A Monster Calls

OK, I'm a little late on this one; it won the Carnegie last year.  But better late than never, particularly with a book as darkly beautiful and profound as this one.

Written by Patrick Ness (quickly becoming the name in YA literature, particularly for boys), but based on an idea by Siobhan Dowd, A Monster Calls tells the story of a boy whose mother is dying of cancer, whose relationship with his grandmother is fraught, whose father has a new family on the other side of the Atlantic: a boy who is being bullied at school, and who has horrific nightmares that destroy the only supposed peaceful time he should have.  So far, so cheery.  Into this mess comes a Monster, a force of nature who arrives one night armed with three stories.

"Stories are wild creatures," the Monster said. "When you let them loose, who knows what havoc they might wreak?"

They are fairy-style tales ('long ago...a wicked witch...')  but they do not end the way our hero, Conor, expects them to.  In fact, they infuriate him.  They expose injustice.  They tell us that not all stories have happy endings - the Monster is forewarning us about the very book we are reading.  They tell us that people are complicated, that right and wrong, good and evil, are never straightforward concepts.

Then the Monster wants something in return.  He wants a story from Conor.  But not just any story: he wants the story of Conor's recurring nightmare.  For buried inside this nightmare is a painful Truth, and before he can begin to come to terms with his mother's inevitable death, Conor must face this Truth.  He must speak it aloud.

There is an element of Fight Club to this book, most noteably in the scene where the Monster beats up the school bully, and intelligent young readers will quickly pick up on what is really happening here.

But what truly brings this book to life are the extraordinary illustrations by Jim Kay, and I urge you to buy the version that contains them - I can't imagine why they have even bothered to publish it without them, but mine is not to reason why.

How's this for a visual representation of the fear of losing your mother?

The pictures, which often take up double pages, curl tendrils into the text and literally weave themselves around the words.  They are terrifying, comforting, astonishing... beautiful.

One word of warning though - for the last quarter of the book, you will need tissues!

Golden Age of Illustration

The Edwardians have been described as a generation of young men and women who refused to grow up. Theirs was the era of Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland, stories which have come to define the dreamlike lives of many upper class boys and girls in the years preceeding the First World War. The Fabian idyll of the Belle Epoch could not have been ended more cruelly, but while it lasted, this was a time to embrace childhood and the imagination.

Between 1880 and 1930, some of the greatest artists in the world turned their considerable talents to illustrating children's books. Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and The Water Babies were inevitably popular choices, but many artists also looked to Fairy Tales for inspiration. I have collected here a small selection of my personal favourites by artists whose work you will be more than a little familiar with - and perhaps a few to whom this is your first introduction. Explore them further, I urge you. I grew up with many of these pictures, and they still have the power to make my heart beat faster in wonder.

Arthur Rackham (1867 - 1939) is probably the best known children's story illustrator of the time - maybe of all time. His Art Nouveau style never patronised, and his use of muted colours instilled a twilight realism into every image. Below is a scene from Cinderella (or Aschenputtel) and below that, from The Goose Girl:


These next two are from Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, and exhibit a dangerous beauty all of their own:



Over the Atlantic, Jessie Willcox Smith (1863 - 1935) was creating similarly dark illustrations, in which many of her heroines seem to cower and shy away from the fairy folk that approach them, as seen here in Cinderella and Snow White:



Kate Greenaway (1846 - 1901) had, of course, been drawing for children for a long time by the 1880s, and her pictures provide a sharp contrast to the threat that seems to lurk inside the pictures of Rackham and Smith. Greenaway was all about spring and meadows and flowers and washed out pastels. Here she shows tea parties and picnics in benign settings:



Likewise, Mabel Lucie Attwell (1879 - 1964) developed a twee style that is instantly recognisable as her own, but she was not averse to tackling some of Anderson's darker stories, such as The Ugly Duckling:


Even Edward Burne Jones (1833 - 1898), arguably the most talented of the Pre-Raphaelites, sourced ideas from Fairy Tales, using his trademark rich colours to imbue weight and depth to the stories he illustrated. This is taken from a series of pictures of Sleeping Beauty:


Edmund Dulac (1882 - 1953) is, for me, the most alluring of children's illustrators. His pictures from the Snow Queen have adorned my walls all my life, and he is part of the reason this is my favourite Fairy Tale. There is a loneliness, a haunting aspect, to his characters that really touches a nerve in me. Can you make out the Snow Queen herself in this first image?



And this, from the Little Mermaid, demonstrates again Dulac's simultaneous coldness and warmth:


Kay Nielsen's (1886 - 1957) work is more stylised, as shown in this illustration for The Tin Soldier:


...as is that of Wilhelmina Drupsteen (1880 - 1966). These two come from Snow White:

All of these artists influenced the way children's books were illustrated for decades to come, and in no work is this more evident than that of twin sisters Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone (1928 - 1979 and 1998 respectively). I have shelves of books from my own childhood that have been lovingly brought to life by these two exceptional artists. Their prescision is phenomenal, and their use of light... well, you only have to look at these few examples to understand. This first is from The Princess and The Pea. Look at her dripping skirt!

The above illustration for The Little Match Girl is, to me, so flawless that even without knowledge of the story, it can break hearts. The truly beautiful can do that, I think.

And this, from The Frog Prince, pulls together flavours of the medieval and the Roaring Twenties in one single image that seems to even smell of wet trees and damp rock.

All of this is not to say that there are not stupendous children's illustrators at work today, for there truly are. But I think the era from which all the above pictures come is known as The Golden Age of Illustration for a reason...

Dark Matter

I have just moved into a Grade II listed cottage, built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, held up with beams from ships that sailed with the Mary Rose. No wall is straight, no doorway high enough for a man to pass through without stooping, no window large enough to let in more than a teaspoon of light. Pear tree branches scrape at the glass at night, wind howls down the chimney and through gaps in the ancient doors and windows, and the floorboards creak and groan continuously.

And so, alone in my cottage, I decided to read a ghost story.

Dark Matter is the tale of a doomed arctic expedition which results in one man, alone with his diary and a pack of huskies, living in perpetual night at the northern end of Svalbard (Spitsbergen at the time). He sees things in the snow and on the rocks, but more significantly, he feels things - horror, fear, malevolence, the things that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up without tangible explanation.

Michelle Paver writes well, though with a fondness for simple sentences that I found slightly childish (she is best known for her children's series beginning with Wolf Boy, after all). It is a book about place, which those of you who read ...Lamp - and Book regularly will know is my particular love, and it is indeed even about the very place I most dream of visiting one day.

Dark Matter is atmospheric, characters are well-drawn and likable enough where they need to be, though I might also suggest a little bland, and it is suggestively creepy enough to count as a ghost story. But did it do what ghost stories should do above all else, and scare me? Did I dread turning the light out at night? Did I see things in the corner of my eye, and fear what might be standing outside my bedroom door when I opened it? No.

I could make some suggestions as to why not - primarily, for me, it is too definite in its adamancy that what Jack experiences is a 'real' ghost, and way too simplistic in its reveal of the reason for the haunting. Far more interesting, surely, is the potential ambiguity that comes of the psychological trauma of being alone in 24 hour darkness in a landscape so brutal? The idea that even Jack could not be sure that what he saw was real, rather than a trick of his mind, would have made this more powerful. In all ghost stories, it is the not-knowing that is the most frightening aspect.

Although it is not being marketed as a children's book, I would recommend this to teenagers rather than adult connoisseurs of the genre. It is short, and enjoyable from the point of view of someone for whom experiencing first-hand this landscape and the Aurora Borealis is the number one dream, but is most certainly not terrifying. Not even to a young woman reading it alone in a 400 year old cottage in the Peak District...

The Chalet School in Exile (2)

I'm going to start with a brain teaser - see if you can work out, from what we are given in Chapter 1, how this happy family are related:

"Dr Jem Russell, head of the Sonnalpe Sanatorium in Tyrol, glanced at his young sister-in-law, Jo Bettany...Jo gave an impish grin, and turned and ran along the wide corridor to the bathroom, where she found her adopted sister, Marya Cecilia Humphries, commonly known as Robin...Robin stuck her fingers in her ears and raced on down the long corridor to the big room where the little Russells, together with their young cousins, the Bettanys, and Dr Russell's younger niece, Primula Mary Venables, were curled up round a big armchair...Robin ruffled the silvery fair curls that covered Peggy's small head...'All right, but not ve babies,' stipulated Rix, Peggy's twin...Jacky [was] the youngest member of the Bettany family present - though in India a little brother and sister known to the Sonnalpe people as 'second twins' were beginning to trot all over now...Sybil and Jacky crawled out of their corner...Sybil sometimes resented the mothering...She had been known to madden Rix by chanting, 'You're only a cousin! David an' me belong!'

Who the heck is David? I re-read the first chapter and drew a family tree, which took me most of the afternoon. This is not a book for those who are easily confused or who find it hard to remember who's who. Having not read any Chalet School books in probably 25 years or more, the names of the girls (oh, Chapter 1 is nothing compared to the lists of names and descriptions that come later - it's like The Iliad!) meant little to me, and I have to admit that after a while I gave up trying to remember who was involved in which adventure or prank and who was the same age as who else and who was best friends with whom, and just got on with reading the story.

I suppose what I most wanted to find out is, is The Chalet School in Exile just another twee early twentieth century girlschool novel, or, considering its subject matter, is it darker; is it, in fact, a War novel? It manages, I think, to span some sort of strange gap between the two. It is notably emotionless, imbued with a crazily stiff upper lip. Deaths, of Jews the girls witness being attacked, and of friends and relations, are covered in such a matter-of-fact way as to be off-hand. They are like newspaper obituaries written by a journalist who never met the deceased. I find this fascinating; today's children's literature treats emotion in almost the opposite way. Consider the works of Jacqueline Wilson, prolific writer of modern girls' books, and as such, a worthy comparison with Elinor M Brent-Dyer. Emotion, the description of it and the dealing with it, is at the core of what Wilson writes. Today's young female reader is shown that she should bare her feelings for all to see, that she should display her grief rather than lock it away. The Chalet School teaches a very different lesson, perhaps one that translated as the 'spirit of the Blitz', that oh-so-English manner of mildly shaking an angry fist at the Luftwaffe as they razed our cities to the ground.

There are little snatches of news thrown into the story that remind us with a shock that this was written in 1940, long before the worst atrocities of the Nazi regime had come to light. Concentration Camps are mentioned as places of torture, no more. A news broadcast from Germany "was vehemently insisting that a U-boat had sunk the Ark Royal", and the girls spend their evenings learning how to treat burns and put on gas masks. The most glaringly ironic aspect of the story comes, though, when the School must de-camp - and they choose to move to Guernsey! At the time of writing, Brent-Dyer had no way of knowing that the Channel Islands would be occupied.

The book is very much divided into two halves. The first is set in Austria and involves much fleeing from gestapo officers. A small group of girls and two male doctors, sent to protect them, (poor weak creatures that the girls, though some are in their twenties, are) escape over the Swiss border in a rather hurried description of a week in disguise as gypsies, tricking Nazis and hiding in barns, eating berries and suffering dreadfully from blisters. The tiny amount of time given to such a vast enterprise is incongruous, and made all the more so by a plan at one point to try to seek refuge in a fictional country, Belsornia, the Belsornian King's daughter being an ex-pupil of the Chalet School. To throw something so ludicrous into a tale of escape from Nazi occupation is on the one hand utterly trivialising, and yet on the other, works, by throwing into greater relief the trueness of what they are running from. It is a technique of which Brecht would have been proud!

Then suddenly, it is a year later, and the new school is about to open on Guernsey. At this point, the book reverts to type, and for a while nothing more interesting happens than that members of the Fourth hide the gardening tools, which go rusty. Things pick up again, however, when a new girl arrives at the school. She is German and haughty - she must be a Nazi! I'll not spoil the reveal.

The Chalet School in Exile is quite unlike anything I have read before, possibly due to the contrast between the usual subject matter of such books, and the individuality of this specific 'adventure'. The language is distancing - did anyone ever really talk like this? There are too many examples for me to isolate one, though the word "quoth" appears at least once, and 'wild' girls are described by one doctor at the San as "stormy petrels", which just seems inappropriate to any place or time as yet recorded! It is terribly elitist - how must the ordinary girls who comprised its main readership have felt at having their state schools described thus: "...the education was good enough of its kind, but the girls of a very different class, with an outlook on life of which her parents disapproved." Poor Guernsey-girl Beth, to have had to suffer such indignity before the Chalet School arrived on her shores!

Whilst not being, obviously, the huge fun that the majority of girlschool books are, this is an intriguing and historically fascinating work, and I am delighted that Girls Gone By have brought it into the public consciousness once more. It is compelling on many levels, and works very well as a companion piece to many of the Persephone titles. As the Headmistress so accurately comments towards the end of the book, "'Oh, drat Hitler and all his works.' With which reprehensible remark the Head picked up her essay books and departed to the study." Quite.

Eloise in Moscow

If you haven't yet discovered the Eloise books, I urge you to do so. Eloise is the brainchild of Kay Thompson, a little known MGM studio actress of the 1930s and 40s who, in 1955, published Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grownups. The eponymous feisty heroine was brought to life by illustrator Hilary Knight, and was an instant success. I will let the leading lady introduce herself:

"I am Eloise. I am six. I am a city child. I live at the Plaza... My mother knows The Owner... Nanny is my nurse. She wears tissue paper in her dress and you can hear it. She is English and has 8 hairpins made out of bones. She says that's all she needs in this life for Lord's sake... She always says everything 3 times like Eloise you cawn't cawn't cawn't. Sometimes I hit her on the ankle with a tassel. She is my mostly companion... I have a dog that looks like a cat. His name is Weenie. Sometimes I put sunglasses on him... I have a turtle. His name is Skipperdee. He eats raisins and wears sneakers."

- from Eloise -

Several books followed, among them my personal favourite, Eloise in Moscow.

This particular adventure satirizes the Cold War spy thriller: on her way with Nanny to their hotel Eloise observes that "everybody watches everybody...You have to be careful of what you do and say in Moscow otherwise they will swoop down on you and snip-snap at your wrists and send your radio to Copenhagen by rail." Knight's exquisite pictures detail a luxurious hotel decorously adorned with portraits of Stalin and Lenin; his piece de resistance is the central fold-out of the Kremlin, which, like a child, I can stare at for hours at a time. The running commentary by guide Zhenka is wonderful: "In former days is possible to see here market place Red Square immediate neighbourhood of Kremlin scene of momentous events in Russian history and is point of convergence of highways leading through Moscow's ceaseless noisy and brisk commerce." Perfect.

Eloise is described by Marie Brenner as "Holden Caulfield for kindergarten girls", which strikes me as incredibly accurate. She is an "ancient child with the musical vocabulary of a poet"; a cross, in English terms, between Nancy Mitford and Clarice Bean (whom I suspect was directly influenced by Thompson's creation). And yet these are, like so many children's books, largely lost on the very young. Eloise in Moscow, for example, served, at its time of publication, as an antidote to the Cold War propaganda and fear-mongering that gripped America in the 1950s. It is, more than any other of the Eloise books, of great interest as a piece of social history.

I have given Eloise the room to speak for herself here, as I simply cannot do justice to the beauty of these books, in terms of language or images. They are truly wonderful, and I can only hope that you will take the time to become acquainted yourself with this fabulously funny little girl and her gorgeously glamorous life.

What I Saw and How I Lied

Noir thriller for teenage girls? Are you sure? Well, yes, actually, and boy, does it work! Recommended by a friend who works in children's books, and whose literary opinions I rate very highly, What I Saw and How I Lied had me from the first scene:

"The match snapped, then sizzled, and I woke up fast. I heard my mother inhale as she took a long pull on a cigarette. Her lips stuck on the filter, so I knew she was still wearing lipstick. She'd been up all night."

Judy Blundell captures the darkness and glamour of post-war America as though she lived there; it is a nuanced piece of writing, wreathed in smoke, cinched at the waist and held tightly in place with a gallon of hairspray. The atmosphere slides off the page and envelops.

Our guide through this alien and superficially enchanting world is a girl on the brink of womanhood, and in that sense is nothing new for Young Adult fiction. What sets Evie apart is her wiseness. And it's not an omnipotent wiseness, common in children at the helm of a raft of recent adult fiction (Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, for example), but the honest wiseness that follows curiosity, desire and a succession of mistakes; the wiseness of a young woman who watches, who understands certain things but not others, and who, above all else, wants to know. She is a beguiling heroine.

And so, femme fatale aside, what of this noir plot? Well, it reveals some unpleasant truths about post-war society, it ticks all the pulp boxes - murder, deceit, money, sex - and it takes some unexpected twists. Characters are altered by events - we, like Evie, do not know who we can trust, and our mind is changed regularly; no-one is whiter than white, all are sullied in some way, are morally shady. And when, towards the end, Evie herself ceases merely spectating and steps into the limelight, and we learn, finally, not why she lies but how she lies - such a clever title - that morally shady area becomes for a time, the heart of the novel.

Although a teen novel, What I Saw and How I Lied is not noticeably written for the young. It is perhaps a little heavy handed in terms of imagery occasionally, but then, few fourteen year olds these days are familiar with Bette Davis, Joan Crawford or Humphrey Bogart. And for my money, this is an era that can comfortably handle being a little over the top; blood-red lipstick has never been known for its subtlety.