How did Long John Silver Lose his Leg?

by Dennis Butts

  Can Mayne’s prose, then, simply be admired in the abstract? Even, or perhaps especially, his books for young readers are linguistically complex – and it is not irrelevant to point out that transcribing Mayne is notoriously difficult. Take The Blue Book of Hob Stories (1984) for very young readers, centred around an eccentric house-spirit, Hob. This is the opening of ‘Hob and Clockstop’.

  ‘How strange,’ says Mrs, the last day of February, at time for tea.

  ‘How strange,’ say Boy and Girl. ‘Hob has laid the breakfast table.’

  ‘Breakfast,’ says Mr. ‘What nonsense. If there was such a person as Hob he would have to go.’

  ‘Hob’s mad,’ says Budgie.

  ‘Hob is doing his best,’ says Hob. ‘They’re late. It’s breakfast o’clock by the grandfather.’

  ‘Tock,’ says Grandfather. ‘Tick.’

  ‘The clock is wrong,’ says Mr. He tries to set it right.

  The weights run down. The pendulum goes clatter. Something mechanical is the matter.

  ‘Never mind,’ says Budgie. ‘I will ring my bell,’ and she rings half and quarter past twenty seven o’clock.

  Mayne’s oblique style did not diminish. In Every Dog, published after his release from prison in 2009 by a publisher specifically set up to publish him, he describes the ginger cat, Oggin, pursuing a ghost dog:

  And Oggin coming out of the room where he had been testing a sandwich, dropping the sandwich, getting to twice his already enormous size and thrice as ginger, shouting out terribly rude things, rising off the carpet, and hurling himself out of the door, not touching the ground. You could see his claws flashing, Robert was sure, the air ripping . . .

  Oggin went across the garden like a mad rocket losing its orbit, got into reverse before the wall but still continued forward (but now backwards) hissing like something about to be blown up. He landed with all four feet on the face of the wall, face to the ground, fell off it, looked round for the enemy, and sat down, shedding growls . . . Oggin thought dogs were best in small pieces all over the landscape.

  But this may not be enough for a children’s author to obtain absolution. The court of opinion about children’s literature is where the ordinary reader exercises power, and as a result it may be harsher than others. But, as always, that judgment depends on where you are standing.

  27. Who is Killing Cock-Robin?

  The Mysterious Death of the Children’s Book

  In 2012, a book by ‘Daisy Meadows’ (a syndicate of British writers) appeared; it was the latest in a series of over 100 books, the ‘Rainbow Magic’ series. It was (and is) called Matilda, the Hair Stylist Fairy. Some uncharitable commentators saw it as another sign that the British children’s book as we used to know it, that fine tradition running from A Little-Pretty Pocket Book in 1744 to the global bestselling ‘Harry Potter’ books, was finally coming to an ignominious end.

  It marked, they might say, the peak of the ‘commodification’ of childhood. Marketing experts define what childhood is in terms of the products that it should want, and then the publishers ruthlessly provide the books. There is nothing new about this, except for the perfection that the process has reached: more than 90% of British children’s books are commissioned, and the lists of the major (conglomerate) publishers are clones of each other. Children’s publishing is no longer the province of avuncular gentlemen or dynamic pioneering ladies, with their offices in tall houses in London squares; gone are the days when Arthur Ransome, having been sent a manuscript (The Far-Distant Oxus) by two teenagers, could walk into Jonathan Cape’s office and declare, ‘I’ve got the bestselling book for 1937!’ Now the product is positioned on the strategy-curve; books are not books but franchises; authors are commissioned by virtue (if that is what it is) of their ability to speak, perform, and market their books – the quality of their writing is a secondary issue. Now the catalogue of each of the major publishing conglomerates looks identical to that of every other: each has their major fantasy series, the vampires, the fairies, the naughty little boy characters, and so on. Originality is pushed to the edges: sequels and prequels to The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, Winnie-the-Pooh and practically any other well-known and exploitable text abound. Children’s books have become just another project to feed to pre-programmed (not to say brainwashed) consumers.

  But children’s books are also suffering from three other serious crises which might possibly prove fatal.

  The first is the rapid increase in the number of books that were for children, but which are no longer; the second is the rebirth of the phenomenon of the ‘crossover’ book; and the third, most radically and irreversibly, is the storm of new media that has broken over the publishing industry.

  Children’s books, like other popular forms of literature, tend to be for their times: it is probably safe to say that no modern children ever read any children’s book published in the eighteenth century: Isaac Watt’s Divine Songs for Little Children (1715), a staple of schoolroom well into Victoria’s reign (as Alice could have attested) is now only history. Favourites of the nineteenth century, which hung on well into the twentieth – the works of G.A. Henty, R.M. Ballantyne, or Mrs Molesworth, for example – are now scarcely remembered except by scholars. Even world-famous ‘classics’ such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Water Babies and Treasure Island are (whisper the blasphemous thought) known only by reputation or through adaptations into comics or films. That is not to say that there are not a lot of ‘classics’ still around in neat sets in bookshops and bedrooms, but whether they can be truly said to be for children any more is seriously debatable. The ancient tradition of the worthy school prize, or the grandparently present is not (to the delight of publishers of such books) yet dead.

  Then there is the assumption that the modern child is more attuned to images than words, and that the only way to make a book that was once for children into a book that is for children is to adapt it into comic strip (or graphic novel) form. The result is that pages of prose are reduced to simple statements. Take the famous scene Treasure Island in which the not entirely admirable Jim Hawkins (armed only with two damp pistols) is pursued into the rigging of the Hispaniola by Israel Hands, who has a dirk between his teeth. In the original prose, the episode is full of subtle ironies and narrative tricks: Jim reports, but doesn’t ‘see’ Hand’s hand holding the knife; equally he doesn’t report the actual effect of his shooting – and does not take responsibility for it.

  ‘One more step, Mr Hands,’ said I, ‘and I’ll blow your brains out! Dead men don’t bite, you know,’ I added with a chuckle.

  He stopped instantly. I could see by the working of his face that he was trying to think, and the process was so slow and laborious that, in my new-found security, I laughed aloud. At last, with a swallow or two, he spoke, his face still wearing the same expression of extreme perplexity. In order to speak he had to take the dagger from his mouth . . .

  I was drinking in his words and smiling away, as conceited as a cock upon a wall, when, all in a breath, back went his right hand over his shoulder. Something sang like an arrow through the air; I felt a blow and then a sharp pang, and there I was pinned by the shoulder to the mast. In the horrid pain and surprise of the moment – I scarce can say it was by my own volition, and I am sure it was without a conscious aim – both my pistols went off, and both escaped out of my hands. They did not fall alone; with a choked cry, the coxswain loosed his grasp upon the shrouds, and plunged head first into the water.

  If this is converted into visual form, the text might read (as it does in one version):

  I scrambled up the rigging, but Hands followed me. He threw his knife and pinned me to the mast. I fired my pistols and he fell into the water.

  The ‘shelf-life’ of books seems to be rapidly becoming shorter. Books that in the 1970s would have been the common stock of children’s bookshelves – John Masefield, M.E. Atkinson, Gary Hogg, Pe
ter Dawlish or Percy F. Westerman – have disappeared. The sailing, camping and tramping novels of Arthur Ransome, or the girls’ school stories of Angela Brazil, may still be in print, but are really either part of the heritage industry or are on the curious life-support system of the enthusiasts’ societies (a fierce and immensely learned body of amateur scholars). Some, such as Mary Norton’s The Borrowers or Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden, have received a new lease of life through film or television adaptations, and have received the questionable accolade of becoming ‘modern classics’. But whether they are truly ‘alive’ for more than a handful of child readers might be questioned. In the face of so many competing forms of entertainment, the literary horizons, even of book-reading children, have shrunk.

  Of course, there are some survivors: publicity panjandrums as massive and accomplished as those of Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl are not so easily derailed, and readers of Blyton’s ‘Malory Towers’ or ‘St Clare’s’ books seem impervious to anomalous names such as Gwendolyn and Darrell. (This may be partly because these series, far from being girlish wish-fulfilment, are in fact full of a rather brutal realism about how girls behave towards each other!) And Winnie-the-Pooh and Milne’s poems must owe their survival (like it or not) to the remarkable Mr Disney. After all, whether the first poem in When We Were Very Young is now to anyone’s taste today might be reasonably questioned:

  Who comes tripping round the corner of the street?

  One pair of shoes which are nurse’s;

  One pair of slippers which are Percy’s . . .

  Tweet! Tweet! Tweet!

  The next nail in the coffin of children’s literature is the ‘crossover’ book – a book which started life aimed at one audience and which has transmuted to be read by a different audience – which is in fact a phenomenon of some antiquity. Adults have always read children’s books and vice versa, but in the early twentieth century, as childhood became strongly differentiated from adulthood as a protected space, the distinction between books for children and books for adults became more marked. Books written in that period generally had little attraction for adults (except nostalgically), but as childhood has become less and less a protected space, it is perhaps hardly surprising that the books have grown together again – or that books from this period do not appeal to modern children.

  The crossover traffic (and this is a fact that has provoked a good deal of hand-wringing among the self-appointed guardians of the nation’s literary health) has generally been from children to adults. Whereas popular heroes such as Leslie Charteris’s ‘The Saint’, and even James Bond, have slid inexorably into the teenage market at various times, many more books have moved the other way. Richmal Crompton’s ‘William’ stories, which were originally aimed at adults when they first appeared in 1919 (in Home Magazine) have again, thanks at least in part to radio adaptations, been accepted by adults as much as by children. (Incidentally, William shares with the Saint and James Bond the remarkable talent of remaining the same age while the world whirls past them. By the time the last Saint book was published in 1997 Simon Templar was 102; when William the Lawless brought his career to a close in 1970, William (12 in 1922) was a sprightly 60; in Skyfall, James Bond was looking very well at 83.)

  A great many fantasy books (another cause of hand-wringing) have made the transition, notably Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and Ursula K. le Guin’s ‘Earthsea’ quintet. For others the transition has been a little more awkward: repackaging Tolkien’s The Hobbit, or C.S. Lewis’s ‘Narnia’ series, or books by Diana Wynne Jones or Susan Cooper in ‘adult’ covers does not make them adult reading. The idea that a single book could be sold into two markets simultaneously (and at different prices) by changing the cover art was established by Richard Adams’s Watership Down (1972), and emulated with huge success by the ‘Harry Potter’ franchise.

  An outstanding recent example was Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003), which originated with a children’s book publisher, David Fickling, and almost immediately was repackaged for adults. It won the Whitbread Award for best adult novel and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award. Its first-person narrative by a boy with Asperger’s Syndrome is remarkably convincing: the children’s book – or whatever this now is, has entered new territory:

  And I don’t know why Mr Shears left Mrs Shears because nobody told me. But when you get married it is because you want to live together and have children, and if you get married in a church you have to promise that you will stay together until death do us part. And if you don’t want to live together you have to get divorced and this is because one of you has done sex with somebody else or because you are having arguments and you hate each other and you don’t want to live in the same house any more and have children. And Mr Shears didn’t want to live in the same house as Mrs Shears any more so he probably hated her and he might have come back and killed her dog to make her sad.

  Of this blurring of boundaries, in which the children’s book shifts towards the adult book as childhood disappears, Pratchett is is a prime example. It is hard to distinguish his novels ‘for children’ set on the ‘Discworld’, from The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents to Wintersmith, from other ‘Discworld’ novels; they have young protagonists, but otherwise could be for adults. Even the books more obviously for teenagers, such as Only You Can Save Mankind assume a reader of considerable sophistication. Johnny has been having what he assumes are dreams, and explains them to his friend Yo-less (so called, despite his objections to racial stereotyping, because he never says ‘yo’.)

  Johnny didn’t go into too much detail. He just talked about the dream, and not about the messages on the screen. Yo-less listened carefully. Yo-less listened to everything carefully. It worried teachers, the way he listened carefully to everything they said. They always suspected he was trying to catch them out.

  He said, ‘What you’ve got here is a projection of a psychological conflict . . . your mum and dad are splitting up, right? . . . So you project your . . . suppressed emotions onto a computer game. Happens all the time. You can’t solve real problems, so you turn them into problems you can solve. Like . . . if this was thirty years ago, you’d probably dream about fighting dragons or something. It’s projected fantasy.’

  Another curious way in which the territory of the children’s book is breaking down is the marketing of children’s ‘classics’ to adults. This is another manifestation of the ‘books that were for children’ phenomenon: children do not read Treasure Island much any more, but adults who are interested in Victorian literature and culture do, and such editions are provided with annotations, introductions, bibliographies, and so on.

  If this seems odd, it chimes with the holistic way in which children’s books are now read: the book is only a part of the whole matrix of experience. Examples include back-stories, side stories, the fanfiction forums where new stories appear on the internet; books are becoming a part (and often a small part) of an interactive communicative universe. The author is not dead, but is being replaced by multiple authors: everyone can be an author.

  As a result, there is some doubt that the printed book as we know it will survive at all. The bombardment by the electronic media is changing not only the way stories are presented (on screens rather than on pages) but also what those stories consist of. Social media and internet-searching habits are changing the mindset of a new generation – the sequential static-media narrative has lost its dominance.

  But perhaps there is no need to be quite so gloomy about the future of children’s books: they have proved to be remarkably resilient, and success has come in the oddest places. Who would have thought that a book that is essentially a nineteenth century public school story (with added wizards) would become a bestseller? And the electronic revolution, with print-on-demand, has meant that self-publishing is no longer merely ‘vanity’ publishing, and small publishers are proliferating. Bl
ogging and fanfiction may be producing vast quantities of unedited or uncontrolled texts, but even for these writers, the solidity of the printed book seems to be the goal. And it may well be that the hard-copy book may survive longer among children – i-pads are not ideal for reading in the bath, or, in the case of young readers, chewing.

  From the very beginning, when Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book was published in 1744 with ‘a Ball and a Pincushion, the use of which will infallibly make Tommy a good boy, and Polly a good Girl . . . ’ children’s books have been multimedia, part of games, part of socialization, part of education, and part of entertainment. If they disappear, they will leave a very large gap. So perhaps Cock-Robin is not dead yet!

  Notes

  1. Difficulties with Dates

  Reprints of almost all Marryat’s novels can be found in second-hand bookshops. An annotated edition of The Children of the New Forest, edited by Dennis Butts, was published by the Oxford University Press in its World’s Classics in 1991. Tom Pocock produced a readable biography Captain Marryat: Seaman, Writer and Adventurer (London: Chatham Publishing, 2000).