And they lived happily ever after. Any more.

{Photo of our two nieces by rocketlass.}

Other responsibilities are pressing today, but I thought you might enjoy a brief note that ties together two recent threads: childhood reading and opaque, obscure writing.

Over Christmas, we learned that our two-year-old niece loves to read books out loud. Of course, she can't quite read yet, so instead she flips the pages and yammers to herself in a mix of English and baby talk--but without fail, she ends every page by saying, "Any more" in a declarative, end-of-story tone of voice.

Her parents have no idea where she picked it up, but it's very entertaining to watch. Any more.

Childhood reading

{Photo by rocketlass.}

As I read Laura Miller's charmingly conversational yet thoughtful The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia (2008), I perked up at this passage about J. R. R. Tolkien:

Tolkien has had many admirers of considerable intellectual stature--Auden was his great champion in the press, and the novelist Iris Murdoch sent him fan mail--but this, too, doesn't go very far in persuading other intelligent people who can't abide his books. Murdoch perhaps chose the wisest course when her husband, the Oxford professor John Bayley, would demand to know how she could be so enthralled by books that were so "fantastically badly written": she'd stare at him in amazement and insist that she didn't know what he was talking about.

Murdoch's response seems just right to me: Bayley is asking a question that doesn't really apply to the Lord of the Rings. Yes, they're badly written, teeth-clackingly awkward at times, but that's not the point. At their best, they immerse the reader in a world that seems inexhaustible, so fully imagined that we begin to suspect there's no question we could ask that Tolkien wouldn't have been able to answer--we feel that we've been invited to enter a supreme work of focused imagination, the vitality of which makes the clunky archaisms of Tolkien's prose entirely beside the point.

That said, neither Tolkien nor his friend C. S. Lewis were real touchstones for me as a young reader, like the latter was for Miller. I read and loved The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but I felt none of the same magic from the two men's subsequent books. Looking back, I can see that they represented two important poles of imagination for me: the jumble-sale quality of Lewis's imagination--which, as Miller writes, "lifted figures and motifs in whole cloth from a motley assortment of national traditions, making no effort to integrate them into any coherent mythos"--clashed with my desire for order, while Tolkien's obsessive attention to detail (a quality I would later come to admire) took the books too far in the other direction, bogging them down in hours of elvensong when all I really wanted was for someone to draw sword in anger.

Neither author could match Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain or Susan Cooper's Dark Is Risingi sequence (and in particular its first, and least fantastic book, Over Sea, Under Stone, which I read over and over). Looking back, I think that one overarching reason for my preference was that Narnia and Middle-Earth both lacked a quality I prized in fiction even as a boy: a sense of the everyday reality that lies underneath the fantasy and adventure. As Miller points out, neither Tolkien nor Lewis seemed all that interested in the day-to-day life of their worlds: there's no discernible economic activity, no incidental change, and--outside of Sam Gamgee--no characters who reveal long-range plans or aspirations that are disrupted by the events that have swept them up.

Alexander and Cooper, on the other hand, offer plenty of hints of what people in their worlds do when not questing: Taran is an assistant pig-keeper; Coll a full pig-keeper; Fflewddur Fflam a bard; Eilonwy, as a princess, is expected to do nothing--and that limitation drives her nuts. At the end of a battle, Coll laments the crops churned under by the fighting, a loss that will be felt that winter in the surrounding villages. In Over Sea, Under Stone, the Cornish village that the children visit on holiday is entirely ordinary, which makes the irruption of sinister forces and ancient magic all the more astonishing. It is a simple vacation with a somewhat distant relative, a situation we can all recognize--and then suddenly it's much more.

I was a very fortunate child, surrounded by a loving family in a rural freedom that seems more idyllic with every passing year. I didn't want to escape to somewhere: I wanted a world where adventure and dailiness could live side by side, where I could be part of momentous events but not have to give up the home I loved. Alexander and Cooper seemed to understand that in a way that Tolkien and Lewis--whom I now know were themselves in search of full-on escape from a world grown uncongenial--did not.

To circle back to where this post started, I'll turn once again to Iris Murdoch. In a 1962 interview for the Sunday Times, collected in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (2003, edited by Gillian Dooley), Murdoch responds to a question about whether there's a division between fantasy and reality in her own work:

If fantasy and realism are visible and separate aspects in a novel, then the novel is likely to be a failure. In real life the fantastic and the ordinary, the plain and the symbolic, are often indissolubly joined together, and I think the best novels explore and exhibit life without disjoining them.

Though Murdoch wasn't referring here strictly, or even at all, to fantastic literature as represented by Tolkien, Lewis, et al., I think her point nonetheless has some validity. Cooper's and Alexander's books were so powerful for this young reader exactly because they "indissolubly joined" the world of the everyday and the world of the imagination; they offered a new reality I could believe in, and set alongside my own, rather than escape to.

I Capture the Castle

The past fortnight of Pottermania has made me extra-sensitive to questions of genre. Genre can be of great use as an aid to description and understanding of a book, but instead it often becomes prescriptive, limiting expectations for both a book's artistry and its potential audience. Most of the tut-tutting about how Harry Potter's popularity with adults is a sign of the apocalypse is tied to its being a children's series, and while that strain of criticism seems less prevalent this time around, with previous volumes a lot of commentators allowed that aspect of the series to obscure the undeniably cheering fact that the books' great popularity has led 8.5 million people--many of whom do not spend a lot of time talking or thinking about writing--into discussions of the elements of creative art, such as narrative structure and strategies, artistic intentions, and representation of character. (Michael Berube has a fascinating article in the most recent issue of the Common Review about his son, who has Down Syndrome, learning about how stories work through reading Harry Potter.)

I wouldn't argue that the Harry Potter books aren't children's literature. Rowling is specifically writing for children (or young adults), and her structure, concerns, and approach, however creative and well executed, fit too neatly within the tradition for me to say otherwise--but I also don't care, because a genre classification has no power to limit the books' audience at this point. There's joy and excitement for readers of any age there, along with a singular (and fun) feeling of community that books, by their very nature as solitary objects of contemplation, generally don't provide.

Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle (1948), on the other hand, I would argue could use the boost of not being regarded as a children's book--or at least not regarded solely as such. Marketing it that way makes sense: Dodie Smith is best-known for The One Hundred and One Dalmations, the book is told in the form of the journal of a seventeen-year-old girl who lives in a decaying castle in rural 1930s England, and the publishers make extravagant use of praise for the book from J. K. Rowling. But at the same time that it is a novel in every way suitable for a smart teen or pre-teen reader, there is nothing about it that ought to limit it to that audience. Without disrupting the verisimilitude of her young narrator's perspective, Dodie Smith's perceptiveness and intelligent attention shine through, and though I Capture the Castle is a gentle book at heart, with little of the darkness of the world, there's at the same time a palpable sense of reality to it. Its gentleness and humor are not created through avoiding or denying life's dangers but through enthusiastically embracing the world as it is--imperfect, yet still able to take your breath away with its shimmering beauty. Smith is not talking down to anyone, and she's not limiting the insights her story can generate: she's simply showing us a young woman learning about herself, her family, and the differences that make us who we are.

The narrator, Cassandra, lives in genteel but actual poverty with her family in the ruined castle, which they rent from a family of landed gentry. Her volatile father is a writer who published a critically hailed avant-garde book (which comes across as a mix of Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave, the more fragmented portions of "The Waste Land," and, say, Finnegans Wake) when Cassandra was a toddler, but hasn't published a thing--or earned a shilling--since. The rest of her eccentric family consists of the teenage son of an old family servant, her younger brother, and her beloved older sister, as well as her stepmother, Topaz, a former model and artistic bohemian who is by turns silly, self-involved, dedicated, and kind. Topaz is the sort of character Anthony Powell or Evelyn Waugh might include in a party scene, though Smith presents her as a far more complicated figure than those two's passing mentions would allow. In a near-perfect isolation, sometimes glorious, sometimes constricting, the family ekes out a unique, cobbled-together existence, the roles of parent and child indistinct, the children without even a clear idea of how other people live. Like Iris Murdoch would later do in a couple of novels, Smith shows how the such unusual places can develop their own odd atmospheres, affecting and infecting the people living there; though the bonds such isolation forces can be glorious at times, the possibility that they will curdle and become malign is ever present.

As the novel opens, Cassandra's sister has reached her late teens and is beginning to despair of ever escaping the family's insularity and establishing a life of her own; life has established a pattern, and it seems unlikely ever to change. But suddenly change bursts upon the family in the form of the new heirs to the manor house, a pair of attractive young men who stumble into the castle one night while searching for their grand new home. (Another similarity, now that I think about it, to Murdoch: her novels are full of figures who enter established groups and disrupt them--though Smith's young men are essentially benign, while Murdoch's are almost always at least chaotic, if not demonic. I could certainly imagine Murdoch knowing and liking this book.) Like Austen heroines, the sisters spin dreams around the men, and those dreams begin the inevitable process of forever changing their seemingly changeless family life.

Through some luminously described scenes--a paired swim on a cool spring night around the six-hundred-year-old moat, an illicit late-night dance in the candlelit manor, a solstice bonfire--the girls fall in and out of love, the family's life is turned upside down, and Cassandra grows up. Like her sister, she welcomes the idea of escaping their poverty, but that escape inevitably brings a loosening of the family bonds as well. The book ultimately reminds us of the inevitability of change and the importance of accepting it--we can and should try to hold on to what is good, but there often comes a point when such efforts become false, and a healthy heart must learn the art of gracefully moving on. It's a hard lesson for anyone, let alone a teenager, and Smith presents Cassandra's acceptance of it with great subtlety and care.

Dodie Smith invests the Cassie and her language, as well as the other characters, with such evident warm love and empathy that I will confess to assuming that she had drawn them from her own childhood, though her Wikipedia entry gives no hint of a connection. I think that obvious love is another reason that I Capture the Castle gets pigeonholed as a children's book: a lot of people do read it when they're young, and that warmth resonates strongly, inspiring a deep devotion that we don't often develop for books we read as adults. So if you have smart, bookish children, by all means give them a copy--but be sure to find the time to read it yourself. You won't regret it.

R.I.P. Lloyd Alexander (1924-2007)

From The Book of Three (1964)

Taran wanted to make a sword, but Coll, charged with the practical side of his education, decided on horseshoes. And so it had been horseshoes all morning long.

With those utterly straightforward, yet evocative lines--surely one of the best openings of any children's book--Lloyd Alexander began his Chronicles of Prydain, a five-book series aimed at young adults that wove the Mabinogion and other Welsh myths with Alexander's own inventions into a fantastic, heroic, exciting tale that's the equal of any children's story I know. Alexander died back in May at age 83, though I just learned about his death from Ed at the Dizzies, and obituaries are still appearing now. He leaves behind more than thirty-five books for children, the writing of which he described as "the most creative and liberating experience of my life."

Looking back, my discovery of Alexander in fourth grade seems perfectly emblematic of the experience of childhood reading. I bought The High King (1968), the final volume of the Prydain Chronicles, at a Scholastic Book Fair, seduced as much by the Newbery Medal logo as by the swords and monsters on the cover. I devoured it, astonished, then read it again while waiting for the remaining volumes to be sent to my local library through the regional library system.

When they finally arrived, they didn't disappoint. This was storytelling of a wholly different caliber than I, having previously subsisted mostly on the Hardy Boys, had ever encountered. There were real dangers in Prydain, real values--compassion, care, kindness, and, most of all, bravery and heroism--at stake, and there were real consequences to the characters' actions, good and bad. I think the Prydain Chronicles may have been the first books I read where all the members of the heroes' party weren't there to celebrate at the end. As Alexander's hero, Taran the Assistant Pig-Keeper, puts it in The Black Cauldron (1965):

"It is strange," he said at last. "I had longed to enter the world of men. Now I see it filled with sorrow, with cruelty and treachery, with those who would destroy all around them."

But even as Alexander was making that more clear than it had been to me up to that point, he never went long without a reminder of the good that also graces the world. Taran's worries lead his friend and mentor Lord Gwydion to reply:

"Yet, enter it you must," Gwydion answered, "for it is a destiny laid on each of us. True, you have seen these things. But there are equal parts of love and joy."

As fun and surprising as Alexander's inventive fantasy can be, it is that ability to mix sorrow with joy, excruciatingly difficult trials with moments of sweet fellowship, failure with success, that lifts the Prydain Chronicles to the highest echelon of children's literature; despite not explicitly teaching lessons or linking Taran's struggles to our own, the books cannot help but enlarge a child's understanding, empathy, and self-knowledge. Alexander himself hints at that in the last lines of his introduction to The Book of Three:

The Chronicle of Prydain is a fantasy. Such things never happen in real life. Or do they? Most of us are called on to perform tasks far beyond what we believe we can do. Our capabilities seldom match our aspirations, and we are often woefully unprepared. To this extent, we are all Assistant Pig-Keepers at heart.

Though the Prydain books were Alexander's crowning achievement, I read most of his other books multiple times as well. The Westmark Trilogy, a mostly realistic trilogy set in a vaguely eighteenth-century Europe, tells the dramatic tale of a revolt against corrupt monarchical and religious authority, along the way advancing arguments for individual liberty and the importance of being willing to fight for what one believes in. I checked all three out of the Carmi Public Library multiple times; the third volume, The Beggar Queen (1984), is the first book whose publication I remember anxiously awaiting.

Even some of Alexander's less ambitious, stand-alone novels are well worth remembering. One that I still recall fondly is Time Cat (1963), which undertakes to explain why it is that we attribute nine lives to cats. It turns out that cats are natural time travelers, allowed nine times in their lives to enter different eras and places--which also explains where cats are those many times when, despite turning the house upside down, you can't find them.

If you're looking for books to put in the hands of the kids in your life, you really can't go wrong with Lloyd Alexander. There's little higher praise in my book.

From Taran Wanderer (1967)

"I have the sword I fashioned," Taran proudly cried, "the cloak I wove, and the bowl I shaped. And the friendship of those in the fairest land of Prydain. No man can find greater treasure."

Melynlas pawed the ground, impatient, and Taran gave the stallion rein.

Thus Taran rode from Merin with Gurgi at his side.

And as he did, it seemed he could hear voices calling to him. "Remember us! Remember us!" He turned once, but Merin was far behind and out of sight. From the hills a wind had risen, driving the scattered leaves before it, bearing homeward to Caer Dallben. Taran followed it.

Rest in peace, Lloyd Alexander. Your tale is told. As the bards used to say at the close of each story in the Mabinogion:

And thus ends this branch of the Mabinogion.