Elidor or Narnia? Adam Mars-Jones, Alan Garner and C.S. Lewis

"I remember being disappointed by Elidor," writes Adam Mars-Jones in his essay on Alan Garner for the London Review of Books.

Well, I remember loving Elidor and still admire it, in part because reading it, in contrast to some of Garner other work, does not make you feel as though you're being hit over the head with a compendium of folklore. He is disgraced beyond rescue, but William Mayne used to handle such material with a lighter touch - see his treatment of the legend of the Richmond drummer boy in Earthfasts for an example.

Mars-Jones's central complaint about Elidor is that, having invited comparisons with C.S. Lewis by packing four children off to a magic kingdom, he treats the story differently in every way:

It turns out that in their role as (exiled) champions of Elidor they must wield magical implements known as the Treasures, but these are issued with little ceremony. C.S. Lewis would have taken at least thirty pages to unite the children with the Treasures; Tolkien might have taken three hundred. In Elidor there’s a gap of only three pages between the news that the Treasures exist and the children acquiring them. It’s not much of a quest – barely a trip to the toy shop.

It's not a quest at all, and it's not a trip to a toy shop either. There is a strong sense that the children are being used: given the Treasures and then bundled back into their own world to face danger when other beings from Elidor try to force their way in.

What Garner does is force the reader to question the deepest assumptions of this sort of story.¹ Did the children really visit Elidor or just imagine it? Is Malebron, the only being they meet there, as good as they found it natural to assume?

C.S. Lewis has his moments - I loved the scene early in Prince Caspian where the boy is told that the legends about a golden age of Narnia and talking animals are all true, and I loved reading the scene from The Magician's Nephew where Jadis drives a London cab like a chariot. But that latter scene, like much that is good in the book, is a pastiche of Edith Nesbit.

So when Mars-Jones commends Lewis to Garner as someone to study on how to write about relationships between brothers and sisters, you feel he has missed the mark. It would be more economical to send him straight to Nesbit.

But then I have always been puzzled by the reverence with which Lewis is treated as a children's writer and, in America in particular, as a religious thinker. Whatever is good about the Narnia books is progressively throttled by allegory until we arrive at the final book in the series, The Last Battle, which is positively unpleasant to read.

While his religious thought, and treatment of the Problem of Evil in particular, combine the faux mateyness that George Orwell complained of, with a near thuggishness. It's like reading theology written by Kenneth More.

Notes

1. Having just written this, I came across an essay on Tyger Tale called The Anti-Narnia: Elidor by Alan Garner.

Nevill Holt and William Mayne: Two posts with important comments on child sexual abuse

This story was in the Guardian this morning:

Police say they are uncovering a hidden “epidemic” of paedophile abuse in the 1970s and 1980s, with thousands of allegations leading to convictions against people who abused their power to attack children. 

New figures seen by the Guardian show that 4,024 allegations led to guilty verdicts at court after police investigations since 2014 into decades-old child sex offences. 

Officers say hundreds of offenders, including teachers, religious workers, youth and care workers, thought they had got away with their crimes. Many victims have been traumatised, and some have killed themselves or been left with severe mental health problems.

Yet the press and public seemed to have lost interest in the subject.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse continues its excellent work, but no one seems to be listening to its proceedings.

My reason for writing this post is to flag up two posts on this blog that have acquired dozens of important comments on the sexual abuse of children.

In January 2010 I wrote about Nevill Holt, the prep school near Market Harborough that closed in 1998 when the police turned up one morning. I took the photograph above in 1984 when it was still a school.

And in March of the same year I wrote about William Mayne, a children's writer I greatly admired and even collected, who was imprisoned for offences against girls in 2004.

William Mayne's The Member for the Marsh and the draining of the Somerset Levels

A BBC News page gives the history of the draining of the Somerset levels:

In Roman times artificial flood defences were built to keep out the tides from the nearby Severn Estuary, and ditches were dug. This created a network of inland channels to drain large areas of floodplain marsh. 

During the Middle Ages the monasteries at Glastonbury, Athelney and Muchelney drained and looked after the land. 

Dutch engineers arrived to drain the Levels in the 17th Century. Farmers have managed the landscape ever since.

Except that there is more to it than that. A post on Tallbloke's Talkshop (written by the nicely named Corporal Jones' Ghost) tells the more recent story:

You have to go back to 1939, when the MOD decided that they needed a new Munitions factory for HDX explosives, HDX uses a lot of water, all munitions manufacture does, but HDX is greedy. 

The levels had too much water and so we built one on the Levels, ROF37 or ROF Bridgewater or ROF Woolavington, it’s all the same place. 

To ensure that there was enough water even on the waterlogged Levels, we built the Huntspill River, we then connected it to the River Brue to the North and the Kings Sedgemoor Drain via a pipe to the South, we also widened the River Sowy to get water to our factory.

This information has been taken by bloggers who are sceptical about climate change as proof that the current flooding of the Somerset Levels were caused, not by exceptional weather, but because the government did not spend enough on draining them.

Their assumption seems to be that, even though the munitions factory has gone, we must continue to drain the levels the way we did while it was open. This seems an odd argument to me, and not only because climate change sceptics tend to be opposed to government action in most other circumstances.

Large areas of the Fens are purposely flooded every winter, but no one thinks that is an outrage. And Environment Agency figures quoted  suggest only 40 houses on the Levels have actually been flooded. So it is by no means obvious that their assumption is right, even if the climate is not changing.

This winter's floods have also reminded me of a book I have long had on my shelves without reading: William Mayne's The Member for the Marsh.

Writing about Mayne will always be awkward, following his conviction for child abuse. My defence is that he was a superlatively good writer for children and that if you cannot separate artists from their work you are due for a life of disappointment.

I can also say that this blog carries the fullest discussion of Mayne and his offences that I have found anywhere. You can find that discussion in the comments on a post from 2010.

The Member for the Marsh is typical of Mayne in the way it brings together children of different ages in an easy companionship.

A group of boys discover what they suspect is the site of a prehistoric lake village in a marsh that the local farmer is about to flood. If this were a Malcolm Saville story the farmer would be a villain and the children would save the village site.

But the farmer is no villain. He is happy for the boys to enter the marsh, but stipulates there must be no schoolmasters allowed to visit - because he does not want them finding the site.

The boys have a bonfire and carry out a little amateur archaeology to prove the site really had been a lake village. Then it is lost beneath the water. But the farmer makes sure a causeway is left dry so one of the boys can use it to get to and from the school bus.

Running through the book is a sense that the draining of the levels is a work in progress. The munitions factory is not mentioned, but its effect is felt.

Six of the Best 379

Richard Kemp looks at the problems of being a young councillor - and of being Jake Morrison in particular.

As Armenia moves closer to the EU, Russia is taking advantage of the country’s economic and geopolitical vulnerabilities to maintain its influence says Hayk Hovhannisyan on LSE EUROPP.

Freaky Trigger looks at some of the wonderful books of the disgraced children's writer William Mayne.

"There's a telling scene in one of Graeme Swann's entertaining video diaries from the 2010-11 Ashes tour when on Christmas Day the single members of the side sit around a table for their festive turkey. Swann's wife isn't present so he's forced to slum it with the singletons. “Tell us a joke, Monty!” he implores, a response met with a mumbled, embarrassed excuse by Panesar that he doesn't know any." Pavilion Opinions on the travails of Monty Panesar.

You can find some paintings of the London Docks 1939-45 on Isle of Dogs Life.

Elsewhere in London, Richly Evocative visits Islington's unexpected Eden.

Richmond and Richmond Castle, North Yorkshire

Richmond ... was like no other town they had ever seen. When they reached the top of the hill they were in one corner of an enormous cobbled square. In the centre was the squat building of a church, in the sides of which were really built some shops. At the top of the huge market square beyond some parked buses, was a great stone pillar crowned with a ball, round which were some steps on which dalespeople were sitting. Shops and inns were round the four sides of the square and between them, the children noticed, were the narrow entrances to many little courts and alleys.
The Secret of Buzzard Scar (1955) Malcolm Saville

The whole castle wall has long since fallen, all along the edge of the rock overlooking the river. Now the mown grass comes to the edge, and there is a fence, not to keep out any strangers, but to keep in the visitors. But the rest of the walls round the great court are there still, hiding the town from the castle and the castle from the town; but there is enough to show clearly what the castle was like
Earthfasts (1966) William Mayne.

My favourite children's writers had given me a clear enough picture of Richmond, yet somehow I had got it wrong. I had imagined a castle high above the town - something like the set up at Montgomery.

In reality, the castle is more intimately connected with the town than any I know. The castle old bailey is the town's market square.

My guidebook says that the ruins of Richmond Castle represent "one of the most important surviving examples of early medieval domestic architecture in the country".

They are right, but that it is not what strikes you most about the castle ruins. Its setting - perched high above the River Swale - is hugely impressive, and its modern history is important too.

Richmond Castle was used to house conscientious objectors in World War I - the Richmond Sixteen. There drawings and writings still exist in the castle gatehouse, though they are too fragile to put on display to the public.

The military authorities' plan, apparently, was to ship them to France, where they could be shot for refusing orders in the face of the enemy. This plan was thwarted, but many of the Sixteen found themselves social outcasts after the war - but they were in the right, were they not?

The castle yard was also the site of barracks of  the North Yorkshire Militia from 1855, and those buildings were the home of Robert Baden-Powell for two years until 1910 - just the period when his Scouting movement was taking shape.

The barracks building were demolished in 1931. Had they survived until the present day, they would surely have been preserved as an important part of the site's history. I met the same change in attitudes at Tynemouth Priory this summer.

The case of William Mayne revisited

William Mayne was one of Britain's very best children's writers from the 1950s until his death a couple of years ago. And in 2004 for he was gaoled for two-and-a-half years for offences against children.

Now a post on Freaky Trigger by someone who calls himself pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør (as is his right in a free country) returns to this troubling case:

It seems to me challengingly important, because so challengingly dreadful, to propose that a genuinely lovely writer, a writer deeply worth reading, by children and adults, can at the same time be an abusive man who betrayed trust and responsibility. 

We’re all contradictory, and writers are especially well used to firewalling the sensitive imagination off from the reaches of life that are experienced rather than imagined, for all kinds of reasons, good and bad. And all writers — and this certainly includes me — write as much for an imagined reader as the readers they happen to know and meet in life. 

Who were Mayne’s imagined readers? What do his books tell us?

pˆnk s lord, if I may call him that, makes great claims for Mayne's writing:

Sand is an amazing book, quite unlike any children’s novel before it, at least by any other author I can quickly bring to mind. At one (not unfamiliar) level, it’s a sketch of the fascination and antipathy between secondary modern boys and grammar school girls, in a small never-named northern coastal town — and as such fits into its time, the time of kitchen sink cinema and Coronation Street, the Beatles and, well, Ballard, actually. Because — in its deceptive, even diffident way — it’s a closer cousin to Ballard, Beckett and Camus than anything you’d surely expect to encounter in children’s books.

But I am convinced that these claims are entirely justified. William Mayne is an extraordinary writer.

Pˆnk s lord plans to read or re-read all the Mayne books he can find and (I think) to blog about them.

In the mean time, you may be interested in my own post The death of William Mayne. It has acquired 70 comments and gives us a clearer picture of the man and his activities.

Guardian obituary of William Mayne

An obituary of William Mayne was posted on the Guardian website earlier this evening and will appear in tomorrow's paper.

Written by Julia Eccleshare, it passes briefly over his conviction for abusing girls and gives a full but intermittently unethusiastic account of his writing career:

A recurrent theme of Mayne's stories was how children could see and accept magic and magical explanations, while the adults around them create rational stories to explain the same outcome.

There was no sentimentality around Mayne's sense of children's belief. Instead he simply posited that children are as at home with unreality as reality, while adults take a different view.

I wrote about William Mayne myself a few days ago. There is quite a debate going on in the comments there.

Six of the Best 30

I have never been quite sure how or why Baroness Warnock came to be regarded by government as the nation's premier philosopher, but Ethical Post (or is it called Kingdom?) pays respectful attention to her ideas for reforming education. And they sound the sort of thing I would agree with too.

Iain Dale's Diary offers 20 pieces of advice to election candidates. I am not sure I agree with the oft-repeated one about not canvassing on Sundays - in my councillor days I found that people had time to chat then - but it is all useful stuff whichever party you are in.

Did you know that Gillian McKeith wanted to be a Tory council candidate in Hampstead and possibly a parliamentary candidate too? Mr Eugenides lists this among several stories that should have been April Fools' Day spoofs but weren't.

Matt T has been reading Picture Post from the 1940s and comes up with a suggestion for a central London airport and some worrying news about Gale's honey.

My recent blog post on William Mayne is just about the only mention of his death you can find on the web. Certainly, no obituaries have appeared in the newspapers. Now Life must be filled up has posted an appreciation of his work.

Wartime Housewife gives a recipe for Good Friday: hot cross buns

The death of William Mayne

The Darlington and Stockton Times reports:

An award-winning children’s writer whose career was ruined when he was jailed for sex attacks on children has been found dead at his home in the Yorkshire Dales. 

William Mayne, who was 82, was the author of more than 100 books and was regarded as one of the leading children's authors of the 20th-century. 

But his career crashed to a halt in 2004 when he was jailed for two-and-a-half years by a judge at Teesside Crown Court. 

He was also placed on the sex offenders’ register and banned from working with children for life after admitting to 11 charges of indecent assault between 1960 and 1975.

The paper goes on to quote the Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature as calling Mayne "one of the most outstanding children’s authors of the last century".

And the book is right. At his best he was almost miraculously good - as in A Grass Rope, which won the Carnegie Medal for the outstanding children's book of 1957. In it a hunt for a unicorn is completed in a manner that satisfies both a romantic little girl and a scientifically minded teenager.

I started collecting Mayne when Malcolm Saville books became to rare and expensive 10 or more years ago. Having another writer to look for made it less likely that I would return from a trip to a secondhand bookshop empty-handed.

While my collecting of Saville had a lot to do with nostalgia, I found that I could read Mayne book, even those written for younger children, with unaffected pleasure. He always was argued by some to be a children's writer whom children did not read but adults loved.

His disgrace late in life was sickening, but then the annals of children's literature contain their share of distinguished figures whom you would hesitate to employ as babysitters.

That fact that Mayne used his fame as a writer to entice children might be used by some as an argument in favour of requiring authors who visit schools to have clearance from the Criminal Records Bureau or Independent Safeguarding Authority - the proposal Philip Pullman objected to so vehemently.

But at the time Mayne was committing his offences he had no criminal record - no one has a criminal record until he is caught. So it is hard to see how a CRB check would have made any child safer.

If anything, the feeling that someone "must be alright" if he has the relevant piece of paper puts children at risk because it makes other adults less likely to voice their conerns. We cannot contract out our responsibilities as adults to an agency of the state.

Later. An obituary of William Mayne has now appeared in the Guardian.