Our eldest child — soon to be 10 — has read, watched or listened to Black Beauty at least a dozen times. She’s devoured picture book versions, the illustrated text and Samuel West’s sublime narration. When she and her sister are watching the film I can tell from three rooms away when poor Ginger has carked it. Yes, she is horse-mad, but I’ve realised the unique hold the book has on her is not entirely equine. When finishing her most recent read, she called me in to share the final line:
My troubles are all over, and I am at home; and often before I am quite awake, I fancy I am still in the orchard at Birtwick, standing with my old friends under the apple-trees.
Her voice cracked. I wept. It was beautiful.
The recent death of Raymond Briggs reminded me how important melancholy is to children’s fiction. When I think of his graphic works The Snowman and When the Wind Blows, it’s not his unique imagery — at once naïve and corrupt — that comes to mind, but the bruise both books left on my young heart. A similar melancholy pervades his more upbeat works. Father Christmas isn’t a jolly elf, but an elderly curmudgeon in need of a holiday. Fungus the Bogeyman isn’t a mythical terror, but an overworked nobody in existential crisis.
The books we remember aren’t the ones that improved us
To me, melancholy isn’t to be confused with depression or despair, but rather the appreciation that — as Black Beauty comes to realise at the end of his tale — life is at once sad and beautiful. Right now, the idea of embracing melancholy feels quite counter-cultural. Books, particularly children’s fiction, often seem intended to distract or improve us. There is a tendency to promote works that either seek to improve the world within — see You Are Enough: A little one’s guide to embracing self-love or Marcus Rashford’s You Are a Champion — or the world at large (depending on which particular cause appeals to the parent).
Will future generations of adults think back fondly on those early days of self-help literature? It seems unlikely. Whilst most parents seek to protect their children from trauma, it’s telling that the books we tend to remember most acutely in adulthood aren’t the ones that improved us, but the ones that hurt us — or, at least, helped us to explore and understand our hurt. If literature is a “safe space”, it isn’t because it should protect us from distress, but rather because it allows us to experience the very worst aspects of life whilst snugly tucked up for bed.
When I asked my Twitter feed about the sad books that stayed with them, there were a few constants. The Velveteen Rabbit, Watership Down, When the Wind Blows, Bridge to Terabithia and anything by Margaret Wild. A few parents expressed guilt for breaking the hearts or spirits of their offspring by exposing them to the deaths of Aslan, Hazel or (in the case of the Briggs book) most of humankind.
Obviously, it’s important to help our kids realise — and prepare for the fact — that terrible things happen. But trauma is not the same as melancholy. Whilst we might reel from the death of Manchee in The Knife of Never Letting Go or Artax in The Never-Ending Story, those shocks say less about our lives than a general acknowledgement that things are never perfect. Life isn’t a plot in which isolated moments of sadness happen; it is suffused with sadness throughout.
Kids need books that reflect, rather than deny, that reality
It isn’t necessary to go as far back as Black Beauty to find books of splendid melancholy. I think often of John Burningham’s Borka, which features a goose with no feathers who never learns to fly and whose disability never becomes a superpower. Her happy ending, such as it is, comes from moving to a big city where she is no longer the weirdest of birds. In David McKee’s Not Now, Bernard, a young boy’s self-involved parents continue to ignore him, even after he has (perhaps) been replaced by the monster who ate him. Arnold Lobel’s Owl at Home sees our befuddled eponymous fowl make tea from his own tears, having meditated on the small injustices and tragedies that permeate our existence (broken pencils, songs whose tunes have been forgotten, sunrises nobody witnesses). To borrow from Seneca: why weep over parts of the story when the whole of it calls for tears?
This is a lesson that modern children’s literature — and entertainment — often struggles with. The well-meaning urge for resolution and restoration is strong and tied to the hero’s narrative that dominates American pop culture. In a Hollywood context, melancholy is often expressed as an exaggerated kookiness or grotesquerie — Frankweenie, Coco and, to a lesser extent, Encanto, spring to mind. Even death is often presented as a problem to be solved, rather than an inevitability to be lived with — how many superheroes are revived from death via sorcery, technology or reboot?
Paradoxically, this modern approach to sadness is starting to feel seriously outdated. The ability to tolerate melancholy feels ever more important in a world rife with plague, conflict and famine. For the next generation of kids, disaster might not be an extreme event but something far more quotidian. They need books that reflect, rather than deny, that reality.
The final wordless frame of Briggs’s The Snowman might drive an icicle into young hearts, but gloom hangs over every page. Whilst the TV adaptation added a jolly section in which our unnamed hero is whisked off to meet Father Christmas (a more avuncular version than Briggs’ own), the book’s flight of fantasy only takes them as far as the nearest pier, through sleet and snow haze, to watch the weakest of sunrises stain a distant corner of the wintry sky. It isn’t a celebration or even a distraction, but a shared moment of resignation. If there is consolation, it is in the shared realisation that life can be as beautiful as it can be bleak. Children need that more than ever — even if that moment of discovery is only shared with a good, sad book.
