Sacred Texts?

Jacqueline Wilson is to publish an updated version of Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did in July (see Bookseller article http://t.co/v97KuTDMoQ), on the back of her success last year with Four Children and It, a contemporary reworking of E Nesbit’s Five Children and It. Why has she done it? Presumably the idea is to bring the stories she loved as a child to modern readers. Either that, or else after writing a hundred books she’s running out of ideas.

I’m saddened by the idea of this. What Katy Did isn’t a hard book to read, and Five Children and It is perfectly simple. Certainly there are some bits of language that might read oddly to a modern child's ears and they might come across mention of ways of doing things or objects or events that are unfamiliar. There’s always the possibility with old books like these that children are going to be exposed to attitudes that aren’t acceptable any more. But why should that be a problem? Surely coming across the unfamiliar in books, struggling to understand it, is how we learn.

It’s not that I think that original texts are sacred and shouldn’t be tampered with. If that were true we’d never have ended up with Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, or Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs or Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones or Clueless. But what these examples do is take something of the original and use it to make a new original, not simply an easy-read version. If an author can't add something of their own, they ought to leave well alone.

I’m not sure whether Jacqueline Wilson's intention is to do the same for these classic children's books as those abridged versions of classics they sometimes give children to read in schools. I hope not, because why would you do that? As if there weren’t plenty of fabulous books out there accessible to readers of all abilities. I can’t judge because Wilson's Katy isn't out yet and I haven’t read her Four Children and It, though I have to admit, I was curious when it came out, but had no excuse to buy it as my daughters have grown out of her. I’d like to think Jacqueline Wilson and her publishers believe that readers will read her versions and be brought around to the originals, on the same principle that people who see a film or TV series they like will then go out and buy the book. Maybe they will. It's possible, I suppose.

In my experience of working with children in primary schools I’ve noticed that a lot of children go through a ‘Jacqueline Wilson phase’. It isn’t always Jacqueline Wilson (when I was a child, it was Enid Blyton) and it isn’t always girls, but few other authors lend themselves quite so much to this phase because few are quite so prolific. During this time, unless forced, they pretty much won’t read anything else by any other author, but they will read and read and read from their author of choice. It’s not a bad thing. It’s a sort of initiation into being a reader, where a child suddenly realises the joy to be had from reading and relishes the passage of story from page to brain. And when they come out of the phase, suddenly the whole world of books is open to them. And when they do, maybe they’ll remember that in amongst all the other stories that JW gave them there was something about a girl called Katy, and look, here on the shelf there’s this old book, What Katy Did, maybe that’ll be good …

The soothingness of words

The other day I came into the kitchen at breakfast-time to find Livia, aged 7, reading the comment page in the newspaper. Though I know she's a good reader I did find this a bit surprising as she's only just graduated from  Rainbow Fairies (boo! hiss!). Just to see if she was really reading it, I said something too her. Her finger went out to mark her place on the page as she raised her head to speak to me. Yes, she was definitely reading the words. Did she have any idea what she was reading? By the time she got up from the table I was involved in something else and so I didn't ask. Only later when I ran my eyes over the same page, left open on the table, while I ate my lunch did I stop to wonder what she had got from reading something that almost certainly meant very little to her.

In a book I am reading at the moment (The City of Dreaming Books by Walter Moers), someone says 'Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.' I agree with this, but only partly. Ideally, a person reads and thinks at the same time; he is engaged with the reading matter. However to be truly engaged involves pushing all one's other thoughts to the background of the mind. That's what makes reading is such a useful way of passing travelling time and why it's such a good thing to do before sleeping (except for those occasions when the book is so gripping you can't stop thinking about it after you turn the light out). I can't see why anyone who can read would ever need to meditate. It's easy to empty your mind if you can fill it with someone else's words.

As for Livia's breakfast-time reading matter, I think this is the other side of the same idea. A reading person with an empty mind (as it often is at breakfast time) may find that their eyes simply latch onto words that they see. I don't suppose for one moment that Livia picked up the newspaper and selected the comment page to read. It was just there and eyes rested on it and then she did what she always does with words, she followed them across the page. I do it all the time: words leap out at me, notices, labels, road signs, poems on the Underground (what a great idea). I can still quote the message printed on the sanitary bags on the back of the school loo doors. On holiday in Crete this summer, I found the Greek alphabet desperately frustrating because it took such an effort to remember which shape had which sound and so to decipher the words. Of course I didn't need to do this. It was quite clear what all the words meant, as everything was written in English too, and German and something Scandinavian. But the words were there and were calling out to be read, and the fact that they weren't giving me their message felt like they were bombarding me with their crypticness.