Thoughts on ‘Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise’

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‘Children’s fiction has a long and noble history of being dismissed,’ writes Katherine Rundell in this short but inspirational hardback. She cites Martin Amis who once said, ‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book.’ 😲 Instead of going on the attack, though, Rundell, a prize-winning author and Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, has chosen to write a wonderful rebuttal.

She shows how the best children’s books help us ‘refind things we may not even know we have lost,’ taking us back to that time when ‘new discoveries came daily and when the world was colossal, before your imagination was trimmed and neatened …’

As the Financial Times says, ‘It’s a very short book but it packs a real punch.’ It also covers a lot of ground – zipping through the history of children’s books (which, in English, began as ‘instruction manuals for good behaviour’), the importance of fairy tales (with their ‘wild hungers and heroic optimism’), the need for greater diversity of authorship (‘there is so dazzlingly much to gain’) and how library budgets should be increased (not ‘slashed’), along with lighter issues, such as the ‘bookworm’s curse’ of knowing a word’s meaning but not how to pronounce it.

There are many thought-provoking ideas here but one, in particular, made me pause: ‘… there are some times in life when [a children’s book] might be the only thing that will do.’

A few months ago a friend of mine, struck down by a neurological illness that had left her bedridden and unable to speak, had reached the point where people were questioning whether she’d lost her mind. In the past she and I had often discussed books and one day, not long before she died, I decided to read her one of my all-time favourites – Richmal Crompton’s William (1929). The chapter I chose was one in which 11-year-old William tries to distract a gullible woman from her gold-digging suitor by interrupting him with preposterous stories. Halfway through one of these, my friend opened her eyes and laughed. I felt the bond between us; it was a precious moment.

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Another friend, who lived to 105, found life in a care home unbearably restrictive (she always referred to herself as an inmate). Her father had worked for Henry Ford – she’d met him as a child – and she’d lived an incredibly full life. Now she was mostly confined to one room, and books were a lifeline, especially certain children’s books. Even though she was 44 when Dodie Smith’s The 101 Dalmatians was published, this one was a favourite. Her reaction when I turned up with it was just wonderful.

This is how Katherine Rundell finishes her 63-page essay: ‘Go to children’s fiction to see the world with double eyes: your own, and those of your childhood self. Refuse unflinchingly to be embarrassed: and in exchange you get the second star to the right, and straight on till morning.’

How can you refuse?

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Covid-19 and the case of the stymied writers

Covid-19 seems to have affected a lot more things than I anticipated.

For one thing, I’m still trying to get used to the fact that nobody else is going to be in my flat anytime soon.  I don’t have to sniff all the liquid soaps in the supermarket to make sure they’re not too girly for male guests.  I don’t have to invest in posh paper napkins.  There’s no point trying out recipes to see if they might impress the family. 

I can spray on perfumes without fretting about whether they’ll offend.  (Perfume is my passion but not necessarily everyone else’s.)

And writing has become impossible.

See, I have a character in a boat on a loch and things are about to happen to her.  I know where she is, and why.  I just can’t decide WHEN she is.

 

The pandemic has changed the world.  Do you set your ‘contemporary’ story just far enough in the past to not acknowledge Covid-19 ?  And if you do, should it include ominous foreshadowings?  Or if you decide to exclude current events, will your story be relevant to readers? 

We can’t aim for a future, post-Covid-19 world, because we don’t know that there will ever be a post-Covid-19 world, or what the future looks like. 

The Guardian recently published an article about writers’ lockdown blues:

“I’m finding it incredibly difficult to work out what to do,” says Holly Watt, author of To the Lions, winner of the 2019 CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. She is working on her next novel, the third in her series following investigative journalist Casey Benedict, which was due to be published in summer 2021.

“I’m trying to work out where we might be. Might there be a vaccine? Will getting on a plane feel wildly anachronistic? Will journalists working from an office seem weird? How interesting can a book actually be when everyone is sitting in their sitting room in their pyjamas?” Watt asks. “It feels odd to be writing about people hopping on trains or popping to the pub, but focusing on Covid might make it date hideously. But if you don’t mention it, it is the massive elephant in the room.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/01/no-pubs-no-kissing-no-flying-how-covid-19-is-forcing-authors-to-change-their-novels

How are you dealing with this?

Behaving Badly – and Barbara Pym

Tags

Barbara Pym, Barbara Pym Society, Behaving Badly, Catherine Heath, Green Leaves, Judi Dench, St Hilda's College Oxford

‘I could hardly make a big production of it, you know… when he told me, about how he’d spent the night with some girl called Rebecca, all I could think of was the fact that I’d bought turbot for supper…’

Catherine Heath’s fifth and final novel Behaving Badly gives us one of the most brilliantly-conceived comic heroines ever. Published in 1984, it is somehow perfect escapist reading for today, taking us to a past which feels in retrospect to have been more innocent and less complicated.

‘I was going to do Hollandaise sauce, and I thought, oh dear, our lovely dinner’s going to be quite wasted. So when he told me about this girl I just said, oh, yes, I see. Oh, thank you for telling me. And that was all and we ate the turbot and do you know I quite enjoyed it… So I mean, there’s no point in putting on a tragic act. It stands to reason that nobody, nobody that greedy has much dignity to stand on.’

Fifty-year-old Bridget Mayor has dutifully filled her life with hobbies, television and church-going after her husband dumped her five years earlier to marry a much younger woman. Nothing very unusual about that for women in seventies Britain. But what happens when an Excellent Woman stops being excellent and decides she will start pleasing herself instead of other people? What’s the point in clinging to dignity? To her husband’s horrified discomfiture Bridget insists on moving back into her old home in Hampstead, where her devious ex-mother-in-law Frieda conspires to get rid of the intruder Rebecca. But that’s just the start…

Writing in The Times, Isabel Raphael wrote of Behaving Badly: Here is an exceptional novel, brisk and unsentimental, touching and subtly romantic. It is also very funny. Her style is poised and cool and her dialogue as artfully artless as that of Barbara Pym; and there is no higher praise in novels of this kind.

There are connections between the two novelists Barbara Pym (1913-1980) and Catherine Heath (1924-1991): both studied English Literature at St Hilda’s College Oxford, both seamlessly combine wit, satire and sympathy, and both died of cancer aged sixty-six. But it’s disappointing that Catherine Heath remains relatively unknown. In the Barbara Pym Society’s publication Green Leaves of November 1998 Hazel K. Bell wrote how she hoped that Catherine Heath’s wonderful novels would one day be rescued from obscurity, in the same way as Barbara Pym’s have been.

That hasn’t happened, despite Judi Dench’s superb performance as Bridget in the 1989 British television series of Behaving Badly, now available as a DVD. If only they would show it again!

Behaving Badly clearly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It will seem too dated for some, too much a piece of social history, even too trivial. But for others it’s an altogether delightful read where favourite lines can be relished over and over again: Upstairs Frieda closed a detective story. It was useless. She had no access to South American arrow poison. And as one character says near the end, using a very Barbara Pymish word, ‘Isn’t it, in a way, splendid?’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sanditon – ‘I must not depend upon being ever very blooming again’

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Andrew Davies, Another Lady, Georgette Heyer, Marie Dobbs, Mr Woodhouse, Sanditon

In rereading Jane Austen, we are able to experience something of that age of elegance which too often eludes us in the twentieth century. We are unrepentant about this form of escapism and turn to her six novels for relaxation… Like Mr Woodhouse, we enjoy the company of these old friends best; and though we prefer their actual company to secondhand discussions and speculations about them, anything concerning them will always hold a fascination for us…. writes Another Lady AKA Marie Dobbs.

In her An Apology from the Collaborator, included at the end of Jane Austen’s Sanditon completed by Another Lady published in 1975, Marie Dobbs admits that she offers her version for our sheer enjoyment, aware that Jane Austen’s language, integrity and meticulous technique cannot be faithfully copied.

She was too hard on herself. Marie Dobbs’ completed Sanditon is peppered with delightful passages poking fun at human vanity and folly, which feel as though they could be written by Jane Austen herself. The Miss Beauforts… were certainly no longer content to remain on their balcony now these two personable young men were to be perceived strolling about admiring the Sanditon views. Indeed, they felt a definite obligation to improve the landscape for them immediately by dotting graceful feminine silhouettes wherever they be most visible. The very next day Miss Letitia carried her easel out of doors and began moving it from sand to shingle, from hill to Terrace with tireless and unselfish activity. No concern for completing her own sketches interfered with her sense of duty to adorn whatever vista might require her presence.

There is some splendid Austen-ish dialogue too, as in this speech from Reginald Catton, one of the only two on-stage characters added by Marie Dobbs: ‘So that was Miss Denham! Predatory female – Sidney warned me. He said I would not be in the least danger from anyone else – could handle all the Miss Beauforts with ease – but Miss Denham would be hanging about me forever if once she caught sight of my barouche. I told the groom to keep it well out of sight in the stables.’ 

Reginald Catton may also remind fans of Georgette Heyer of her comic young men about town, such as Ferdy Fakenham in Friday’s Child. Marie Dobbs makes the hero Sidney Parker resemble the witty, charming, teasing Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey, but in his unassuming kind-heartedness there are echoes of Georgette Heyer’s endearing Freddy in Cotillion. The later developments of the plot come close to Heyer regency romances too – no problem for those of us who love both authors, as we must suspect Marie Dobbs did  – but perhaps some literary critics might argue that Jane Austen was intending to take a different and sharper line.

It’s difficult not to feel disappointment that Andrew Davies’ recent television adaptation of Sanditon didn’t follow the story and tone of the Another Lady/Marie Dobbs completed version. In the eleven chapters Jane Austen wrote before illness stopped her in March 1817, she set up everything we love in her other novels and Marie Dobbs fulfils the sparkling early promise with grace, respect and humour. Added to this we have in Sanditon a merciless satire of hypochondriacs and medical quackery, speaking to us all the more poignantly when we remember that Jane Austen was only four months away from her death on 18th July.

But as the ever-so-sensible heroine Charlotte says to the would-be seducer Sir Edward who has read more sentimental novels than agreed with him: ‘our taste in novels is not at all the same.’ Nor is our taste in television adaptations all the same, and this is probably a very good thing.

Where do good ideas come from?

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Cheltenham Literary Festival, Franz Kafka, Ian McEwan, Jean-Paul Didierlaurent, Metamorphosis, Pulp fiction, Ros Schwartz, The Cockroach, The Reader on the 6.27

Where do good ideas come from?

Sometimes you read a book with a strikingly original and simple idea; you then think, “Well, of course, I could have thought of that if I I’d tried,” but the point is YOU DIDN’T.

Two examples from books I’ve just read:

The Cockroach by Ian McEwan. We know Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which opens with a man waking up to find he’s a giant insect. Why not reverse that? Have an insect who wakes up to find he’s turned into a man? Brilliant. And when we learn that that man is the British Prime Minister, who is leading the country into a whole new economic system that merely a few years back was advocated only by people who were thought crackpots …. Well, you can finish the sentence. A topical satire and, as I’ve said, a great and simple idea. (Unfortunately I’ll have to return the book to my sister who lent it to me, as she got it signed by the author at the Cheltenham Literary Festival.)

The Reader on the 6.27 by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent is the other (translated from the French by Ros Schwartz). Here the simple idea is to have a central character who loves books but is compelled to work in a factory that destroys them. This is an appalling place where books are pulped. They are devoured and converted into a disgusting slush by a dreadful and dangerous machine into which our hero has to climb each day as part of its maintenance. And each day he rescues a page from whatever book is going into its maw, and reads it to his fellow-commuters on the train to work the next morning. They love it. The other characters are grotesques, all with some often bizarre link to books and writing. (Fortunately I was given this by a friend so can keep it. Thanks, friend.)

Wondering what to do with that gift card you got for Christmas? You could see if you like as much as I did what these writers made of these original and simple ideas.

The Cockroach by Ian McEwan, published in 2019 by Jonathan Cape, ISBN 978-1-529-11292-4 RRP £7-99 (it’s only 100 pages)

The Reader on the 6.27 by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent, translated by Ros Schwartz, published in 2016 by Pan, ISBN 978-1-5098-3685-7 RRP £8-99

‘Prague Spring’

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1968, Alexander Dubcek, Bielefeld, Czechoslovakia, Moody Blues, Prague Spring, Simon Mawer, Warsaw Pact

Topicality, or anniversaries, can give writers real opportunities.

The events of August 1968 are the setting for Prague Spring, the new novel by Simon Mawer. He has written before about Czechoslovakia, as readers of The Glass Room will know, that telling and compelling history of a villa that is remarkably like the Villa Tugendhat in Brno. (See https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2017/08/15/the-glass-room-revisited/.) He shows the same confidence and attention to detail here.

The novel focuses on two diverse couples whose lives become intertwined in Prague as the political tension mounts, as Warsaw Pact troops are massing on the borders. Two students decide to hitch-hike across Europe: wealthy, Home Counties Ellie (revelling in the role of revolutionary socialist – this is 1968, remember!) and poorer, Sheffield-born James. Their relationship shifts as they find their way across Europe, depending on the opportunities or the hazards that face them. Dubček and “socialism with a human face” have been much in the news, and the toss of a Deutschmark decides that they will go to Prague to see it rather than head south to Italy for the sun.

Meanwhile, at the British Embassy in Prague, Sam Wareham (a fluent Czech- and Russian-speaking First Secretary) has met beautiful Lenka Konečková. She is the daughter of a victim of the show trials in the 1950s, and is someone anxious to enjoy the new freedoms the Prague Spring has brought. With her Sam explores this new optimistic world in ways that might well have been closed to him if he was confined to his usual round of Embassy socials and official trade union visits.

The mixture of this exciting new freedom, and the threats gathering at the frontier, generates a tension that pervades the love lives of these characters and the people they meet and the places they go. We visit a chaotic pop concert given by a ramshackle American pot-smoking pop group the Ides of March, and at classical concerts we are transported by the music of Dvořák and Brahms. We attend an exuberant political meeting; just like the hitchhiking couple, we meet a wide range of folk on the road, we come across an influential Party member, and we see shadowy people in action at the Embassy. Musicians feature quite prominently – as well the Ides of March we meet a famed German cellist, a more famous Russian conductor and his young violinist lover. There is even a cameo appearance by the Moody Blues (as a way of evoking the late 1960s in the minds of those of us who were there, bringing in Nights in White Satin is a masterstroke). Dubček is seen briefly. We visit Café Slavia and are greeted by a shortish man in a leather jacket who we are told later is a playwright … There is a lot of sex (as, I recall, there was in The Glass Room).

Reader, I don’t think I’m really spoiling it if I tell you that the paths of these two couples cross and the Russians do invade. The sense of massive confusion throughout the city when that happens is well described. The Prague Spring is being brutally brought to an end and our protagonists find themselves in the midst of the horror and the chaos.

Simon Mawer has included in the text four short explanatory notes to give some background: on the suspicious death shortly after the Communist coup d’état in 1948 of the Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk; on the Communists’ murder in 1949 of the democrat Milada Horáková; on the Bavarian-Czechoslovak border; and on ‘Ghosts’ – Kafka, Hašek, the Castle itself, and the letter from five members of the Czechoslovak Presidium to Brezhnev asking him to intervene to save the country from counter-revolution.

In August 1968 I was staying with a German family in Bielefeld. I recall their fear that the Russians wouldn’t stop at the Czechoslovak border.   Many readers will have their own memories of what it was actually like to be in Czechoslovakia as they unfolded: for those of us who don’t, Prague Spring is a novel that tries to capture that historic moment.

Published by Little, Brown ISBN 978-1-4087-1114-9

(This piece first appeared in the October/November 2018 issue of the British Czech & Slovak Review, the newsletter of the British Czech & Slovak Association – see http://www.bcsa.co.uk. To hear Simon Mawer talking about this book in a radio interview go to https://www.radio.cz/en/section/books/simon-mawers-prague-spring-a-complex-love-story-amid-the-drama-of-1968.)

Which children’s fictional characters still walk beside us?

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A Little Princess, Anne of Green Gables, Apple Bough, Emily of New Moon, Frances Hodgson Burnett, L. M. Montgomery, Noel Streatfeild, Saplings, Susan Coolidge, What Katy Did

The children’s section of our local bookshop has been invaded by older adults buying Christmas presents for grandchildren. Watching them picking up titles from the classics shelf I wondered if they are secretly longing to buy the books they loved as a child rather than today’s bestsellers?

Perhaps all of us can remember the books which seemed to frame our childhood and become part of our identity. They were usually about ordinary children in the real world; they gave us companions who shared the same feelings and troubles. Such books were entertainment and escape, but also something even more valuable. They contained characters who inspired us with a wider vision. Without ever being preachy, they were stepping stones in the confusion of growing up and sorting out what matters in life.

Anne Shirley in the Anne of Green Gables series, Emily Starr in the Emily of New Moon series (L. M. Montgomery), Myra in Apple Bough, Laurel in Saplings (Noel Streatfeild), Katy Carr in What Katy Did (Susan Coolidge), Sara Crewe in A Little Princess (Frances Hodgson Burnett) – just some of the vital friends who lived beside me in childhood and ever since. It’s good to see them still on the shelves in bookshops along with today’s favourites Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Matilda.

Train delays can have their compensations

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Ancient Greece, Arachne, Athena, Bereavement, Chaos, Chislehurst, commuters, Europa, Matt Chamberlain, Stephen Fry, Train travel, Zeus

My train journey home on Tuesday evening was muchly delayed – long enough to qualify for a refund!  “Signalling problems in the Chislehurst area …”  But no worry: I had a seat, and some good reading material.  Two good reading materials in fact.  I settled down to a happy session.

I remember the green gaze is the latest poetry collection by Matt Chamberlain (for previous ones see the posts https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2017/07/24/collaboration-one-mans-trash/ and https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2016/12/29/lowering-awareness/ on this blog).    In his Foreword Matt Chamberlain talks about seeing things in colours.  He writes, “The preceding year has been difficult, with bereavements and faltering friendships …  But green says ‘calm tolerant, easy’, and when buffeted between red heat and deep blue cold, I sought its neutrality.   I longed for the return of nature.  I remembered the green gaze.”

‘A Father’s Day’ will echo with anyone who’s lost a loved one, thinking of the everyday actions that won’t be done again.  ‘Commuters’ suggests ways of passing a train journey, eg “Rain makes patterns and I imagine introducing people to their own reflections, me their gentle intermediary.”  ‘Counting’ describes the sheer abundance of nature: “Frank swept away twelve tons of leaves last night but morning said ‘I’ll raise you’; now the scarlet carpet is measured in fathoms.” ‘An Old Soldier’ recalls one’s youth in a way that will resonate; we won’t have in our own memory bank an Action Man stuck for years on a telephone line, but we’ll have the equivalent.

And many more, as they used to say on the sleeves of compilation LPs.  (Talk about going down Memory Lane!)

The other was Mythos, Stephen Fry’s retelling of many of the Greek myths.  As you would expect from him, it’s so readable, a fresh take on familiar stories.  And many of them that weren’t familiar to me.  Told with affection and a modern feel.  In the very first chapter, for example, describing Chaos and the creation of the universe, he explains how your trousers began as chaotic atoms, became your trousers, will become landfill, and in time will return to cold Chaos once the Sun expands and destroys the earth.   When telling the story of how Europa, changed by Zeus into a cow, swims across the Bosphorus, he delights in pointing out that ‘Bosphorus’ and ‘Oxford’ mean exactly the same thing.  Time and again we see the Greek origin of our words or our ideas.

His imagined conversations on Olympus entertain, as does his recognition that he is repeatedly introducing us to perfectly beautiful young people, who may well (but not always) come to sticky ends once their beauty attracts an Olympian.   Adonis, Ganymede, Narcissus, Echo, Psyche, Semele – they’re all here.

Sometimes he gives us interesting variants on what we’re used to.  Athena, for example, changes Arachne into a spider not because she presumptuously took her on in a spinning competition, but as a reward for being a great artist, the poor girl having just hanged herself in mortification a few moments before.

Eventually the signalling difficulties in the Chislehurst area were resolved.  But I hadn’t minded.

 

Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells – and a story of splendid ladies

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Charlotte Bartlett, Disgusted Ladies, Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, E M Forster, Tunbridge Wells, Votes for Women

The expression ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ may have entered the English vocabulary in the 1950s onwards as a byword for middle class conservative moral outrage, but this elegant spa town in the south east of England has a habit of regularly cropping up in literature well before that. We find references in Dickens’ Bleak House, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Fanny Burney’s Camilla, and Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon for a start.

It’s often depicted as the residence of genteel aunts and maiden ladies – a favourite being Charlotte Bartlett in E M Forster’s 1908 novel A Room with a View: ‘I am used to Tunbridge Wells, where we are all hopelessly behind the times’.

But not all of the good ladies of Tunbridge Wells were like Charlotte Bartlett then, any more than they are now. Just published by Matador is Disgusted Ladies by local author Anne Carwardine. It tells the fascinating story of how the town was home to a series of ordinary yet extraordinary VOTES FOR WOMEN campaigners – remarkable and courageous women who were disgusted for all the right reasons.

Tunbridge Wells in 2018, a hundred years after women were given the right to vote: no longer disgusted but still a town with a distinguished literary presence, past and present…

 

 

 

Oxford short stories

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Bodgers, Bodleian Library, Colin Dexter, Olympics, Oxford, Oxford Homeless Pathways, OxPens, Sheep

Ninevoices have warned in the past of the dangers of being in Oxford if you’re a fictional character, and we’ve also extolled the works of other writers’ groups. The two come together in The Bodleian Murders and other Oxford stories, produced by the OxPens group in 2016.

This is the third of five collections of short stories OxPens have produced. It was a gift from my daughter and I’ve much enjoyed its variety. Some of the stories are University-based – such as of course the title story – but others are set elsewhere in the city or in the Oxfordshire countryside. Rural Bliss (set in a village near Chipping Norton) is a warning to husbands of the risks of not taking seriously enough your wife’s delight in rearing sheep. Oggi (set largely near Henley-on-Thames) is about bodgers, craftsmen who make chairs to order from wood they have, er, liberated from woods nearby.

History is well served. Burning Words takes us back to 1555, when the mere ownership of a book inscribed by a burned heretic could bring great danger. In The Stunner from Holywell we see the creation in 1857 of a beautiful painting by Rossetti and what happens to it a century later.  Colin Dexter appears in Just Keep Going, with encouraging word for uncertain writers.

A Visit from Social Services describes just that, and shows us the perils social workers face making house calls on the elderly. In Time for the Wake mysteriously links Oxford with a funeral in Nigeria. The Festival of International Art and Scholarly Culture, Oxford farcically takes us back to the excitement of Olympic year in 2012, when the local Arts Committee decide to join in the festivities in ways that may mean that the dreaming spires won’t get back to sleep for a long, long time. The death count in The Bodleian Murders rivals that in an episode in Midsomer Murders, and that in only ten pages.

There are 15 stories in all. Lack of mention of the other 6 here shouldn’t be taken as any form of criticism at all! Thanks, OxPens. (http://www.oxpens.co.uk/)

ISBN 978-1-904623-24-3 RRP £7-99 Available from Blackwells post free http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/bookshop/home    Profits from the book are shared with Oxford Homeless Pathways (formerly Oxford Night Shelter).

https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2015/12/26/stay-away-from-oxford/ speaks for itself.

Other writers’ groups that have featured on this site:

https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2015/08/26/an-evening-with-tunbridge-wells-writers/;

https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2016/01/26/delayed-reaction/ (the Just Write group in Amersham)

https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2015/10/25/our-friends-in-norwich-their-mustard-short-story-competition/ (Norwich Writers’ Circle)