Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise

by Katherine Rundell

  Why You Should

  Read Children’s

  Books, Even

  Though You Are

  So Old and Wise

  Books by Katherine Rundell

  The Girl Savage

  Rooftoppers

  The Wolf Wilder

  The Explorer

  The Good Thieves

  For younger readers

  One Christmas Wish

  Contents

  Why you should read children’s books

  A caveat

  On reading as a child

  On how children’s fiction came to be

  On wild hungers and heroic optimism

  On children’s fiction today

  Politics

  Imagination

  Hope

  And where to find them

  The galvanic kick of children’s books

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Why you should read children’s books

  The place I loved most as a child was the public library in Mount Pleasant, Harare, Zimbabwe. The children’s section had seemingly not been restocked since the 1950s, and it smelt of the leaking roof and the ferocious sun which flooded, impeded only by dust, through the glass doors. The spines of the books were sun-bleached, and some had been taken out so rarely the fines on the returns slip were listed in shillings. It was there that I read my way through almost every book on the two dozen shelves: shelves which contained profoundly unlikely adventures, an enormous quantity of mediocre horse stories, and a book which had been shelved there by mistake in which the heroine has sex in a gondola. And, too, some of the greatest fiction ever written for anyone of any age at all.

  Children’s fiction has a long and noble history of being dismissed. Martin Amis once said in an interview: ‘People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children’s book. I say, “If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book.” ’ There is a particular smile that some people give when I tell them what I do – roughly the same smile I’d expect had I told them I make miniature bathroom furniture out of matchboxes, for the elves. Particularly in the UK, even when we praise, we praise with faint damns: a quotation from the Guardian on the back of Alan Garner’s memoir Where Shall We Run To? read: ‘He has never been just a children’s writer: he’s far richer, odder and deeper than that.’ So that’s what children’s fiction is not: not rich or odd or deep.

  I’ve been writing children’s fiction for more than ten years now, and still I would hesitate to define it. But I do know, with more certainty than I usually feel about anything, what it is not: it’s not exclusively for children. When I write, I write for two people: myself, age twelve, and myself, now, and the book has to satisfy two distinct but connected appetites. My twelve-year-old self wanted autonomy, peril, justice, food, and above all a kind of density of atmosphere into which I could step and be engulfed. My adult self wants all those things, and also: acknowledgements of fear, love, failure; of the rat that lives within the human heart. So what I try for when I write – failing often, but trying – is to put down in as few words as I can the things that I most urgently and desperately want children to know and adults to remember. Those who write for children are trying to arm them for the life ahead with everything we can find that is true. And perhaps, also, secretly, to arm adults against those necessary compromises and necessary heartbreaks that life involves: to remind them that there are and always will be great, sustaining truths to which we can return.

  There is, of course, 1 Corinthians 13: ‘Now that I have become a man, I have put away childish things.’ But the writing we call children’s fiction is not a childish thing: childish things include picking your nose and eating the contents, and tantruming at the failure to get your own way. The 45th President of America is childish. Children’s fiction has childhood at its heart, which is not the same thing. Children’s fiction is not written by children; it stands alongside children but is not of them.

  (That children’s fiction isn’t written by children is probably for the best. I completed my first novel when I was about eight years old, as a birthday present for my father. I sewed a cover for it in blue silk and embroidered it with stars. It was called Sally’s Surprise. The titular surprise, I find on rereading it, is presumably that there was no plot. Nothing happens. It was, in this sense, avant-garde and Waiting for Godot-esque. It had, though, a lot of descriptions of horses, which is less so.)

  There is, though, a sense among most adults that we should only read in one direction, because to do otherwise would be to regress or retreat: to de-mature. You pass Spot the Dog, battle past that bicephalic monster PeterandJane; through Narnia, on to The Catcher in the Rye or Patrick Ness, and from there to adult fiction, where you remain, triumphant, never glancing back, because to glance back would be to lose ground.

  But the human heart is not a linear train ride. That isn’t how people actually read; at least, it’s not how I’ve ever read. I learned to read fairly late, with much strain and agonising until, at last and quite suddenly, the hieroglyphs took shape and meaning: and then I read with the same omnivorous un-scrupulosity I showed at mealtimes. I read Matilda alongside Jane Austen, Narnia and Agatha Christie; I took Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle with me to university, clutched tight to my chest like a life raft. I still read Paddington when I need to believe, as Michael Bond does, that the world’s miracles are more powerful than its chaos. For reading not to become something that we do for anxious self-optimisation – for it not to be akin to buying high-spec trainers and a gym membership each January – all texts must be open, to all people.

  The difficulties with the rule of readerly progression are many: one is that, if one followed the same pattern into adulthood, turning always to books of obvious increasing complexity, you’d be left ultimately with nothing but Finnegans Wake and the complete works of the French deconstructionist theorist Jacques Derrida to cheer your deathbed.

  The other difficulty with the rule is that it supposes that children’s fiction can safely be discarded. I would say we do so at our peril, for we discard in adulthood a casket of wonders which, read with an adult eye, have a different kind of alchemy in them.

  *

  W.H. Auden wrote: ‘There are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children.’

  I am absolutely not suggesting adults read only, or even primarily, children’s fiction. Just that there are some times in life when it might be the only thing that will do.

  A caveat

  There are of course many books marketed for children which wouldn’t repay adult attention; these are often books which rely for their power largely on fart jokes, on the sheer tantalising fact of dinosaurs and on the physical gorgeousness of fairies. I certainly don’t want to dismiss the ancient power of the fart joke – there are fart jokes dating back to 1900 BC – but I’m interested, here, in the texts for children that acknowledge the right of the child to have as rich a story as the adult writing it would demand for themselves. Not only the classics: there are such riches of new work every year. Children will not be patient if you pontificate or meander or self-congratulate. Rather, children’s fiction necessitates distillation: at its best, it renders in their purest, most archetypal forms hope, hunger, joy, fear. Think of children’s books as literary vodka.

  On reading as a child

  What is it like to read as a child? Is there something in it – the headlong, hungry, imm
ersive quality of it – that we can get back to? When I was young I read with a rage to understand. Adult memories of how we once read are often de-spiked by nostalgia, but my need for books as a child was sharp and urgent, and furious if thwarted. My family was large, and reading offered privacy from the raucous, mildly unhinged panopticon that is living with three siblings: I could be sitting alongside them in the car, but, in fact, it was the only time when nobody in the world knew where I was. Crawling through dark tunnels in the company of hobbits, standing in front of oncoming trains waving a red flag torn from a petticoat: to read alone is to step into an infinite space where none can follow.

  As a result I suffered from the bookworm’s curse of knowing the meaning of words without knowing their pronunciation, never having heard them out loud. I pronounced saccharine wrong well into my twenties. I’m still not entirely sure about pedagogy. There were also words whose pronunciation was straightforward but whose meaning I did not know, and slowly pieced together from their surroundings. I got a lot wrong: somnambulistic (P.G. Wodehouse: not a deadly illness), soporific (Peter Rabbit: nothing to do with lettuces). A fowling-piece in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase turned out to be a gun, and not, as I had assumed, some kind of weaponised bird. As a child, reading alone for the first time, I navigated a book like an unknown land in which unfamiliar words crop up like strange herbs, to be gathered now or stepped over and returned to later.

  Martin Amis, expanding on his brain-injury comment, said: ‘I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write’; but that’s a total misunderstanding of what is at work in a children’s book. I don’t rein in the English language when I write, not because I expect all children to know every word, but because I trust that they’re able to deduce or ignore the meaning without it collapsing the story. Frances Spufford, in his brilliant memoir The Child That Books Built, cites the research of Claude Shannon in 1948: Shannon, a mathematician working for the Bell Telephone Company, wanted to know how much of a telephone conversation could be lost to static before communication became impossible. He concluded that up to fifty per cent of a conversation or text could be either missing entirely or not understood before meaning becomes lost. Taking my cue from Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication, I’ve just finished the edit of my most recent children’s novel. I’ve kept facade, abundance and renunciation, because there aren’t other words that will do the same jobs of meaning, tone and rhythm so well. But the rule isn’t a hard and fast one: I cut adamantine, a word I love and think children might also love, because it came at the climax of the story and I didn’t want to lose even that split-second flicker of time that comes when a reader jumps over an unknown word. I would do the same if I were writing for adults.

  On how children’s fiction came to be

  To love a thing – which I am, propagandistically and self-servingly, hoping to persuade you to do – you must first know both what it is, and how it got there. How, then, did children’s fiction come to be?

  The first children’s books in English were instruction manuals for good behaviour. My favourite, and the sternest in tone, is The Babees’ Book, which dates in manuscript from around 1475: ‘O Babees young,’ writes the author, ‘My Book only is made for your learning.’ The text is a monumental list of instructions in verse form: ‘Youre nose, your teethe, your naylles, from pykynge / Kepe at your mete, for so techis the wyse.’

  In 1715, Isaac Watts published his fantastically uncheerful Divine and Moral Songs for Children. I find this book fascinating because its author’s preface shows that the idea that it was intellectually degrading to write for children was strong by the eighteenth century: Watts writes, ‘I well know that some of my particular friends imagine my time is employed in too mean a service while I write for babes … But I content myself with this thought, that nothing is too mean for a servant of Christ to engage in, if he can thereby most effectually promote the kingdom of his blessed Master.’ The book itself fits into the category, popular at the time, of ‘upliftingly lugubrious’; it is largely made up of briskly invigorating rhymes about the inevitability of death:

  Then I’ll not be proud of my youth or my beauty,

  Since both of them wither and fade;

  But gain a good name by well doing my duty:

  This will scent like a rose when I’m dead.

  In 1744 came what’s often called the first work of published children’s literature, John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, Intended for the Instruction and Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly. With Two Letters from Jack the Giant-Killer; as also a Ball and Pincushion; The Use of which will infallibly make Tommy a good Boy, and Polly a good Girl. Newbery’s text is actually wittier than it sounds, shot through with a vein of irony, but its ancestry was clear: it came from a history of pedagogical* texts and situated itself among them. Newbery’s text set a pattern: children’s books would be instructive first and entertaining second.

  Alongside the morally uplifting accounts of Sunday schools and rigorously unpicked noses, though, there was another kind of story evolving, of a more unruly and subversive kind: the fairytale.

  * * *

  *I do not know how to pronounce this word.

  On wild hungers and heroic optimism

  Fairytales were never just for children. They are determinedly, pugnaciously, for everyone – old and young, men and women, of every nation. Marina Warner argues that fairytales are the closest thing we have to a cultural Esperanto: whether German, Persian, American, we tell the same fairytales, because the stories have migrated across borders as freely as birds.

  All fairytales, by and large, have the same core ingredients: there will be the archetypal characters – stepmothers, powerful kings, talking animals. There will be injustice or conflict, often gory and extravagant, told in a matter-of-fact tone that does nothing to shield children or adults from its blunt bloodiness. But there will also usually be something – a fairy godmother, a spell, a magic tree – which brings the miracle of hope into the story. ‘Fairytales,’ Warner writes, ‘evoke every kind of violence, injustice and mischance, but in order to declare it need not continue.’ Fairytales conjure fear in order to tell us that we need not be so afraid. Angela Carter saw the godmother as shorthand for what she calls ‘heroic optimism’. Hope, in fairytales, is sharper than teeth.

  That spirit of heroic optimism – optimism blood-covered and gasping, but still optimism – is the life principle writ large. It speaks to us all: because fairytales were always designed to be a way of talking to everyone at once. They provide us with a model for how certain kinds of stories – by dealing in archetypes and bass-note human desires, and in metaphors with bite – can yoke together people of every age and background, luring us all, witch-like, into the same imaginative space.

  Fairytales are also a way of tracing our cultural evolution. More than any other kind of story, they live and breathe and change. Cinderella is a good example. It’s the first fairytale I remember loving, long before I could read, perhaps because it’s the most physically dynamic. In a squadron of sleepers (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty) and captives (Rapunzel, the unnamed spinner in Rumpelstiltskin), Cinderella was the one who did the most running, albeit mostly away from things, and in glass high heels.

  The earliest known version of the Cinderella story dates from around 7 BC, an oral tale recorded by the Greek geographer Strabo in his Geographica. Those who are perplexed by the precedence that footwear takes over personality in the modern Cinderella would find the Strabo version even more so, for in it, the shoe precedes the woman: an eagle snatches a leather sandal from a beautiful woman and drops it into the lap of the king of Memphis (it’s been pointed out to me I should clarify: the ruler of the ancient capital of Aneb-Hetch, rather than Elvis). The king is so moved by the exquisite shape of the sandal that he orders men to search the country for its owner, and makes her his wife.

  It was Charles Perrault in his Histoires ou
Contes du Temps Passé in 1697 who added the fairy godmother and the locomotive pumpkin. In the Brothers Grimm 1812 version of Cinderella, Aschenputtel, the stepsisters cut off their toes and chunks of their heels in a bid to fit the slipper. One by one, the prince is fooled and embraces them, but the trick fails when the shoe overflows with blood. In Giambattista Basile’s La Gatta Cenerentola, Zezolla, once married to the prince, offers the stepmother a trunk full of wonderful clothes; when she leans in, Zezolla slams down the lid, decapitating her. (I tell this story to children when I visit schools, and their joyful, riotous approval shakes the walls.) In her 1893 Cinderella, Marian Roalfe Cox compiled 345 variants of the nearly archetypal story: in the Icelandic version, the evil stepmother is an ogress, who makes her ogress daughter cut off her toes to deceive the prince. The prince finds out, kills the ogress daughter, makes porridge of her and feeds her to the hungry stepmother.

  So fairytales have always evolved. Currently, though, in Britain, the princess narratives are anchored primarily by the Disney films (the earliest of which, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, dates from 1937); films which are marketed squarely at young, usually female, children. They have made us believe that fairytales are only for the young and beribboned. The market cap of Disney is currently around $200 billion; more than the GDPs of Iceland, Morocco, Namibia and Kyrgyzstan put together. They make a colossal profit from telling those stories; they have a huge financial incentive to keep their versions foremost in the public eye. There are retellings published every year, but they haven’t yet shifted our sense of the cultural authority of the stories in the Disney renderings; they’re read as ‘para-texts’: texts that offer twists on the dominant narrative, rather than replacing it. And the dominant narrative will always, to an extent, be taken as having our cultural benediction behind it. As Spufford writes, ‘we cannot be told “once there was a prince” without also being told (on some level and in some part) that it was right that there was a prince. What knits together out of nothing, and yet is solid enough to declare that it is so, recommends itself to us … In this lies the power, and the danger, of stories.’