? story. And then there’s the association of the rakshasa with beauty. If you grew up on a diet of Amar Chitra Katha and the like you know that rakshasas are mostly hideous, mysteriously olive-green, and can only be beautiful when they want to trick you into wanting sex with them–see for example many depictions of Surpanakha.

Karimuga looks like this:

The other rakshasas were jealous of him.

“Look at his beautiful purple skin!”

“Look at his splendid red eyes!”

“Look at his wonderful hairy legs!”

“Oh, look at his huge belly!”

“And those teeth!”

 

Karimuga is beautiful because he is fat and hairy with red eyes and yellow teeth. Ravishankar’s nameless “Monster” is unconcerned with beauty–its concern is that it be as physically terrifying as the limitations of a small boy’s artistic skills can make it. Both of them, then, are offering alternative ways of “judging” appearance; one by ignoring traditional literary beauty standards altogether in favour of a much more useful paradigm, and the other by overturning those standards and creating a set of beauty standards that are almost its opposite. Incidentally, Moin’s monster was also supposed to have purple skin (and who can blame it for wanting such a thing).

I think it’s also interesting that part of the monster’s problem is that it cannot be drawn–at least, not well. Particularly when you consider some of Niveditha Subramaniam’s rakshasas:

I think it’s possibly relevant that both of these creatures exist in part outside the clear black outlines that, for example, their eyes (and the face of the green one) have. The green rakshasa also has hairy legs without really having enough leg for the hair to rest on. There’s something decidedly non-Euclidean about all of this; monstrousness, then, is undrawable.

But creating alternative standards of beauty can be as exclusionary as the original ones, as The Pleasant Rakshasa finds. All this new set of attractive traits does is to set up Karimuga as the ideal to aspire to. It’s only when Karimuga is able to share the wealth, to let go of the power that his beauty gives him (while still retaining his glorious yellow teeth because you have to be able to love your body) that any sort of revolution can happen. And Karimuga is happy.

 

[Or this is all complete nonsense. But you should read both these monster books anyway, they're excellent.]

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March 20, 2013

Keshni Kashyap and Mari Araki, Tina’s Mouth

This was fun. From this weekend’s column:

 

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“To be honest, Sartre, up until last week I did not have the slightest interest in the meaning of my existence”.

Tina Malhotra is the youngest member of her family, and attends a prestigious, and expensive, school in California. “Prestigious” here means the sort of school where it is normal to take a class on existentialism. Philosophy isn’t that interesting to Tina, though, until a particularly disastrous period in her school life when her best friend grows overly absorbed with a new boyfriend and leaves her behind. Tina has no one to have lunch with, an unrequited crush, and has never been kissed. Perhaps writing a diary addressed to Jean-Paul Sartre will help her to figure things out.

Describing itself as “an existential comic diary”, Tina’s Mouth, by Keshni Kashyap and Mari Araki, chronicles the events of one semester in Tina’s life. These include the end of her oldest friendship, her first kiss, and varying degrees of family drama. The “comic” part of the equation (though it’s also frequently a very funny book) is provided by Mari Araki’s illustrations.

Like most people reading this, I have never attended an American High School. I have (again, I suspect, like most people) watched far too many teen movies, and read far too many teenage books, and recognise all of the tropes. So it’s sometimes hard to tell how far Kashyap and Araki’s depiction of Yarborough Academy is authentic and how far it is specifically intended to invoke these tropes. There’s certainly an awareness of, and a willingness to play with the tropes of the high school story; the cool teacher who smokes pot, the charming, unattainable crush, the terrible secrets and betrayals heard in the girls’ bathrooms, and the division of the student body into ridiculous cliques. So we have “hippies”, “cheerleaders”, and “skaters” (are there really still skaters?), but there are also “pseudo-intellectual-future-art-school-hipsters”, and anti-racism clubs featuring white boys with dreadlocks. The back jacket of the book describes Tina as a “wry observer” of those around her, and this is sometimes true. But often Kashyap’s satire is light-handed, allowing the reader to see the absurdity of things and behaviours Tina takes for granted. This is certainly true of the many sections in which Tina’s Indianness comes into play; when the mother of a friend refers to her as “my little six-armed goddess”, or the boy she has a crush on expects her to teach him about Buddhism, it’s far more effective than the more explicit list of silly questions people ask about her heritage that she provides at the beginning of the book.

One of the things that makes Tina’s Mouth work is the matter-of-fact way in which Tina’s Indian origins are merged with other aspects of her life. The book never makes a particularly big deal about the fact that Tina once had a crush on Lord Krishna, or that her sister, whose last boyfriend was a German architect, must fight off Pinky Aunty’s matchmaking her with doctors. An old story about Krishna’s mother Yashodha seeing the universe in her son’s mouth comes up over and over. No book deserves credit merely for avoiding a lazy stereotype, but so many books make this cultural difference the site of angst that this approach comes as a relief.

It’s probably clear from all of this that despite Sartre’s presence Tina’s Mouth is not a book that engages deeply with philosophy; though there’s a throwaway conversation about Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and a scrawled “Die Camus # ❤” on the last page. It manages not to be too precious with its references, which is really the most one could hope for.

Araki’s art is charming and detailed. In one scene, as an increasingly drunk aunt lectures Tina about feminism, philosophy, and the superiority of European (as opposed to American) men, Tina’s mother’s increasing disgust at the smoke from the aunt’s cigarette is never alluded to by the narrative, but becomes the focus of interest for this set of panels. These are real people, and the book never lets us forget that.

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March 1, 2013

A solution to Susan

A few years ago, I read Alan Garner’s Elidor and was struck by a number of similarities with C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books. This is not to say that I think Garner was doing a conscious rebuttal of Lewis in his own work, necessarily (that disclaimer applies to this post as well). Portal fantasies with “chosen” children were, I think, a reasonably established trope by the time Garner’s earlier books were written, as were fantastic unicorns and books that began with train journeys (see for example practically every school story ever). I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all of these, along with other tropes, come into play in Elidor, but that’s because Elidor works as an inversion of exactly that type of fantasy.

It’s probably also a coincidence that both writers write of girls named Susan; there are a number of Susans floating about mid-twentieth century children’s literature. Still, reading both the Susans together is potentially illuminating.

Lewis’s Susan Pevensie first appears in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe as the concerned older sister. She tries to mother the younger ones, is sensible, is rescued by her brother, grows into a good archer and a beautiful woman.Skimming the book again I see that the being sensible part remains constant; at the end of the book Susan is the only one of her siblings to suggest not taking the path that will (though they don’t know this at the time) send them back to their own world with no way of coming back. In The Horse and His Boy, which is set during the Pevensies’ time as rulers of Narnia, she’s an adult, capable of desire and contemplating marriage to a Calormene prince (who turns out to be evil, as most brown people are). There’s no sign, either here or in the final pages of LWW, that any of the children spend much time thinking about where they came from or contemplate returning– though at the end of The Horse and His Boy Aravis and Shasta hear Lucy telling the story of how the Pevensies came to Narnia, so at least at this point they still remember. And while I find this a little creepy, the implication is that these characters’ lives are here.

And so to Prince Caspian, the last book in which Susan appears. I’m indebted for my reading of Susan in this book to Ana Mardoll’s ongoing chapter-by-chapter deconstruction of the series, all of which can be found here, but I want to particularly focus on these two posts. Ana Mardoll sees Susan as deeply vulnerable, and strongly affected by being hauled in and out of Narnia; and it’s a situation that is potentially traumatic. We’re never shown how Susan feels at being told at the end of Prince Caspian that coming back is no longer an option for her, but it’s quite conceivable that she’s less accepting of it than her brother.

Within the series’ internal chronology, that moment when Susan walks through the door in the air and back to “our” world is the last time we see her. We will see her siblings, and fellow Narnia-adventurers in The Last Battle though:

“Sir,” said Tirian, when he had greeted all these. “If I have read the chronicle aright, there should be another. Has not your Majesty two sisters? Where is Queen Susan?”

“My sister Susan,” answered Peter shortly and gravely, “is no longer a friend of Narnia.”

“Yes,” said Eustace, “and whenever you’ve tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says, ‘What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.’”

“Oh Susan!” said Jill. “She’s interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.”

Critiques of Lewis tend to focus on that “nylons and lipstick and invitations” line, and while I find it rather indicative of Lewis’ politics in general, I find what Eustace says to be more interesting. Susan says Narnia doesn’t exist at all, and within the logic of the series this doesn’t make sense because obviously it does exist and this is the real problem.

Back at the beginning of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, the Pevensie children had found Lucy’s insistence that she had entered a magical land through a wardrobe alarming, and had asked Professor Kirk for advice. His answer:

“There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad.”

This is a version of Lewis’s trilemma, and let’s ignore for the moment all the things that are obviously wrong with it as an argument. Lucy is not in the habit of lying and is “clearly” not mad (how likely is it that the Professor’s degrees are in anything related to the field of mental health?) so we have to assume she’s telling the truth, against all laws of time and space as the children know them.

Within the logic of Narnia’s universe (which I am respecting much more than the Professor does that of the real world) Susan is not telling the truth when she says Narnia does not exist. Is she in the habit of lying, then, or is something much more serious going on here? I notice that the dismissive comments that the ‘Friends’ of Narnia make about Susan do not come from her family. Polly, Jill and Eustace all have negative things to say, but of those who know her best, Peter is short and changes the subject, and Edmund and Lucy are silent.

 

 

One of the reasons I suspect no one expected a third book in Alan Garner’s Weirdstone of Brisingamen series is that it ends so very well. In The Moon of Gomrath Susan briefly rides with, and feels a strong kinship with the Daughters of the Moon. She has further reason to feel like she belongs with them; the Mark of Fohla, given to her by Angharad Goldenhand. We see Susan’s desolation at the end of the book twice, through her own eyes and her brother’s, as they leave her behind.

The Einheriar paled, their forms thinning to air and light, and they rose from her into the sky.

“Celemon!”

But Susan was left as dross upon the hill, and a voice came to her from the gathering outlines of the stars. “It is not yet! It will be! But not yet!” And the fire died in Susan, and she was alone on the moor, the night wind in her face, joy and anguish in her heart.

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The hoof-beats drew near, and the earth throbbed. Colin opened his eyes. Now the cloud raced over the ground, breaking into separate glories that whisped and sharpened to skeins of starlight, and were horsemen, and at their head was majesty, crowned with antlers, like the sun.

But as they crossed the valley, one of the riders dropped behind, and Colin saw that it was Susan. She lost ground, though her speed was no less, and the light that formed her died, and in its place was a smaller, solid figure that halted, forlorn, in the white wake of the riding.

 

It’s a horrible moment.

And you have to wonder how much of the awfulness of those final moments of Elidor has to do with the terrible thing that has just happened (the death of Findhorn) and how much of it is the horror of return to the mundane world:

… for an instant the glories of stone, sword, spear, and cauldron hung in their true shapes, almost a trick of the splintering glass, the golden light. The song faded.

The children were alone with the broken windows of a slum.

These children cannot skip unconcernedly back and forth between worlds without consequence or thought for what they must now do without. There’s magic, then it’s gone, and they are bereft.

And so to Boneland*, Garner’s 2012 conclusion to what we now know is a trilogy. This is a darker book, an adult book. It works outside the realm of children’s fantasy and in some ways is not fantasy at all. Susan is not present in this book, any more than she is in The Last Battle. Here she is not even named. And Colin cannot work out where his sister has gone; for much of the book he can’t even be sure he had a sister. The siblings are separated, either because one of them has managed again to access the world of fantasy from which the other has been cut off, or by death, or (as is the case in The Last Battle) the two are the same thing anyway. Susan is not the one left behind this time, she has moved ahead into whatever it is she has moved into. Boneland is all about Colin’s fractured psyche that is partly (in one of several possible readings of the book) a result of his childhood adventures. In a sense, then, if we accept Mardoll’s reading of Susan (I do, though I’m reasonably sure Lewis would not) with Boneland Garner may provide us with a solution to the problem of why Susan is no longer a friend of Narnia. I wonder how Colin would answer if asked whether the events of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen were “real”.

 

 

 

* I reviewed Boneland here, and Maureen Kincaid Speller has some detailed notes here that are especially helpful in placing it in the context of Garner’s larger body of work. And see also this lovely snippet about girls who went back (by Atilla/atillariffic on tumblr, based on art by Helen Green/dollychops).

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February 11, 2013

Two Owls and a Goat.

I’m never looking for anything in particular at the Delhi Bookfair, which is why my purchases always feel (to me) so unexpectedly entertaining. Among those I picked up this year were three Indian children’s books the covers of which featured, respectively, an owl, an owl and a goat. I like owls and goats.

The first was The Magic Feather by Roma Singh, published by Tulika Books. The owl on the cover is slightly misleading — though it plays an important role in the book it has very little screentime and no speaking lines. A little girl is looking for her friends. She tucks a fallen owl feather into her hair, and from then on, whatever she places in her hair leads her to a wonderful land. Eventually she reaches the land of books, where she finds her friends and they all read things.

What makes this is the art, which is a mixture of papercraft and simple, drawn-on colours, which makes for a sense of overlapping textures leaping off the page. The little girl’s hair is made of long strips of curling print, and birds, clouds, leaves are varieties of patterned paper. Some of the paper still bears text,  so that on the owl’s wings or the belly of a frog it is possible to read part of an article about construction work. It is so very pretty.

Owl Ball by Francesca Xotta was published by the National Book Trust and was not half as attractive as (though a fraction of the price of) The Magic Feather. The NBT can be frustrating if you like children’s books– there’s so much potential for greatness wasted for lack of funds and perhaps lack of care. I’d work for them (part-time only) for free if it meant better-edited books.

So, Owl Ball. It’s about an owl who lives in a park where children regularly dump junk food. Our protagonist eats these unhealthy things and grows fat. This causes the other animals in the park to bully him and call him names, including “kumbhakarna” and “football”; it becomes clear that in calling him “Owl Ball” the book is doing something similar. Owl Ball is too weak to defend himself from the bullies until he meets a little girl. She tells him he must become physically strong in order to stand up for himself. A strict programme of exercise follows but this is not enough. She must “turn Owl Ball into a normal owl … his behaviour also needs reformation”.

Now that he is strong, does Owl Ball defend himself from the bullies? Well, no, because they are impressed by his newfound slim handsomeness and do not taunt him anymore. Instead they all become friends. What Owl Ball has learnt is that his new friends are really a bunch of bullies to whose ideas he was forced to conform “excess of everything is bad”. Owl Ball  is a story about how children can protect themselves from being bullied by getting rid of whatever traits about them the bullies fixate upon — and that these bullies make desirable friends. And that being fat is the worst thing in the world. It was published in 2009.

The last of the three books was The Bravest Goat in the World, a story (incredibly) by former president Dr. Zakir Husain, translated by Samina Mishra and with illustrations by Pooja Pottenkulam. It’s published by Young Zubaan, and I bought it mainly for the combination of the title and this illustration, reproduced on the cover:

(Note: the goat in question does not have seven legs. That is merely her coat, though various people on twitter suggested that they might be udders).

Chandni is a goat, owned by a lonely man named Abbu Khan who keeps goats for company. All his previous goats have escaped and run to the mountains, as mountain goats cannot abide being chained; Chandni yearns to do the same. Eventually she breaks free, lives the life of a real goat, falls in love, and (spoiler warning!) … is killed by a wolf.

Which is the point at which in many books we’d learn that Chandni shouldn’t have left her nice safe home. Instead, The Bravest Goat in the World actively validates her choice. We’re told that she had lived “like a mountain goat”, that in fact “it was Chandni who had won in the end”. What we have is a book that upholds an idea of personal integrity as more important than anything else– certainly more important than safety; as far as morals in children’s books go this is one we really don’t see enough of. Our former president. There’s rather too much text on each page to make for perfection, but between the unusual, gory morality of the story and Pooja Pottenkulam’s adorably silly illustrations, I was completely charmed.

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January 10, 2013

Jenny Overton, The Thirteen Days of Christmas

Despite my distaste for a particular aspect of this book (see below) I’m curious to read Overton’s other work. I’ve heard her compared to Antonia Forest (whom everyone who reads this blog is probably sick of hearing me gush about), and I’d really appreciate it if someone who had read both writers could tell me a little more. Just … not this book again, please.

Last weekend’s column:

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Tradition dictates that it’s acceptable to leave your Christmas decorations up until Twelfth Night – the 5th or 6th of December (yesterday or today) depending on who you talk to. Surely this ought to apply to Christmas reading as well.

Jenny Overton’s The Thirteen Days of Christmas is set in England at some unspecified time in the past. Certainly long before the carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas” was invented; this purports to be the story of how it came into being.

Annaple Kitson is the oldest child of her family, and since the death of their mother has looked after the rest. Her father and younger siblings aren’t always happy about this; for one thing, Annaple is a terrible cook. For another, she is romantic and tends to go off into daydreams – or to inconvenience the rest of the family by demanding that they do things in the most proper or most picturesque ways. Luckily the very rich Francis Vere wants to marry her. Francis’ wealth means that Annaple would never have to cook again, but she keeps turning him down for being insufficiently unromantic. At Christmas, therefore, Annaple’s younger siblings advise Francis to be as strange and creative as possible. And so he shows up on Christmas morning with a partridge and a pear tree.

Annaple may find this gift unusual and charming, but her reactions to those that follow grow progressively less amused. Three French hens may be useful, but the cumulative nature of Francis’ gift-giving (as those familiar with the song will be aware) means that she ends up with thirty. The house, presumably quite small, is soon crowded with poultry, songbirds and visiting dancers and performers. What is a family of five to do with the daily delivery of eight pails of milk, or over forty swans? Worse, as the gifts get more and more out of control, all the neighbours show up to enjoy the tamasha.

It’s all very absurd and, told in Overton’s matter-of-fact style, it’s easy to see why this is so many people’s Christmas read of choice. It’s also interspersed with the lyrics of some beautiful old carols. But it’s this spectre of an appreciative audience, gleefully watching the heroine’s downfall, which made me very uncomfortable while reading.

Because everyone but Annaple herself seems to really want this match to happen. Annaple’s insistence on romance is portrayed as silly and perhaps it is, but she does have the right to turn a man down if she doesn’t wish to marry him. Worse, her family consistently blames her for his excesses—she should never have told him her favourite nursery rhyme or her favourite fairy tale. We are never sure if Francis is aware of how much he’s inconveniencing and upsetting his chosen bride; since he’s an idiot if he isn’t and manipulative if he is, the outcome isn’t promising for Annaple either way. The vast crowds on the street outside all appear to be on Francis’ side, much like the back-up dancers who materialise in a Hindi film song to support the hero’s play for a girl.

Over the last couple of weeks most of this country has been engaging in a conversation about our attitudes to women and the ways in which our cultural products reflect or perpetuate them. Certainly not the most conducive background against which to read a book about a silly young girl being publicly humiliated (since Annaple sees it this way, I must too) by an entertained crowd, all because she has chosen to reject the eligible man who wants her.

Luckily Francis’ twelfth day present turns out to be something Annaple loves, and we’re not presented with the spectacle (which at one point seems quite likely) of her marrying him just to get the harassment to stop. The thirteenth day is the wedding, and for the first time we see the Kitsons as a loving family. But even the lovely, warm scenes between Annaple and her sister Prudence (finally!) were not enough to allay my deep discomfort.

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December 13, 2012

Kyo Maclear and Isabelle Arsenault, Virginia Wolf

I bought Maclear and Arsenault’s gorgeous children’s book recently, and therefore had to write about it for this week’s column.

 

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In her essay “On Being Ill” Virginia Woolf observes how little of our literature is about illness, even though illness is a state of being with which most of us are intimately familiar and which we experience so intensely.

Kyo Maclear and Isabelle Arsenault’s Virginia Wolf looks at first like a typo (and if you enter this title into Google it will helpfully assume you’ve got it wrong and provide you with links to the great modernist writer). But it really is about a little wolf named Virginia.

Virginia is not a werewolf, at least in the conventional sense of the term. But sometimes she wakes up feeling “wolfish”, as her sister puts it; she growls, moans and scares people away. She asks her sister not to wear an overly cheerful dress. Her sister can do nothing to make her happier.

The whole house sank.
Up became down.
Bright became dim.
Glad became gloom.

It’s possible to read this as a simple mood swing of a sort, but it’s also a surprisingly realistic portrayal of depression. Arsenault’s artwork captures this beautifully. While Vanessa, the sister who narrates the story is a clearly delineated little girl in a yellow dress, Virginia Wolf is an undefined dark smudge with wolfish, pointed ears. She is literally transformed by her depression. The earlier pages of the book are all monochromatic greys and faded colours.

Of course the connections to Virginia Woolf are more than just the pun in the title. It becomes clear that the story is loosely based on Woolf herself. The narrator of the book is named Vanessa after Woolf’s own sister, the artist Vanessa Bell. There is a reference to their brother, Thoby Stephen. The magical place to which Virginia claims she would fly if she could is called “Bloomsberry”. Woolf would later in life live in Bloomsbury, London (and be an important member of the ‘Bloomsbury group’) – though Maclear’s characters, who imagine the place to resemble a beautiful garden, would probably be disappointed in this part of London. And most importantly of all, Woolf suffered from depression.

“There is, let us confess it (and illness is the great confessional), a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals”, says Woolf in “On Being Ill”. Mental illness is a serious topic, it’s a difficult topic, but it’s one that a children’s book is still capable of tackling in ways that feel above all true. Virginia’s despair and Vanessa’s helplessness are familiar, particularly to a reader with any experience of depressive disorders. But to feel helplessness, or sadness that you cannot articulate and that won’t go away, are also things that children understand.

Vanessa’s solution is to recreate Bloomsberry at home. She fills the house with pictures of flowers and fruits, paper butterflies and confetti. She allows Virginia to take refuge in art.

The whole house lifted.
Down became up.
Dim became bright.
Gloom became glad.

Suddenly the book is full of bright pinks and sunshiny yellows. Virginia turns and we see that she has been a little girl all along; the ‘wolf ears’ merely the silhouette of the bow in her hair.

For the adult reading it, this isn’t quite the happy ending that it might otherwise be. We know that sometimes loving sisters are not enough, that art can’t always save us. We know that, in 1941 at the age of 59, Virginia Woolf would fill her pockets with stones and walk into a river.

If there’s one concession Virginia Wolf makes to its audience then, it’s not to make this clear. Except perhaps in Vanessa’s nervousness the next morning, it’s possible to believe that the wolf has been banished, or at least tamed for good. As a tale of love and wildness and transformation, this has some of the power of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. As a book about depression it shies away from that last step, and I don’t know whether to be sorry or glad.

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October 6, 2012

Chris Haughton, A Bit Lost

In last week’s Left of Cool column I talked about owls, poo and children’s books as detective manuals. I adored A Bit Lost, and I think I’ll be collecting Haughton’s future work.


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 I rarely buy children’s picture books. But in the past year and a half I have bought four copies of Chris Haughton’s A Bit Lost (published as Little Owl Lost in the USA), replacing my copy of the book each time I’ve spontaneously given it away. Haughton’s art is what makes A Bit Lost so special. It’s very simple, with big areas of empty space that allow the reader to focus on the (surprisingly expressive) animals themselves. The colours are vibrant and improbable – the sky is olive green, the ground is blue, the trees move from a medley of oranges and reds in the day to shadowy purples at sunset. The animals are bright pinks and purples and greens.

Haughton tells the story of a baby owl who falls out of its nest while its (we’re not given any clues as to the baby owl’s gender) mother is asleep. It lands with a bump on the forest floor, and immediately sets about the search for its mother, aided by a helpful squirrel. Unfortunately, the baby owl’s ability to describe its mummy is limited. On being told that she is very big, the squirrel leads the baby owl to a bear. Hearing that she has pointy ears it suggests a hare, and “big eyes” lead it to suggest a frog. Luckily the frog is a bit smarter than the squirrel and is able to reunite the little family. Everyone goes back to the nest and eats biscuits to celebrate.

Obviously there’s nothing particularly original about this story. P. D. Eastman’s Are You My Mother was published more than fifty years ago and that book also tells the story of a baby bird wandering from animal to animal (and in some cases to inanimate objects) trying to find its mother. But then this is a story that is always going to resonate with young readers – many of us still remember the sheer terror of being small and outside the house and separated from a parent.

But there’s another reason this story works. This column has in the past mentioned Terry Pratchett’s Where’s My Cow?, a book-within-a-book about a man searching for his missing cow. In that book the protagonist’s search consists of approaching various farm animals (and a hippopotamus, for some reason), hearing the noises they make, and concluding that they are not his cow. Pratchett’s policeman character Sam Vimes reads the book to his son, and while doing so alters it so that the search for the cow turns into his son’s search for his daddy, by interrogating and eliminating the men he encounters in the city’s streets. It’s appropriate that Vimes is a policeman; Where’s My Cow? is a sort of police procedural.

And then there’s The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business, by Werner Holzwarth and Wolf Erlbruch. This children’s book, first published in German in 1989, is about a mole who wakes up to find that someone has pooped on his head. His search for the culprit consists of approaching each of his suspects (horses, rabbits and the like) and comparing their faeces to what is on his head before declaring them innocent. Eventually the dog is found to be the guilty party, and the mole gets his revenge.

Deductive reasoning consists of slowly eliminating possibilities – as Sherlock Holmes would have it, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. A Bit Lost, like the other books I mention here, is all about eliminating possibilities. Can this be my mummy? Is that my cow? Can this animal have defaecated upon my head? And in a way all books for young children are a form of detective fiction because it is though deduction that we discover what things are not, and therefore what they are, and how they (and we) fit into our world.

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September 21, 2012

When life gives you Robinsons

As some of you may already know, I now have a monthly column in the new Indian edition of the National Geographic Traveller. It’s called “Paper Trails”, and in the three months that I’ve been writing for it I’ve managed to quote Derek Walcott, not quote Jean-Jacques Rousseau, talk about the Chalet School and inform everyone that travel writing is a lie.

I’ll be putting all the columns up eventually. For now, here’s a slightly longer version of August’s piece on robinsonades and the amazing generosity of desert islands.

 

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The first great shipwreck survivor in Western literature is Robinson Crusoe. In Daniel Defoe’s novel of 1719, the seafaring protagonist finds himself stranded on a deserted island where, with the entire contents of his ship at his disposal, he manages to live for a number of years. The island provides him with goats to domesticate, fruits to eat, and even a native servant for company.

Robinson Crusoe seems to be the book that all future island-dwellers have read. A century later, in 1812, Johann Wyss’s Swiss family jokingly give themselves Crusoe’s name. The men who land on Jules Verne’s L’Île mystérieuse in 1874, meanwhile, seem familiar with Wyss’ work, and mention the Robinsons’ habit of giving various parts of their island fanciful names. The island survival story would draw so much from Defoe’s pioneering novel, that in 1731 (only a little over a decade since Robinson Crusoe) the German writer Gisander named the genre the “robinsonade”.

Robinsonades generally involve people stranded in deserted places who must struggle against nature to survive. Often, the characters in these stories cultivate the land; many of them settle there for good and begin to populate it. All of this sounds as if the shipwreck story were a constant struggle between man and nature. Yet this is not always the case.

At the beginning of C.S Lewis’ Prince Caspian (first published in 1949), four children are magically transported to an island where there appears to be no other sign of life. At first, the children have no idea where they are. Though they realise that they might starve to death, the thought is quickly dismissed. “It’s like being shipwrecked,” remarks Edmund, the younger boy. “In the books, they always find springs of clear, fresh water on the island. We’d better go and look for them.” There is no need to worry; these characters are familiar enough with the robinsonade to know that nature will provide. In fact,far from islands being the site of an intense struggle between man and the environment, many books give the impression that they are among the most benevolent places in the world. To be cut off from human society seems more beneficial than not.

Take Wyss’ Der Schweizerische Robinson (The Swiss Family Robinson). The island upon which the family find themselves stranded immediately provides them with safe harbour and giant trees for building in. Soon afterwards they will discover an astonishing and geographically improbable range of edible plants and animals. When they need shelter the island not only offers up caves but fills them with useful rock salt. So wonderful are the conditions of their exile that when the family are granted the opportunity to go home most of them choose not to avail of it.

R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858) saw three teenaged boys shipwrecked on an island in the South Pacific. Decades later in 1954, William Golding would write a much less compassionate island book, Lord of the Flies, as a counter to Ballantyne’s novel. The three boys work together in what Golding seemed to think was improbable camaraderie for a group of teenagers cut off from civilisation. Again, the island provides everything they could possibly need – food (coconuts, fruits, fish and wild pigs), fibre from which to make clothes, and candlenuts to provide light. Over and over, the boys compare their island home to paradise, and when danger comes, as it does in the form of sharks, pirates and cannibals, it is always from across the sea. Here human civilisation, rather than nature, is the greatest source of savagery. Wyss and Ballantyne’s books are both steeped in Christianity, so there’s a sense not only of the island as unsullied Eden, but of man’s ownership over all of nature.

The Romans believed in the genius loci, a protective spirit that was associated with a particular place. The protagonists of Jules Verne’s L’Île mystérieuse might well be forgiven for thinking that the islandin question had such a spirit, and one that had their interests at heart. On the surface, Verne’s novel seems more realistic about the difficulties of nature – here there are no convenient caves, and edible wildlife does not fall so readily into the palms of our heroes’ hands. More than most robinsonades, Verne centres the ingenuity of humans; his characters build a foundry and prepare blasting powder with the few resources at their disposal. Yet something seems to be protecting them, lighting fires to guide them home, killing dangerous animals and malevolent pirates, and even providing medicines and tobacco to those who need them. It’s almost disappointing when the reader learns that there is human agency behind all of this. But then, perhaps the provision of a benevolent protector is just another instance of the island’s bounty?

The first island many of my generation encountered in fiction was the one in Kirrin Bay, owned by George of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, and first encountered in Five on a Treasure Island (1942). Kirrin Island has been the site of at least one shipwreck that we know of, but for the Five it is a place of refuge. The island has a convenient way of manifesting exactly what the plot needs at any particular time; when the family are in financial difficulties it produces lost treasure, when the children are hiding from kidnappers it has a hard-to-find cave. At a crucial moment it manifests a system of underwater passages that lead to the mainland. Blyton’s The Secret Island also has children fleeing the adult world for safety. The children escape an abusive aunt and uncle for an idyllic life on a hidden island.

Islands in these novels do pose the occasional danger. Wyss’s family encounter a boa constrictor, and Verne’s island is eventually destroyed in a rather spectacular volcano eruption. And yet, judging by what books have taught me, I’d feel safer on a desert island than in a lot of places.

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August 29, 2012

William Mayne, A Grass Rope

A couple of years ago when Mayne died I wrote a bit about my conflicting feelings about him. A couple of weeks ago I reread A Grass Rope and was utterly blown away by it – as I had been the first time.

Last week’s column:

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Years ago I wandered into the children’s section of a library and found a couple of things that probably didn’t belong there – including Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time and James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Presumably someone had glanced at the titles, decided that these books were about child characters, and that therefore they were meant for children to read. This is nonsensical of course- some of the best child characters in literature work as well as they do precisely because they’re being read from the perspective of an older reader.  Swami and Friends is great fun to read if you’re Swami’s age, but it’s even better if you’re old enough to see his fears as ridiculous (and yet completely understandable). I struggle on a daily basis to work out what the difference between children’s and adult literature is, all I can really say for certain is that child characters have nothing to do with it.

One of my favourite examples of a book that contrasts ‘child’ and ‘adult’ perspectives is William Mayne’s A Grass Rope which is in all probability a children’s book (it was certainly published as one, and won the Carnegie Medal in 1957). A Grass Rope brings a group of children together to discover the truth of an old legend connected to their families. An ancestor, trying to protect his daughter from an unsuitable lover, locked her up and left her guarded by a pack of hounds and a unicorn. The suitor, calling on magic to help him, managed to lure the hounds and the unicorn into Fairyland and escape with his bride, but he didn’t get his hands on his father-in-law’s fortune. That, in the form of silver chains on the hounds’ collars, had been lost forever.

Various characters in the story have different feelings towards this story. Adam, the oldest, thinks there might be a non-magical explanation and that, were they to solve the mystery, they might be able to recover the treasure. Nan dismisses the whole as just a story, while for Peter and Mary, the two youngest, the story is completely true.

Mary’s unquestioning acceptance of magic comes into conflict with Adam’s insistence on finding a scientific, rational explanation of events. And for most of the book it seems that Adam is right – it is possible to form a reasonable, logical hypothesis for the old legend. It’s through science that the children discover where the hounds might have gone; but it’s Mary who goes through the gate, hoping to dance with the fairies.

Even as Mayne appears to validate Adam’s science, the book is fully alive to the greater beauty of Mary’s stories. One huge fact is left unexplained for the reader, though we are told that there is a possible explanation. And throughout Mary’s experience of the world teeters on the edge of magic.

They walked along in the dusk. The sky hung overhead in colours of new roses; and to the west lavender and marigold; to the east the green of sage and under the cloud that rolled behind the sunset the edge of darkness came on: silver lined like a well edged with daisies.

‘What colour are we?’ said Mary. ‘All grey and white like that dead woodlouse I found under the rug on the landing?’

‘Dream colour’ said Nan.

Mayne is a difficult subject for many lovers of children’s literature. He was one of the finest children’s writers of his generation, but he was also convicted for the sexual abuse of some of his young female fans. Upon his death in 2010 it seemed clear that few people were sure how to speak of him. Yet speak of him we must; not to remind ourselves that artists can be both vile and brilliant (though that’s a useful thing to know) but because we can’t afford to forget that books as good as The Grass Rope have existed.

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