If Enid Blyton was the Beatles then Malcolm Saville was the Kinks

Now here's a title for a blog post: The Famous Five vs The Lone Pine Club. It's on the blog Unpopular Culture.

I shall resist the temptation to quote it in its entirety, and give you just a taste:

Enid Blyton is perhaps like The Beatles. Certainly she was massively globally successful and subsequently went through dips of critical and popular appeal, before becoming established again as a recognisable global brand whose enormous material success insists on being endlessly reproduced and extended. 

I rather enjoy drawing this parallel partly because I know many Beatles devotees will prickle at the thought of any similarities in artistic merit between the two and partly because Lennon himself poked fun at the Famous Five in his ridiculous ‘In His Own Write’ book. 

In hindsight I wonder if The Comic Strip were as much inspired by Lennon’s parody as anything. Certainly there is a similar smug assumed ‘cleverness’ that irritates me more in my fifties than it did in my late teens or early twenties. Others continue to find it charming, of course, and that is their prerogative.

In this imagined realm of children’s authors as 1960s pop groups then, if Blyton might be The Beatles, who would Malcolm Saville be? Certainly not The Stones and definitely not The Who. The Kinks perhaps? 

Certainly I see Saville as doing something similar to The Kinks in terms of attempting to capture a world (specifically an England) that is dissolving even as they record it. There is too a shared sense of knowingness that what is being lost is in itself partially illusory. They both, at their best, mourn a mediated Englishness.

There's much else about the two authors in the post, which reminds me a little of an article I wrote for the Guardian website years ago.

The writer of Unpopular Culture like Saville's Rye books bests, whereas I'm a Stiperstones man. And he has written at least two other posts on Saville.

There's one on Jane's Country Year, which was Saville's favourite among his own books and shows the influence of Richard Jefferies' Bevis.

And a recent one on, amongst other things, one of the last of Saville's Lone Pine stories, Rye Royal.