I’ve started this blog having completed quite a bit of reading already, having thought of creating a blog a little late in the day. The consequence is that a lot of the posts that follow will be constructed from my notes rather than my immediate impressions until I catch up with myself. Surprisingly, this has turned out to be no bad thing as I can now look back at the books and stories I have read and weave common threads between them. Recently I read Neil Gaiman’s latest, a fictionalised account of his childhood and this helped crystallise some of my ideas.
Gaiman’s book opens with an epigraph from Maurice Sendak, “I remember my own childhood vividly … I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew. It would scare them.” I recall this kind of feeling myself, but also a sense that they didn’t fully appreciate all of the terrible things that there were; I had a hyperactive imagination and instead of finding comfort in my mother’s reassurance that monsters didn’t exist, I felt only an odd sense of pity for her that she didn’t believe in them; it’s just as well the evil knitted gardening clown remained buried at the back of my toy cupboard, weighted under heavy board games and more trustworthy toys, I was better prepared and knew the danger, she’d have been a sitting duck.
These are truths of much children’s fiction, parents have to either be well-meaning and non-present or entirely out of the way. So many heroes are orphans, or are left to their own devices. As readers we have to know that the child needs to get by on their own wits, there may be the odd helpful adult on the way, but they won’t be a whole and intact parent. This rule of course has its exceptions, but if we think of the most popular, or even most enduring of children’s literature the theme exists. The Narnia and Harry Potter books, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, Tracy Beaker and so on…
Of course, if we go back to fairytales, something more sinister happens. Parents exist, but they are usually well-meaning but distant men, if the mothers are present they usually die or are in some other way inaccessible; the strong adult female character is an un-mother, generally step-mothers (Snow White, Hansel and Gretel) or witches (Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty). The theme of threatening female-sexuality exists in many books, cropping up as late as Narnia (Jadis) and beyond. For the modern learning-to-read reader we still rely on these old stories as well as more contemporary stories that present intact families, but these too contain their own stereotypes, more informed by the 1950s than Grimm, but still damaging. This article from the Pacific Standard is telling: http://www.psmag.com/blogs/news-blog/childrens-picture-books-retain-stubborn-stereotypes-62659/
But let’s return to the abandoned child hero; we trust in them because we know from our own childhood (even though we may have forgotten it) that children are extremely resourceful and very robust, in a way we may even have lost. Somewhere in the Bible (let’s say Corinthians) it says that when we grow up, we put away childish things. This, if you’ll excuse me, is foolish. Gaiman is a writer that appeals to children and adults, for me personally his appeal is not that in reading him that it brings back lost memories, but that it speaks to that child that still forms part of me, as the narrator says ‘childhood memories are sometimes obscured beneath the things that come later … but they are never lost.’
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is, at heart, a modern fairytale in the best sense. It doesn’t try to coerce the reader, though it does have a few lovely lines on how one becomes a better parent, by learning the lessons that have come before. The novel has host of unusual characters, the bookish boy helped by the family of women who don’t need men, the guilt-ridden opal miner, and the monster that is simultaneously paralysing terrifying and pitiful, a pond that holds an ocean which holds the secrets of everything. The boy keeps returning to the pond that is an ocean at moments of difficulty and doubt in his life, drawn by its comfort, as all readers are to the stories and creations of our own childhoods. The key for the child reader perhaps is not to make sure they read the ‘right’ kind of stories, but a rich range and plenty of it, they’ll make their own minds up.
PGCE thoughts & things 