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| My splendid adventures with Enid Enid Blyton's work was snubbed by the BBC for decades, it has been revealed. How could they resist?Unusually, I did some research before writing this article. It involved going to Waterstone's and Borders to buy a handful of books by Enid Blyton. At Waterstone's, which had an entire bookcase filled with Blytonia, all the bloke on the till did when I bought two books on the Famous Five and one on the Secret Seven was offer me a wretched loyalty card. But at Borders, the reaction was more interesting."Ah, The Faraway Tree," said the woman behind the counter, thirtyish and wearing a red hat. "I remember reading that as a child – good times, good times." Her older colleague disagreed. "I read lots of Blyton to my daughter last year. It went on a bit." Does she like Blyton? "My daughter loved them, but I … " She didn't want to rubbish a book I was buying, but I could tell by the look on her face she thought they were awful.Blyton divides people – usually innocent, story-loving children and judgmental, politically charged adults. The two sides square up about once a decade; last night, BBC4 screened its new Blyton biopic, and yesterday it was reported that her work had been effectively banned from BBC radio for 30 years because the schools department there thought her "second-rate", "very small beer", "lacking literary value" and "stilted and longwinded".Blyton died in 1968, and for a while it looked as if her work would die with her. So redolent of the 1940s and 50s were her books that the educationalists who held sway in the 1970s and 80s, echoing the disdain of their forerunners at the BBC, hated them. Noddy had long been dismissed as "the most egocentric, joyless, snivelling and pious anti-hero in the history of British fiction", while a stage version of Noddy in Toyland was labelled racist.But for better or worse, Blyton helped shape me. My generation (I was born in 1957) was saturated in her books. I hold no candle for the insipid Noddy, but The Secret Seven captivated the nine-year-old me, and The Famous Five thrilled me a couple of years later. Children of that age now, assailed by computers, are far more advanced, and you could knock a couple of years off those ages. But my bet is that these books still work for children, even though adults invariably consider them vapid. The psychologist Michael Woods once suggested why children and their parents never see eye to eye over Blyton: "She was really a child at heart, a person who never developed emotionally beyond the basic infantile level. She thought as a child, and she wrote as a child; of course the craft of an extremely competent adult writer is there, but the basic feeling is pre-adolescent."The Enchanted Wood was my favourite Blyton book. It is the first book I remember owning: a big, green, luscious hardback I got for my birthday when I was seven or eight, and which cost something outrageous like 15 shillings. The mean edition I bought yesterday has nothing like the same aesthetic appeal. In memory, the adventures of Joe, Beth and Frannie when they reach the top of the Faraway Tree are vivid, but in print the words are flat. Yet you can sense what Blyton is doing. "Up the children went – and before they knew what had happened, they were out in the sunshine, in a new and very strange land. They stood on green grass. Above them was a blue sky. A tune was playing somewhere, going on and on and on. 'It's the sort of tune a carousel or a roundabout plays, Joe,' said Beth. 'Isn't it?' It was – and then, suddenly, without any warning at all, the whole land began to swing round!"The green grass, the blue sky: ludicrous. But it's also astute in the way the young reader is first reassured by the familiarity and can then feel the land violently swing. "They looked for the hole in the cloud – but it had disappeared. 'Joe! But how can we get back home again?' cried Frannie, in a fright."Now read on, and I did, through dozens of her books. Just the picture on the front of Five On a Treasure Island made me feel 12 again, reading it on a drowsy Saturday afternoon. Good times, good times. What author today would dare write a book featuring a boy called Dick and his lovable Aunt Fanny? The chapter titles alone are electrifying: A Great Surprise, An Exciting Afternoon, What the Storm Did, Exploring the Wreck, An Astonishing Offer, Dick to the Rescue! Who, apart from a few snotty-nosed librarian types at the BBC, could resist?Enid BlytonStephen Mossguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Books of the decade: Your best books of 2005 In a very strong year, my choices would include Murakami and Mantel along with Doctorow and Didion. How about you?Halfway through the decade already, and we're all a little older, wiser and in my case more gainfully employed though curiously lighter-of-pocket (damn you, student loans) than we were back in the heady first days of the new millennium. We're also, as a planet, more familiar with the terms "al-Qaida", "war on terror" and "9/11" – and 2005 saw the first attempt from a heavyweight novelist to deal directly with them in the shape of Ian McEwan's Saturday, described by Mark Lawson in the Guardian as "one of the most oblique but also most serious contributions to the post-9/11, post-Iraq war literature". While the reviews were largely complimentary, however, public reception was mixed and Saturday, which sees the day of London's huge anti-war marches in February 2003 through the civilised, satisfied eyes of neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, failed to make the 2005 Booker shortlist. Personally, I found McEwan's liquid sentences could only carry me so far: the redemption-via-poetry towards the end of the novel stretched the bounds of plausibility to snapping point (and I speak as a poetry nut). Happily, though, there were plenty more titles to choose from. This was, as Booker chairman John Sutherland pointed out, an "exceptional year" for fiction, with new novels from Salman Rushdie, JM Coetzee and Julian Barnes. John Banville swooped in from leftfield to take the Booker with his melancholy examination of bereavement, The Sea, pipping Kazuo Ishiguro to the post (two of the judges apparently fought hard for his clever, frightening Never Let Me Go). Zadie Smith's On Beauty polarised reviewers (the Observer called it "exceptionally accomplished"; Peter Kemp, in the Sunday Times described it as "inconsequential" and "self-indulgent"), but went on to win the Orange prize in 2006. My own favourites from the year included James Meek's The People's Act of Love; Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (his best novel, I reckon, though I realise I'm in a minority there); Paradise, AL Kennedy's intimate, sensual exploration of alcoholism ("the good hurt", she called it) which I loved (in fact, it set me off on an ALK kick – I came to her short stories after reading it); EL Doctorow's civil war drama, The March, which lacked some of the heft and sparkle of his New York novels, but remained streets ahead of pretty much anything else by pretty much anyone else; and Hilary Mantel's superlative Beyond Black, which opens with one of the finest passages of descriptive prose I've read anywhere in the last decade.In fact, Beyond Black ties with The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's meditation on the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, as my book of the year. Didion's is an agonizing, beautiful gift of a book: an unsparing exploration of the elliptical mental journeys on which grief takes you; the swoops and switchbacks your mind performs in order to spare you, to permit you to cope. On the non-fiction front, I was also gripped – and educated – by Reza Aslan's history of Islam, No god but God, and Bella Bathurst's exploration of nefarious goings-on on Britain's coastline, The Wreckers, which I picked up on account of a teenage obsession with Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn, and found completely fascinating. Other noteworthy titles include the final volume in Hilary Spurling's biography of Matisse, Matisse the Master, which snagged her the Whitbread prize and caused an outbreak of "magisterials" across the review pages, and Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen J Dubner. In poetry, highlights included Anne Stevenson's Poems 1955-2005 (I saw her reading at the Poetry Bookshop in Hay: wonderful) and Alice Oswald's Woods Etc (a line from it – "It was death, it was death like an in-breath, fully inhaled" – has echoed round my head ever since. I await the near-inevitable news that I'm misquoting her here: my copy of the book's in a box in a friend's cellar, so not available for consultation.) Finally, of course, it would be remiss of me to neglect to mention publishing leviathan JK Rowling, who, with the help of her boy-wizard sidekick, continued her inexorable onward march with the publication of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which broke all sales records, and so on and on and on.Anyway: those are some of my books of 2005 – looking back, it was quite the year. Look here and here for more titles to jog your memory and tell me: what were yours?Best books of 2005Best booksFictionPoetrySarah Crownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The decade in books - reviewed As the decade draws to an end, we look at the books that have defined the first 10 years of the century – and Sam Jordison reveals the Guardian bloggers' worst books of the noughties.We have a reading from the only poetry collection to make it into Saturday Review's top 50. Plus we ask an array of Guardian writers and editors for their must-reads of the last 10 years.Podcast books of the decade:FictionThe Human Stain, by Philip Roth (Vintage)No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy (Picador)The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (Picador)My Elvis Blackout by Simon Crump (Bloomsbury)The Jones family trilogy – August, I'll Go to Bed at Noon and A Curious Earth by Gerard Woodward (Vintage)Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber)The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry (Faber)Unless, by Carol Shields (4th Estate)Atonement by Ian McEwan (Vintage)The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (Harper Perennial)Runaway by Alice Munro (Vintage)Non-fictionBad Blood, by Lorna Sage (Harper Perennial)The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion (Harper Perennial)The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Penguin)Why Most Things Fail: And How to Avoid It, by Paul Ormerod (Faber)Landing Light, by Don Patterson (Faber)Claire ArmitsteadSarah CrownScott CawleySimon HattenstoneSarah BoseleyLisa AllardiceLarry Elliott feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Poems for a baby I just became a dad a month or so ago, and I've been trying to write a poem or two for the baby. Amid the muslins and mountains of nappies, the writing hasn't been going so well, but the reading around's been interesting.There are a lot of great baby poems, from William Blake's "I have no name / I am but two days old" to the entire fine and tender collection Newborn by Kate Clanchy. A whole sub-genre is the baby poem as incantation (from Latin incantare, to chant, bewitch, cast a spell). In "Born Yesterday", a poem for Kingsley Amis's daughter Sally, Larkin takes on the unlikely role of fairy godmother. You can almost imagine the moonrise of his bonce over the pram-rim as he addresses the baby:Tightly-folded bud,I have wished you somethingNone of the others would . . .May you be ordinary;Have, like other women,An average of talents:Not ugly, not good-looking,Nothing uncustomaryTo pull you off your balance . . .In fact, may you be dull –If that is what a skilled,Vigilant, flexible,Unemphasised, enthralledCatching of happiness is called.The optative mood (may you be . . .) suggests prayer, and Larkin's poem is a middle-England commonsensical correction of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter". The Irishman had come to parenthood late, and was in his mid‑50s when his first child, Ann, was born, although he too wished her manageable gifts:May she be granted beauty and yet notBeauty to make a stranger's eye distraught . . .Whereas Larkin insists that he doesn't wish "the usual stuff / about being beautiful, / or running off a spring / Of innocence", Yeats wants his daughter to think "opinions are accursed" so that she may recover "radical innocence". He wants her to have the gift of being "happy still" even if everything around her is in turmoil, and for her husband to bring her to "a house / where all's accustomed, ceremonious". (Larkin wishes "nothing uncustomary . . .") It's tricky, reading Yeats now, not to find the ideals he had for his daughter a little restrictive and chauvinist: be decorative, decorous, and wed an aristocrat.Fourteen years earlier, in the introductory rhymes to his collection Responsibilities, Yeats was already thinking, rather grandly, about inheritance and ancestry – "Merchant and scholar who have left me blood / That has not passed through any huckster's loins" – and asking "pardon" that "Although I have come close on forty-nine, / I have no child, I have nothing but a book, / Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine."Though I'm sure it's a simplification, I've been struck by how often, for male poets, having children roots itself in linear imagery, bloodlines, inheritance; whereas for female poets, the process is a form of replacement, of disappearing. Sylvia Plath's "Morning Song" begins (brilliantly):Love set you going like a fat gold watch.The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cryTook its place among the elements . . .and continuesI'm no more your motherThan the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slowEffacement at the wind's hand.Here, maternity is self-sacrifice, likened to rain falling, forming a pool which then shows the rain-cloud's own dispersal. The key word (foregrounded by its length, and the overlong build-up line preceding it) is effacement, the act of one thing erasing another. The female poetics of childbirth often deal with Thanatos, with Freud's death-drive, whereas for males it's bound up with Eros (and egos), with continuance, unity, cohesion. The male sees something created in his own image; the female sees her own image being eliminated by another.In Jorie Graham's "Wanting a Child", the bare metaphors of a river, rocks and the sea interact in complicated analogies; the river cuts "deep into the parent rock, / scouring and scouring / its own bed", and the poem ends by describing how the tide (the want for a child?)is always pulsing upward, inland, into the river's rapidargument, pushingwith its insistent tragic waves – the living echo,says my book, of some great storm far out at sea, too farto be recalled by usbut transferredwhole on to this shore by waves, so that erosionis its very face."Erosion / is its very face". In Eliot's words, "in my beginning is my end".If childbirth in poems written by women often surfaces as a form of oblivion, effacement, erosion, for male poets the analogies are repeatedly linear – connective strings, lines, ropes. In Simon Armitage's Book of Matches sequence, the speaker goes with his mother to measure "windows, pelmets, doors, / the acres of the walls, the prairies of the floors":You at the zero-end, me with the spool of tape, recordinglength, reporting metres, centi- metres back to base, thenleavingup the stairs, the line still feedingout, unreelingyears between us. Anchor. Kite.Later on he writes, referring to his wife and himself:I think about the timewe find we hold the loose end of the family line . . .Seamus Heaney, in "A Kite for Michael and Christopher" (his sons), writes of watching it rise "far up like a small black lark", and adds:My friend says that the human soulis about the weight of a snipe,yet the soul at anchor there,the string that sags and ascends,weighs like a furrow assumed into the heavens.Before the kite plunges down into the woodand this line goes uselesstake it in your two hands, boys, and feelthe strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.You were born fit for it.Stand here in front of meand take the strain.There may be grief here, yes, but it's part of the process, a natural chain, a passing-on rather than a rubbing-out.Larkin, childless, and no stranger to the death-drive (in "Wants", he writes "beneath it all, desire of oblivion") sums up the countervailing views in "Dockery and Son". The protagonist visits his old college: "Dockery was junior to you, / Wasn't he?" said the Dean. "His son's here now." Having "no son, no wife, / No house or land" himself, the speaker is amazed at "how / Convinced [Dockery] was he should be added to! / Why did he think adding meant increase? / To me it was dilution." Increase or dilution? I don't know if it's either or neither or both, though I know I find myself holding the wee dote on my knee thinking, now surely to God I can get a poem out of you . . .guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Song Composed in August by Robert BurnsNow westlin winds and slaught'ring gunsBring Autumn's pleasant weather;The moorcock springs on whirring wings,Amang the blooming heather:Now waving grain, wide o'er the plain,Delights the weary farmer;And the moon shines bright, as I rove at night,To muse upon my charmer.The partridge loves the fruitful fells,The plover loves the mountains;The woodcock haunts the lanely dells,The soaring hern the fountains:Thro' lofty groves, the cushat roves,The path of man to shun it;The hazel bush o'erhangs the thrush,The spreading thorn the linnet.Thus ev'ry kind their pleasure find,The savage and the tender;Some social join, and leagues combine,Some solitary wander:Avaunt, away! the cruel sway,Tyrannic man's dominion;The sportsman's joy, the murd'ring cry,The flutt'ring, gory pinion!But, Peggy dear, the ev'ning's clear,Thick flies the skimming swallow,The sky is blue, the fields in view,All fading-green and yellow:Come let us stray our gladsome way,And view the charms o' Nature;The rustling corn, the fruited thorn,And ev'ry happy creature.We'll gently walk, and sweetly talk,Till the silent moon shines clearly;I'll grasp thy waist, and, fondly prest,Swear how I love thee dearly:Not vernal show'rs to budding flow'rs,Not Autumn to the farmer,So dear can be, as thou to me,My fair, my lovely charmer!Robert BurnsPoetryguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |