Back to the Laurel Grove

he U.K. has a new Children's Laureate, to succeed the first ever of such mortals, who was Quentin Blake. I wrote about his election to the (rather ill-defined) regnancy in the January/February 2000 Horn Book and heralded the event as a cue for carnival, a prediction that required little guesswork and has proved entirely right. Few people doubted the likelihood of his success, even though he had to work out his own job specifications as he went along.

This is hardly the place to publish a complete record of the many events that Blake either instigated or lent his presence to during his laureateship, although such a record would well demonstrate the energy and the selfless generosity that he brought to being Wise Man at one moment and cheerleader the next (after all, this was two years taken out of a working life). Two examples can be set down, though, that show the breadth of his engagement. The first is a handsome tall quarto volume with the title Words and Pictures (Jonathan Cape), which Blake describes as "not for the most part a book about reminiscence . . . [but one which] does bring together a number of thoughts that I have expressed in talks and conversations at one time or another."

That typically modest explanation makes the whole affair sound a bit casual, but the informality thus implied is one of the book's great qualities. Unlike the hermeneutic studies and the psychobabble that our academic superiors have brought to their recent discovery of Illustration, Blake meets you as a friend and in the course of his ruminations encompasses an illustrator's credo. "Reminiscence" and sporadic ventures into professional autobiography supply a continuing thread for what he has to say, but he weaves into that account much wisdom about the practicalities of his craft: the influence of predecessors (here is yet another example of a great illustrator paying tribute to Andre Francois, whose work is so little known outside professional circles); the essence of drawing ("trying to become the subject"); the "little theater" of book illustration and the attendant problems in such matters as choice of moment, characterization, use of color, etc. Somehow the observations are more authoritative for being imparted with such conversational ease, and Words and Pictures is one of the most cheering events associated with the establishment of the laureateship.

The other, which had a much more direct impact on children, was a sparkling exhibition that Quentin Blake was able to mount in the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. He called it "Tell Me a Picture," and it consisted of twenty-six paintings by an alphabet of artists from A for Hendrick Avercamp to Z for Lisbeth Zwerger. His choice ranged widely over nations, centuries, and themes and, as may be guessed, included several contemporary illustrators, with the uniting principle being that there should be some narrative content to each painting. What the story might be was never specified, so that everyone visiting the display was encouraged to apply a detective imagination to whatever was going on. Whether the explanations were right or wrong was beside the point; what mattered was looking at — or, better, into — the pictures, and finding a story that satisfied you.

This was a game that could have carried the title of one of Blake's greatest picture books, All Join In. The selection of examples was comic, dramatic, and mysterious by turns (my favorite was Francois de Nome's Fantastic Ruins with Saint Augustine and the Child, which could surely form the subject for a full-length novel by Philip Pullman); the many children whom I saw there, individually or in school groups, were absorbed — looking, copying, writing — and any hint of didactic purpose was dispelled by a parade of figures who accompanied you on your perambulation from picture to picture. These had all been supplied by Blake on a graphic trackway that ran round the wallboards — drawings of a whole crew of kids larking, tumbling, puzzling, dancing in among the gallery's treasures. (You can get some idea of the imaginative energy of the whole production in a celebratory handbook — much livelier than the customary tombstone catalogs — distributed for the gallery by Frances Lincoln Ltd.)

Words and Pictures and "Tell Me a Picture" are variant examples of Blake "delving into the hamper of things that are fun to draw" and a token of the way in which the greatest authors and illustrators can open up the world for children. How Blake's successor-laureate will tackle the job is still largely matter for speculation. The choice fell upon Anne Fine, who, with Peter Dickinson, had been short-listed for the incumbency on the previous occasion and whose distinguished career was substantiated by the electoral forum with a list of the many awards she has received. It must be owned, however, that Fine's distinction as a writer for children dwells in a part of the spectrum far distant from that occupied by Quentin Blake. Even so, Words and Pictures gives the gist, where Quentin writes of the "many good children's books which deal with everyday life, the life of parents and children . . . [and those which] deal head-on with contemporary problems." And later, "it is absolutely right and proper that this should be so," although he adds that there may be advantages in stories "which are like some kind of fable . . . they invite imagination."

If you care to place the fables of Clown or The Green Ship alongside Goggle-Eyes or Flour Babies, the distinction is obvious, and there is little doubt that Anne Fine's eminence, which it is one aim of the laureateship to celebrate, derives from her gifts for making reader-friendly fictions out of "contemporary problems." She has a penetrating sympathy for the confusions and the sense of alienation among some adolescents that form the ground of much YA literature, and her stories are often saved from being the case-studies engineered by some of her contemporaries through her brisk voice and the often funny backchat of her characters.

Unlike those colleagues in the forensic laboratory, Fine has also written many stories for younger children — jokey tales, sufficient unto their day (although a recent picture book, Ruggles, done in perfect collaboration with her illustrator Ruth Brown, is a rapturous success — especially for the doggie-faction of which I am a fully paid-up member). Speaking thus to so broad a constituency is surely a laureatic essential, and, in Fine's case, it combines with a passionate belief in reading ("enchantment, pleasure, escape . . . and the enriching fall-out . . . it's mad not to praise reading for its added value") and the civilizing role of libraries ("Did I go to the library? Do camels spit?"). There is clearly no idle piety there, and in the early stages of her incumbency she has aimed some well-justified shafts at the declining editorial standards of many publishers who undermine rather than enhance children's books by lousy proofreading, inadequate attention to authorial faults, and a fear of the unconventional.

At the reading end of the process, though, she is closely involved with the launch of an inventive scheme to promote "the home library." This adopts the ingenious and almost cost-free procedure of flooding the land with children's bookplates, designed for the occasion by thirty or so of our leading illustrators. (They have worked in monochrome so that the plates can be downloaded from a website, printed, and colored in by recipients to their own satisfaction.) Obviously the scheme gambles on the premise that there is a vital link between reading books and owning them and that bookplates will encourage the latter — but there is likely to be much spin-off in the extent to which adults will be involved in finding out about the good things on offer.

The high profile that the press has so far given our laureates has already done much to justify the idea. They have, however, been greatly if fortuitously aided by what has to be labeled the Harry Potter Effect. (Hard-nosed journalists and the chattering classes, for whom "kiddy books" exists as a term of derision, are beguiled to discover the magic of an obscure single mum being turned into a multi-millionaire.) The Effect may not have led to much improvement in the intelligent discussion of all children's literature; reviewing remains buried in swamps of indifference. But the Wizard Connection, which now involves both Harry Potter and Gandalf McKellen, was surely instrumental in fueling the febrile excitement over Philip Pullman and his dark materials. The Amber Spyglass has recently become the first children's book ever to win the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, worth £30,000, against Top Books in other, adult, categories such as fiction, biography, and poetry. In doing so, it shook up memories of the row two years ago, which I reported in the May/June 2000 Horn Book, when one judge switched his vote in the belief that it would be a "national humiliation" for The Prisoner of Azkaban to be named Book of the Year.

I'm sure that the fuss brought children's books more directly into the consciousness of the judges — to Philip Pullman's inestimable benefit this year. Furthermore, the publicity generated by these events has turned literary journalists (who had previously just about heard of Roald Dahl) into instant authorities on children's books. Panels discussed, editorial-writers pontificated, and Mrs. Coulter's recording angel was subject to daily interview — proffering critical arguments of a punchy articulateness rather beyond what was anticipated, and certainly beyond what might have been expected from Harry Potter's mistress.

Nor were they the only ones enriched by The Effect. Public libraries are unearthing dusty collections of old children's books in their basements and getting grants to furbish them up, regardless of whether they're worth it. Our Arts Council, whose dignitaries may never have heretofore heard of children's books, being as how they were all read Middlemarch in their cradles, has suddenly started seeking an agency (an agency?!?) to do they know not what. Our British Council plans to open a huge exhibition in May at Newcastle upon Tyne devoted to "The Magic Pencil; the art of picture book illustration" (this may eventually find its way to New York). The National Portrait Gallery in London is setting up a pictorial display of the visages of the Great and the Good, along with associated artifacts, under the title "Beatrix Potter to Harry Potter" (come and see Enid Blyton's typewriter). I, too, have found myself hired to prepare the National Library of Scotland's annual exhibition in Edinburgh, which — don't blame me — they have chosen to call "This Book Belongs to Me: From Tom Thumb to Harry Potter" (come and see part of JKR's manuscript of her first book, indited in a cafe just round the corner from the library). Quentin Blake and Anne Fine may have genius, but the Hogwarts lad really does have magic.

P.S. I can't conclude this column without brief mention of the last one (May/June 2001 Horn Book), which had the effect over here of someone poking an ant's nest with an old stick. Many affronted persons started scurrying about, and you may read of their resentment in the September/October 2001 issue ("Letters"). They did not, however, answer my dismay that a list established in the interests of "higher education" should be hospitable to observations of embarrassing puerility. Dismay too at their negative view of John Goldthwaite's Natural History of Make-Believe, although it's not clear if they had read the book or were relying on the opinion of another critic. If that happens to be their chosen method of assessing books, then perhaps they should note Philip Pullman's reference in these pages to Goldthwaite's work as a "brilliant and invaluable study" (November/December 2001) — but one of the revelations at the start of this fracas was that various members of "the research community" in Britain had never heard of, let alone subscribed to, The Horn Book Magazine.

Brian Alderson will shortly have two bibliographical studies published, one on Edward Ardizzone and the second the concluding volume of his study of Ezra Jack Keats.

From the May/June 2002 issue of The Horn Book Magazine