When Paul's niece and nephew came to stay with us last week we spent two evenings with all four of us propped up on the spare bed laughing like drains and taking it in turns to read Mr Gum and the Biscuit Billionaire by Andy Stanton. What a joyful experience it is to read aloud like this, and one which I don't get to do often enough. The Mr Gum books are a particularly wonderful example of this pleasure because they mix an offbeat sense of humour with a sort of madcap poetry. The quote above was right at the start of the book and I found myself turning it over in my mind for days afterwards. It's just so...pleasing. As an image, as a sound, as a celebration of language. And it was in a children's book. I have a real passion for children's literature both because I was an avid reader as a child and because as an adult I still find a very specific kind of imaginative escapism may only be found in reading children's books. It is because of this love of children's literature that I found myself running a children's bookshop for a while, and why I have taken care to carve out a space for children's literature in my thesis.
It is funny how these things come about in research, how every so often you will read something that stays with you and somehow shapes what comes after it in your work. This happened for me when I read Elizabeth Bowen's essay 'Out of a Book' while researching my MA dissertation. I knew even as I was reading it that I was changing, that some chord had been struck. I read with a gleam of recognition, of words that made manifest half thoughts that my brain hadn't been able to verbalise. Any reader will know this feeling and when it happens it is such a moment of elation... a moment in which a text and an author become a friend and kindred spirit.
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| Elizabeth Bowen |
"I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experience, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.
Reduced to the minimum, to the what did happen, my life would be unrecognizable by me. Those layers of fictitious memory densify as they go deeper down. And this surely must be the case with everyone else who reads deeply, ravenously, unthinkingly, sensuously, as a child."
"The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child. I mean that, admittedly, the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind. At any age, the reader must come across: the child reader is the most eager and quick to do so; he not only lends to the story, he flings into the story the whole of his sensuous experience which from being limited is the more intense. Book dishes draw saliva to the mouth; book fears raise gooseflesh and make the palms clammy; book suspense makes the cheeks burn and the heart thump. Still more, at the very touch of a phrase there is a surge of brilliant visual images: the child rushes up the scenery for the story." -Elizabeth Bowen, 'Out of a Book' in The Mulberry Tree
This is what I meant earlier when I talked about that specific escapism to be found in children's books. It is because for me they hold the echo of those periods of childhood reading, of trembling hands pressed to pink cheeks and heart thudding excitement and physical sensation born of a total immersion in the other world and other life on offer between the pages of a book. Andy Stanton's 'huge glossy panther made of time' is one of those phrases Bowen speaks of, one whose very touch creates a surge of brilliant visual images, and it is because this image called out the child reader in me that it has remained in my mind long after the book itself has been put away.
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