I’m a bit confused by some titles in the latest crop of picture books.
Clearly influenced by the likes of Neil Gaiman, they are dark (ish), perhaps provocative (ish), and more like graphic novels than picture books. Or are they?
I’m thinking mostly of The Three Fishing Brothers Gruff, by a “young graphic designer and surfer”, Ben Galbraith. It has a new (ish) look about it, high production quality (although it could do with a couple of extra commas here and there) and it’s clearly very hip. I imagine it’s selling like hotcakes.
But at which age group is it aimed?
It’s not a kid-friendly read-aloud, and the reading age is quite advanced, even though the words are few. There’s a message so didactic that even this reader, who feels very strongly about over-fishing and the environment, felt it to be OTT. Many kids would feel a bit strange, too, about the fact that all three brothers have to die to prove an environmental point.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the book – I just wonder about its market.
I could ask the same about Uncle Jack, by Kate De Goldi and Jacqui Colley. I loved Clubs (more graphic novel than picture book) but I just don’t get Uncle Jack, its target readers or the impact it would have on young kids. Maybe it’s me.
I see some reviewers have asked this too, and perhaps it’s more to do with the industry (and we readers) coming to terms with the rise and rise of the graphic novel.
Still, Uncle Jack, I suspect, will stand the test of time and find an older readership than is implied by its pitch. The astute Ms De Goldi knows what she’s doing, and perhaps people who have bought it as a picture book for young children will find that they enjoy it more as they grow older.
The Three Brothers Gruff will no doubt win design awards, but I’m not sure that kids will warm to it.
Hopefully I’ll be proved wrong.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
– E. M. Forster

You might have noticed: Jan Morris is one of my heroes.
Her latest book returns to her mythical, mystical Hav, where “Chopin, for example, when he came here with George Sand in 1839 after their unhappy holiday in Majorca . . . rented a house in the Armenian quarter of the Old City and briefly took Armenian lessons with the city trumpeter of the day. On the other hand James Joyce spent nearly all his time at the Cafe Munchen, the famous writers’ haunt on Bundstrasse, while Richard Burton the explorer, as one might expect, went entirely Arab, strode around the city in burnous and golden dagger…”
Salley Vickers’ review in The Times explores Hav, but also pays tribute to lifetime of travel, and some of the finest writing about place – and people – that has ever blessed us:

Of all the qualities that Morris values, she places kindness first. Kindness has the same root as kin. To be kind is to recognise kinship, that we are all, in essence, of the same kind. We are lucky to have Jan Morris, and her gift of transporting us to other realms, and other, apparently foreign, sensibilities to aid us in this lifesaving understanding.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.
– Ernest Hemingway

I’ve written an awful lot of book reviews in my life. Nowadays I write at least five a month for the magazine, not counting all the snippets here. I often notice a strange urge to use a word I wouldn’t use in any other context – reviewspeak takes a hold and I’m off, describing prose as purple or some poor sod as insightful – memoirs seem to quite often be gentle, and if I’m weary or it’s late afternoon and I haven’t had a cup of tea lately, I have to prevent myself from savaging people with adjectives such as “compelling”. (I used “enigmatic” to describe one of my characters in a synopsis the other day. For God’s sake, I muttered, there must be some other word that doesn’t sound like a book blurb, but had to remind myself that it does have a meaning beyond Mr Darcy.)
Anyway, Ben McIntyre has translated some of those euphemisms used in literary reviews – and nowhere else:
Triumphant return to form actually means “I was expecting this to be as abysmal as the last one, but it was only mildly disappointing.”
Gnomic Baffling.
Imaginative Fiction reviewers use this to describe a book that they wish they had written; nonfiction reviewers use it to describe a book they do not believe.
Compelling I managed to finish it.
Painfully funny / sad / poignant / long Demonstrates the deep sensitivity of the reviewer. A health warning also attaches to any book described as achingly, eye-wateringly or heart-stoppingly anything.
Arch I’m not sure if this is funny
Detailed Has footnotes.
Richly detailed Has lots of footnotes.
Densely detailed Has footnotes, endnotes, acknowledgements, epigrams, foreword, preface, bibliography, appendices, indices, and marginalia. Translation: unreadable. qv panoramic, workmanlike, painstaking, extensively researched.
Exquisite sensibility Gay.
Veiled sensibility Closet gay.
He’s had fun with this. You can read the entire list in The Times.

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly in hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.
– Anne Frank

Just finished John Wray’s fine novel, The Right Hand of Sleep, set in Austria in 1938.
Now, you know when you begin reading a novel set almost anywhere in Europe in 1938 that you will spend most of the next few hours or days beset by a dreadful foreboding.
Wray not only brings that to a climax, but he also leaves you there in it, quite consciously, as if there’s nothing more he need say on events after 1939, and their probable impact on his puzzling but somehow vaguely unlikeable protagonists. There are no simple equations here: of right or wrong action; of political answers; of fear versus courage. Kindly old uncles are vicious anti-Semites. Jewish friends are too drunk or fearful to comprehend the new order. Lovers keep secrets, hermits seek company, pacifists lash out with their fists, Nazis charm and cajole.
It’s an interesting contrast – or perhaps complement – to Iain Pears’ The Dream of Scipio, which I read last year and which continues to play on my thoughts. Here, the ethical threads that run through the three narratives are summed up by the book’s conscience, the philosopher Sophia:

We must be just, we must strive, we must engage ourselves with the business of the world for our own sake, because through that, and through contemplation in equal measure, our soul is purified and brought closer to the divine…

You see how its impact carries on? Wray’s may well be the same. We shall see.
So now I’m in my post-novel slump, which may last for an entire afternoon, in which I feel bereft and abandoned (perhaps cast out is a better term) of the imaginative world I’ve inhabited, courtesy of good writing.
But I recently read about a wonderful new translation of War and Peace, and it must be at least a year since I read it last. I’ve never warmed to my current copy, which was purchased in an emergency: all names are Anglicised, so that Nicholas rescues Mary, which doesn’t seem nearly so romantic.
It’s hard to feel the same way about a pale and suffering Prince Andrew. Our plumber is called Andrew. He’s a lovely plumber, too, but I feel a Russian prince really ought to be an Andrei.
And when you get to the dramatic moment when the bandaged general exclaims, “You see before you the unfortunate Mack!” my guy says instead, “Vous voyez le malheureux Mack“. Luckily I know what he means.
I need a long, happy voyage in a book right now, so I’m pushing aside that demanding reading pile and climbing back into the loving arms of Tolstoy.
As soon as I buy a new copy.

What I like best is a book that’s at least funny once in a while… What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.
– J. D. Salinger (who never answered his phone)

Well, there you go.
Henry Reynolds, the brilliant if controversial Australian historian, reckons postmodernist theory is old hat.
In a discussion at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, he said that postmodernism had provided an interesting take on the language of history but “it just goes round and round, with lots of lights and colours and doesn’t get you anywhere”.
I wish I’d said it like that.
His take on the role of history, especially in schools, is also interesting – as usual. You can read more about it here.

Here are extracts from a couple of recent reviews of Ocean Without End:

“Lily Swann’s transformation from slave to pirate princess as she searches for her father … is surprisingly believable. Set off Santa Lucia, near Malta, the swashbuckling story also carries a palatable dose of history.”
– Ann Packer, Dominion Post

“…A good narrative for either sex to get their teeth into. It is well-assembled in a young person’s (not to say children’s) sense, with sentences and paragraphs structured to meet the target audience.
… But an Enid Blyton tale this is not… There’s a bit of everything thrown in – drama, violence, escape – as is required with a young person’s read, but the yarn will keep them up to finish it. And then they’ll want the next in the series. A good stimulus to get them reading.
If you give Ocean Without End to your offspring, remember to set the alarm on school mornings.”
– Christine Jordan, Greymouth Star