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| From
the November/December 2000 issue of The Horn Book Magazine Future Classics
Of all the science fiction and space travel stories I know, The Green Book travels best, and may travel furthest, in part because its author understands that science fiction is fiction first and science a distant second. The Green Book isn't a computer manual but a human manual, a child's first Robinsonade. "And the next day we all went away, Father and Joe, and Sarah, and Pattie, and lots of other families, and left the Earth far behind." This reads with the heart-breaking directness of Governor Bradford doing his Puritan history of the Plimoth Plantation — remember Bradford's section called "Preparation to This Weighty Voyage"? The Green Book's initial paragraph winches the tension through neatly sprung and simple sentences, culminating in the challenge that opens the novel. Father said, "We can take very little with us." The list was in his hand. "Spade, saw, file, ax, for each family. Seeds, etc., will be provided. Iron rations will be provided. For each voyager a change of clothing, a pair of boots, one or two personal items only; e.g., a favorite cooking pan, a musical instrument (small and light), a picture (unframed). Nothing under this heading will be taken if it is bulky or heavy, fragile or perishable. One book per voyager." The choosing of books that the voyagers must struggle over — Desert Island Discs for bibliophiles — is what we're doing in this exercise of nominating children's books for posterity. Father dutifully forgoes his Oxford Complete Shakespeare for the more useful Dictionary of Intermediate Technology. Poignantly, there are several Robinson Crusoes on board, as well as a Homer. (There seems to be no Max or Madeline, but there is Grimm.) Pattie, the youngest, is considered to have squandered her choice: she brings a green buckram-clad book with empty pages. But when the colonists turn to write in it, after a harrowing first year, they find she has already filled the book with a scribbled history of their efforts. She has already become their Governor Bradford, their Crusoe with a journal. To a reader, an unread new book is much like a whole new world. And child readers one hundred years from now will find their worlds as new as ours ever were. Or newer.
From the November/December 2000 issue of The Horn Book Magazine |
or
this exercise, we'll assume the classics will survive, or
they don't deserve to be called classics. In a hundred years,
Meg Murry will still be tessering, Madeline still pooh-poohing the
tigers, and Max still riding herd on the wild rumpus. M. C. Higgins
will still be great; Wilbur, radiant. But much will be lost because
times move on. Though groaning scales of judgment weigh for enduring
merit, the calipers of personal taste always pinch for freshness.
So I propose Jill Paton Walsh's small masterpiece, The
Green Book — as fresh now as when it was published eighteen
years ago, and getting fresher daily.
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