He was not going to die, not here, not now.
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Adventures in Bookland: The Story of Babar by Jean de Brunhoff
This is a review written by two people, or rather, the same one, separated by so many years that he is, to all intents and purposes, two different people. The first is me, now, age 52, married, with three sons; a home owner, a writer, a man set in the tramlines of a life that has barely moved six miles north on the Piccadilly Line through those years.
The second is me, age 6: a child, a boy who loved reading above all other pleasures, a mixed-race child in a ’60s London that was not, at least where we were living, in the least swinging or happening; a boy whose physical boundaries were circumscribed by being a shy child but whose mental scope had widened immeasurably when he discovered, first, reading and then, the local library.
This young me read Babar, all the Babar stories, and loved them. This young me could not see why there should be this barrier of wordlessness between us and animals – why shouldn’t they speak? And, for that matter, why shouldn’t Babar wear a bowler hat and take tea outside a cafe in an unnamed city that bore a striking resemblance to Paris. Nor did it seem odd to me that Babar should be able to get to Paris on foot, when running away from the horrible hunters who had killed his mother. If, God forbid, hunters killed my mother, I’d want to run away too, and preferably to somewhere where a nice, rich old lady would take me in, give me cake, dress me up nicely and teach me to speak properly.
The old me, getting the book from the library to rediscover his childhood, discovered rather how far away that childhood was. The faith in story – even though I am a writer – is not strong enough now to carry me over what seem to adult eyes the glaring gaps in the story. I think my adult eyes are wrong. Why shouldn’t animals talk? They were obviously meant to. Would I really be surprised if, one day, my cat looked up at me, sniffed, and said, ‘You really are an insufferable bore?’ before sitting on a newspaper to absorb the latest news.
No, I wouldn’t be surprised. In some deep sense, I’d think this the return of a natural order, somehow unaccountably lost along the way. But, for my young self, that lost natural order seemed so much closer and the leap, in book form, hardly any leap at all.
There are many reviews from old people decrying Babar for all sorts of reasons. Don’t believe them. They read with old eyes and older minds. Those for whom Babar was written see him, see story, with different eyes and clean minds. We old people bring the accretion of decades to him, when Babar needs to be read fresh, by a child still barely touched by the world. They will read him, and they will love him, and they will be right to do so.
The Drama of the Good
I’ve now read six of Andrew Norriss’s books and I think I know what his work is about: every story I’ve read has been a drama of the good. But if drama requires conflict, how can there be drama where all the characters are good? That is the question Andrew Norriss seems to me to be setting out to explore in his books, and his writing, and its success or otherwise, represents an answer to that question.
‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Thus begins Anna Karenina, with one of the most famous quotations in literature. And of course, if happy families are all alike, they must be inherently less interesting than unhappy ones. But thought and experience both tell me Tolstoy was wrong. Happiness ramifies, producing unique results; misery contracts, collapsing everything down to a cold, solid core. In this, Dante was right over Milton: the devil in the Inferno is encased in the ice of his own evil, immobile, but seeking to draw everything and everyone down into his own eternal stasis, whereas the Satan of Paradise Lost is active and engaged, more of a character than anyone else.
Here, Milton and other writers and film makers have fallen foul of one of the great shortcuts of dramatic art: it’s much, much easier to write an interesting evil character than a fascinating good one. Why should this be? One answer is that evil, at least in its everyday modes, is encoded into our substance. You don’t have to be an Augustinian to note the evidence of something very like original sin in our substance: simply think of the ease, the positive relief, with which good habits are shucked off when compared to the struggle against bad and destructive habits. We are creatures bent out of true, and thus it is much easier for a writer to understand what is so readily to mind in his or her own nature.
But goodness, true goodness, now, that is something else. Rarely encountered, even more rarely written about, it is almost impossible to capture in words or images precisely because it escapes the categories of thought: the normal binary operations of our mind (black/white, right/left) fail when we encounter true goodness and real evil. Evil is not the opposite of good, it is its absence, the hunger of the abyss for a being it is determined to expunge.
We are empty creatures, seeking fulfillment, and goodness is that fulfillment, in all its various, simple, ordinary forms. Each happy family is unique; it is the unhappy families that are alike, tending towards the dark attractor that is the cause and gourmet of human misery.
Andrew Norriss, is his deceptively slight books, provides a glimpse of escape from that core of despair. In his stories, good people are, genuinely, good, and work towards good ends, yet the threads of circumstance and the workings of providence (which is not without its own humour) conspire to provide the narrative tension that, on the artistic level, pulls the reader along, a smile of unknowing recognition on his face, towards the denouement. For, somewhere in our hearts, buried under the hurts of lives, we know that, really, this is what the world should be like – and will, one day, be.
Blog tour: what, how, why and how…
1. What are you working on?
Quite a lot! First, and I’m about half way through this and typing frantically with one eye on the approaching 16 May deadline, is a biography of Alfred the Great with Dr Katie Tucker, the osteoarchaeologist (she works with bones) who is leading the search for the mortal, but lost, remains of the king. There was a recent BBC 2 TV programme, The Search For Alfred The Great, hosted by the lustrous Neil Oliver, on the efforts to find King Alfred’s body, which can be seen in part here. This biography tells his life, and extraordinary achievements, and Dr Tucker will be writing about her search for his lost remains. The book is called In Search of Alfred the Great: The King, The Grave, The Legend and will be published by Amberley Publishing.
Then there’s volume two of The Northumbrian Thrones, Oswald: Return of the King.
The sequel to Edwin: High King of Britain tells the story of Edwin’s nephew, Oswald, who with his family fled to the sea-spanning kingdom of Dal Riada when Edwin defeated and killed his father in battle when he was a child – in the Dark Ages, the personal really was political! JRR Tolkien, the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, took his inspiration for Aragorn, the dispossessed king who returns to claim his kingdom, from Oswald, and his story is crucial in the history of England. It was a time of great danger – no king of Northumbria before Oswald had managed to die a natural death – but also the sudden birth of great beauty, as if the precariousness of life made the preciousness of things made with consuming skill all the greater.
I’m aiming to have written Oswald: Return of the King by the end of October for publication next Easter. After that, I’ll be working on the final volume of The Northumbrian Thrones, Oswy: King of Kings, which is about Oswald’s half brother and successor as king of Northumbria (in a time before surnames, parents gave their children names with the same prefix to indicate they were siblings; thus Alfred the Great’s five elder brothers and his sister all had names beginning with Æthel. Presumably even his mum and dad were getting confused when they came to number seven and called him Ælfred instead). Volumes two and three of The Northumbrian Thrones will be published by Lion Fiction.
And to round things out, there’s The Light That Drowns The Stars: A Spiritual History of London. Now, I’m an unusual creature: someone living in London who was actually born here, and lived all my life in the city – to be precise, up and down a six-mile section of the Piccadilly Line. This is an exciting, making it up as I go along sort of book, where I’m writing a spiritual history of the town that is both the Great Wen, a pustule on the bottom of the country, and the inspiration of religious and spiritual movements ranging from Methodism to the Alpha Course. Also, London formed me, for ill and good, and that story, I realised, forms how I write its history and thus is part of its history too. It’s a thrilling, though, nerve wracking, book to write. It should be out later next year from Lion Hudson.
2) How does your work differ from others of its genre?
A lot of Early Medieval historical fiction concentrates on the heroic aspects of the Heroic Age: shieldwalls and battles, with a side order of wenching and pillaging – sort of Rambo in the sixth century. I wanted to take this and build a bigger picture: the obscurity of the Dark Ages hides the birth of England, Scotland and Wales, the foundations and many of the lift shafts of everything that came afterwards. And, what is more, it was the battles that often settled the questions: would England expand and dominate the whole country? Answered, emphatically in the negative, in the Battle of Nechtansmere in 685. Would the Romano-Britons be able to drive the Anglo-Saxons from their land? Again, a question answered in blood at Mount Badon and Catterick and elsewhere, and the reason I am writing today in English, not Welsh.
So, with The Northumbrian Thrones, I wanted to widen the focus and look at the interplay of nation building and identity, and how they worked out in the crucial period when the pagan kings of the Anglo-Saxons decided where their religious, and cultural, future lay. The personal choices made by a few men and women then determined our national trajectory up until today.
This was all made considerably easier because I had already written a non-fiction book on the history and archaeology of Northumbria, with archaeologist and director of the Bamburgh Research Project, Paul Gething. Northumbria: the Lost Kingdom, and the many conversations I had with Paul, gave me almost everything I needed in terms of historical research and, in Paul, I had access to one of the finest, most incisive analysts of the Early Medieval period there is. We spent many hours discussing the finer points of shieldwall battle tactics and the etiquette of duelling, with Paul always able to bring to bear some archaeological nugget or fascinating ethnographic parallel.
Another difference is that I don’t simply write historical fiction. Edwin: High King of Britain is my first novel, but I’ve had five books published before it, four on history and one children’s book (the details are all on my books page). I’ve also had over thirty short stories published in various magazines, in genres ranging from science fiction and fantasy, through literary fiction to a stab at romance! There’s a page linking to my stories here.
3. Why do you write what you do?
Because someone paid me! First off, writing is a job. The strange thing is, for all the years I looked on writing as an art and vocation and all that sort of stuff, I got virtually nowhere, wrote very little, and had almost nothing published. Since I’ve switched to looking at it as a job, and started – against all my instincts – to push myself forward and market myself in all sorts of hideous ways, I’ve not had time to stop.
But it’s also fair to say I get very grumpy if I don’t write – my sons found the perfect image of what I’m like if I don’t write regularly: it’s not a pretty sight, is it.
4. How does your writing process work?
I get up at 5am, make a cup of tea, say my prayers, and start writing. Getting up at that time means I get two hours before the rest of the family are up, or at least 45 minutes if I have to leave to do some freelance editing at Time Out or Bella or one of the other places I do shifts at. I know many writers find reading about the actual writing process fascinating, but I avoid reading it and I’m not much cop at writing it. In the end, it comes down to putting one word after another. The main, perhaps only, thing I’ve learned is: trust the words. They’re tough little blighters, and will do all the heavy lifting for you, if you give them the chance.
Thank you to Justin Hill (author of Shieldwall and a very fine writer) for asking me to continue the tour. Read his answers here.
The blog tour has stopped recently at Matthew Harffy’s blog (author of the Bernicia Chronicles, which are also set in seventh-century Northumbria); AH Gray who, although condemned to the sunshine of Perth, Western Australia, finds her true home also by the cold grey waters of the North Sea – she is the author of the Northumbrian Saga.
The tour continues…
Christi Daugherty takes cool and brands it in her own inimitable style. The author of the best-selling Night School series of YA novels, she combines writing about the sort of teenagers I wish I’d been with an unerring nose for a good cup of coffee.
A former crime reporter, political writer and investigative journalist, CJ Daugherty wrote for several American newspapers and for Reuters before becoming a full-time novelist. Her young adult series, Night School, set in a boarding school for the children of the political elite, has been translated into 21 languages.
Julian Bell will warm the heart of English teachers throughout the world – after years teaching the subject all over the world, he is about to step into the page with his first novel, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing.
Julian Bell has worked as a teacher for twenty-seven years in London, Hong Kong, Spain, Kent and Hertfordshire. He is currently Head of English at the Godolphin and Latymer School in West London. He has written comedy scripts for BBC Radio 4 and a variety of stand-up comedians, and his poetry has been published in a number of magazines and has won several prizes. He has also been a restaurant and book reviewer, and has been commissioned by the Royal School of Church Music to write the lyrics of a Christmas carol. He writes a weekly column on London at www.lifelonglondoner.blogspot.com.
Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, his novel set in Dublin in 1920 at the height of the Anglo-Irish war, is the first volume of a planned trilogy: the second volume, My Enemy’s Enemy, will be set in London in 1940 – 41 during the Blitz, and the third, Ourselves Alone, in Belfast, London and the Lake District in 1975. He lives in London with his wife and daughter.
Please Look After This Bear
Goosebumps. I’ve just come face to nose with the best friend of my childhood.
Book review: Daily Life in Anglo-Saxon England
The only reason this is not a five-star book is that for the price (£32!!!!) I’d have expected lots of illustrations and a colour section: there’s a few black and white photos, and 25 or so illustrations, but that’s it. Leaving that aside, the actual text provides a wealth of information about the culture and environment of Anglo-Saxon England, from birth to death to burial (a lot on this, of course, as dead bodies are among the most eloquent of remains). A must read for anyone interested in the period.
The Loss of a Child
Two years ago this month, my then six-year-old son lost his best friend. Uchenna and his family had gone to Hawaii on what really was a dream holiday if you live in a grey, autumnal London, but while there, Uchenna – always a live wire fizzing with energy – slipped away. He was found, drowned in one of the hotel’s pools.
At his funeral, Uchenna’s mother read out this prayer:
Uchenna My Son
Who would have thought I’d stand here to say your days on this earth are done?
Uchenna my bright shining Star
So near in my heart, but now you must shine from afar
Ever playful, ever joyful, my Uche Boy
A true big brother,
Always most likely to give up your favourite toy
Gone but never forgotten
You’ll always shine on my son
You were heaven sent; a special one.
Now it’s time for us to say a fond farewell
Until we meet again in his kingdom where we all shall dwell
I’ll miss you, I love you
Uchenna My Son.If I could turn back the hands of time,
You’d be right here tightly in these arms of mine,
But it is not so and we must all accept
That a greater being than I has a purpose for you now
I know not where, or when or how
But I trust all will be revealed on that final day
When I will see you again and most surely say
I missed you, I love you
Uchenna, My Son.
You were heaven sent; a special one.
Now it’s time for us to say a fond farewell
Until we meet again in his kingdom where we all shall dwell
I’ll miss you, I love you
Uchenna My Son.If I could turn back the hands of time,
You’d be right here tightly in these arms of mine,
But it is not so and we must all accept
That a greater being than I has a purpose for you now
I know not where, or when or how
But I trust all will be revealed on that final day
When I will see you again and most surely say
I missed you, I love you
Uchenna, My Son.
In the two years since Uchenna’s death, his parents have displayed quite extraordinary faith and forbearance. Now, to help others who have suffered the loss of a child, Chioma (Uchenna’s mother) has set up a You Tube channel with her testimony to life after loss. You can see it here.
And there is a Facebook page for families who are grieving for lost children, here.
Hello and welcome
Greetings to everybody visiting my site – I take it the sudden spike is as a result of people reading The Dream of the Night-Shift Power Worker, yesterday’s emailed story from Daily Science Fiction. Thank you for reading the story; I hope you enjoyed it. I’ve had many other stories published, most of which can be read online via links found on my Stories page. Let me know what you think, either through a comment or by contacting me directly.
What the British Say and What they Mean – A User’s Guide
Via Bridges and Tangents, this useful guide to the real meaning of everyday English phrases.
Freedom of Information
I’ve just made my first Freedom of Information request! The Blair/Brown governments may have been among the worst the country has ever had foisted on it, but credit where it’s due: at least one good piece of legislation accrued from those myriad Acts of Parliament. The request is over a personal matter, but I will keep you informed as to how long before I get a response and whether they divulge the information I have requested.
If there’s anything you want to find out about, I suggest putting in a Freedom of Information request. It’s surprisingly easy – more information here and here.