Guest review by Pippa Goodhart: FIERCE BAD RABBITS by Clare Pollard

  

"Just about anyone will meet old book friends in this book, and find things out about those old friends they never knew before. A treat!"

Pippa Goodhart has written over a hundred and fifty books for children. Best known is her picture book You Choose, illustrated by Nick Sharratt. Her most recent children’s novel, The Great Sea Dragon Discovery, set in her home village of Grantchester, won the Young Quills Award for best historical children’s novel for 10-13 year olds. More on Pippa's website. 

This book is a fascinating, heart-stretching, humanity-sharing, amusing read for anybody interested in children or books. Or, come to think of it, anybody who has ever been a child. It’s about picture books, but, more than that, it’s about story and about what makes us who we are.

Clare Pollard is a poet who became a mother. Sharing books with her two young children and remembering her own childhood experiences of story, she adds academic study and a perceptive mind to considering the books many of us know and love. She writes so lucidly, with humour, moving fast through her rich material, carrying the reader onwards.

We get something of a cultural history of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, reflected in what we present to children. It’s gob-smacking to learn that both Franco and Hitler were scared enough of the potential influence of The Story of Ferdinand that they banned and burned it. What was the scary power of that little story for children written by Munro Leaf and illustrated by Robert Lawson? Simply that Ferdinand, the bull, is a character who would rather sit and sniff the flowers than fight. The book was published in 1936. In the US it became a best-seller, knocking Gone With The Wind off the top of the sales chart.

We learn of Eric Carle digging trenches for Nazis aged only fifteen, really understanding what extreme hunger is like, before idly playing with the hole punch on his desk and coming up with his classic Hungry Caterpillar. So many classic children’s picture books have links to the Second World War. Eric Hill, ex-RAF, realised that he’d given Spot the dog aircraft markings with the placement of spots on his coat! There are many more stories behind the stories to discover when you read this book.

I loved getting something of the personalities and lives of children’s book creators. The enterprise of Beatrix Potter, not just self-publishing when publishers turned down her Peter Rabbit story, but also creating and selling merchandise based on her artwork. We hear that Alison Uttley, creator of saintly Little Grey Rabbit, was herself of a bitchy tendency, calling Little Grey Rabbit’s illustrator, Margaret Tempest, ‘a humourless bore’, and neighbour Enid Blyton, ‘a vulgar, curled woman'. In contrast, we have charming Jan Pienkowski regularly meeting-up with Helen Nicoll, the author of his Meg and Mog books, at Membury Service Station, always taking with him a small bunch of flowers for the table they sat at to discuss the next book!

But there are sadder things. It’s so poignant to learn that the Babar stories which open with Babar weeping over his dead mother, was written and illustrated by young father, Jean de Brunhoff, when he knew himself to have TB, and that his own children would soon face the death of a beloved parent. Other examples of stories behind stories had me in actual tears.

And there’s just the quirky interest to be found. Did you know that Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) had a stammer, so referred to himself as ‘the dodo’ as in Do-Do-Dodgson? Hence the dodo in Alice in Wonderland? Do you know what name Winnie the Pooh really had, if only AA Milne had listened more carefully to his son? Did you know that John Ruskin urged Kate Greenaway to undress the ‘girlies’ in her pictures? Urgh! I leave you to read and discover these things out for yourselves.

We also touch on picture book history through the development of different printing techniques, the start of children’s sections in libraries, the introduction of novelty elements of flaps and shaped pages, and more.

As Clare Pollard says, picture book stories are perhaps an area of culture shared more generally than almost any other. And they are important. Picture books, she says, ‘are teaching our children how they should be’. We know that the ones which strike a chord with children are loved and remembered for a lifetime.

I re-read this book over a couple of days, relishing reminders of favourite books and favourite book creators, some of whom I’ve been lucky enough to meet in my Heffers Children’s Bookshop days in the early ‘80s up to now being a picture book writer myself. Just about anyone will meet old book friends in this book, and find things out about those old friends they never knew before. A treat!

Fierce Bad Rabbits is published by Penguin.

Lockdown Sunday extra: DAEMON VOICES by Philip Pullman, edited by Simon Mason

"In every chapter there are things I want to store away, remember and use to encourage myself and others."

This is the last of our Lockdown Sunday extras. From now on we will return to our weekly Monday posts.

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. She has published widely for young readers and is currently working on her second novel for adults.

"I find Post-It notes indispensable. They really came into their own when I was preparing to write about this book. The pages of my paperback copy bristle with so many little yellow stickers that its thickness is almost doubled, and it wasn't a slender book to start with." Philip Pullman says this of The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, and I could say exactly the same of Daemon Voices, except that this is a handsome hardback. In every chapter there are things I want to store away, remember and use to encourage myself and others.

Full of delights and insights, this is a compilation of various lectures, essays, introductions, conference speeches and articles written over thirty years and for various audiences including the Children's Book Circle, the Sea of Faith Conference, the Richard Hillary Lecture and the Finnconn Science-Fiction Convention. Collectively they cover a wide range of subjects to do with writing, storytelling and the imagination. If you've heard Philip Pullman speak, you will hear his voice, clearly, as you read.

I'd intended to dip in and out of this collection while reading something else alongside, but on finishing each piece I was eager for the next, and the other book had to wait.  Among my favourites are those in which Pullman comments on paintings and illustrations, in which he has a keen interest (his own drawings are used as chapter heads in the His Dark Materials  trilogy). I've never before studied  Walter Trier's line drawings for Erich Kastner's Emil and the Detectives as closely as when directed to them by Pullman, though they come instantly to mind when I think of the book; now I see their clarity of line and their compositional skill. How inextricably stories and illustrations are linked in books for both children and adults! It's impossible to think of Swallows and Amazons without Arthur Ransome's own drawings (which is why, perhaps, TV dramatisations often disappoint - the borderland of that magical combination of words and images is destroyed by realism). Who shares my nostalgia for the Rupert Bear stories and annuals, written and illustrated by Alfred Bestall? His name meant nothing to me as a child, but the world (or worlds) he created were fantastical in his own distinctive style. "Bestall was full of fancy," writes Pullman; "I'm sure that's the right word for the special quality of lightness, delicacy, charm that his landscapes, his stories, embody." This is in a chapter called Reading in the Borderland - Reading, Books and Pictures, in which Pullman looks at where we go when we read, and how personal and private it is: "We are each alone when we enter the borderland and go on to explore what lies in it and beyond it, in the book we're engaged with. True, we can come back and talk about it, and if we talk well and truthfully and interestingly enough we might entice other readers into it, and they too will explore it - but they too will be alone there until they in turn come back and tell us what they found there ... "

Another great pleasure of these pieces is the close attention and respect Pullman gives to writers he admires. Awarded the 'Carnegie of Carnegies' for Northern Lights he said that the honour had been given to "the wrong PP", and that it should have gone to Philippa Pearce for Tom's Midnight Garden, which is the focus of a chapter called Narrative Tact and Other Classical Virtues. Here Pullman looks at the currently prevalent use of first-person present tense. (I have my own reservations about that, too. I've used both present tense and first person, but never together; when they're combined I find myself wondering why this character is earnestly telling me everything she does, thinks and sees, recording every bodily reaction, all as it happens and supposedly unmediated.) Pullman contrasts "what we often get now, the immediate, the up-close, the hectic of the incessant present tense, and what I might call the classical style of Pearce's writing, which has a great deal to do with how the narrator does her work." Particularly he examines the subtle ways in which the narrative handles time, in a novel which is of course all about shifts in time; and (with diversions to Emma and Vanity Fair) the flexibility of the free indirect style. "And this is where it gets really interesting, because if it's done well we hardly notice the moments when the point of view shifts from outside Tom to inside Tom, from Tom then to Tom now, from Tom him to Tom us. The movement is performed so swiftly and lightly that it seems the most natural thing in the world, even though really it's a complicated psychological manouevre." But then, who is the narrator? Philippa Pearce, surely? But no ... the narrator is the invention of the author just as surely as the characters are, "and every time I read a book where the author is so miraculously in charge of this ghostly being, ... so uncanny in its knowledge and so swift and sprite-like in its movement, I feel a delight in possiblity and mystery and make-believe."

Then there's the bit about his reaction to first reading Blake's poems: "I knew they were true in the way I knew that I was alive... " and the several times when he tells us he doesn't like fantasy, and a most intriguing question he poses towards the end, in a piece on The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ ... But I'll have to stop quoting; this is getting ridiculous. You'll just have to read the book for yourself, and see what you find there.

Daemon Voices is published by David Fickling Books.

Guest review by Yvonne Coppard: TANGLEWEED AND BRINE by Deirdre Sullivan, illustrated by Karen Vaughn

"Sullivan digs right down into the character’s heart and soul, bringing the shadows of personal history into the light and challenging the reader’s preconceptions."

Yvonne is currently a Writing Fellow with the Royal Literary Fund and an Associate Fellow of Writing Project, which provides training in clear, respectful written communications with a human touch to commercial, public service and charity organisations. Her publications include Bully, Not Dressed Like That, You Don't and (with Linda Newbery) Writing Children's Fiction: a Writers' and Artists' Companion. See more on her website. 

There are so many fairy stories in the world. I have shelves full of them: traditional, ancient and modern; stories for babies, young children, teenagers, adults. Many are retellings with a new slant: political, feminist, satirical, humorous, therapeutic, dark, dumbed-down. Not to mention the critical commentaries, the analysis of form and formula, the exploration and explanation of human cognitive development, of why we need these tales.

All these I have loved. But I haven’t often been surprised or entranced since discovering Angela Carter. And now comes Tangleweed and Brine. It’s marketed as a Young Adult book for readers aged 15+ (Sullivan is an award winning author in this category). This only proves the idiocy of the book world’s prevailing fish-or-fowl determination to categorise and constrain. I hope this book finds its way across the divide.

Thirteen traditional tales from Grimm and Perrault are retold from the viewpoint of the female characters. Karen Vaughan’s moody black and white illustrations capture the spirit of the stories: subversive and dark; aching with loss and longing and a backbeat of anger.

You were a friendless child, a barrel chested, sturdy little thing who played alone. Who looked up through the branches seeking nests, needing something kinder than human…

You grew up soft, but still you learned to hide it. Piece by piece. The world’s not built for soft and sturdy things. It likes its soft things small and white, defenceless. Princesses in castles. Maidens waiting for the perfect sword. You grew up soft, and piece by wounded piece you built a carapace around your body. Humans are peculiar little things.

Sullivan digs right down into the character’s heart and soul, bringing the shadows of personal history into the light and challenging the reader’s preconceptions. Sometimes, I didn’t even recognise the original story until it was almost over (a tip: don’t read the contents page, just dive in.) Tangleweed and Brine is a lyrical beauty of a book. Leave plenty of time to savour each story, to let it sink in, before tackling the next. Let the women who have so often been portrayed as the small, white defenceless things reveal their secret power and the determination to pull themselves free:

Sometimes love is something more like rage. It makes you fight. You feel the future, wide and bright around you, kicking in your gut as though a child. The night spreads wide and you have flown, you’ve flown. The shape of you impressed in attic cloth is all that’s left. You wonder how long it will take for them to notice. It is an idle thought. You don’t care.

- inspirational, poetic and beautiful, though maybe not a bedtime read.

Tangleweed and Brine is published by Little Island.

Guest review by Paul Magrs: HADDON HALL - WHEN DAVID INVENTED BOWIE by Nejib

"The realization that your glory years can sometimes be quite short ones – ‘this enchanted interlude in my peaceful life as a house lasted for only two springs’ – is, I think, the most important part of this glittering tale."

Paul Magrs lives and writes in Manchester. In a twenty-odd year writing career he has published novels in every genre from Literary to Gothic Mystery to Science Fiction for adults and young adults. His most recent books are The Martian Girl (Firefly Press), Fellowship of Ink (Snow Books) and The Christmas Box (Obverse Books.) Over the years he has contributed many times to the Doctor Who books and audio series. He has taught Creative Writing at both the University of East Anglia and Manchester Metropolitan University, and now writes full time.

One of the reasons I love graphic novels is that they feel like someone has taken hold of a conventional novel and given it a bloody good shake. All the redundant words and phrases and padding and fluff and – especially – all the descriptions have simply fallen out. Leaving lots of lovely empty space.

In ‘Haddon Hall’ – a fabular, fabulous account of David Bowie’s rise to fame as Ziggy Stardust by French-Tunisian artist, Nejib – there’s lots of that lovely space. The pages are organized less like a traditional comic strip than they are a child’s picture book of the era he’s conjuring. There’s just a touch of the Babapapa books created by Annette Tison and Talus Taylor in this tale of the strange menagerie that Bowie gathered about him in 1970. Both narratives tell of polymorphous and perverse other-worldly beings who live in heterogenous harmony inside a home perfectly attuned to their needs.

The story goes like this: one-hit wonder David and his kooky American wife Angie find a dilapidated Victorian mansion in London where they can live out their fantasy of being bohemian aristocrats, throwing open their doors to other experimental souls. Guitarists, poets and cats come slinking through the massive, messy rooms and there are orgies and dinner parties and music festivals galore. It’s a utopian period that Bowie himself captures so brilliantly in those early records. It’s a strange thing: to have these sketchy, sometimes rudimentary figures evoking the time, place and even the music so beautifully. Dream sequences and drug hazes spiral off the page. Flashbacks drain the pages of colour, as we visit David’s youth and his brother’s first schizophrenic episode. Mostly, though, the pages are drenched in the gorgeous, hot pinks and oranges of a lost era.

There are cameos from other icons: Marc Bolan wanders through, full of envy and ambition, pipping Bowie to the post when it comes to getting onto Top of the Pops. Lennon glides through the tale in his limousine, lecturing Bowie on the awfulness of pop fame and how it conflicts with art (‘Look, David. I was at dinner last night with Stockhausen and Nabokov…’) They sit together by the river and the world about them becomes scratchier and darker as Lennon explains how isolating stardom is. And then, when David gives sanctuary to his troubled brother, he also rescues the equally-doomed Syd Barrett, of Pink Floyd fame. As a Bowieologist I know pointed out – this never actually happened. But that doesn’t matter. It should have happened and this queer reimagining of the past installs poor Syd under David and Angie’s wings for a little while.

Best of all, perhaps, is the fact that the whole story is narrated by the house itself. Haddon Hall has lain neglected for years and it talks to us directly of its delight when this strange young couple first came to look inside its doors. (‘I didn’t understand them, but already I loved them.’) The grand old nineteenth century pile has a final flourishing of life, thanks to the hippies and the glam rockers who come to make all kinds of music and love inside its walls.

The curling, sprawling, art nouveau fronds and vines and petals that scroll through the pages like flowery doodles look just like exotic plants pushing their glorious way inside a derelict building. The most wonderful moment of all comes, perhaps, as David writes his opus, ‘Life on Mars?’ – and has his turning point – slaving over his upright piano, ignoring the stacked-up meals Angie brings him (‘You have to eat, sweetie…’), smoking endless cigarettes as he plonks away. It takes a whole page of repetitious images – a Warholian frieze of tinkering, tinkling Bowies - until he hits his perfect tune and the song finally comes together. Visually this is rendered as more of those wonderful, spiraling plants, emerging from the lid of his piano, blowing trumpeting, blaring colour back to the story. It’s a fantastic moment – and distils the creative process into one gorgeous double page spread.

I’ve made it sound too straightforward and twee, perhaps. There are complications aplenty, and some wonderful moments of darkness. It’s a book about imagining your own kind of life and inventing it around you, but it’s cognisant of the pitfalls. Mad brother Terry is always there – pursued by the horrifying, phantom shapes of his affliction. Angie’s hopeless auditions and sheer lack of natural talent make our hearts go out to her, even as she tries her best to shine. Bowie himself is riven and eaten up with his desire to make a breakthrough both artistic and commercial. He almost despairs; he almost gives up. But he’s resilient and endlessly creative – and that’s what this book celebrates so fantastically. Even the frightening bits – the turbulent flights of fancy and the monochrome doldrums - are worth dragging yourself through.

The book leaves him with a new hairdo (clip, clip clip: Angie chops his locks into a spiky, Heinz-red cut) and on the brink of massive fame. ‘On that day, David was finally avant-garde.’ It will also mean the breaking-up of the happy home, and already the commune’s members are going their own ways. Haddon Hall looks back on relinquishing its magical grip on its inhabitants and the story ends softly, and sweetly, with the narrator knowing that its best years are over, just as its friends’ are about to begin. The realization that your glory years can sometimes be quite short ones – ‘this enchanted interlude in my peaceful life as a house lasted for only two springs’ – is, I think, the most important part of this glittering tale.

Haddon Hall is published by Selfmadehero, 2017

THE FACTS OF LIFE by Paula Knight, reviewed by Linda Newbery

"The charm, skill and wit of the drawings, recalling Posy Simmonds, and the cleverness and variety of page design, fully involve the reader in a tale that is very personal but never self-pitying."

Linda Newbery won the Costa Children's Book Prize with Set in Stone, a young adult novel set in Sussex in the late 19th Century. She is the editor of Writers Review.

I don’t have children, and am sometimes expected to account for that to inquisitive strangers. “Oh? Is that from choice, or …?” is a frequent response to what seems to be taken as an admission, rather than a statement, of my childless state. These casual questioners seem unaware that that innocuous “or … ?” might possibly plumb depths of grief or loss (though not in my case) which no stranger has any right to probe. As for the idea of choosing not to have children … such a decision is often viewed as peculiar or selfish. Last year, indiscreet remarks from Andrea Leadsom, then a contender for the Conservative party leadership, prompted explanations from her rival Theresa May about why she’s childless: explanations which no male politician would ever be required to give. Yes, we’re in the 21^st Century (where, as Paula Knight points out, the world hardly needs more inhabitants) but still it seems that women are required to be wives and mothers by default; or, if not, to have some good excuse ready for those demanding to know why not. 

The Facts of Life confronts this head on. I met Paula years ago on an Arvon course and have tracked her progress since as a successful illustrator of children’s books.  This is a new departure: a memoir told and shown in versatile comic-strip form. Referring to herself as ‘Polly’, though it’s clearly her own experience she draws on, Paula traces her early and adult years, from her awareness of bodily functions and sex, on through career opportunities, relationships and friends’ pregnancies (exclamations and congratulations followed swiftly by a sense of inadequacy – this shown so neatly in talking heads and speech balloons, no commentary needed) to conception, loss and finally resignation and adaptation. It’s striking how little the Swinging Sixties and the arrival of the contraceptive pill affected the advice given to teenage girls in the 1970s: ‘Polly’, born in 1969, got from parents and teachers the clear expectation that marriage and motherhood were to be her destiny.

Post-viral fatigue syndrome and the break-up of a relationship take Polly into her thirties, when a new man, Jack, offers a new chance. Flexible page layouts animate her dilemma. While an hourglass trickles down the centre of one page, two Pollys face each other from either side: one a paint-spattered artist, the other smugly pregnant, her baby-bulge counterpointing the inward curve of the glass.  On another page, a Janus-headed Polly looks left and right at the pros and cons of being a mother. “’Sometime later’ was here now … “  While examinations and tests continue, a well-meaning acquaintance tells her, “You’ll never know love quite like it unless you have children,“ – a familiar statement that pushes other kinds of love into second or third place. The excitement of conception is followed swiftly by miscarriage, more than once, and we accompany Polly as she cocoons herself against the platitudes offered so kindly by friends. The graphic approach works brilliantly here, as we see her assaulted by music, noise, words and visions. Finally, when the barrage of tests and the whirlwind of expectation and disappointment become too much, Polly and her very supportive Jack begin to examine their future without children.

In one drawing a crack in the wall behind two talking heads widens and splits as Polly counters the assumptions of a former friend preoccupied with childcare. Facing a campaign poster image of the clichéd ‘hardworking families’ beloved of politicians, Polly reflects, “As a person without kids, you must prepare to be effaced in a society where ‘family’ means ‘children’.” But compensations are to be found in the natural world and in new friendships – and, self-evidently, in art. The decision not to persevere is not an ending, but the start of new explorations and a reassessment of values.

There’s quite detailed medical information throughout, but also humour and a light touch. In one drawing, a deceased Polly sits upright in her wicker coffin to ask, “Um, do you have ‘Farewell Regality’ by Rachel Unthank and the Winterset?” If she doesn’t have children, who will be around in her old age to take care of such things? The charm, skill and wit of the drawings, recalling Posy Simmonds, and the cleverness and variety of page design, fully involve the reader in a tale that is very personal but never self-pitying. This is a tricky balance to strike, and Paula Knight is to be congratulated for producing a book which will be of particular value and comfort to people of both genders whose experience is similar to Polly’s and Jack’s, but should also have wider appeal for its insight into the lives of others and for its exploration into the big questions of life: why are we here? What difference can we make in the world? 

The Facts of Life is published by Myriad Editions.