Why I read children's books

The simple faith of the imagination

Sometimes when I am ill, or too tired to do anything else, I read children’s books. I enjoy them at other times, too, but it seems much more excusable to spend time reading Narnia when I’m incapable of reading something that will contribute to my other research or this Substack. And yet, children’s books have a way of worming themselves into your consciousness and tapping inside your mind so that you feel compelled to go back to them, the way Lucy felt compelled to go back to Narnia. So I often find myself immersed into a book that will not be useful to me in any way but which I simply had to read. (You can read my notes on the children’s books I have been reading at the bottom.)

There is a great pleasure to reading children’s books as an adult that is separate from the pleasure of remembering them. The Magician’s Nephew was probably my favourite book as a child. Reading it now it a dual pleasure of rediscovery and current immersion.

But there is, perhaps, a greater pleasure in reading children’s books as an adult for the first time. When I first read Charlotte’s Web, though, I was in my twenties. This was a whole new world. I read it in one sitting and was distraught by the ending. I read, that is, for the first time in many years, like a child.

What does that mean? Beyond the sense of reading so deeply that the world around you goes quiet and you feel, once you put the book down, like you just came to the surface after being submerged (a feeling we are all more likely to associate with going down internet rabbit holes—a phrase, very tellingly, that comes from Alice in Wonderland), reading like a child means reading with the simple acceptance of the imagination, which is akin to having a simple faith.

By simple I mean, “undesigning; sincere”. This is not naive or witless simplicity, but the simplicity of one who is able to take the book on its own terms rather than constantly assess it, search within it to decode its meaning, or to be forever pattern matching the book against your existing beliefs and ideas to decide “what it means” or “what sort of message” it has for you or, worst of all, to decide if you approve of the book. Books must be allowed to teach us how to read them, but as adults we are forever allowing our own feelings to colour our reactions to a book. Children are much better at simply entering the world of the book itself.

So many people want to hear optimistic, hopeful messages (and spend too much time watching movies and shows that have redemptive story arcs), and will find them in the books they read—hence the culture that treats Jane Austen primarily as a romance writer without giving equal weight to the satirical and the philosophical elements in her work. We are largely secular and so much less able to see the religious aspects of many classic novels: yes Jane Eyre is feminist, but it is feminist in a very low-Church manner that is now much less visible to us. We see what know; but if we read like children we will see what is there.

Children, as Diana Wynne Jones was always saying, pay much more attention than adults. They enter into the world of the book and they accept what it tells them. We find St. John irritating and we disapprove of him, so we glide more easily over his section. Children are so absorbed in the book they come away with much clearer ideas of the world they have been reading about. As adults reading children’s books we can start to rediscover that ability to enter the dream of the work of art.

Some of you will recall that this is similar to the distinction A.D. Nuttall makes between opaque and transparent criticism. The opaque critics stay outside the art: they are formalist and make the formalities of the text opaque, so we can see how the trick is done, as it were. The transparent critics leave the formal techniques transparent, so that they can be inside the art.

This is an example of opaque criticism: “In the opening of King Lear folk-tale elements proper to narrative are infiltrated by a finer-grained dramatic mode.” This is an example of transparent: “Cordelia cannot bear to have her love for her father made the subject of a partly mercenary game.” As Nuttall says, both are valuable, but the opaque critics tend to distrust transparency. And “If the critic never enters the dream he remains ignorant about too much of the work.”

Children are naturally transparent readers. Adults are naturally opaque (albeit many of their critical faculties are too personal, too assumptive, and thus lead to mistakes). Reading children’s books is a splendid way to retrain the transparent function of your reading mind.

And the more you read books you already know, the more you will be able to read as both an opaque and transparent reader. We all know that Narnia is both an immersive fantasy and a Christian allegory. Similarly that Lord of the Rings is both a seminal work of high fantasy and a moral tale about the battle of good and evil. His Dark Materials is another good example.

Transparent reading is the basis of all good opaque reading: they are not separate and distinct modes of appreciation; they are linked. Until you know a text very deeply you cannot appreciate it in its fullness. To really see Jane Austen’s genius we must re-read her works. To really understand what Shakespeare accomplished we must be able to think ourselves around inside the plays. We must build the word of a novel in our minds to compare, juxtapose, analyse, and assess it properly. Otherwise we end up with a very dry and technical criticism that wins the book no readers and the critic no joy.

This sort of transparent reading is what makes writers like Hilary Mantel and Alan Hollinghurst so popular. There is much good opaque criticism to be made out of their works, but they are only worth that sort of critical attention because they are so rewarding for the transparent reader. When people complain that Dickens wrote too many words I have a similar reaction: we do not want books to be taut and tight just for ease of analysis; we want them to be little realms that we can occupy. Some writers can achieve that in very small space, some in very large ones, and some gifted writers (Dickens very much included) can do it in both.

Dickens is a good example of this phenomena because he is like a children’s author inverted. It is often said of great children’s literature like Lewis, Pullman, Milne, Rundell and so on that it can be enjoyed by adults as well as children; Dickens is the inverse: he can be enjoyed by children as well as adults. Not young children, perhaps, but he is far more exciting to the junior mind than many other great novelists. He allows the transparent faculty full reign—indeed, he demands it. His novels shimmer with the tinge of fantasy, as if by opening them you are walking through a wardrobe into a place with its own rules.

A place where the simple faith of imagination will be richly rewarded.

---

Some of the children’s books I have been reading

Unraveller
I just began this book and while it seems too long it is a very well-executed concept. I enjoy writers who are able to make magic real rather than those who reiterate the tropics of previous fantasies and I will be reading more books by Frances Hardinge.

Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
This series is so deeply embedded in my imagination I have no idea how far down it goes. I wrote a story for my children a couple of years ago and was startled to see just how similar it was to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader on this reading. My copies have creased spines and folded corners. I remember sitting up at night reading them at the age my daughter is now (seven/eight). Alas, though they enjoyed The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, my own children seem uninterested in Narnia. I will never forgot its forests and wastes and castles and animals; I especially love the dragon and magician in Voyage. And I will never ever ever watch the films.

The Thirteen Clocks
This was new to me, by James Thurber, a satirical, poetic, gothic story, written in lovely prose. It is as strange as the best books of its type always are. I am now very interested to read his other fantasy stories. A clear influence on Neil Gaiman (who wrote the introduction in my edition)—anyone who has read Stardust will see the roots in this as well as in books like The Last Unicorn and The King of Elfland’s Daughter.

Cart and Cwidder
My love affair with the work of Diana Wynne Jones continues. I am finding Dalemark less immersive than the other series I have read and might soon give in to the immense and itching compulsion to re-read The Lives of Christopher Chant, which I love very much, not least because it interacts with The Magician’s Nephew. However, this book is richly imagined and Jones is a lesson is how to unfold a world without having to explain it: there are good things on every page.

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
One reason I have been enjoying the Joan Aiken series is that I retain very mild, but very persistent, Jacobite feelings. Not that I wish England to have been governed as a Catholic country (cradle Catholic though I was). The Reformation served us well enough, though we were needlessly cruel to Catholics for many long years. It has to be admitted that in a nation obsessed with the idea of monarchy, succession, and the One True King, the Hanoverians have been remarkably successful. They still are. There shall be no nonsense here about calling the current Royals the Windsors, or their old name the Saxe-Coburg Gothas—we don’t need to retain the romantic myth of patrilineal descent. Victoria was as Hanoverian as anyone, as was her Germanically -plump and mischievous son; the modern Royals have plenty of the spirit of Victoria’s “wicked uncles”, with their drinking, philandering, and private scandals. The twin strain of George III’s dutiful, devout nature and his children’s runaway, reprobate temperament still defines the Royals more than anything else. King Charles has the busy reforming nature of Albert, but few others have shown that side of their inheritance. No, we pseudo-Jacobites must accept that the monarchy still works remarkably well because it is Hanoverian. It is hard to imagine the lush and luxurious Stuarts adapting so well to democracy, alas.