a gallimaufry

Happy 2023!

A belated Happy New Year! I hope you all enjoyed the holidays and have started 2023 in the nicest ways possible.

For me, one of the highlights of Christmas this year was going to see the Royal Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker in London with my mother and daughter. It was everything you would want a ballet to be: beautiful music, expertly played by the orchestra; lovely sets and costumes, and, most important of all, exquisite dancing. Not that I am an expert, but I actually cried a bit while watching it, and more than once too. The audience was filled with little girls in sparkly velvet and net dresses and it was one wonderful, happy experience. It’s shown every year and I thoroughly recommend it.

After a frantically busy couple of months, I finally and tardily finished reading Brian Attebery’s absolutely brilliant new book, Fantasy: How it Works, which I reviewed for Shiny New Books. If you don’t have time to wade through my turgid prose, just go out and buy/borrow it. It explains why fantasy isn’t just childish escapism, and analyses lots of books to discuss how it works and what it does. All in a very readable, chatty style.

(And look at that gorgeous cover!)

For the rest of the holidays, I enjoyed lounging about reading both in the UK and here in Belgium. In fact, I have rearranged a corner of the sitting-room for maximal reading and lounging pleasure. It’s also easier for me to write there, for I have been writing (just not here).

I spent September to the endish of December following the Golden Egg Academy 12-week Write Your Successful Children’s Novel course. It was brilliant and if you are thinking of writing for children, I highly recommend it. There are no entry requirements, and week by week you learn how you actually put a book together, what to think about, what to develop and how to structure it. It is really practical, and handily it’s distance learning so you can do it at your own pace. Pretty much every week there is a Zoom or FaceBook meeting with the course leader, Imogen Cooper, who is just the nicest person as well as hugely experienced, and you can ask questions and get advice. At the end you can send in your first 2000 words plus a synopsis for one of the Golden Egg editors to evaluate. I have to say that the feedback was very helpful and perceptive.

After another busy few weeks at work I am keen to get back to work on my book. One of the elements I hadn’t been sure about was having a dual narrative, and the editor suggested that sticking to one viewpoint would be better. My book’s other massive weakness, caused by my tendency to plot as I go along rather than before I start, is that there is too much going on and not enough focus on the main theme. So it’s time to prune and plan (at least a bit) before getting back down to writing. The feedback has really enthused me to carry on. I hope to have a reasonable first draft ready by the end of the summer, so that I can re-apply for the 12-month course on developing your children’s novel.

Because of all this I have mainly been reading children’s novels, especially recently published ones. Here are some of them, in short!

The Poisoned Pie Mystery, by Nicki Thornton  

A boy to whom accidents just keep on happening, a talking cat who is also a master detective and a lot of cake… This is a brisk and chirpy novel for children of about 9+. The author does something quite daring with the parents, which I did not see coming.

The Hounds of the Mórrigan, by Pat O’Shea

An older work but a wonderful immersion into Irish mythology, as Pidge and Brigit journey through a magical landscape in search of a drop of the Mórrigan’s blood. Truly magical, the many joys of this book include the characterisation of the children, who act and speak like real children, and the creatures they encounter.

Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi

In a mythical sort-of version of Nigeria called Orïsha, the maji are people who used to have magical powers but lost them suddenly twelve years ago. Now they are oppressed and enslaved by the majority kosídan and their cruel king, but maybe there is a way for teenaged Zélie and her friends to restore magic and end the tyranny. This is the first YA novel I have ever read and my was it bloodthirsty! But the story is compelling and I loved the setting.

The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place, by Julie Berry

I don’t think this book is very well known outside the US? But it should be. An exciting opportunity is delivered to the students of St Etheldreda’s School for Young Ladies in nineteenth-century Ely, when their horrid headmistress and her brother both drop dead: poisoned. Rather than informing the authorities, the girls decide to continue as usual and enjoy their freedom, pretending that the two victims are still alive. Of course, this becomes increasingly farcical and meanwhile the murderer is still lurking about. A bouncy entertaining read and the American author gets pretty much everything British spot on and believe me that is high praise.

 

From Spare Oom to War Drobe: Travels in Narnia with my Nine-Year-Old Self, by Katherine Langrish

When I was nine years old I wrote a book called Tales of Narnia, and I still have it. In spiky blue ink, written in my best handwriting with only occasional crossings-out and spelling mistakes, it runs for eighty-six numbered pages and fills an old hard-covered notebook from front to back. [...] I covered the notebook with a paper wrapper which I painted dark blue, and stuck a poster-paint picture I’d made of Aslan on the front. He looks very stiff, very yellow and rather cross.

So begins this lovely ramble through C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. It is really for people who, like Langrish, adored the books when they read them as a child but perhaps have not revisited them since. So a chapter is devoted to each book, including a detailed retelling each story and extensive quotes. As we explore, Langrish considers how Lewis’s personal beliefs, the historical situation (shortly after the Second World War and during the Cold War) and literary and folkloric works contributed to each book. Her knowledge is impressive but lightly worn, so that it’s like reading along with a good friend whose ideas you mostly but not completely agree with.

Langrish is even-handed, although she admits she likes some books more than others (and does anyone truly love The Last Battle?), she is alert to beautiful writing wherever she finds it. She considers the darker side of the books: racism? Yes, definitely. Misogyny? More mixed. There are strong girls in every book, and some great villainesses; but on the other side there is the Susan problem and, though I don’t think Langrish mentions it, no strong and likeable adult females. Do these problems mean that we shouldn’t read the books any more? Of course not!

And I had not realised it, until Langrish pointed it out, how thoroughly Lewis loathed schools. There are plenty of references to them in the books and they are always awful places.

I was impressed by Langrish’s tracing of motifs and plots to their source material. This includes Victorian and Edwardian children’s books and fantasy literature, Mediaeval and Renaissance poetry, fairy tales, Greek, Roman and Norse myths, the Arabian Nights, Christian theology and of course the Bible. Lewis’s uses of these gives different flavours to the books: for instance, there is a strong debt to E. Nesbit in much of The Magician’s Nephew, but more of a Mediaeval romance feeling to The Silver Chair. Langrish also argues persuasively for the influence of more recent history on some of the books. So Maugrim’s secret police surely draws on the Cheka and the Stasi, Nickabrick on the struggles of Irish revolutionaries, and the silver chair on the horrors of trench warfare.It is all very illuminating and gave me a new respect for Lewis’s skills as a children’s writer and as someone who understood children. (The only real remaining mystery: why did Edmund love Turkish Delight so much?) Langrish’s emphasis on her own responses to the books keeps it from ever threatening to become dry. Passages such as Aslan’s death and rebirth, or the creation of Narnia, still move and delight her; Caspian’s lengthy back story bores her.  A particular joy is how she contrasts her adult reactions with her child ones. At the end of The Silver Chair, grown-up liberal Langrish disapproves of the way Jill and Eustace deal with the bullies but nine-year-old Katherine loved it.

This is the kind of book to read on a rainy Sunday afternoon with the kind of tea and toasted muffins you would eat in a faun’s cave in Narnia. Although you will then spend your Sunday evening grubbing about in the attic looking for your battered Puffin paperbacks...

(All the illustrations on this page are by Pauline Baynes; this last one is the cover illustration for The Last Battle - rather different from the one on my Puffin edition!)