No. 66 - Peter Pan

Hello! 

I've started a new routine at home, like many of you probably have, and Tuesday is my day for blogging. Hopefully I will be able to get hold of a lot of the books digitally and can continue to write a new post once a week for the time being. Maybe, I can even keep this routine up when things go back to normal! 

This week's book is in fact a play! We haven't had one of those yet! It's J.M. Barrie's fantastical tale, Peter Pan. The play was originally devised by Barrie as a way of amusing some boys he knew, the Llewellyns. If you've ever seen Finding Neverland, you'll know about the relationship Barrie had with these boys and their mother. If you haven't seen this film, I suggest you watch it, it's brilliant! Anyway, although the play came first, Barrie first published the story as a novel for children called Peter and Wendy in 1911, and later in 1928 the play was published, and has been amusing audiences across the world ever since!

Peter, the Lost Boys, Wendy and Captain Hook are a well know set of characters in children's literature. Of course made all the more popular by our friend Walt Disney! I'm not going to moan about Walt this time though as I've never actually seen the Disney Peter Pan (no gasping please!). Instead I'm going to talk to you about the version I know, the play, the original tale of Peter and Wendy. I've never read the novelisation of the play, but I might after this. You can read it for free on the super Project Gutenberg website. Maybe I'll read it and write another post comparing the book and the play. The Project Gutenberg website is great. You can read loads of out of copyright classics online or download them as ebooks for free. 

Now, during my degree Peter Pan was one of the play texts we studied, and my word there is a lot more to it than you expect! At first glance it seems to be a story of childhood vs adulthood, of growing up and loosing your belief in magic. In the famous scene where Tinkerbell is dying Peter Pan asks the audience to save her life by clapping if they believe in fairies. Here the entire audience, adults and children alike, are holding the fate of the character in their hands, literally. A critic once said that more often than not it was the adults who stood up during this scene, clapping furiously. Barrie is inviting them to embrace their childhood again, and the magic of believing in magic. In that moment, and indeed throughout the play, we are asked to suspend our disbelief, and it is interesting to see how far this stretches in adults and children. As we know, it is much easier  for children to believe and we see this is so many children's books. There is always a negative stance on adulthood, and how adults view the world. It is often suggested that adults grow out of believing in the fantastic, and this is a theme found in Peter Pan. However, instead of creating a closed world Barrie encouraged adults to relive their childhood fantasies, rather than shutting them out. Adults are as much allowed to look at Neverland as children are. In fact it has been said that Peter Pan was predominately written for adults, for this exact reason. This claim is backed up by the fact that the characters had already appeared in one of Barrie's novels for adults The White Bird. 

Once you start digging a bit deeper with this play you begin to notice the characters rather than the story. The story itself is muddled, confusing at times, and seemingly a lot happens with no real purpose. Pan is trying to kill Hook, Hook is trying to kill Pan, but it is never truly explained why. There are some fights, and then everyone flies home again, except stubborn Peter. It has been suggested that things never resolve themselves in Neverland because Neverland is not a real place. There are no consequences, they can do what they like. You feel like you've stumbled into a children's game that only makes real sense to those involved. 

Once we ignore the plot, we can start to look more closely at the characters, and this is where it gets interesting! Peter Pan, the boy who refuses to grow up, is a mythical character. Is he human? Is he a fairy? We are never sure. He famously says 'To die will be an awfully big adventure" suggesting that for him death is of no consequence and implies that maybe he is immortal. Peter, like Neverland, is made up and so anything can happen. Captain Hook on the other hand has a very real reminder of his mortality in the shape of the crocodile that has swallowed a clock! The creature ate Hook's hand and Hook is convinced that the crocodile would like to eat the rest of him. The ticking of the clock inside the crocodile's stomach can be heard every time the crocodile approaches Hook, like a ticking time bomb, a reminder that eventually Hook's time will be up because he is a mere mortal! Interestingly, in most productions of Peter Pan, the actor playing Mr Darling (the children's father), also plays Captain Hook (think of Jason Isaacs in the 2003 Peter Pan film). This double role reinforces the idea of Hook as mortal. In fact, is Hook actually Mr Darling? One of my theories is that Neverland is in fact an elaborate make-believe game played within the nursery. Peter Pan is a symbol for the Darling children's childhood, and his conflict with Hook or Mr Darling is about the way the children are growing up. The crocodile is a metaphor for their mortality, whilst Hook's need to defeat Pan, or childhood, is Mr Darling's ambition that his children will grow up to be successful adults. 

There is another theory that has been put forth many times, which will change the way you view this children's story forever. Some critics have suggested that Peter Pan is in fact a retelling of the Oedipus story, where the son tries to kill the father so he can marry the mother. In terms of this story, Peter Pan can be seen as the son, Hook the father and Wendy the mother. There is an extraordinary amount of emphasis placed on the figure of the mother in Peter Pan, and this Freudian reading of the story could explain why. Peter's main purpose seems to be to attack Hook at all eventualities, suggesting that if Hook were the father figure (he is the double of Mr Darling remember) Peter seems pretty intent on bumping him off. As for Wendy, she is portrayed as the mother very early on. In the first scene of the play she is playing at being her own mother with her younger brother John. Then once Peter arrives she becomes his mother, and in Neverland she is the Lost Boys' mother too. Despite being mother to all, Peter is very possessive of Wendy. This could be suggestive of an Oedipus complex. However, when Wendy asks him what his feelings towards her are (and she does this many times!) he always replies 'you are my mother', suggesting he has nothing but familial feelings for Wendy. 

I'm not sure how far I follow the Oedipal theory when it comes to Peter Pan, but it is interesting to explore these critical theories and use them to inform our reading of something that seems, on the surface, just a fantastical play for children. For me, the most interesting aspects of the analysis lie in the doubling of characters, and the theories surrounding the themes of childhood and growing up. I hope this has been of interest to some of you, I've certainly enjoyed writing it. It's not often now that I get to do a critical review of a text. Maybe I'll try and do more! 

Thanks for reading, L x

Next week, I'll be looking at Oliver Jeffer's picture book The Way Back Home. 

No. 67 - Asterix the Gaul

A big hello from me! I hope you're all doing well and are getting through in the best way you can during this time of uncertainty. It's a funny old world, and frankly it all feels a bit like a dream, but as with all dreams we'll wake up to a bright new morning at the end of all this. This week in the UK we learnt that we all had to stay indoors for the time being, and so it's time to fall back on our own resources. For all the parents having to home school your children, I hope you have fun together and learn from each other. The National Literacy Trust has a wonderful resource called Family Zone to help you with lots of useful links and activities to make home schooling a lot easier. Why not check it out! If I discover anything else I'll post it on here. I might also do some more posts with activities and book recommendations etc too, so watch this space!

It's a perfect time to explore new books series, and other types of literature too. I think this post about the Asterix comics has come just at the right time! 

Aside from reading the Beano each week as a child, I've never really been a comics or graphic novels kind of a girl. The first book on this list was The Adventures of Tin Tin, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and you can read my review here. So, I was really glad another comic popped up on the list, and I had a feeling it would be just as enjoyable. As with Tin Tin, I had never seen any adaptations of the stories so I was in the dark as to how the format worked, and what the characters were like. I found a PDF of Asterix the Gaul, the first Asterix comic online, along with all the others, why not take a look! I downloaded it onto my tablet and got reading. I'm not used to reading things on a screen, as I tend to favour a print copy, but a trip to the library was out of the question at the moment! I loved the creasy, battered scan of this comic, it was nostalgic, and reminded me of some kind of archived document. It was almost as good as paper! 

The first adventure of Asterix sees him and his Druid friend Getafix foiling the nasty Romans with a magic potion that makes their hair grow uncontrollably, which as you can imagine is rather funny! Asterix's village remains unconquered by the Romans, at a time when Julius Caesar was rampaging around invading anywhere he could! The Gauls' success is due to another of Getafix's magic potions, one that makes them superhumanly strong! Perfect for fighting Romans! There's classic slapstick, misdirection, and fights punctuated with 'BANG!' and 'BIFF!'; all the wonderful tropes you expect from a comic. The characters are appealing, and the drawing's themselves tell the story as much as the words do. It's great!

Originally of course, this comic was written in French, but it was translated into English in 1969. This meant that a lot of the jokes and names that had been used in the French comics didn't make sense in English, and it was up to translation duo Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge to act not only as translators but comedy geniuses as well! The English Asterix books were praised for keeping the same comedic feel, despite having to be tweaked for English consumption. The character names are the most obvious difference between the French and English editions of this comic. For example, the druid is Panaoramix in the French version, but Bell and Hockridge changed the name to Getafix in the English one, in a reference to drugs and the magic potions he was always concocting! Just from this name change you can see that Asterix doesn't always seem to be aimed at a child audience. In fact, I think they are more for adults than children! The puns are at times so unrelated to childhood that I wonder whether Bell and Hocking, and indeed Goscinny and Udurzo (the original creators) were just trying to make themselves laugh! The Roman centurion named Marcus Ginantonicus is a favourite of mine, for example! There is also a lot of Latin in the English translation. Having not read the French version I can't say if it was in the original, but I do wonder what child today would understand the punchline of a joke if it were in Latin? Is this a symptom of the time it was written? I'm not sure. Latin was certainly being phased out of schools in the 1960s, so I wonder why it was chosen to play such a pivotal role in the text? 

"Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.", "The fact...", "How are you?" "Very well, thank you!" 

Yes, I had to use Google Translate!

In my last post I spoke about nostalgia, about the way child readers these days couldn't necessarily relate to child characters from the past in an immediate way, but there was always the thread of the collective childhood experience that kept them together. However, with the Asterix's books there is no collective childhood, it relies purely on story telling, adventure and an understanding of European history. This, I think, would make these comics a struggle for children these days.

If the whole story was reliant on the text, I think the adventures of Asterix would have been lost long ago. But luckily, the visual storytelling keeps these books afloat. There is a lot to be said about comics, and I'm going to use the phrase reluctant reader again! Combining words and images helps children find a passion for reading, beyond the picture book, but with the same familiarity. I'm not sure this is entirely true of the Asterix comics, because of all the layers to the narrative, but even if you ignore the text I think you can get something from the story. You can see the conflict between the Romans and the Gauls and get a gist of the action unfolding, as well as the physical humour. I love the simple palette of colours and the way the types of characters have their own distinct looks. As a icon of visual culture, Asterix is right up there! 

Overall, these comics have many downfalls when it comes to appealing to modern children. However, as an adult coming to them for the first time I enjoyed the humour, and using Google Translate for the Latin was quite fun! I'm not sure I'd recommend these comics for the child reader, for parents yes, but if you want a classic comic that will entertain today's young people, I'd stick to Tin Tin instead!

Thanks for reading, L x

Next up, it's J.M Barrie's magical Peter Pan.

No. 68 - The Family from One End Street (and World Book Day 2020)

It's World Book Day month, hooray! Thursday 5th March was World Book Day, a favourite of mine as you may already know. I love seeing which characters children dress up as, and how their little imaginations are sparked by literature of all kinds. The free books for this year's World Book Day are fantastic as always, with authors such as Anthony Horowitz, Robin Stevens, and Matt Haig contributing brand new stories. You can see the full list of the books here, so encourage children to cash in those vouchers and grab a new short story!

As for today's post, I want to talk to you about Eve Garnett's masterpiece The Family from One End Street. First published in 1937, this book oozes authenticity in a way books these day's rarely do. It is a wonderful depiction of the life of the Ruggle family, who live at No.1 One End Street, in the fictional town of Otwell-on-the-Ouse (which is said to be based on Lewes in Sussex). Nothing extraordinary happens, and the setting is thoroughly domestic, but this is it's appeal. It is wonderfully mundane.

Unusually for the time, it focuses on the life of a working class family. The mum, Rosie Ruggle does people's laundry and Dad, Jo Ruggle is a dustman. They have seven children, Lily-Rose, Kate, Jo, twins John and James, Peggy and baby William. Children of the time were more likely to be reading about the exploits of middle-class families, think about The Famous Five and The Secret Seven, so this book was quite special. Just like the typical middle-class adventure novel, most of the chapters are based around the children, following their exploits and adventures (although I use the term loosely). The Ruggle's tales are moral, entertaining, and often follow the troubles of their everyday life. What happens when Lily Rose melts a rich ladies petticoat with an iron, and how will the Ruggle's afford Kate's new school clothes? Will they make it to London to see Uncle Charlie in the parade? There are so many lovely episodes in this book that will have you routing for the working class Ruggle's. It is so endearing, plus there is a lovely air of gentle humour about these stories which I really enjoyed.

These days children expect stories with exciting twists and turns, fast action, and snappy storylines to keep them reading. There doesn't seem to be as many books that are slower paced, and actually deal with the domestic level of life quite like this does. I worry that the publishing industry has it's work cut out trying to create books for the screen generation, who expect everything to be instant and quick. Books like Eve Garnett's require consideration and time. Although it is by no means a difficult read, it requires absorption. There are no quick fixes here. The stories are charming, and although not much happens, you enjoy going on a small scale adventure with these characters. It puts me in mind of Shirley Hughes books, in particular the 'My Naughty Little Sister' series, which I adored as a child. This slow, gentle pace of story telling is a rare beast these days I think, and that is a huge pity. I understand that nowadays children would find it hard to identify with a child from the 1930s, and as an adult reader I have a greater understanding of this time period. However, I feel it's such a shame that it is no longer a favourable way of storytelling. The stories in this book are refreshing. There are no arguments, no social media fallout, no political or environmental worries, no gender politics, these stories are simple, wholesome and uplifting. 

Like the stories themselves, the illustrations have a similar feel. I think this is because they were also created by Garnett. They are simple line drawings, yet packed with tons of expression and life. You feel like you've taken a look into her sketchbook after a day out. Just look at the one below showing the family at the beach one Bank Holiday.

I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone who loves a bit of nostalgia! It's stories and characters hark back to a time when life was simpler. There is more of a clear gender and class divide, yes, but then this book was written at a time when that was normal. I wouldn't however say the characters fall into those stereotypes. Those girls are quite feisty, and the boys have their moments of weakness. Even Mr Ruggle has moral dilemmas to face. Overall this book is a lovely example of domestic fiction for children at it's best. It is about the love, and life, of a family.

Thanks for reading, L x

Next up, it's the Asterix comics by Uderzo and Goscinny!