Products sold at the till are by their nature impulse buys, appealing to our baser instincts, which sneak out when we aren’t concentrating. In supermarkets, it’s where they display sweets, trashy magazines and the Daily Mail. In bookshops, the tills used to be the domain of the novelty read – Don’ts for Husbands, Barry Trotter and A Simples Life – to name some of the most egregious. In recent years, though, we’ve seen a more serious brand of author perched on the tills of our bookshops. There’s been The Embassy of Cambodia by Zadie Smith, Lyra’s Oxford by Philip Pullman, The Gifts of Reading by Robert Macfarlane and We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. These books all tend to be short, around a fiver, presented in handy A6 format and yet are handsome, giftable hardbacks. They sell, as a rule, by the boatload.
Joining this august lineup is Katherine Rundell, with a 50-page essay: Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise. Her thesis is clear and familiar – she finds that when she tells people she’s an author of children’s books, she’s greeted with “roughly the same smile I’d expect had I told them I made miniature bathroom furniture out of matchboxes, for the elves”. This is another chapter in the genre wars, where writers of what Amitav Ghosh calls the “generic outhouses” – sci-fi, crime, thriller, YA and children’s literature – complain that their work is not held in the regard reserved for literary fiction. Most of the arguments in this realm are axiomatic to the point of meaninglessness – all but the most fanatical literary hardliners accept that such generic boundaries are endlessly porous and that there are as many great genre novels as there are terrible works of literary fiction published each year.
Rundell’s argument is both more subtle and more interesting, though. There’s something particular about children’s fiction, she says, that can open up new perspectives for adults. The best children’s fiction “helps us refind things we may not even know we have lost”, taking us back to a time when “new discoveries came daily and when the world was colossal, before the imagination was trimmed and neatened…” There’s also something instructive in reading books that, as Rundell points out, are “specifically written to be read by a section of society without political or economic power”. In an age whose political ructions are the result of widespread frustration at the powerlessness of the many in the face of the few, this recognition of how emboldening and subversive children’s books can be feels important.
Rundell notes that the best children’s novels operate on two planes, one of which caters to the traditional expectations of plot and jeopardy that young readers bring to books, another, reflecting the adult writer’s consciousness at play in the novel, brings something darker: “acknowledgments of fear, love, failure; of the rat that lives in the human heart”. It reminds us of WH Auden’s assertion that “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.”
My own kids are of an age – 11 and nine – when they have long set off on their own literary journeys, encouraged by friends, teachers and librarians. Once a week, though, I read to them aloud, partly because I think it’s the best thing a family can do together, partly (mostly, and selfishly) because it allows me both to revisit old favourites – The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Dark Is Rising, A Wizard of Earthsea and A Wrinkle in Time. More recently, though, my children have been recommending their own books for us to read. After my son devoured Rundell’s The Wolf Wilder, we read The Explorer and Rooftoppers together and we were blown away. Rundell is the real deal, a writer of boundless gifts and extraordinary imaginative power whose novels will be read, cherished and reread long after most so-called “serious” novels are forgotten. Why You Should Read Children’s Books… is an entertaining enough window into the mind of a great writer, but you’d do better to turn to her novels. We’re halfway through her latest, The Good Thieves, and my kids declare it her best yet. Quite old and sporadically wise though I am, I agree.
This review is from the Observer
