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 …

Don't mention the ending!

Here’s the thing. I’ve been reading a lot of books lately with the intention of reviewing them. Obviously knowing that you’re going to write about a book is going to influence the way you read it to some extent. It’s hard to avoid a little distance, the sense of a checklist (good characterisation, tick, realistic but unexpected plot turns, tick). You know you’re onto a winner when you lift your head from the book and realise you haven’t been paying attention to your checklist. That’s what makes reviewing a book you love so much harder than reviewing one you haven’t enjoyed so much.

So there you are, you sit down to write a review. You do a bit of plot summary, you talk about the characters, the style, the mesmerising parts, the shaky areas. But what you can’t talk about, not really, is the end. Spoilers are a no-no in reviews. I get that. It makes sense. If you know what happens in the end, it can colour your reading of the whole book.

But what if you need to talk about the ending? What if your opinion of the book hangs on the ending? There’s that thing, isn’t there, when someone is reading something you’ve already read and they ask you what you thought of it, and you want to say, ‘yeah, I loved it, but the ending was terrible,’ only you can’t because they haven’t finished it yet. I wonder if that’s why book clubs are so popular, because you know everyone you’re talking to has got to the end of the same book as you, so you don’t have to worry.

Many of the books I’ve read, and particularly those aimed at Young Adult readers would be fabulous reads if it were not for the ending. My pet hate is the series thing, when you approach the last pages of the book, expecting the whole thing to reach some kind of satisfying conclusion, only to end up with a cliff-hanger which won’t be picked up until the next book. Puh-lease! Have some respect for your readers, authors. OK, I get the need to tempt the reader into reading the next volume, but what I want at the end of a book is a sense that in some way the story which started on the first page has reached a conclusion, even if only partly, by the last page.

The other thing I expect from an ending – and this may sound like a contradiction – is a sense that the story goes on. For me, this is the one thing that makes a story seem true. At the end, even if the main character dies or the world is destroyed or the enemy defeated or the school year is over, there ought to be a sense that the world the author has created can exist beyond the story. We don’t need to be told any more, but it’s still there. Think of it like this: J K Rowling could have kept writing books about Hogwarts and all that forever. People would have bought them. There are plenty of stories she could have told. She stopped, but Hogwarts is so real in people’s minds that it doesn’t matter. It’s real now. It has a life beyond the books.

And I know there are people who will disagree with me, but what I expect from the ending of a children’s book or a YA book in particular is a sense of hope. (Adult books are different, but I still prefer ones that end with hope.) There’s a place for bleak in children’s fiction, but somewhere in it there needs to be something slightly uplifting. At the end of The Fault in Our Stars, Augustus is dead and Hazel is going to die, but Hazel is ready and she knows her parents are going to be OK. (Oops! But surely you’ve read it, or seen the movie …) You’ll rarely come across a sad book with a better ending than Ways to Live Forever by Sally Nicholls. Read it, honestly. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry and, at the end, you’ll get that sigh you get when something’s just perfectly right.

So what I’m wondering is when I review, should I mark a book down if the end doesn’t do it for me? But that’s not really fair, because I might have really enjoyed the rest of it and if I can't talk about the ending, the reader might think I had a problem with the whole book. Or should I ignore the ending, since I can’t actually talk about it, and mark the book based on the rest? Maybe I need a special ‘unsatisfying ending’ icon. Hmm. But that would give it away, wouldn’t it?

Three reasons to love Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle

 1 The ending.

Somewhere around the middle of the book, Cassandra’s trying to decide if she envies Rose or not. She says:

“When I imagine changing places with her I get the feeling I do on finishing a novel with a brick-wall happy ending–I mean the kind of ending when you never think any more about the characters.”

And so of course this book isn’t going to have that kind of ending. I’m not going to spoil it for you, just in case there’s any chance you’re reading this and you haven’t read ICTC, but let me tell you that Dodie Smith provides an ending which could not be more perfect, leaving you looking hopefully into the future with Cassandra and giving you plenty of scope for thinking about all the characters. Thank goodness no publisher nagged her into providing a sequel!

2 The sense of time.

The trouble with journal books and letter books is that usually they don’t account for the amount of time the character has to spend actually writing in between all the things they’re doing. In ICTC, we get the sense of how long writing takes – sometimes Cassandra tells us that it has taken her two or three days to complete an episode – and also a sense of her in the present, as she writes: think of the first sentence, “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink,” and the end, “Only the margin left to write on now. I love you, I love you, I love you.” There are no slips: we learn straight away that she’s practising speed-writing which is why she writes so much even before anything begins to happen, the now around her is beautifully integrated with the events she’s describing.

3 The evocation of a time gone by.

It didn’t occur to me when I first read this that it was anything other than a contemporary novel when it was written. I was struck by the differences between then and now: the idea of them living on hand-outs in a castle, the treatment of Cassandra by everyone as if she were a child though she’s 17 or 18 (it’s not made clear) and her – I can’t think what to call it – backwardness? innocence? when it comes to men. The whole attitude to love and marriage really: it all seems deliciously old-fashioned. The thing is though, when you sit up and take notice, this is a book published in 1949 about the 1930s. By 1949, that decade before the war must have seemed like another world. And once you realise that, you start to notice how much there is in the book that’s there just to give you a glimpse of this other world. Think of the part when Simon and Cassandra stand in the village taking in the sights and sounds and smells, or the off-hand mention of the sheep in Hyde Park (it’s true, see http://www.peterberthoud.co.uk/2012/03/hyde-parks-shepherd-his-sheep/). It’s a very conscious evocation of the past.

I could go on. I could tell you that it’s laugh-out-loud funny in places and in others full of the joys and agonies of unrequited love. I could witter on about the marvellously ‘captured’ characters and settings, and the funny little digs at ‘arty’ people. I’ll stop now though, but for one thing: read it or reread it. It’ll make you smile.