Should There be a Qualitative Distinction between Adult and Children’s Literature?

My piece last week on the tributes to Alan Garner reminded me of the age -old dispute of whether so called young adult and children’s literature can realistically be viewed as mainstream literature. I am reminded on Alan Garner’s Red Shift which – with some discussion - was placed on both adult and children’s lists in libraries.

It’s an old discussion which has never really been resolved.

Of course, well written, perfectly crafted stories touching fundamental issues with poetic simplicity, published in the young-adult/children’s literature field,certainly should count as mainstream literature. Writers like Alan Garner, David Almond, Susan Cooper and Lucy Boston come to mind. Perhaps it’s the elements of magic so clearly intuited by  children and some special adults are a link between these writers.

This discussion means a lot to me. Written simply as novels, my first four books were placed by the publishers into the Young-Adult and Children’s Novel category. These novels were read and enjoyed by adults as well as children. In writing them I never saw then as any different from my later adult novels. I researched and told the story as it blossomed in my mind. I didn’t write them for ‘young adults’ or ‘children from eight to twelve years.’  For me they were just stories I was compelled to write. 

I was reminded of this on Monday when I was sorting out the shelf of my

own books. I came across a novel of mine called French Leave, on the flap of which was the review of the earlier novel The Real Life of Studs McGuire. It was from Growing Point, then a prime review source for children’s books. It said  The Real Life of Studs McGuire states the urban dilemma fair and square in an up-to-date setting and through strongly contemporary characters...the action is swift and exciting enough to carry the message to th0se who read it,...
I like that, It reminded me of the joy of writing about Studs. This one was categorised as ‘Young Adult’... 

Next I came across a novel of mine called Cruelty Games which was

On Kindle and Paperback here 

published as an adult novel. These are very different novels but both of them centre on the inner and outer lives of boys of sixteen and their impact on the lives around them. Interestingly my present novel-in-progress The Blue Pool, centres around Dee, an eccentric girl of thirteen and her impact on the people around her. It will be categorised as an adult novel,

Both Studs and Cruelty Games were  published by mainstream publishers and have been more recently republished by me.  I thought perhaps adults, young  and old,  might enjoy reading them and deciding whether they should be placed in and adult or young adult category.  

Or any category at all?
Wx

Alan Garner, Elidor, and Me

 ‘Garner lives and works close to the Edge and is neither metropolitan nor provincial, He’s closer to being parochial, in Patrick Cavanaugh’s sense, never being ‘in any doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish'. But he’s more than that. He goes under the parish to fetch out stones, he cleans them, he inspects them, he turns them into steeples and into walls, he lifts them up to the stars above. He turns stones to words. He is the first in his line to use words not things...’ David Almond.

The postman – late today – hands over the package. It is beautifully packed, so I open it carefully to find a book that I’d forgotten I’d ordered. It’s a finely produced book – good paper, good bindings. I smell it, as I always do with new books: a seductive smell for a lifelong reader,

I had forgotten it, because it’s months since I made my contribution to this important book – a crowd-funded publication by Unbound of London. My own name is there in the back, with hundreds of other individuals who contributed to the publishing process.

First Light, meticulously edited by Erica Wagner, comprises a series of

celebratory essays and tributes to Alan Garner - that leading shamanistic literary writer of his generation - that magus of the stones and the earth -who can take us back with ease to into the magical ages of bronze and iron and the Celtic sunrise.

Children are at the centre of Alan Garner’s novels which speak clearly to children who read. But he does not speak just to children. He speaks to all of us in the language of storytelling which links the reality of today with the the myths and magic embedded our human identity that we have inherited from with our Iron Age, Bronze Age and Celtic ancestors.

One important element in all Garner’s writing is that – unlike many so-called; fantasy writers today – it derives nothing from the more esoteric escapist fiction of CS Lewis or Tolkien. Looked at properly, Alan Garner – like David Almond, quoted above -  is much better labelled a reality writer than a fantasy writer.,

This volume,First Light, features tributes from a wide range of writers: from

Margaret Atwood to Neil Gaimon, from Helen Dunmore to Philip Pullman, from Rowan Williams to David Almond  

David Almond’s contribution is my favourite. As a writer he is closest to Alan Garner in having the magical skill of using child characters to give us access to the everyday magic all around us.  Children today can do this, still wrapped as they are, in the birth-caul of innocence. We can do it too, using the child inside us as a conduit for wonderful insights.

These days an increasingly rigid desire to catologue literature has led the public imagination to categorise the work of supreme writers such as Garner and Almond as ‘Children’s Literature’. Both of them are garlanded with prizes and awards acknowledging their success specifically in this field. But they are much more universally significant writers than that,

This collection of essays – in which every contributor has her or his own personal story of the impact of Alan Garner on their lives and their writing - convinces me even more that it’s time we stop  marginalising writers inspired by and accessible to children and honour them in the mainstream of literature.

Every reader will have their favourite in this collection. As I have said my favourite is David Almond’s .And I was touched by the very different contributions from two of Alan’s children the novelist Elizabeth and the scientist Joseph.

Philip Pullman, in a fine appreciation, embraces the difficult task of analysing the depth and complexity of Garner’s craft: ‘There’s an area of human activity where wiliness and cunning share a border with magic and the ability to call spirits from the vasty deep, and to call a storyteller crafty is not to disparage his craft but to acknowledge the borderland between conscious skill and inspiration from somewhere unreachable by logic and reason.’ He goes on: ‘There’s much I’ve stolen from Garner but this interest in craft, and the craft of story-telling has been the most rewarding.’

As T S Eliot once said, ‘All good writers steal. The trick is to steal from the best…’

For me, as a writer, the most inspiring words come Alan Garner himself. ‘At the bottom level, my stories have to work as entertainment, keep a reader turning the page to find out what happens next. At the top level, they have to work for me, say what I want to express. In fact, I must write poetry, making words work on more than one level, subjecting myself to the poetic disciplines - pace, compression, simplicity.

Most of all I hope First Light will send shoals of readers back to reading the excellent novels of Alan Garner.

My favourites are  the fabulous Elidor 

and The Stone Book Quartet. What’s yours?

Personal note: My novel The Pathfinder also draws on Iron Age and Bronze Age and Celtic identity colliding with the Roman occupation of Britain, See in side panel,      wx

The Girl Who Was Punished For Reading

When I was young, for reasons clear to regular readers of these posts, I was a book worm. Well, not so much a book-worm as a book-dragon. Once I discovered that it was possible to escape into a book I was hooked.

What was I escaping from? Well, start with a drab house, a stressed mother, bullying at school, arms and face too long, hands too big, hand-me-down clothes, sparse meals…

From such a place I could escape to a ranch in Canada, a long treck in China, a Scottish farm, a Spanish hacienda, a Danish castle, a house called Manderlay, a sailing boat, or a boarding school in Surrey. Adventure, colour, drama, comedy and tragedy were at my finger tips at the turn of a page. It was fan-tastic. On reflection, my life then could define the term escapism.

Nowadays there is a school of thought that disadvantaged children should be offered literature that validates and reflects their own environment.* There are good examples of this. We have novels like those of David Almond or Alan Garner that might do this in a way sufficiently complex and multilayered to be of interest right across - and up and down- the snakes-and-ladder board of class and culture.You may have your own favourites that fit this bill.

In those days, though, I did not look in literature for what I already knew; I looked for what I could wonder about: sumptuous rooms, tea on the table and a smiling mother, picnics in the dorm, trekking in the wastes of Canada, murderous wives and predatory widowers, love beneath the oleander tree, walking with a hundred Chinese children to safety, delivering lambs on a Scottish hillside, assassinating kings and sailing with my comrades down Coniston Lake

So far, so escapist. But in so escaping I discovered for myself the universals of emotional, political and social life far beyond the confines of that small house in that small town. I now feel certain that this level of escapism ensures that - in tune with the Bronte sisters - though one’s domestic life might be contained, the spirit can roam free and the soul is never parochial.

However, being a book-dragon was not without drawbacks. One day at school, escaping the dining hall clatter of plates and voices onto Crusoe’s Desert Island, I was pulled up by my red-haired German teacher.

‘What are you doing there, Wendy?’

‘Reading, Miss.’

‘Two hundred lines! I must not read at the dinner table.’

I must not read at the dinner table

I must not read at the dinner table

I must not read at the dinner table

I do now…

wxx

* (Afterthought. Of course there was all of D H Lawrence in which I did recognise aspects of my own life. And I did encounter The Family From One End Street written and illustrated by Eve Garnett, a charming and romanticised version of working class life which no more resembled my own than did The Forsyte Saga… )

A Study in Bafflement and The Magic of John Fowles

A month ago I was asked by superweblogger Norman Geras to write a piece about a novel that had affected me. I wrote a piece for him and because at the moment I am thinking about time and shape-shifting now here it is for you::

Some thoughts on John Fowles’ novel ‘The Magus’.*
‘… it must substantially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent. My only plea is that all artists have to range the full extent of their private lives freely. The rest of the world can censor and bury their private past. We cannot…’ John Fowles, in his introduction to the revised 1977 edition of The Magus.

Of the hundreds – even thousands – of novels I have read in the last forty years The Magus is one of only two novels - the other is Alan Garner's Owl Service - which I read to the end and then turned straight back to the beginning to read it again to find out what the heck it was about.

My bafflement is not unique: many people emerge from reading this long novel with a feeling of floundering, of not-quite-knowing. John Fowles wrote to one schoolgirl, ‘What one writes is one’s own explanation, you see, and if it’s baffling then the explanation is baffling…The Magus is trying to suggest that reality, human experience is infinitely baffling…’

The Magus tells us the story of Nicholas Urfe, a kind of mid-century intellectual everyman touched by post-world-war-blues and the edges of existentialism, shot through with heavily-worn learning and the cynical naiveté of personal, sexual and political inexperience. Nicholas is a fool rushing in where only magicians and shapeshifters tread.

Fowles tells us elsewhere that as a child, being short-tongued, he used to call the ‘earth’ ‘urf’ and perhaps that’s where Nicholas’s surname comes from. Occasionally, as I re-read the novel to write this piece, I wondered whether Nicholas Oaf might provide a better clue to this intriguing character.

The young, intelligent, self absorbed Nicholas goes to the Greek island of Phraxos to teach in a high school, just as John Fowles himself did as a young man on the real island of Spetsai.

On Phraxos, bored with the school and the teaching, Nicholas falls in love with the light, the landscape and the natural environment of the island – as did Fowles in his diary:

‘I walked through a small brake, and a woodcock flew off from under my feet. A lizard scuttled away. It was very warm, airy; I struck off the road and came to a cliff facing westwards. I sat on the edge of it, on a rock, and the world was at my feet. I have never had so vividly the sense of standing on the world; the world below me.’

Fowles obsesses about the light, writing again in his diary - ‘It and its absence are life and death. It reveals everything and spares nothing. It can be both achingly beautiful and consoling; it can be terrifyingly ugly.’ – and simply all of this is all reflected in the novel in the way the Island weaves its spell on the young Englishman Nicholas Urfe.

The spell is personified in Conchis, a millionaire resident who lives in an exquisite villa on a headland. Using beautiful identical twins as bate, he lures Nicholas into his world in which nothing is what it seems and reality changes according to Conchis’s whim and will. To unleash this magic, Conchis tells Nicholas fantastic stories which change form and meaning; he uses masques and staged scenarios masterminded by himself, playing mind games with Nicholas – and of course with the reader, who is driven to identify with Nicholas’ fear and angry bewilderment, in order to hang onto the crazy course of the novel.

It strikes me that The Magus is a narrative of mind and meaning that can only exist in novel form. There was a disastrous – even laughable - attempt at a film which focused ridiculously on sado-masochistic sequences which are only one illusory element in the series of games which Conchis plays on Nicholas Urfe. The more successful filming of his novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman had a screenplay by Harold Pinter who cleverly tackled the job by treating the screenplay as a kind of metaphor for the novel.

But we need no esoteric knowledge to relish this novel. It works on so many levels – it works as a quest novel; a novel of adolescent rites of passage; a novel of place and the natural world; a novel shot through magic realism, (meeting Matthew Strecher’s definition - what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something 'too strange to believe.
This novel can be all things to each reader. Perhaps it is this all-encompassing nature – so full of adolescent energy, firing on all cylinders – which is baffling for the kind of reader who wants a safe journey, a sure narrative and a distinct - more or less predictable – ending. She or her needs this to take him or her through a novel.

I read The Magus twice: in its first edition in 1967; then I read his revised edition in 1977. How odd, you would think, to revise your novel and put it out there again! At the very least this showed that The Magus, for John Fowles, was clearly unfinished, highly personal, business. (There is another discussion there…)

But for me there is no doubt that The Magus is John Fowles’ masterpiece. It is an historic novel of the mid twentieth century - trailing the smoke of D H Lawrence, Alain-Fournier, James Joyce, Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre, but marked by its own distinctive signature of intensity, its sense of magic, its confusions, its challenges to the reader, all of which are entirely unique to John Fowles.

Rereading the novel yet again I was worried in case I would find less in The Magus to relish. But in fact there is more. Since I last read it I've written a good number of novels myself. So now, as well as still appreciating all the other elements, I am reflecting on the courage, the originality, the riskiness of the writing and the structure of the novel. And, strangely, I am now in the middle of writing a novel myself which is set in an ancient magical place and involves unexplainable time illusions that may baffle the reader.
This has been a bit of a risky departure for me, but re-reading The Magus has been inspiring. It is as though John Fowles (who tends to scatter Frenchisms in his prose) is shouting across the ether. ‘Courage mon brave!’

If you liked it then, you will like it now. Worth a second or third read for anybody ...

WX

Wise Owl Writers

I was inspired to think about owls by a piece on television: an examination of how silent owls are in flight. It seems that design engineers are experimenting with feather-like fringes for the wings of planes, to make them more silent as they land in cities.


Some wonderful shots of a white barn owl flying reminded me of a farm holiday we had in Scotland when the children were small. Mr J, the farmer, was a whipcord, weatherbeaten man whose hobby - when his farm chores were done - was to break in fine horses. Long before the Horse Whisperer was written, we witnessed that same strange magic on this farm in Scotland.

Every day at dusk Mr J would walk a section of the boundary of his farm. One night he asked me to join him and - as we walked - he uncovered for me the layers of history of the landscape and the nature of the families that once lived in the tumbled cabins. When we got back I was tingling all over, quite certain that I had just travelled through time. Later, Mrs J told me - without a touch of rancour - that was the first time he'd ever let anyone do the walk with him. Even she was not allowed to go. A true honour.

Because of Mr J's Pied Piper charisma the children spent a lot of time 'helping' him, so I was free to roam. Beside the river down from the farm was a ruined water mill where I spent a lot of time watching the water rush by and scribbling in my notebook. Late one evening I was sitting there and suddenly felt very conscious of being observed. I looked around. No one. Then, as I watched, a white barn owl rose with a whirring rush - up, up through the trees growing inside the mill. He glided silently across my vision and vanished into the darkening sky.

After that, I went down to the mill every night to be rewarded by that same magic. And I told no one. Not even the children.

Since then I have loved owls. I have read and enjoyed books full of owls, from Winnie the Pooh's advisor, to the one who went to sea with a pussy cat, right down to the owl that flutters cleverly around Harry Potter. I have learned that - according to legend - Greeks believed that owls had a a magical "inner light" so they could see in the night. And Greek stories tell of soldiers seeing an owl fly across the field on the night before a battle and knowing it as a sign of victory.

But owls are creatures of the night. They have a vicious, dark side. They are silent stalkers and serial killers. Maybe that's part of their attraction. For me The Owl Service by Alan Garner, (winner of both The Guardian Award and the Carnegie Medal), best expresses the mythic contradiction within these enigmatic creatures. His beautifully written novel is a brilliant evocation of the fragility of adolescent relationships and young people living in the borderland betwen myth and reality. (As an adolescent I myself lived in such a place...) Only David Almond, writer of the wonderful Skellig and the even more wonderful Fire Eaters can match Garner in this combination of insight. sensitivity and crackling, poetic prose.

Perhaps it's worth noting here that The Owl Service was one of only two novels, where - once I had finished it - I instantly read it right through again, to find out what the heck had really happened and enjoy it even more. The other novel where that happened to me was The Magus by John Fowles. That must be a mark of a good novel, I think.

(I wonder what instinctive signs and signals you get, to know when a novel is a good one? I like these instinctive personal signs. Much better than waiting to be told what makes a novel good by some reviewer or literary advisor)

Happy reading!

Wendy