Well, well, well.
The much-maligned Enid Blyton strikes back. This week, British adults voted her Famous Five series as their own favourite books for children.
The series – which started 63 years ago – pipped Chronicles of Narnia to win first place in a national poll (by YouGov, commissioned by the National Literacy Trust). This is in spite of a couple of decades of derision directed at Mrs Blyton and her creations, and all the current hoo-ha about CS Lewis’s Narnia stories.
In announcing the result, John Ezard in The Guardian still couldn’t quite bring himself to be gracious:

The Famous Five are a group of clean-living, well brought-up middle class children who take pride in being “jolly good sports”. Their adventures, fuelled by their inexhaustible addiction to ginger beer, lemonade and sandwiches (“Oh goody, cucumber,” said George), were dismissed as hopelessly outdated and irrelevant by librarians and others in the 1970s.

Blyton’s gentle fantasy, The Faraway Tree, came third, followed by Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Both of which, you imagine, ought to have had a bit of a boost from Hollywood in recent years). Blyton also took 16th and 17th place in the top 20 with the Secret Seven adventure series and the Malory Towers girls school series. There’s no mention of my personal favourite, The Secret of Killimoon – my mother’s old copy had some critical pages missing, and I nearly cried with the anguish of never knowing what had happened in them.
The Famous Five were Julian, Dick and Anne, plus their cousin Georgina (George) and dog, Timmy. It’s fair enough to say that it’s hard to tell Julian and Anne from Peter and Susan in Narnia, or any of them from the Secret Seven, but George may well be responsible for me never ceasing to be a tomboy. Still, we won’t hold that against poor Enid. I’m sure she didn’t intend it.
In defence of Enid Blyton, although I find it hard to read the books as an adult, at least her Five and Seven characters had interesting adventures – a new mystery to solve every time – and they were smarter than the police, brave and energetic, cycled everywhere, and never had to be saved by grown-ups. They were never sappy like dumb old Nancy Drew. They had dogs, which is always good, and big appetites. I remember most vividly the descriptions of High Tea which always came at some point towards the end and sounded terribly grand. “What’s jugged hare, Mum?” I’d ask. “Can we have that for dinner? Can you please make scones? It’s an emergency.” The Famous Five might not have had the grand scale of Lord of the Rings but they were ripping good yarns, well told.
It must be said that adult memories of cherished childhood books are sometimes more faithful to the experience of the reading adventure, than the text itself. My bet would be that the order would be different if all those who voted had to read the books again. But never mind. The people have spoken, and here’s the list:
Top 10 books
1 Famous Five
2 Chronicles of Narnia
3 The Faraway Tree
4 The Hobbit
5 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
6 Black Beauty
7 Treasure Island
8 Biggles
9 Swallows and Amazons
10 Lord of the Rings

Anyway, what’s wrong with being a jolly good sport?

Robespierre famously announced in 1792 that, “History is fiction”. If he’d known then how many times he was to appear as a character in later historical novels, he might have said rather more on the matter.
How very post-modern of him. I wonder what he would have made of Jeanette Winterson’s imagined history, The Passion, where lines from TS Eliot pop up unannounced in Napoleonic Venice, where religion and romantic passion are both “somewhere between sex and fear”, and where the beating heart of the beloved is always elsewhere – literally. Napoleon makes a guest appearance, the same character familiar to readers of Tolstoy (or more recently Gallo) and yet at once more heartless – in a story about passion, the Emperor’s only great love is chicken. History as passion.
Tolstoy’s Napoleon is the classic portrayal – he may or may not be a genius, he is lonely and certainly vain, he can lead his Army into hell and deserts them in the ice. Napoleon is a man who stalks the deserted corridors of the Kremlin.
History as gilt-framed portrait.
Tolstoy doesn’t care about Napoleon (although he does care about Kutuzov). He cares instead about his families, his earthy weeping soul-filled Russians. They are the heart of his history – the rest is a wind that buffets, an inexplicable movement of armies and time (war and peace). But that’s another story altogether.
Max Gallo’s Napoleon (I’ve only read the first two volumes so far) is an altogether different person: fanatically focused, almost hollow, almost mad, almost explicable – but not quite.
History as the story, once again, of great men. Not the Great Men of Victorian history-making: the empire builders, the stalwarts of Rorke’s Drift, the arrow in the eye, the honour roll of endless generations of Cecils or Norfolks. It is the history of great men, retold, from an imagined interior.
We know what the great man Bonaparte wrote, said in public, wore – even how he behaved. Except that he also lied, fantasised, exaggerated, and was famously inconsistent. Historians can argue details about his well-documented life, and yet here is a character real and imagined who is also unknowable. You can join the dots any way you like – and any portrait will still be a likeness. “What is history,” he once asked, “but a fable agreed upon?”
If only the young Napoleon had been more involved in the Revolution and Terror, he might have figured in Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety. He might for once have been a real character, as fully formed as her Danton and Desmoulins, and chilling Robespierre, whose “history is fiction” she quotes, and plays with, throughout a novel that is and isn’t history, that is written in past and present tense, that realises the lives of real people perhaps more perfectly than any other.
AS Byatt writes in On Histories and Stories that the experimental third-person narratives by Mantel (and Pat Barker in the Regeneration Trilogy) “can creep closer to the feelings and the inner life of the characters – as well as providing a Greek chorus – than any first person mimicry” (the historical narration she calls “ventriloquism”). Byatt should know – she’s a dab hand at it herself. Barker and Mantel, she says, “tell us what we don’t know… they imagine it on the grand scale – and we are richer as readers.”

In children’s historical fiction, the grand scale of history, of great movements or times of turmoil, provides the opportunity for young protagonists to face danger or launch quests or solve history’s puzzles. They are cast out into history, and history allows them to operate outside their normal lives or fears (and those of the reader). They can be caught up in history, as innocent bystanders; they can be involved in history, winning battles or saving lives; they can observe and mature and celebrate history. History as adventure – history as a familiar pattern.
Great men (and sometimes great women) are always popping up to lend a hand, or wave a flag, like Sean Connery suddenly appearing as Richard the Lion Heart in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. I quite like that. It’s a Victorian tradition that has never gone out of fashion – the Children of the New Forest grow up just in time to ride into London with the restored King.
That’s history as finale, as reward to the young reader for sharing so many dangers. The historic moment, the celebration of victory – even in fantasy as history, magic as history – brings a tear to my eye every time. Luke Skywalker stands in front of all those Ewoks wearing his medal, in exactly the same way as Peter, Susan, Lucy and Edmund sit on their thrones in Narnia, the hobbits in Lord of the Rings, Harry returned safely to Hogwarts – it’s Arthurian, and has a history and tradition of its own.
So history may be swirled around in fantasy or magic, or random, or circular, or parallel. You can live it or watch it or imagine it or jump through time into other histories. History as the unexpected.
Robespierre’s complete sentence, made as always in the spirit of history-building, if not fiction writing, was: “Our revolution has made me feel the full force of the axiom that history is fiction and I am convinced that chance and intrigue have produced more heroes than genius and virtue.”
History as intrigue.

I take it all back. Philip Roth may have a point.
In his “Best quotes for 2005” list for the Sunday Times, John Dugdale ferrets out those lines in or about books that have made most readers squirm this year (beside the Bad Sex Awards, although Marlon Brando appears in both lists).
His gong for Most exciting academic project was awarded to this extract from the programme for Birkbeck College’s Dickens Weekend:

So sorry I missed that.
My personal favourite is the quote from a TV interview with Jonathan Coe which gets the Worst timing award:

Q. If you could abolish one thing in the book world, what would it be?
A. Literary prizes — they wrongly encourage seeing literature as a contest or a news story. They’ve got to go.

You may agree with him on this, but not longer after Coe’s biography of BS Johnson, Like A Fiery Elephant, won the £30,000 Samuel Johnson prize. I haven’t heard whether he gave the money back in protest at being part of a contest or news story.
Coe, funnily enough, has lectured at Birkbeck, so he’s obviously a hilarious chap. Sue Tyley once wrote (in Birkbeck’s journal), admiringly, that “Coe livens up his fiction as much for his own sake as for the reader’s: he has confessed to getting bored easily while writing, to changing voices frequently because of losing confidence in them, and to breaking out of a conventional narrative line into email, letter or unpunctuated dialogue as much because he can’t bear to do another chapter in the third person as because the subject matter requires it.”
The Sunday Times list makes excruciating reading, except for the fact that most of the writers quoted are in deadly earnest, and you know perfectly well that within each of us beats the impulse to spout nonsense – hence the popularity of blogging.

Post script: I’ve just started reading Roth’s Shop Talk, a book of interviews with fellow authors such as Primo Levi, Milan Kundera, and Edna O’Brien. They’re more like discussions, since sometimes the questions take up a couple of pages. Still, I can’t help thinking he must have forgotten writing it when he called for a moratorium on discussing books. It’s hard to sound normal when you’re discussing ideas and writing. It’s not like talking about the weather.

(For Les Bursill)

A strand of tar threads through blackened bush.
Steam snakes up to meet the rain.
Somewhere hidden here
are flying fish and low-sweeping gulls,
burnt scrub, bandicoots,
and foul-mouthed hermits.
Waterfalls splatter across the road.
Under a cliff flank
an echidna etched in ochre
is three hundred years old and fading fast –
below it, in yesterday’s dust,
are tracks, and an ant hole scratched wide open.
On the beach,
bluebottles on the wet sand
deserted by an ebb tide
are left to desiccate
just out of the ripples’ reach.
Nobody knows what else there might be –
pale unseen orchids or
snakeskins or
ships’ ribs under sandbars or
bushfire sparks or
a whale’s fluke
just offshore.
But at night, and in the early mornings,
there is only the mist, the car radio, and the black road.

The long-awaited trial of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk was adjourned on Friday amid concern in the European Union (EU) that the case could challenge freedom of expression.
Pamuk, author of My Name is Red and Snow, faces a possible three-year jail term for “insulting Turkish identity” by saying that a million Armenians were killed in massacres 90 years ago and 30,000 Kurds in recent decades. You’re not supposed to mention those sorts of things in Turkey. Why they don’t just blame the Armenian massacres on the Ottoman Empire and move on, I don’t know (fear of compensation claims, perhaps, or because of the historic link to the more recent Kurdish insurgency).
But Pamuk’s case comes at a critical time as the country begins serious negotiations about joining the EU – which doesn’t look kindly on laws which limit freedom of expression, or on countries which jail writers and journalists for saying what they think.
Yet in a continent quietly celebrating the recent Austrian charges against Holocaust denier David “Did I really say that?” Irving, allowing membership to an entire nation that denies a genocide is undoubtedly tricky. On the other hand – how do you get a country to admit responsibility for alleged war crimes? And how do you admit your own complicity: when it was the European powers and the US which drew up the boundaries of modern Iraq and Turkey, denying the Kurds a homeland, after World War 1? The US, Britain and France aren’t exactly famous for ‘fessing up to their own colonial incursions.
I was in Turkey last year and people were largely very excited about joining the EU (they saw it as a fait-accompli) and the Euro was proudly encouraged. I loved every second of my time in the country, but when I started researching Turkey prior to my visit, I was confronted with a terse statement on the home page of the Government Ministry’s websites denying any killing of Armenians ever took place. It’s still prominent. You can read instead about “the killing of Turks by Armenians.” It’s at complete odds with Turkey’s usually sensitive approach to the commemoration of the Allied 1915 invasion of their own land along the Dardanelles.
My impression was that there’s a cultural gulf between central government in Ankara and a clamouring Euro-focused entrepreneurial class – particularly in Istanbul, one of the world’s most exciting cities – and perhaps between traditional rural people and city folk. I imagine this will lead to divisions later on issues such as agricultural subsidies and trade tariffs. It’s always been a country on the cusp of two continents, two histories, just as Istanbul has always been amongst the world’s most cosmopolitan of cities, so these aren’t new issues.
But I admit I wasn’t brave enough to start engaging complete strangers in discussions about the Armenian genocide or the war against the Kurds. Like many issues of national identity, inside the country, even among friendly and invariably generous people, the belief in these events as “myths” appears fairly common. Every country has those. Ask a Tasmanian whitefella about the fate of the Aboriginal inhabitants. Ask the Japanese Prime Minister about the Sandakan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, or the Korean “comfort women”. Indeed, just the other day I read an extract from a Southern US history textbook all about how the relationship between “masters” and slaves was one based on mutual respect and benefit. No mention of whips or lynching.
Pamuk’s case, along with the dramatic shifts in Turkish society, will be critical not just to the question of EU membership, but also to the future political environment inside the country. While the hardline nature of the government has eased over the years, it’s still concerned with keeping a certain kind of “peace”.
The trial will restart on February 7, 2006, after a dispute as to whether the law under which Pamuk is charged can apply, as it was introduced after his statements in an interview. All very well, legally, but I can’t imagine Pamuk shutting up about it now, whether new laws or old apply.
George W Bush banged on a great deal about the Kurds killed and dispossessed by Saddam Hussein – haven’t heard him sticking up for Orhan Pamuk, though I guess he’s got enough going on at present.

I’m going to have to give up this blogging business. American author Philip Roth, in an interview with the Guardian, has called for a “100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk”. Supporting his nomination for World’s Grumpiest Writer (currently neck and neck with Tom Wolfe), he refuses to smile for the camera, insists he never smiles unless alone, continues to not smile, and says he wishes he could:

“shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot.”

He can’t be blamed entirely for sounding solemn – the interviewer, Danish journalist Martin Krasnik, focuses on death and the fear of dying. But clearly the writing life is tragic, so I’ll have to give up on that as well:

It’s a horrible existence being a writer filled with deprivation. I don’t miss specific people, but I miss life. I didn’t discover that during the first 20 years, because I was fighting – in the ring with the literature. That fight was life, but then I discovered that I was in the ring all by myself.

Quite possibly, everyone else was too frightened to get in there with him.

I believe that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
– Margaret Atwood

There were two moreporks in the tree outside our kitchen window last night. Moreporks, for the uninitiated, are small, very owl-shaped New Zealand owls, with a distinctive call that sounds like someone calling out “More pork!”. I think we have them back in Australia too, but they must have an accent, because they’re called Mopokes or Boobooks.
Anyway they are rarely seen. We saw one close up the first day we came to inspect the house, and decided that an owl paying a visit was a sign, so we moved in. Never saw the little blighter again, until the other night, although he calls out often. Now he has a friend. They are as owl-like as each other. They were sitting on the branch, deep in conversation.

Florence Nightingale had an owl called Athena, which she carried around in her dressing gown pocket. She would perch on Flo’s finger for treats, and make a bow and curtsey on the table. She must have been a Little Owl: Athene noctua.
Athena had been rescued from some naughty boys at the Acropolis, where the great carved stone owl of the original Athena perches (she’s now outside the museum – I loved that owl, and scoured Athens’ shops until I found a little replica to bring home).
When Florence left for Constantinople to nurse soldiers during the Crimean War, Athena got left behind in the attic. She died not longer after, they said, of heartbreak.
But that’s not the end of Athena’s fame. Last year she was rediscovered in a collection of Flo memorabilia (Floriana?) which was about to be sold off.
People fell in love with poor, stuffed Athena, and a campaign sprang up to raise the money to buy her. That gorgeous man from the Antiques Roadshow, ceramics expert Henry Sandon, had a special fundraising porcelain piece made for the Save Athena Fund: needless to say, it was a statue of the Lady With the Lamp.

Harold Pinter was unable to be present to accept his Nobel Prize due to illness, but that didn’t stop him addressing a few thoughts in a lecture last week, beamed into Stockholm on video. He got stuck into Blair and Bush over Iraq and even volunteered to be a speechwriter for Bush.
But he also had some interesting things to say about the nature of fiction and reality:

It’s a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author’s position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can’t dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man’s buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.
So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.
But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.

He concluded by calling for an “unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man.”
You can read his full speech here.

How did pirates sound?
Nobody knows. But we can be pretty sure they didn’t all swagger around snarling, “Ahoy, me hearties! Walk the plank, you scabby sea-dog!”
Pirate crews were quite cosmopolitan, especially in the Mediterranean, where men (and they were almost entirely men, with a few notable exceptions) from ports right around the Middle Sea and beyond could find themselves lumped together on the same ship for years.
How did their families sound? We do know something of the pronunciation of some classes of people in Britain, at least, because until Doctor Johnson’s Dictionary set down standards of spelling, people often wrote words as they sounded. (There’s a fascinating glimpse of this in Liza Picard’s wonderful Restoration London.) But even those records, in letters and journals, only tell us how the literate classes sounded.
We have to imagine it. Historical novelists always have.
So here’s the thing: If you’re writing historical fiction, especially in the first person, should you aim to replicate the imagined voices of the time in which your story is set?
In an article in Solander, Belinda Copson posed the question more broadly: “Should characters think and behave in a manner authentic to the period, or are we happy for them to be modern teenagers in period costume?”
And if you try to create an “authentic” voice, would anybody read such a thing?
It can work – sometimes. Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang is an example. But we’ve all seen it backfire badly into incomprehensible or laughable gibberish. You have to be very good to pull it off. Few of us are.
It’s an issue if you’re writing for younger readers, who won’t skip over boring bits but either give up altogether, or plod on under sufferance – particularly readers aged 9 to 12, such a vulnerable time in anybody’s reading career. A few impenetrable books and you’ll be turned off reading for life.
I remember having to force myself to plough through Kidnapped at that age, since I had no idea how a real Scots accent was supposed to sound, and couldn’t understand what anyone was saying for the first half of the book. It was the same with the broad Yorkshire voices in The Secret Garden – and yet Stevenson and Hodgson Burnett are amongst the best of their era. Kidnapped’s thrilling plot, and The Secret Garden’s gloomy atmosphere and brilliant characters, carried me through.
On the other hand, anachronism drives me insane. I’m one of those people who shouts out loud in the cinema if anyone in a period film set before about 1850 says, “OK”. Keira Knightley’s apparently 17th century character uttered it in Pirates of the Caribbean. I nearly had apoplexy.
I understand that it can happen unconsciously to one writer, and perhaps slip by an editor (it will happen to me one day, and you can quote this back to me), but not when there’s a team of writers, directors, actors and a million other people on a project. Did nobody wonder: “Gee, that sounds a bit modern”?
Even worse are the supposedly groovy updated versions of old stories (Hamlet in a leather jacket, that kind of thing). I’ve only seen it work a few times on stage: Julius Caesar set in a corporate boardroom, with the august Robyn Nevin as a female Mark Antony; or in opera, such as Don Giovanni set in 1930s Tangier. Clueless and Bridget Jones’s Diary succeed as reworkings of Jane Austen because they are utterly different in everything but plot. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Valley girl portrayal of Emma did not, because her body language was completely 20th century, even if her frock was Empire line.
So I’ve gone for the immediacy of a transparent (I hope) modern narrator’s voice, without any (I hope even more fervently) glaring anachronisms. Somewhere between Copson’s two extremes, but verging towards the modern.
Older characters may have a few little mannerisms (I have to admit that in my head they mostly sound like my great aunts and uncles), and people from other countries who are speaking English have a certain cadence that I hope has been conveyed.
It’s the solution mastered by Geoffrey Trease in the 1930s with Bows Against the Barons and the Carey series, and it’s certainly the style that most appealed to me as a young reader. I’ve been re-reading him lately and it’s reinforced my belief that young people ought not have to struggle to read historical fiction.
It should create a sense of wonder and engagement. Anything that takes attention away from that is affecting the reading process – and the reader’s enjoyment.

Historical fiction dilemma #1: Ethics