The Child that Books Built

by Francis Spufford

  And I was equally puzzled by the strange silence of the authors about their characters. Oh, they described them, all right – but who was good? Who was bad? What was I supposed to think about them? I was used to the structure of a fictional world being a structure of judgements, an edifice built to provide you with a moral experience in exactly the same way that it brought you tastes, smells and sights. I expected to be guided. I thought that reading was intrinsically a bargain in which you turned off your own powers of judgement and let the author’s take over, so he or she could show you a pattern made by the interplay of some people who were exactly what the author said they were. The point of stories to me was that people could be decisively known in them. The author’s special intimacy with them unmasked them for the reader; or rather, turned them so that you saw exactly the moral facets of them that the story needed. Suddenly, instead, I was finding myself in written worlds that asked me to work the characters out as I would have worked out real, interesting strangers I happened to come across. But I didn’t study strangers. That was why I read books! Compared to the books I was used to, and was growing out of, grown-up literature seemed spectacularly open-ended. I would read a few pages, and there would seem to be no edges and limits to what was going on; no sense of an evolving shape, and so no urgency, and no particular reason to read on. Of course, the reformulating jump into adult fiction consists exactly of a retuning of your reading mind to those subtler, wider, but still ultimately decisive cues to meaning that a writer for adults constructs in the expectation that the person reading will bring an active, participatory judgement to the task. No book is truly open-ended. Ask any deconstructionist: they’ll tell you that a fictional text, however wide it spreads its net, is a closed system within which possible interpretations are carefully limited and managed. But there is still a great difference in sensation, for the reader, between a story that is explicitly story-shaped, following visible and external rules like the rule of a happy ending, and one that takes advantage of the novel’s great freedom to flow into any form at all that embodies the author’s sense of the internal order of their material. I was not yet willing, or able, to see the ad hoc shapes of adult novels. I still needed the given forms, the definite outlines of children’s books.

  So for now, when the elaborative choice was offered to me, I took articulation. This meant I asked for my reading to extend to new subjects without it changing its nature. I looked for books that used familiar means to talk about new things. The pickings were thin. If I had been growing up ten years later, I would have had far more choices. In the 1980s, a whole booming publisher’s category appeared of writing specifically aimed at teenagers – books designed to lead ‘young adults’ gently out of children’s books by offering them the certainties of a children’s book’s narration, only applied to the lives of those who had entered the Age of Acne. I could have read Cynthia Voight’s extraordinarily tough, and sparely beautiful, series of novels about the Tillermans, a poor-white family growing up in the Tidewater back-country around the Chesapeake Bay. Or the New Zealand novelist Margaret Mahy’s terrific Brontëesque supernatural thrillers, The Changeover, The Haunting and The Tricksters. Mahy did family life with an elegant, witty realism that made you feel you were getting a leg-up to being an altogether more noticing kind of person; simultaneously, she understood how inchoately sexy magic is, at a point in your life when real sex is still three wishes away, and gleams with as much mixed fascination and alarm as if it were truly a spell. Will it turn you inside out? Will it steal you away from yourself? Or if I had been a nineties teenager, and wanted fiction to carry me through the complications of a world where brown heroin is easily available in secondary schools, I could have turned to Melvin Burgess’s Junk.

  Instead, I mostly made do with books of adventure which, like the James Bond novels, existed in a masculine blur between boyhood and adulthood. I read books for boys with adult male heroes whose thoughts contained nothing a thirteen-year-old couldn’t recognise, like Lawrence Durrell’s espionage novel White Eagles Over Serbia; I read books theoretically for grown-ups that nonetheless showed adult men doing things that were perfectly intelligible in the context of an all-male boarding school, like escaping from Colditz. It was a bit too late for Biggles. His adventures with Ginger and Algy displayed a hopeless lack of savoir-faire. You couldn’t believe he was an adult, even a drastically censored one. But he had meatier successors in the numerous cheap reads devoted to Battle of Britain fighter pilots and the like. Them you saw whizzing away from the airfield in their sports cars for a date with some dishy WAAF. There was also a German novelist called H. H. Kirst whose books put you in a kind of counterpart wartime world on the other side, a cheerfully sleazy place populated by Wehrmacht conscripts called Rudi who were always on the scrounge for a stein of beer, a warm place to sleep, and a barmaid with a plunging neckline. My contemporaries who liked their military adventures nastier read Sven Hassel. Remember him? His books were called things like Blitzfreeze, and they always had a haggard Kraut with mad staring eyes on the cover.

  Now and again the lightning struck, and I chanced on a proper adult novel that spoke to me successfully. Satires worked, in particular. When an author sets out to make you feel the horrified pleasure of recognising a quality in people taken to its satirical limit, he or she devises an emotional path through the novel for the reader to take which is analogous to the signposted experience a children’s book offers. I found Brave New World and 1984 instinctively familiar. I knew nothing about the cinema-going, eugenics-believing, hormone-fixated pre-war scene that Aldous Huxley was extrapolating into his satirical future, and Orwell was introducing me to totalitarianism for the first time, even as he was carrying it to the point of all-dominating satiric completeness. But I knew where I was in relation to this sort of writing. I knew that both authors would stand me where I needed to be to see what they wanted me to see. I opened 1984 and read: ‘It was a bright cold day in April and all the clocks were striking thirteen …’ Ah, I thought, now you’re talking. As I read the famous, exhilaratingly grim final paragraph, where Winston Smith, post-torture, post-rats, begins to cry with joy as he hears news of another meaningless victory on the radio, I felt myself being led by Orwell through an exact, deliberate sequence of sensations: repulsion, fascination, and an undeniable, almost mathematical pleasure at the ultimate demonstration that there is no hope at all. ‘Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache … But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.’ That moment fits the novel like a black crown, and it works because it induces exactly what Orwell intended it should.

  I did also find some treasures as I gleaned the increasingly barren field of books ‘for older children’. Emma Tupper’s Diary, for instance, by Peter Dickinson, the author of the Changes trilogy, filmed for children’s TV with a title sequence my generation often remember because it spooked them and they don’t know why: the one where the train freezes in the cutting. Outwardly, Emma Tupper conformed to the laws of adventure. It had dinosaurs in a Scottish loch, and a submarine invented by an eccentric Victorian scientist. But it actually focused to a greater extent on someone learning the laws of an alien social landscape. The Emma of the title, a stolid outsider of about my age, goes to stay for the summer with a family of near-adult Scots aristocrats, who as lairds of their glen are indulged in their play with dangerous adult toys. Show-offs and fantasists all, they tease and partly include Emma. She observes them, likes them, works them out in her head, and notices when their jokes ‘contain cruel little crumbs of something else, like sand in lettuce’. I thought much more about the Macandrews and the way they talked than about the dinosaurs, when I finished that. And then I loved Jane Gardam’s A Long Way from Verona, a hectic novel about a schoolgirl growing up in a Tyneside vicarage during the war. It was the first first-person novel I read that really used someone’s individual spe
aking voice for humour, and to suffuse a chain of events with someone’s character, rather than just to create a faux document, which historical novels for children did, a lot. It exploited the subtleties – hidden in plain sight – of how people say what they say; and what they don’t say.

  The point is this – in three parts. Tripartite. Viz:

  1. I am not quite normal

  2. I am not very popular

  3. I am able to tell what people are thinking. And I might add

  4. I am terribly bad at keeping quiet when I have something on my mind because

  5. I ABSOLUTELY ALWAYS AND INVARIABLY TELL THE TRUTH

  Jessica Vye, Jane Gardam’s heroine, perpetually disconcerts teachers, and falls for a hopelessly unsuitable posh Rupert Brooke lookalike. She winds up her friends by taking everything terribly seriously. She is afflicted by embarrassment as powerful as physical fear. I found her voice incredibly sympathetic. I’d wanted to be in books myself before, but she was the first character in fiction I strongly wanted to be real, and in the world with me, so I could know her. Like Emma Tupper, A Long Way From Verona carried me half into the adult world of open-ended unguided curiosity about people, by a way that I could manage. Not coincidentally, both books had thirteen-year-old heroines: the same age as me. For both of them, and for the reality of their lives, I felt a pre-romantic glow that was the ancestor of my blissed-out later astonishment that the girls I had crushes on moved through the world sitting on chairs and brushing their teeth just as I did, as if they had no idea what goddesses they were, what charged and roseate possibility surrounded their every action. Personhood and girlhood at once!

  But despite these occasional hits I still had to search longer and longer in libraries to find any book I wanted to read. The sheer quantities of stuff I seemed to have to turn over now before anything appealed, reminded me of the description of Marie Curie discovering radium that I’d read years before in an old children’s biography of her. Having deduced that there was a faint trace of radioactivity in an industrial by-product called pitchblende, she arranged to have several factories’ output of this stuff delivered to her in a disused Paris coalyard. Then she stirred the pitchblende in a giant vat: ton after ton after ton of black sludge, just to isolate one gleaming gram of radium.

  *

  Then, a godsend: I discovered science fiction. In a way, of course, all genre writing is a natural counterpart to the controlled world of children’s fiction. Pick up a romance, a Western, a thriller, a Wodehouse comedy, a horror novel or a detective story, and you know in advance what sort of synthetic experience you are about to be offered. Genre writers are in the business of delivering sensations for which their readers have already at least half-formed a wish. They even return you to the old convention that titles of books should be descriptive, or, more than that, are contracts, which the author breaks at his or her peril. (Leave It to Psmith will contain a character called Psmith; there are sure to be literal lambs at some point in The Silence of the Lambs, whatever further resonance they then have there as a metaphor; Murder on the Orient Express is absolutely guaranteed to feature transportation by rail in the direction of Constantinople.) So perhaps I could have found equal satisfaction in another genre’s style of predictable pleasures, although it was in fact reading science fiction Puffins ‘for older children’ like John Christopher’s Tripods trilogy, and Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein, that gave me the end of a thread I could follow out of the impasse of nothing-to-read. Heinlein’s ‘juveniles’ – as his kids’ books were labelled without much regard to the dignity of their readers – led me to the rest of his output, on the adult SF shelves in the library; first in the public library in Staffordshire during the school holidays, and a little later, when I was fourteen and fifteen and had moved to boarding school in London, in one of Westminster City Council’s old branch libraries, off Great Peter Street. This was an old-fashioned temple of public reading. Tramps snoozed in the reference room. Tired globe-lamps filled the main hall with an oily yellow light that made it feel as if it were always a winter dusk outside, even in June. I picked one after another of the yellow SF hardbacks published by Gollancz off the shelves. I had the whole of SF’s history since its pulp heyday in the 1940s to catch up on – Heinlein and Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, André Norton and James Blish. The written world had been re-seeded with novelty. Possibility had come sweeping back.

  The best description I’ve ever found of the elation I felt is Wordsworth’s little hymn of thanksgiving in The Prelude for the pulp he’d read at the same age, two hundred years earlier.

  Ye dreamers, then,

  Forgers of lawless tales! we bless you then,

  Impostors, drivellers, dotards, as the ape

  Philosophy will call you: then we feel

  With what, and how great might ye are in league,

  Who make our wish, our power, our thought a deed,

  An empire, a possession, – ye whom time

  And seasons serve; all Faculties; to whom

  Earth crouches, the elements are potter’s clay,

  Space like a heaven filled up with northern lights,

  Here, nowhere, there, and everywhere at once.

  Wordsworth, naturally, was not reading SF. In the 1780s, teenage literary popcorn came in the shape of cheap romances and nutty gothics, books in which young men chanced on gigantic diamonds or mad monks cackled in dungeons extending ad infinitum, like a hall of mirrors designed by Piranesi. But the quality that makes a teenager want to give thanks is common to the genre fiction of Wordsworth’s time and mine alike.

  Maybe ‘the ape Philosophy’ – meaning every scornfully rational adult voice you really didn’t want to hear just then – was right, and a lot of the books you responded to vividly were bad; were drivel, were cheap, were ‘lawless’. (An irony, that last accusation: ‘lawless’ genre books often obey unrealistically reliable rules.) If I had looked at the stuff I was reading with a hard critical eye, I would have had to agree. Some of it was frankly bad. Some of it was good on one point only – one idea, one invention – and the whole of the rest of the novel only existed as a scaffolding to hold that one good thing in place. And some of it was ‘good’ in a purely efficient way, because it worked out a daft premise sleekly. So what. Who cares. Good books are so often committed to self-denial of one sort or another. They make their fictional world real by making it austere; they hammer invented events into proportion, and subdue them with probabilities. At other times in your life, discovering limits and feeling out the dimensions of reality can be one of the most liberating things fiction can do for you; it can be an aid to a bold, exploratory recognition of yourself. But when you’re fourteen the dimensions of your own character that you will ultimately have to get used to, and respect, are hopelessly unclear, while the restrictions imposed on your life are all too apparent. Sensible, probable books keep sending you back where you came from. It’s the wild and tacky ones that let you see further into the world you do not yet know. It’s the books that dispense with rigour and proportion that let your imagination billow out, and go exploring. They give you time, space, empire, power; an existence answerable to your wishes as your own really is not. Their freedom from what really is becomes your freedom, very directly. They give you scope.

  Sometimes that scope is manifested in larger-than-life heroics. SF is rich in characters who have superlative talents, or who find themselves at the hinge of galaxy-changing events, where one action of theirs can sway the fate of billions. This leg-up to demi-godhood is very attractive at fourteen. When you don’t feel certain yet that you securely possess even an ordinary power of self-determination, the idea of extraordinary powers calls strongly. You know that it is a crude fantasy to dream of being the Chosen One, the unknown heir to the throne of the stars, the warrior student in the high-tech dojo who moves with a lethal grace no one has seen before. But it has a crude sweetness, nonetheless. It briefly drenches your view of yourself in welcome syrup. Yo
u are trying out the sensation of exceeding the scope of an ordinary adult by the same margin by which you presently fall short of it. In a sense, even, it’s easier, at this time, to imagine yourself as a hero than as an adult; easier to imagine yourself being autonomous in the drastically total way that a hero is, when the person you find yourself to be when you put down the book is still (to use Julian Barnes’s description of adolescence) ‘a creature part willing, part consenting, part chosen for’. Wordsworth did the same thing sometimes. He read Milton and Shakespeare when he was moulding his destiny as a poet, but he read Du Bartas when he wanted to imagine being the finest swordsman in all France. I read Rocket Ship Galileo when I wanted to imagine building a spacecraft in my back garden, and blasting off to fight the Nazis on the moon. Is this just a return of an infantile wish for omnipotence? The bawling toddler’s demand to be king or queen of everything? Not quite; something from early in our history has come around again, but its meaning is different now in its new context, at this place further up on the rising spiral of development. The emergent powers that are being glimpsed in the shadowplay of fiction are a different set, this time round.

  And simple identification with heroes is only one thing that SF gives, and perhaps not a very important one. George Lucas famously constructed Stars Wars on the theory that science fiction is just mythology in modern dress. Luke Skywalker is just a new incarnation of an ancient and universal hero, as analysed by Lucas’s anthropological guru Joseph Campbell. The light sabre updates the hero’s archetypal sword. R2D2 and C3PO are the hero’s equally inevitable funny friends, turned android. Of course, Lucas must be partly right, and not just because the millions he took at the box office are experimental confirmation. In part the move from childhood reading to SF is easy because SF holds to ancient laws of plot, already deeply engrained in you. I discovered very quickly as I read my first few SF novels that mostly, when you thought of them reduced down to their emotional basics, the stories of the books were familiar. They used situations that were as old as storytelling. Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy began in a slave market on the planet Sargon, but it told the story about the orphan who finds his place in the world after many wanderings. The Rebel of Rhada, a novel about a primitive far future, essentially transposed into it the story of the faithful knight who saves the infant king from his treacherous regents, and marries the princess who has helped him in his adventures. And indeed, as in myth – or fairy tale – the appeal of these situations did not depend on subtle individual characterisation, or on them securing your assent to challenging emotional logic. They were strong, and simple, and instantly intelligible.