If stories have the power to do good, they can presumably also do the opposite. I don’t – before the Daily Mail unleashes itself at me – want to ban Disney or Cinderella. (A headline from 2017: ‘At last we’re united – by [that is, rallying furiously against] a mum trying to ban Sleeping Beauty’). Cinderella is a fantastically strange and remarkable story and if I had a child I would tell it to them. But the Disney Cinderella – the Cinderella who waits patiently to be seen, beautified, and chosen and made rich – not only lacks agency: she lacks hunger.
Real fairytales are about hunger: hunger for power, above all; but also hunger for justice, for love, for change and transformation, for other humans. Characters devour one another, sometimes literally, until they’re stacked inside each other like Russian dolls. So if I had kids I’d like to tell the Disney Cinderella as one of many old versions, along with La Cenerentola and the Icelandic version: as part of a raucous and wild tradition. And I would like to tell, too, a new version: one in which Cinderella does even more running, less waiting; one in which the heroic optimism remains but perhaps comes from Cinderella herself: she could, metaphorically or possibly literally, devour her fairy godmother.
It’s not strange to want to change these stories. These stories have always changed: it would be strange to want to keep them in stasis. As Angela Carter wrote, ‘I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode.’ Fairytales, myths, legends: these are the foundations of so much, and as adults we need to keep reading them and writing them, repossessing them as they possess us.
On children’s fiction today
It was in the middle of the nineteenth century, as paper became more affordable and childhood literacy rates soared, that children’s fiction began to take the actual desires of children into account. The subversive hunger of fairytales, unleashed into the newly booming printing press, made its way into children’s novels. Stories designed for children were unhitched from the schoolroom and the pulpit, and the First Golden Age of children’s books was born. Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, J.M. Barrie and E. Nesbit killed the parents, or abandoned them, or left them when they fell or flew to Wonderland or Neverland, and in so doing they released the child from the imperatives of the adult world. It must have felt like dynamite. Orphaned and unsupervised children roamed through Storyland, wreaking the chaos necessary for an adventure to take place. Larger and wilder experiences were on offer: stories which pushed back at the edges of what was possible.
It was here that the idea that children were sweet or gentle or necessarily more simple or likeable than other kinds of humans was jettisoned, along with the idea that all logic must be adult logic. As a child, I had no illusions that children were sweet: children, I knew from my own furious heart, were frequently nasty, brutish and short. In casting aside that idea, children’s books began to play by their own rules and, in so doing, became works of art distinct in themselves, in their own tradition, not watered-down versions of some other, adult thing.
And that tradition has held. You could draw a family tree from Peter Pan, who first appeared in 1902 (‘and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless’); to Mary Poppins in 1934, with her stern and impenetrable enchantments (‘Mary Poppins never explains anything’); to the anarchic and surreal logic of Where the Wild Things Are (1963) and The Tiger Who Came to Tea (1968), who ‘drank all the water in the tap’. (I have met Judith Kerr only once: she said that one of her publishers wanted her to change that line, because it was impossible and they were afraid the impossible would trouble children. I am very glad she kept it.) And on to Roald Dahl and Frank Cottrell-Boyce and Lissa Evans and to someone whose name we do not yet know, writing somewhere a story that will shake us in our collective shoes.
The family tree keeps growing. Children’s fiction today is still shot through with exactly the same old furious thirst for justice that characterises fairytales: the wicked stepmother is beheaded by a trunk, Mrs Coulter in Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass (2000) falls eternally through a hole in the tissue of the universe. And, too, knitted closely into the need for justice, there is a related stance, the happier cousin of protective retribution: that of wonder. In a world which prizes a pose of exhausted knowingness, children’s fiction allows itself the unsophisticated stance of awe. Eva Ibbotson escaped Vienna in 1934, after her mother’s writing was banned by Hitler; her work is full of an unabashed astonishment at the sheer fact of existence. Journey to the River Sea (2001) has a kind of wonder that other kinds of fiction might be too self-conscious to allow themselves. So it’s to children’s fiction that you turn if you want to feel awe and hunger and longing for justice: to make the old warhorse heart stamp again in its stall.
Politics
A lot of children’s fiction has a surprising politics to it. Despite all our tendencies in Britain towards order and discipline – towards etiquette manuals and school uniforms that make the wearers look like tiny mayoral candidates – our children’s fiction is often slyly subversive.
Mary Poppins, for instance, is a precursor to the hippy creed: anti-corporate, pro-play. Mr Banks (the name is significant) sits at a large desk ‘and made money. All day long he worked, cutting out pennies and shillings … And he brought them home with him in his little black bag.’ Edith Nesbit was a Marxist socialist who named her son Fabian after the Fabian Society; The Story of the Treasure Seekers contains jagged little ironical stabs against bankers, politicians, newspapers offering ‘get rich quick’ schemes and the intellectual pretensions of the middle class.
And the same is true across much of the world; it was Ursula Le Guin, one of the greatest American children’s writers, who said this: ‘We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.’ Children’s books in the house can be a dangerous thing in hiding: a sword concealed in an umbrella.
Children’s books are specifically written to be read by a section of society without political or economic power. People who have no money, no vote, no control over capital or labour or the institutions of state; who navigate the world in their knowledge of their vulnerability. And, by the same measure, by people who are not yet preoccupied by the obligations of labour, not yet skilled in forcing their own prejudices on to other people and chewing at their own hearts. And because at so many times in life, despite what we tell ourselves, adults are powerless too, we as adults must hasten to children’s books to be reminded of what we have left to us, whenever we need to start out all over again.
Imagination
Children’s fiction does something else too: it offers to help us refind things we may not even know we have lost. Adult life is full of forgetting; I have forgotten most of the people I have ever met; I’ve forgotten most of the books I’ve read, even the ones that changed me forever; I’ve forgotten most of my epiphanies. And I’ve forgotten, at various times in my life, how to read: how to lay aside scepticism and fashion and trust myself to a book. At the risk of sounding like a mad optimist: children’s fiction can reteach you how to read with an open heart.
When you read children’s books, you are given the space to read again as a child: to find your way back, back to the time when new discoveries came daily and when the world was colossal, before your imagination was trimmed and neatened, as if it were an optional extra.
But imagination is not and never has been optional: it is at the heart of everything, the thing that allows us to experience the world from the perspectives of others: the condition precedent of love itself. It was Edmund Burke who first used the term ‘moral imagination’ in 1790: the ability of ethical perception to step beyond the limits of the fleeting events of each moment and beyond the limits of private experience. For that we need books that are specifically written to feed the imagination, which give the h
eart and mind a galvanic kick: children’s books. Children’s books can teach us not just what we have forgotten, but what we have forgotten we have forgotten.
Aristotle would agree (probably). In around 350 BC he defended the importance of phantasia; he argued that to lead a truly good life it was necessary to be able to wield fictions – to imagine what might be or should be or even could never be. Plato, who mistrusted poets and would have mistrusted children’s novelists even more, would like nothing about this essay. But defy Plato.
Hope
One last thing: I vastly prefer adulthood to childhood – I love voting, and drinking, and working. But there are times in adult life – at least, in mine – when the world has seemed blank and flat and without truth. John Donne wrote about something like it: ‘The general balm th’hydroptic earth hath drunk, / Whither, as to the bed’s feet, life is shrunk, / Dead and interred.’ It’s in those moments that children’s books, for me, do that which nothing else can. Children’s books today do still have the ghost of their educative beginnings, but what they are trying to teach us has changed. Children’s novels, to me, spoke, and still speak, of hope. They say: look, this is what bravery looks like. This is what generosity looks like. They tell me, through the medium of wizards and lions and talking spiders, that this world we live in is a world of people who tell jokes and work and endure. Children’s books say: the world is huge. They say: hope counts for something. They say: bravery will matter, wit will matter, empathy will matter, love will matter. These things may or may not be true. I do not know. I hope they are. I think it is urgently necessary to hear them and to speak them.
And where to find them
In order to read children’s books, of course, you must first be able to access them. This, which could and should be both easy and free, currently risks becoming neither.
My love of that sun-bleached Harare library had a baffled edge to it: it seemed too good to exist. Why didn’t people steal the books? (They do, of course, but at a relatively low rate of attrition: around five per cent. The most stolen books tend to be sex-and-witchcraft-based: a poll in America found that two of the most stolen books in the country were The Prophecies of Nostradamus and The Joy of Sex.) Yet in a world which wasn’t, in my short experience, known for giving something for nothing, libraries were giving one of the best things in the world for free.
The Times reported recently that since the turn of the decade in England more than £300 million has been slashed from library budgets. More than 8 million people are active borrowers from libraries; still more use the libraries’ other services, like internet and book groups, and yet 700 libraries and book-lending services have been closed by councils since 2010. And – a fact that people outside of education or kid’s fiction tend to find staggering – the government won’t mandate libraries in schools: currently the only institutions required by law to have libraries are prisons. To which it’s hard to say much that isn’t unrepeatable in front of children.
I still find libraries astonishing; I still think they speak to our better instincts. The library remains one of the few places in the world where you don’t have to buy anything, know anyone or believe anything to enter in. It’s our most egalitarian space. And we live in a world in which the problems that threaten to engulf us, surely, have inequality – and the catastrophes that inequality inflicts on men, women and children – at their heart. In these dustbin-fire days, to turn away from the institution of the library feels criminal. If hope is a thing with feathers, then libraries are wings.
The galvanic kick of children’s books
In 2016, my understanding of the world I lived in was upturned: by Brexit, Trump, a sweep across Europe towards nationalism and insularity, terrorist attacks. In the immediate aftermath, adult literary fiction did not help: I couldn’t make it work. It was reading through the prism of children’s fiction that brought back my faith in what books can do: because what helped were the old narratives, told for the benefit of children and adults and anyone who would listen: Icelandic folk tales, Grimm. They said that this, though it felt like an ending, was not: there has always been vaunting ambition, bitter acrimony, misunderstanding, hunger for power, folly, kindness, passion. Fairytales have already recorded, in their sideways way, all of human vice and yet not fallen silent in despair.
I still believe – most days, most of the time – that stories have power. I believe, like Aristotle, that fiction can put forward truths, via narration, which cannot be baldly stated by abstract theoretical language. There are ideas in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that I could no more summarise than I could sing you all the parts of a hundred-instrument symphony: fiction resists reduction. Fiction can’t, by itself, right the world. But I believe, still, in the wild and immeasurable value of pouring everything you think good or important into a text, that another may draw it out again: what Elena Ferrante calls ‘a fishing net that captures daily experiences, holds them together imaginatively, and connects them to fundamental questions about the human condition’. But if its value is to be maintained now, in this moment we’re living in, when astonishing technological breakthroughs meet vast human inequality, we shall need new voices.
Kazuo Ishiguro said in his Nobel Prize address: ‘We must search more energetically to discover the gems from what remain today unknown literary cultures, whether the writers live in faraway countries or within our own communities.’ And for that to work, he says, ‘we must take great care not to set too narrowly or conservatively our definitions of what constitutes good literature.’ In doing so we might find ourselves borne up in the hitherto silenced talent that has not yet found a way into the public sphere. There is so dazzlingly much to gain.
And Ishiguro’s call applies not just to adult fiction but to children’s too. Children’s fiction needs to widen and change again, as it has widened and transformed before. Recently a study of children’s fiction in the UK showed that only four per cent of books published in a year had any characters who were black, Asian or minority ethnic, but that 31.2 per cent of school children are from minority ethnic origins. Like most writers, I often go to visit schools and, when I do, I ask the children to help me write a story – I ask for character names, a boy and a girl. Many of the schools I go to are in South London, where I live, and more than half of the children in the classrooms will have English as a second language, but the names they suggest in those schools are always the same: Jamie, Harry, Lizzy – Anglo-Saxon names pre-owned by monarchs. Those are the kinds of names, we’ve been telling children, that heroes have.
This isn’t to say that children need to see exact replicas of themselves in every story they read – fiction, in giving you a front-row seat to another person’s heart, allows you to be male, female, armoured bear – but every child does urgently need to be able to find themselves somewhere. As the world transforms so swiftly, children’s fiction needs new, ever-more-various stories, from all across this kaleidoscopic planet on which we stand – already it has begun, but we need more; new ideas, new mediums, from places and voices we’ve hitherto failed to listen to: new jokes, new riches. This is the time for another twist in its evolution: another Golden Age.
*
There will be many who would shame you for children’s fiction beyond the bright line of your eighteenth birthday. Your embarrassment is expected, indeed anticipated by the market: the Harry Potter books were issued with an alternative grown-up cover, so that the old and serious needn’t blush on the bus. But refuse to be shamed. Apart from anything else, it’s good practice. There’s a gorgeous scene in the 1949 black-and-white film Adam’s Rib, when Katharine Hepburn questions her secretary about the moral double standards of the day: her secretary, defensive, says: ‘I don’t make the rules.’ ‘Sure you do,’ says Hepburn. ‘We all do.’ Shame requires your acquiescence. So rebel. Go to an independent bookshop and stride towards the books with bright colours on their spines.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who knew more about a great deal than mo
st of us, wrote about her childhood reading in Aurora Leigh; about how she:
read my books,
Without considering whether they were fit
To do me good. Mark, there. We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits, – so much help
By so much reading. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth –
’Tis then we get the right good from a book.
So defy those who would tell you to be serious, to calculate the profit of your imagination; those who would limit joy in the name of propriety. Cut shame off at the knees. Ignore those who would call it mindless escapism: it’s not escapism: it is findism. Children’s books are not a hiding place, they are a seeking place. Plunge yourself soul-forward into a children’s book: see if you do not find in them an unexpected alchemy; if they will not un-dig in you something half hidden and half forgotten. Read a children’s book to remember what it was to long for impossible and perhaps-not-impossible things. 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.
Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise Page 2
