This all sounds quite complicated and somewhat improbable, but Blyton moves briskly through it, so I’m prepared to go along with it and accept the implicit message that aunts and uncles are not as good guardians as a parent. What I find much harder to accept is Blyton’s writing. Within a few pages, I’m devastated to discover that The Castle of Adventure is a terrible book.
“What I find much harder to accept is Blyton’s writing. Within a few pages, I’m devastated to discover that The Castle of Adventure is a terrible book.”
The critic in me is furious, and will not shut up. ‘Look at this! This is awful!’ she keeps shouting in my head. Even on the first page, there’s some expository clumsiness where Lucy-Ann is carefully telling Dinah the contents of a letter that Dinah has already read, and it doesn’t let up. The writing is uniformly flat, vague and clichéd – ‘In the distance the hills looked blue and rather exciting’ – and there are way too many exclamation marks. The story is preposterous: I can’t bring myself to write a full synopsis. The castle of the title is an abandoned and dilapidated pile on a hill near the cottage and there’s a local story about a wicked man who used to live there and lure victims to their doom, but it’s never enlarged on or followed up in any way. Villains do indeed secretly inhabit the castle, but they are complete cardboard, with menacing beards, menacing scars under their beards, and menacing foreign accents. They are supposed to be ruthless spies (the book was first published in 1946, so I imagine they are either German or Russian) who secretly take over the castle of the title to investigate an apparently unguarded secret machine next door (why can’t they just fly over it in a plane and take pictures?). When they discover the girls in the castle, they keep them locked up at night but allow them to roam about during the day. Don’t they think anyone will come looking for the girls? And if they are so ruthless, why don’t they just shoot them? There are a couple of scenes where characters hide by climbing in and out of ornamental suits of armour with a rapidity that would astonish a medieval knight. And there is a deus ex machina in the shape of a stalwart Bulldog Drummondish chap with ‘a ruddy face and twinkling eyes’ known as Bill Smugs (Police? Secret service? Who knows) who by an astounding coincidence has helped the children on their previous adventure. By another astounding coincidence, one of the kids runs into him in the neighbourhood and invites him to their cottage: of course he is on the trail of the spies anyway and turns up just in time to get everyone out of trouble with his readily summoned gang of rough house lads. Hooray!
Long before I reach this point, everything is reading like… well, like a parody of Enid Blyton. We even have ginger beer, though not lashings of it. But what about the children? Don’t they make the whole story work? Well, no. They seem to me little more than stereotypes – the redheads, the tuftyheads. The boys are at least given some personal passions: Jack is mad about birds, Philip is mad about animals (and they in turn are mad about him). They are each a bit older than their sisters, who idolise them, even though Philip teases Dinah and Dinah gets a bit cross.
“It’s a chastening discovery: young Jane was not the child of impeccable literary taste that I’d fondly imagined.”
Dash and blow. My two previous hypotheses have collapsed. I needed neither good writing nor beautifully observed characters, and I certainly didn’t need a great character, or characters, to identify with. It’s a chastening discovery: young Jane was not the child of impeccable literary taste that I’d fondly imagined. And as I read on, I discover that young Jane was not at all perturbed by blatant discrimination against girls. Lucy-Ann and Dinah are maddening wimps, and the casual sexism makes me cringe. Everyone loves those girls but assumes they are a liability, and the girls themselves seem to share this view. Lucy-Ann is shy, weepy, easily scared and always reluctant to do anything even mildly daring. Dinah is a bit bolder, but terrified of anything creepy-crawly (and there are all too many creepy crawly things forever making her shriek and jump). In their escapades, the boys always take the lead and the girls follow. The girls are also invariably the ones who provide the picnics, lay out the food, pack up afterwards and wash up when they get home. The only boys’ job mentioned is bringing in firewood. The boys treat them with rough chivalry and genial condescension. (‘You girls stay down the bottom of this crag.’) When Jack goes off to the castle for a few days to watch an eagles’ nest and take pictures on his camera (that are apparently of a quality it takes professional wildlife photographers decades to acquire), he won’t let his sister come: ‘You can’t hang on to my apron strings all the holidays.’ But she is allowed to visit to bring him food. Later, Jack is going through a tight underground tunnel: ‘He was sure that if the girls had been with him, someone would have got stuck with fright, and would not have been able to go either up or down, after a while.’ And the girls are deliberately kept out of the final confrontation with the villains, though the boys can stay.
“‘Unfair to girls!’ I keep saying to myself. Why won’t Blyton give them a chance to stick up for themselves?”
‘Unfair to girls!’ I keep saying to myself. Why won’t Blyton give them a chance to stick up for themselves? Just because they are a little younger than the boys gives her no excuse. There is, however, a fifth child in this story, a little girl called Tassie who I think is more interesting and more gutsy than the other four put together, and potentially a great character Blyton never quite develops. First we must understand that even in the deepest countryside, the spectre of the British class system is never absent. Mrs Mannering may not be all that well off, but these kids with their private schooling (how do they afford it?) are undoubtedly middle class, and the locals in ‘the village’ aren’t. The children mock the way they always say ‘Ah, that’s right.’ Tassie is definitely from the wrong side of the tracks, a dirty raggedy barefoot girl (described once as a ‘gypsy’) who lives in ‘a tumbledown cottage’ with a ‘scolding, untidy mother’ who at one stage shakes her like a rat. She can’t read or write and is ‘more like a very intelligent animal than a little girl.’ Tassie is fascinated by the clean, well-dressed foursome and clearly in love with Philip. In a painfully patronising scene, Mrs Mannering gets her into a hot tub, scrubs the shrieking child with carbolic soap and gives her an old dress and shoes that once belonged to Dinah. The detail that touches me is that Tassie loves the shoes but thinks they are too good to wear on her feet: she hangs them by the laces around her neck.
Although we might feel sorry for Tassie, who is clearly a deprived and abused child, the children admire her because she is so agile and athletic, knows the short cuts around the castle, and is the first to attempt the terrifying underground passage Jack thinks the girls would never get through, in a chapter splendidly titled ‘Tassie Is Very Brave’. I could have happily read a bit more about Tassie, but she remains a mysterious wild child.
The Castle of Adventure is not a particularly long book, but I had to force myself to keep reading, to dodge the temptation to skim, and to finish it. Whatever magic was in this book for me once has long since evaporated. But that presents me with another challenge: whatever did I see in it in the first place? Because there is no doubt I loved it, and all the other Adventure books. There must have been something very powerful there that totally transcended crummy writing, undeveloped characters and a predictable plot. Children don’t read critically, but if a book doesn’t hold them, they just stop reading. I never, ever wanted to stop the first time round.
“Whatever magic was in this book for me once has long since evaporated. But that presents me with another challenge: whatever did I see in it in the first place?”
Critics have tried to explain why Blyton is still so popular with children, but I don’t think most of them get it. In his book The Promise of Happiness: Value and Meaning in Children’s Fiction, Fred Inglis claims that children read Blyton ‘in order to avoid using their imaginations… The pleasure of reading her… is like that of tirelessly bouncing a ball against a wall. It is contented and tranquil. In the strict sen
se, it is marginal: the pleasure of such privacy is only possible in its own little enclave. The novels transform time into a safe anaesthetic.’
No, Mr Inglis. It wasn’t like that. I wasn’t anaes-thetised, I didn’t feel safe, I didn’t get any of the repetitive pleasure of bouncing a ball against a wall. Sure, I knew things would end happily, and that was reassuring; but in the middle of the story, I was excited and scared and my imagination was frantically at work, and not for one moment did I feel in control. The story swept me up and bore me along and I just had to cling on and go with it.
So how did she do that? I decided to find out a bit more about Enid Blyton and her writing methods. You might quibble about the quality, but there’s no denying she’s a genius at quantity. More than 700 books, says the biographical note in my edition of The Castle of Adventure. Her career spanned about forty-three years, so that averages out at about sixteen books a year; at her peak, according to Wikipedia, she was writing fifty books a year. The Adventure books, each about 200 pages long, were each written in a week. The River of Adventure was written in five days. I’m dumbfounded. Ah, but perhaps she planned them all out carefully before she began writing? Quite the opposite. She sat down to write after breakfast with her portable typewriter on her knee and wrote through the day, with a short lunch break, until five, producing 6000 to 10,000 words a day. She described her methods in letters to a psychologist, Peter McKellar: ‘I shut my eyes for a few minutes… I make my mind a blank and wait – and then, as clearly as I would see real children, my characters stand before me in my mind’s eye… The first sentence comes straight into my mind, I don’t have to think of it – I don’t have to think of anything.’ In her biography she said, ‘If I tried to think out or invent the whole book, I could not do it. For one thing, it would bore me and for another, it would lack the “verve” and the extraordinary touches and surprising ideas that flood out from my imagination.’
“‘In 2008, forty years after her death, she was voted Britain’s best-loved author, ahead of Roald Dahl and J. K. Rowling, and well ahead of Austen, Shakespeare and Dickens.”
What strikes me here, even more than her unflagging industry, is her amazing confidence. Quite a few authors write in this intuitive, right-brained, trance-like way, though probably not as fast; but then they go back, the left brain kicks in, and they revise and redraft. It seems Blyton never bothered. Her first impulse is her best, and she doesn’t have to ‘think of anything’. Why would she? If you judge in terms of success with readers, it isn’t necessary. And what success: she is a phenomenon, and an enduring one. The most popular children’s author of all time. Six hundred million books sold. In 2008, forty years after her death, she was voted Britain’s best-loved author, ahead of Roald Dahl and J. K. Rowling, and well ahead of Austen, Shakespeare and Dickens.
It’s interesting how many well-known writers admit to Blyton as an early joy and inspiration. In a brief internet foray I counted Melvyn Bragg, Ken Follett, Hanif Kureishi, Keri Hulme, Carol Ann Duffy, Bernard MacLaverty and Brian Patten. My fellow Australian fans include a great writer for children, John Marsden. His favourite book as a child was The Children of Cherry Tree Farm, and in particular the character of Tammylan the hermit, who sounds a bit like a grown-up version of Tassie: he lives in the forest, doesn’t like people and communicates with animals. ‘She had something. I don’t know what it was to this day,’ he told me in an interview. ‘No other writer had it. Jeffrey Archer tried to imitate her and it was a dismal failure. She had something children responded to. You can’t pin it down. It’s so humdrum. You feel comforted by the banality, you feel secure. Like when I was a kid the only cheese was Kraft cheddar.’
Another Australian fan, Robert Dessaix, says that Blyton was a greater influence on him than his beloved idols Tolstoy and Turgenyev, with a profoundly transforming effect on his imagination. In his entertaining and very popular lecture ‘How Enid Blyton changed my life’, he nominates The Magic Faraway Tree books as major influences, and he has an intriguing gender-bending view of the Famous Five: ‘I was always rather struck by Julian, such a willowy yet manly youth, fair-haired and tall (like my partner, Peter, who is tallish and still quite willowy), good natured and firm (as he is), with marvelously determined eyes and a strong chin … and cousin George, the little girl who prided herself on being the best son anyone could want.’ So whether she was aware of it or not, Blyton could subvert the norms. Some say that tomboy George is based on herself as a girl.
“Whatever the reasons, kids continue to love her books – worldwide, about eight million copies of Blyton books are sold every year – and this popularity has never suffered the slightest dent from the frequent attacks from generations of critics.”
Is it the blandness of Kraft cheddar, or the sly sub-version? Whatever the reasons, kids continue to love her books – worldwide, about eight million copies of Blyton books are sold every year – and this popularity has never suffered the slightest dent from the frequent attacks from generations of critics. Everything I found wrong in my re-reading of The Castle of Adventure has already been tut-tutted about, and more beside. Blyton has been banned from school libraries more than any other author. The BBC banned her work from the airwaves for more than thirty years because she was considered ‘a tenacious second-rater’. She has been accused of being both vulgar and snobbish, sexist and racist. Noddy’s Golliwogs were purged in favour of teddy bears and goblins. Dame Slap in The Magic Faraway Tree became Dame Snap as the series was purged of corporal punishment.
In company with the attacks on her writing come gossipy slurs and innuendoes on her personality. She hated children, say her detractors, which I find hard to believe: you can’t devote your whole life to pleasing people you hate. Perhaps it was more the inconvenient reality of her own children that bothered her.
The Woman Who Hated Children views are largely based on a famous 1989 memoir, A Childhood at Green Hedges, by her daughter Imogen Smallwood. She doesn’t pussyfoot around. ‘The truth is, Enid Blyton was arrogant, insecure, pretentious, very skilled at putting difficult or unpleasant things out of her mind and without a trace of maternal instinct,’ she wrote. ‘As a child, I viewed her as a rather strict authority. As an adult, I did not hate her. I pitied her… Most of my mother’s visits to the nursery were hasty, angry ones, rather than benevolent. The nursery was a lonely place. The nannies lingered in the warm kitchen and I had no friends to play with.’ The children in her mother’s books were ‘her best friends. Real children were an intrusion. I found her very cold and saw little of her. She didn’t mean to be cold. The world she was living in was too important to her to embrace those who intruded on her.’
“It may be that Blyton was like A. A. Milne, seeking out an escape, a fantasy childhood in her writing that she could never have replicated in reality, either as a child or in her relations with her own children.”
We will never know for sure how much of a monster mother Enid Blyton was. She certainly refused her daughters access to their father after she briskly dispatched him in a divorce, which seems particularly insensitive considering that Enid’s adored father ran off to live with another woman when she was thirteen. But her other daughter Gillian had a more benign view than Imogen, remembering how she and her mother would go black-berrying or picking buttercups: ‘My mother always seemed to have time for me.’ It may be that Blyton was like A. A. Milne, seeking out an escape, a fantasy childhood in her writing that she could never have replicated in reality, either as a child or in her relations with her own children. Maybe she wanted to return to that sunny world that had shattered for her when her beloved father abandoned the family. Maybe she felt a confidence, a sense of control when she was writing that she couldn’t bring to the rest of her life. Maybe in that sense, writing was an addiction for her, and she would resent anything that broke the spell. I can speculate on this, but it doesn’t help me solve my big question: What was it that I, and millions of others, saw in her writing that so enchanted me?
I go back to The Castle of Adventure and try to look at it again without my critic shouting at me. I can’t read as a child now, but surely there is some inkling here of what I loved?
“I realise how much Stuart Tresilian’s black-and-white illustrations contributed to my enjoyment of the story.”
One thing that helps is that in the meantime I have found another edition, a Macmillan and Co Ltd hardback from 1956, which is virtually identical to the one I read. Now I realise how much Stuart Tresilian’s black-and-white illustrations contributed to my enjoyment of the story. They are melodramatic but meticulously realistic, with a theatrical use of light and dark: often the scene appears flooded by footlights. There’s a supercharged frontispiece where the villains scowl and cower before mysterious figures in suits of armour, one of them holding a very unmedieval pistol. Tresilian’s animals have more character than his humans: I love his eagles. Altogether the illustrations invest the text with a high seriousness, and when you look at them you forget the story doesn’t deserve such dignity.
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