J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Stone Chamber of Azkaban Philosopher-Prisoners (1997-99)

Let's entertain the notion that the first three HP novels together constitute a 700-or-so-page singleton. This, you see, would put them on a par with the much fatter later novels. Not that I'm suggesting, you understand, that Goblet of Fire marked the point where Bloomsbury's entire annual accounts had come to depend upon Potter to such an extent that nobody dared actually edit Rowling's submissions any more ('Joanne, I'll be honest: there's a really good 300-page novel struggling to get out from under the weight of this 700-page splurgefest about the Quidditch World Cup and attendant plot-coupons ...'). Certainly not.

Take it this other way, then. Posit HP as a five-part drama, like a Shakespeare play. These first three titles, taken together, are Act 1: setting the scene, introducing the characters, laying down the narrative- and worldbuilding rules readers will need to keep in mind if they are properly to enjoy what follows. Act 2, Goblet of Fire, is mostly keeping the various plates spinning atop their bamboo poles, but it does two new things: it brings Voldemort properly back into the world of the novels; and it kills off a proper character, Cedric Hotdiggory.* This is a skilful way of ramping-up the series: it brings the villain out of the shadows, and shows us that something important is at stake by adding the George-R-R-Martin patent narrative destabliser, that characters we like, perhaps (gulp!) even main characters, could die.

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*Note: 'hot' is my 12-year old daughter's assessment of Robert Pattinson, rather than her judgment on the character as he appears in the novel; and it therefore has little actual bearing on this discussion. My own view? He's not even that hot.

It's such a good narrative trick that Rowling repeats it in the next three acts. In Order of the Phoenix, Voldemort's power in the world grows (Dolores Umbridge takes over Hogwarts, for instance) and Sirius Black dies. In Act 4, Half-Blood Prince, Voldemort grows yet more powerful, the plot-coupons get a new names ('Horcruxes', which I don't like: the plural, surely, should be horcruces) and Dumbledore dies (boo!). That sets up Act 5, Deathly Hallows, where Voldemort establishes his Thaumaturge Reich, the plot coupons are all cashed-in and several characters die, not least snakeface himself. Taken as a whole, I'd say Goblet and Phoenix could have been combined into one 700-page book, were concision needful (Harry Potter and the Gobbling Fiery Phoenix. Or, wait: does that make it sound too like a turkey?)

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. I have a couple not wholly joined-up things to jot down about the first three skinny volumes, occasioned by my re-reading them. So here we go. In sum: better, worse, better.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was better than I remembered it: less twee, funnier and more efficient, in the sense that it very deftly introduces both the world and the key characters, includes a number of very readable set-pieces and does it all in approx. 200 pages. The songs are a mis-step, I think ('You can keep your bowlers black/Your tops hats sleek and tall,/For I'm the Hogwart's sorting Hat/And I can OH GOD PLEASE STOP'): an attempt to Hobbitify or Roald-Dahl-tint the text that misfires by skewing too groaningly twee. There were more of these, apparently, in the first draft of Chamber of Secrets, but Rowling's editor wisely cut them out. A good editor's worth is above rubies, you see (vide. my first paragraph above).

The other thing that struck me re-reading this novel was how solid a character structure the core triad is: Harry, Ron, Hermione. I take the point of those who regret the sidelining of this latter (hard to argue with this justly famous 'Hermione Granger and the Philosopher's Stone' satire). But, working with what we've got: Harry as ego, the figure with whom the reader tends to identify; Ron as id, a creature of more prominent appetites (sweets in the early books, snogging in the later), quicker to terror and envy and so on; Hermione as super-ego, driven, hard-working and rule-bound. It's a less caricature version of the Kirk-Bones-Spock triad that served OS Trek so well. And the three are well drawn qua friends. Friends of the qua. The triad structure works because it externalises something important about our own developing psychodynamic.

On the other hand, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was considerably worse than I remembered it. In part this was because I had forgotten how nails-down-a-chalkboard annoying Dobby is. Partly it has to do with the arbitrary way the school rules are applied by notionally 'good' authority figures (when Dolores does this arbitrary-authority thing in Phoenix it's coded as very wicked indeed). Harry and Ron fly a car to Hogwarts and are warned that further infractions will result in them being expelled. They break about a hundred subsequent school rules, putting themselves and others in danger of death; as a result Dumbledore rewards them. What particularly irked me about this was the sense that Malfoy and his kind are bad because they don't think the rules apply to them; where Harry and his friends genuinely don't think the rules apply to them, and we're supposed to love them for it as free spirits. (Wendy Doniger asks: 'Why not just use magic to get all the questions right in exams?' and answers herself: 'because it’s no fun that way; so the quill pens used in exams are bewitched with an Anti-Cheating spell.' Using magic to do well in his exams is exactly the sort of cheating trick Malfoy would use, if he could get away with it! But, wait: how is that different to Hermione using a time-turner in Prisoner of Azkaban to get ahead of her classmates in her studies?) What's objectionable here is the idea that some people (Harry and his pals) are just better than others, and not to be judged by the same criteria as the rest of us -- which is precisely the moral opposite of what the books purport to be saying.

But, actually, the thing I disliked most about Chamber of Secrets was that it just struck me as technically not very well put-together. The first half, more or less, is draggy and slow, with not much happening. The second half, by contrast, feels rushed and over-stuffed, with too much action and drama and suspense.

Still, I come not to carp, but to .. er, some other kind of fish. Prisoner of Azkaban was a real pleasure to re-read. The narrative bait-and-switch with Sirius Black (he's a dangerous madman! He's your bestest adult friend of all!) is well handled; it generates actual suspense in the early portions of the novel, and properly effective twists in the later sections. The Dementors are creations of genuine imaginative brilliance. The Scabbers/Peter Pettigrew revelation is very clever (though it carries with it the slightly icky implication that for the first two books pre-pubescent Ron has been cuddling an evil, seedy, middle-aged man on his lap). But best of all is the business with Harry seeing his father's Patronus, believing his Dad has come to save him, going back in time and having to save himself episode. The aforementioned Wendy Doniger puts this well in her LRB review of the novel:

In the third book, Harry is haunted by his mother’s dying screams, but now that he is older he moves on, in Lacanian fashion, to come to terms with his father. Thanks to a wonderfully complex and subtle episode of time travel that traces a Möbius twist in the chronological sequence, Harry encounters himself in the loop where past and present come together and overlap. The first time he lives through this period, he sees, across a lake, someone he vaguely recognises: perhaps his father? No, his father is dead, but that person sends a silver stag which saves him from present danger. When he goes back in time, he runs to the same place to see who it was, and there’s no one else there: he is the one who sends the stag to save himself in the future. ... The moment when Harry realises that he mistook himself for his father is quite powerful; and it is, after all, the only real kind of time travel there is: each of us becomes, in adulthood, someone who lived some thirty years before us, someone who must save our own life.

What's especially nice about this is the way it points to a strength of the books: the way they tell a story about kids growing up that includes parents as part of the picture, both in the sense that real-life kids growing up necessarily have many dealings with grown-ups (something with which the Famous Five or the Pevensies aren't troubled); and in the sense that grown-ups are what kids are growing up towards.

Potterpitude

The difficulty, when it comes to engaging critically with the Potter phenomenon, is distance. I don’t mean in a personal sense; I’m too old to have been properly swept away by the novels as they appeared. But in a general sense. The sheer cultural ubiquity of the books and their spin-off films, the scale of their popular success, make it hard to get a clear view of them. I’m going to step into a lecture theatre this coming Thursday and talk about them to an audience of third year undergraduates. Usually when I lecture about something I know more about that something than the students do; that’s kind of the point of me being up at the front. But Thursday I know full well that many in my audience will know these books in much more comprehensive and fannish detail than I.

So what can I say? Good question. I can, I suppose, try to situate the book in the contexts of children’s literature and fantastic literature. I don’t mean: listing all the precursors and analogues to Rowling’s novels. That would take a long time and be very dull (Wikipedia has two lists: one benign in a Rowling-part of-a-rich-tradition sort of way, the other a much sourer list of accusations of copyright-infringement). We could spend a lot time down this particular dust-mine and come up coughing and pale with only one nugget: that the Potter books are deeply derivative. Which of course they are: they're cooked-up from chunks and scraps of British public school fiction, Tolkien, Lewis, Sword in the Stone, Mary Poppins, The Worst Witch, all stirred in the big cauldron of Rowling’s agglomerative imagination. That doesn’t get us very far. These books haven’t been as successful as they have because they are derivative. Or perhaps it would be better to say: the derivativeness points-up Rowling’s skill in choosing the most resonant bits and pieces from myth, tradition and popular story and assembling them effectively—no mean skills, either of those. Plus young readers care less about this than others. It’s new to them.

I might be tempted to say something more about the ‘public school’ tradition, if only to elaborate on this post I put up last year on Farrar’s Eric, or Little By Little (1857). Eric is a good boy at a very posh public school who goes bad, because (basically) he is corrupted by an evil so powerful and malign that it may not even be named. Farrar calls this appalling, mortal wickedness ‘Kibroth-Hattaavah’. In the 21st-century we call it by a word which may etymologically derive from the Latin for ‘manual turpitude’ or ‘defilement with the hand’: manus turpare. Masturbation. A piece of cod-Latin is, I insist, not out of place in the cod-Latin-packed Rowlingverse. Eric is a bad novel, but it was hugely successful (it was the reason the name 'Eric' came into vogue); its DNA informs the long, dense tradition of British public school stories that succeeded it. (The other key originary text in this mode of writing, Tom Brown's Schooldays, is less obscurely sexual in its version of school; although the battle between Tom and the bully Flashman is clearly the prototype for Harry and Malfoy).

Hogwarts is a public school of a rather old-fashioned sort: Latin and robes and bizarre rituals all soaked in a rather startling celebration of upper-class codes and values. [The demonising of the Malfoy de-haut-en-bas cruelty and snobbishness is actually part of this high-caste valorisation: see, for instance, Gilmour’s classic The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (1981); and Christine Berberich’s follow-up, The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature (2007)]. But Hogwarts is more than this. Certainly, some of the cheerier and more whimsical aspects of the books owe a lot to the Jennings books, to Billy Bunter, and to the sublime Molesworth. ‘Hogwarts’, for instance, the name of Potter’s school, ‘derived from "The Hogwarts", a Latin play by Marcus Plautus Molesworthus’. Re-reading the books, getting ready to teach them, I was pleasantly surprised by how much more endearing I found the use of humour this time around (other aspects were considerably more grating on re-read. Dobby, say). But I’d still insist that it is not the whimsy or the humour of the books that explains their extraordinary cultural penetration. That I think is down to the way Rowling handles her darker theme.

So, a facile way of explaining the success of the books would be to say: they are wish-fulfillment fantasy. Rowlings groks that, for children school is central to their experience. To quote myself:

Formally conservative and stylistically flat novels, yes—but this series is one of the great representations of school in western culture. Perhaps the greatest. School dominates your life from 5-18; more if you go to college. When you’re 25 and reading fiction, school has been literally two thirds of your existence. It is our gateway to the adult world, our first experience of socialisation outside the family. It’s a massive thing. When do Booker shortlisted novels ever apprehend it? They don’t—the most you will get is a little background of character A’s schooltimes past, by way of fleshing out their characterisation as adults. Because it is as adults that we’re supposed to be interested in them. School is a massive, global phenomenon. Yet where are the other great novels of school life?

Rowling spins her school as more fun and exciting than the actual schools her readers actually attend; but one thing that is coming across very clearly from my present re-reading is that this school, and by extension ‘school’ as such, has something very dark at its heart. This is externalised in the second book as the ‘chamber of secrets’, a large subterranean space (as per the broader Gothic mode in which Rowling is also working) inside the castle, hidden from the figures of authority—Professor Binns dismisses its very existence as myth, since ‘a long succession of Hogwarts headmasters and headmistresses haven’t found the thing—’ [Chamber of Secrets, 115]. But its there, and inside it is: death. A basilisk whose very look will kill, and whose reflected image turns you to stone. Or more to the point: Voldemort is there, the noseless embodiment of death—the brilliant pupil who has killed to conquer death

Here is William Acton's 1857 moral-panic-provoking description of what happens to a child when he succumbs to the evils of masturbation:

However young the children may be, they get thin, pale, and irritable, and their features become haggard. We notice the sunken eye, the long, cadaverous-looking countenance, the downcast look which seems to arise from a consciousness that their habits are suspected, and, at a later period, that their virility is lost ... Such boys have a dank, moist, cold hand, very characteristic of great vital exhaustion; their sleep is short, and most complete marasmus comes on; they may die if their evil passion is not got the better of; nervous symptoms set in, such as spasmodic contraction, or partial or entire convulsive movements, together with epilepsy, eclampsy, and a species of paralysis accompanied with contractions of the limbs.

It was because he genuinely believed that this was a clear and present danger to actual schoolboys that Farrar wrote his admonitory public-school novel in the first place. In my ‘Farrar’s Horcrux is Wanking’ post I suggested that thin, pale Voldemort, with his cold, clammy physicality and his tertiary-syphilis-esque noseless face, slyly articulates this buried climate of fear. Tom Riddle’s story is a retread of Eric's from Farrar's novel; but it might be more to the point to say that Voldemort is the apotheosis of Kibroth-hataavah, taking people over and destroying them. In this he represents both a character in his own right and the mysterious, morbid-erotic power that causes others to decline and die. Read Acton's description again: then look back at the descriptions of Quirinus Quirrell in the first novel: he starts thin, pale, timid, nervous and twitchy and gets worse as the novel moves along ('in the weeks that followed [Quirrell] did seem to be getting paler and thinner'; Philosopher's Stone, 167). It's because Voldemort is literally part of him and revealing that fact kills him. In Chamber of Secrets it is pale Ginny Weasley who, prompted by proto-erotic yearning for Harry, develops a dangerous secretive habit (writing in Tom Riddle's diary) and who as a result becomes 'white as marble, and as cold', 'moaning ... shuddering' [Chamber of Secrets, 226, 237]. (On the other hand: Rowling is comfortable enough with all this to make a joke of it too: Percy says 'er, if you must know, Ginny, er, walked in on me the other day when I was -- well, never mind -- the point is, she spotted me doing something and I, um, asked her not to mention it to anyone' [212]). I don't want to flog this to death; you take my point. Yeah; there's a lot of flourishing of wands. Yes, the older generation have nicknames like 'wormtail' and 'prongs'. I'm sure I don't need to paint you a picture.

And my point, actually, is less smutty. It's about the secret-hidden-in-plain-sight nature of Magic itself. How do the muggles not notice the existence of an entire, parallel society? Or since many of them do notice it, why do they not do anything about it? In the early books (Harry and Ron flying the car to school for instance) the impression is that the wizards have to expend a lot of labour and ingenuity hiding themselves from the muggles for their own wizardly protection. But the very beginning of Prisoner of Azkaban we learn that there's nothing muggles can actually do to wizards and witches: burning them as per the great medieval witch-burnings is easily deflected with a simple spell ('the witch or wizard would perform a basic Flame-Freezing Charm and then pretend to shriek with pain while enjoying a gentle, tickling sensation'). So the question gets turned around: are the wizards hiding themselves for the protection of the muggles? Here's how Belle Waring puts it:

Um, why aren’t wizards ruling the world, with Voldemort having a continental empire, full of Muggles whom he has shuffling off, of their own accord, under the imperius curse, quite horribly with no need for guards or jailers or even wizards to construct the camps…? Naturally in a book for children one would put it more, “why aren’t wizards trying with a bit more of a ‘can-do spirit’ to take over the world, I wonder?”

I suppose the tacit answer to this question the books offer (it's never specifically addressed, I think) is: wizards have scruples about these things. Except that, clearly, a great many don't. What's wrong about framing the question this way, I think, is that it insists on reading the text according to the coherence of its surface-logic, its worldbuilding. But the books aren't real. I think the hidden-in-plain-view nature of the magic derives its symbolic eloquence from a different, psychological Chamber of Secrets. That there is sex, in the general (we might say: healthy) sense in co-educational schools, especially as the kids get towards the end of their teens, is not a surprise; and Rowling faces it straightforwardly and pretty well, I think, in the later books. But there's a flipside. There is also something in 'school' that is buried, secret; something that claims the lives of schoolkids; something dark and foul, to do with death as well as sex. It's not merely chronological antecedence that gives Farrar's 'kibroth-hataavah' its longevity as a continuing problematic. It is the direful reality of too many schools, even some of the highest-status and oldest public schools.

Maurice Sendak, In The Night Kitchen (1970)

Some good discussion in seminar today about Where The Wild Things Are, and about picture-books more generally: repetition; Fort-Da; shifts of scale; the place of beasts. But not much love for In The Night Kitchen. Weird, they said. Just random, they said. The nudity in it is most offputting they said. Freaky and inappropriate, they said. (They're not alone in that last one: 'In the Night Kitchen proved controversial on its release, as several well-meaning librarians and teachers reacted to Mickey’s nudity by removing the book from the shelves and/or covering the child’s offending genitalia with marker, tape, or other method of obscuring it. The book continues to appear on lists of banned or challenged books, somewhat to the consternation of those who can find nothing disturbing or “sexual” in the nudity of such a young child as Mickey appears to be'). What do we make of Mickey's Little Nemo-like dream-adventure?

The sensation of falling is commonly associated with going to sleep (see also: Alice). In other news Hypnic Jerk will be the name of the villain in my soon-to-be-written groovy interplanetary spy-adventure novel.

Yes, the nakedness. Several of my students expressed unease at the images; but it is surely a version of nudity entirely lacking in erotic charge. Little kids get naked all the time, after all.

The Oliver Hardy chefs are a little incongruous, I suppose; except that (a) Hardy looks so gorgeously podgy and jolly and well-fed, that he fits a story about the delights of rich, sweet foodstuffs; and (b) the Laurel and Hardy schtick is grown-adults-acting-like-young-kids, which also chimes well here.

So Mickey ends up with a suit of clothes made of pastry; and also with a pastry-plane. A propeller-driven plane, as you can see. Perhaps modelled on the Fokkcake Dr.I, as flown in the Great War by The Bread Baron. No, wait: of course not! The Dr.1 was a triplane ... and anyway look at the star on its wing! It's clearly a completely different American dessert-themed aircraft. Perhaps the Mousse-tang P51. Or maybe an A-36 Apacheesecake.)

Alright, alright. No more pudding-themed aircraft puns. Yes: I'll stop.

So Mickey falls in the milkie, dissolving away his pastry suit.

The chefs are pleased (the final roundel of the book declares: 'And That's Why Thanks To Mickey We Have Cake Every Morning'). Mickey himself is pleased too; so pleased he makes a noise like a euphemism for male member:

And then he slips back into his bed. There are affinities with Wild Things, of course; the child transported away to a fantastical, hyperbolic land where he is allowed to indulge his appetites (anger and boisterousness in Wild Things; hunger and thirst in Night Kitchen). But the seminar groups that looked at it today thought that, where Wild Things possessed a powerful narrative through-line and a unity of affect, this was a random assortment of jumbled nonsense. Nor does it, they insisted, pack the sort of satisfying Fort-Da wallop they insisted was to be found in Wild Things.

So.

I must say, it seems to me an even more maternally-oriented, leave-mum-return-to-mum Fort-Dada specie of book. Mickey leaves his womb-bed and falls into the world. Once there he is dressed, and provided with a private plane in which to explore the wild outside. But then, halfway, the story takes a reverse turn. Into the milk goes Mickey:

I'm in the milk and the milk's in me! God bless milk and God bless me! It's the maternal-nutritive principle; the source of nourishment and comfort combined, in a sort of visual pun, with the amniosis of womb-existence (the amniosis-gnosis). The Da in Fort-Da doesn't get more Ma than this.

Maurice Sendak, Where The Wild Things Are (1963)

[This week's 'EN3225 Children's Literature' course lecture is on picture books, taking Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are as a case study. So, accordingly, here's another repost from Punkadiddle—this time from 2010, soon after my New Model Army came out (which I mention because I mention it in the post). It discusses Sendak's original, and the David Eggars novelisation of the 2010 film. I still haven't seen the film, even though it has come on telly several times. Some part of me recoils from it, I guess; though why the recoil is happening isn't clear to me. The original occasion for blogging was that my son loved it so: I must have read it every single night for three months straight. Now I am obliged to think about it in the academic context of teaching a 3rd year course; some 2014 thoughts are added at the bottom of the post.]

Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are is one of my holy books. I’m not alone in that, of course: it’s a widely adored picture book. But I can make a boast true of few Sendakophiles: I have rewritten Where The Wild Things Are, as a novel called New Model Army, very far removed from the original in terms of its manifest content, very much closer (perhaps too obviously so) in terms of its latent symbols and mood.

I haven’t seen the Spike Jonze movie version, although I probably will, at some point. But I have now read David Eggers novelisation. It’s not a bad novel, exactly (though neither is it a very good one), but it gets the original very wrong, I think; and more pressingly it gets the process of adapting the original wrong. What I mean by this latter observation is that it puts all its energy into the surface details of the picture book, and seems weirdly blind to the deeper currents of the text ... it maintains and elaborates, sometimes at pitifully diluted length, the manifest content of Sendak’s original, and misrepresents and distorts the latent elements. Since it’s the latent elements that give the book its extraordinary potency, this is little short of disastrous.

Of course, maybe I am saying nothing here. It could be that I’m talking not about Maurice Sendak’s original book, only the hybrid of it twined bindweedily around the stem of my imagination. Eggers is under no obligation to write a novel about my imagination, after all. And lots of the specifics of the novelisation are cannily worked out: Max is the son of a bitter single mother, and has an older sister who doesn’t want to play with him any more. The forest grows not in his room, but exists actually outside his house (he’s warned against entering). He runs away, into this forest, takes the boat from there, and ends up where the wild things are. The book calls them ‘infant-like, almost cute, and at the same time pathetic, tragic’, which isn’t how they strike me. But let a thousand flowers bloom, and all that. Anyway, the wild things themselves have a strange selection of names—strange, that is, for wild things (I suppose that’s Eggers’ point): Carol, a male, is the main figure, but there’s also Douglas and Catherine. There’s a lot of ‘I’ll eat you!’ running about. Max burns their forest down. They build a fort. Towards the end, to escape the wrath of Carol, Katherine does eat Max, and the lad is later cut from her stomach. Then he goes home.

Where The Wild Things Are is a boy’s book: it’s a book about the joys of playing rough, of consciously misbehaving, and being a beast. But much more potently than that, it’s a pure narrative distillation of Fort-Da. The boy’s mother stops his fun, and he casts her, metaphorically, over the side of his cot, via the brilliant expedient of generating a whole new imaginative world that doesn’t contain her. But of course the logic of Fort-Da is that he must, symbolically, spool the mother back in to him—or in this case draw in the real world of his room again.

Sendak’s original has so many beautiful and eloquent moments, and is so potently economical, I could spend many thousands of words talking about it. But I’ll limit myself to noting only a couple of things, because they strike me as illustrative of the way in which Eggers retread wholly misses the forcefulness of the source text. In Sendak, it’s the case that the land of the wild things is more immediate and vivid than reality -- look at the way he portrays Max’s initial mischief in tiny boxes of illustration surrounded by several inches of white margin, and the way the size of the picture grows along with the forest in his bedroom, until it fills the entire page. (That the final image of Max in his room, with the meal waiting for him still hot, also fills the page suggests to me that he has been somehow enriched by his sojourn in the Wild Things’ land). Watch what Sendak does with the moon in his illustrations. There’s nothing so nuanced in the expository blubber of Eggers’ prose.

But more fatally, Eggers wholly fluffs, or misses, the two crucial beats of the story. The first immediately follows the three-page Wild Rumpus (Eggers includes the Rumpus, although shifts its tenor from sheer jouissance to fright and chase). Then:

“Now stop!” Max said and sent the wild things off to bed without their supper. And Max the king of all the wild things was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all. Then all around from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat so he gave up being kind of where the wild things are.

I never cry at books (I almost never cry at anything at all: my upper lip being so stiff) but there’s something in the piercing directness of that articulation, about Max wanting to be where someone loved him best of all, that makes my eyes hot with incipient tears. There’s nothing equivalent in Eggers novel; which is to say, the moment of loneliness is smeared and diluted and spread over the whole section.

Then there’s my favourite moment of all the original book. My 2-year-old [2014: Good grief he's six now! Six! Where did the time go?] is fond of this bit too: I think it speaks (to him) of the awesome power he has recently discovered, and which he utilizes a great deal. The power of saying ‘no!’

But the wild things cried, “Oh please don’t go—
We’ll eat you up—we love you so!”
And Max said, “No!”

So he gets back in the boat and sails home. Look at the picture: Max is smiling. He’s happy. He understands that wildthingishness is not violence, or malevolence, or fear, or existential dread, or anything of the things Eggers talks about. It’s a purer joy. We’ll eat you up—we love you so! is so perfect a line: it captures both the extraordinarily edible quality of little kids, the way our (parental) love for them almost spills over into wanting to devour them, they’re so delicious. And it also captures the childish perspective too: where apprehending the world is most completely and immediately done orally, where eating is the most immediate sensual pleasure. Egger has nothing so brilliant in his account.

When he awoke he saw all of the beasts, all but Carol, before him. They had untied his boat and had prepared it to sail. Max rose from Katherines lap and stood, still feeling light-headed.

"So you're going," Douglas said ...

Max nodded.

Douglas extended his left hand. Max shook it.

"You were the best thinker we ever had," Douglas said.

Max tried to smile.

"I'm sorry for all this," Ira said quietly. "I blame myself."

Max hugged him. "Don't."

Judith and Max exchanged glances. She made a face that said Oops, sorry! then emitted a high nervous laugh. "I never know what to say in these situations," she said. [273]

To be clear: Eggers reads this superb, intense, poetic moment, almost the climax of Sendak's book, in terms of downbeat social awkwardness and embarrassment. Has he ever met a child? Has he ever been a child?

And Max said: NO.

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[2014 postscript]: As with Lion, Witch and Wardrobe, commentators on the original post made interesting points in the comments. Abigail Nussbaum damned the film with faint praise:

I've seen (and been underwhelmed by) the film but haven't read Eggers's book. The Sendak is, of course, an old favorite, though it's been years since I read it. There are ways in which the film captures childhood very well, particularly in the first half in which Max plays with total abandon, to the exasperation of his mother and sister. But the interlude with the Wild Things is about the loss of childhood and a sense of tragedy and heartbreak at that loss that, as you say, seems entirely un-childlike. It's how an adult, even a young one, would feel once they've irrevocably passed out of childhood, not the reaction of a child still capable of running off to the king of the Wild Things.

'DC' liked the film better, although still with some reservations.

It transposes the story onto a 9 year old child - the Max of the book must be younger, right? What 9 year old wears a wolf costume? - and I think captures something of both the giddiness and the fractiousness of the way children of that age play together. I remember alliances shifting day to day, underpinned by absolute notions of who was supposed to be best friend's with whom. It is also, I guess, about a child trying to understand why a family might be fractured. I can quite see that this would jar against what seems to be a more primal, or fundamental, reading, Adam, but I don't think it's quite as necessarily invalid in itself as you suggest.

And then, a few weeks ago, and with rather splendid synchronicity, my friend Waxbanks added to the debate. Of course he has a kid of his own now, Feliks, so he has mellowed some:

Feliks loves to 'read' it aloud -- he's memorized the sounds, many of the words, and even our intonations. He's about 2-1/2 now.

The other day he got to the first 'terrible eyes' page and dug into it with theatrical abandon. ROOOAAAARRRRED!! TERRRRRRIBLE CLAAAAAWWWS!! I was so proud!

Then he turned the page and looked solemn, and lowered his voice to a whisper, and said very quietly to himself: 'Til Max said, Be still.'

The rest of the book he was silent, just turning the pages and taking in the pictures. He was very focused and intense; he almost looked puzzled. When he reached the end he flipped back a few pages and said again, 'Roared their terrrrrible roars, and gnashed their terrrrrible teeeeeth...' Then he closed the book, whispered something to himself, set it aside, and started to play with a piece of ribbon.

He adds, with a slightly mournful turn: 'I want to carry that memory with me my whole life, but I know I won't.' I wouldn't be so sure, mate.

What about me? Well, I'm still with Feliks, aesthetic-judgement wise. This remains one of my holy books. But thinking about it in a specifically academic context is making me re-evaluate aspects of it. I remember talking about the book with an old girlfriend, many years ago. She wondered whether the Wild Thing on the left, in this image, was visually coded as 'Black':

What do you reckon? At the time, I disagreed; and it still seems to me that the monster isn't obviously or stereotypically 'Black'. But, a white man, I of course suffer from the representational blindness of my kind. Black herself, my then-girlfriend was more sensitive to such visual coding. And 'Blackness', or more precisely the colonial and post-colonial context, is almost too obviously a feature of the text. What other story does Where The Wild Things Are tell, if not the story about how a young white boy travels far overseas to a 'tropical' land (palm trees, jungle), overcome the hostile natives and appoint himself his king? The natives do what he tells them; at first he indulges their 'wildness' in the rumpus; then he punishes them, arbitrarily, by starving them. Finally, in a little re-enactment of the drawn-out post-war process of de-colonisation, he heads home, happy with himself.

Does this seem too far fetched a reading of the text? Look again at the image immediately above. What about the Wild Thing on the right? Long, lank red hair. Chicken legs, like Baba Yaga's hut. Yellow-coloured, like the yellow star? The red-hair alone makes me wonder if Sendak (of course, a Jew himself, many of whose Polish family members died at the hands of the Nazis) is playing with stereotypical notions of Jewishness. Is the point to mark the Wild Things as Other, racially as well as in terms of their animality? The most famous of the beasts is probably the minotaur who appears on the front cover.

Is that the Otherness of myth? A sort-of Greekness, or ancientness, as if Max has stepped out of time? A nobler version of Othernes, in other words; elevating and resonant. Minotaur-Wild-Thing is, after all, the only character to have human feet. That's a more forgiving reading of the semiotic of these monsters than the racial one.

It gets quite arbitrary, quite quickly. The guy in the middle, with the close-cropped hair, big red nose and bear body? Let's say: the proletariat. The eagle-headed guy is America. This mode of clumsy allegorising is jejune, of course. I still find myself thinking that the larger context of western imperial adventuring is harder to wish away, though.

Leo, Maleficent and Armoire.

What I'm doing here is reblogging something that was originally diddle-punked a few years back: and I'm taking the opportunity to revisit what I argued. The various, often perceptive comments to my original post started a process by which I rethought my perspective on this novel; time has continued that process. So this repost is after the manner (if you can bear the sublime-to-the-ridiculousness of the comparison) of Le Guin's 'Is Gender Necessary? Redux' (1976/87) essay. Following that lead, I'll gloss the paragraphs where my thinking has shifted.

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[2011] The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. This is the best-made and most compelling of the Narnia books: four English schoolchildren, evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz, find a magical wardrobe. Passing through it they move (in a splendidly realised, dream-like pun) from fur coats to fir trees: they have passed into the Fantasy realm of Narnia where the animals can talk. Here they find themselves in the battle between the White Witch -- whose malign magic is keeping the world always winter -- and Aslan, a magical talking-and-flying lion. Edmund, one of the four kids, seduced by the White Witch, betrays his brother and sisters for some Turkish Delight. To redeem him Aslan delivers himself willingly into her clutches. She kills him, but he comes back to life, and in a big conclusive battle the wintry evil is defeated and the White Witch killed. It's a book with genuine charm (impossible to fake, that); inventive, witty, well-plotted and immersive.

Now, alright. Let's talk turkey, and by turkey I mean: Christ and his wattle. I have seen this novel described as an allegory of Christ’s passion, but it’s not—this may seem like an unimportant quibble, but I'm going to insist upon it. Tolkien, Lewis’s friend, always expressed his ‘cordial dislike’ of allegory; and although Lewis was fonder of the mode, he isn’t writing it here. What The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe does is explore the logic of incarnation, something of central importance to Christians. Aslan doesn’t allegorically represent or symbolise Christ; he is the form Christ’s incarnation would take in a reality populated by talking animals. Similarly, Christ in this world (I mean our world, the one we're in now) was not a ‘symbol’ for God, he didn't 'stand in for' God; he actually was God, incarnated in human form. That's actually a pretty important part of Christian belief.

[2014] I stand by this, I think. If anything, I'm tempted to expatiate upon this last point further, because I so often see the book described as an 'allegory'. But the fit is poor. The lion 'allegorises' Christ; the Witch 'allegorises' Satan, and the wardrobe allegorises ... er? Narnia is kind-of an allegory of heaven, except that it would be a very peculiar theology that claimed Satan had defeated the forces of Good to the extent of ruling Heaven and covering it with ice for several centuries. But, actually, having said that: that's not really my problem. Lewis in his day probably knew more about 'proper' allegory than any man alive; and to read his several studies on the medieval manifestations of the mode is to see how rarely allegorists are able to think coherently through their worldbuilding. My problem, actually, is that selling the book as an allegory misses one of the things that makes it a great Christian novel; and even more that it misunderstands its deep grasp of the imaginative logic of childhood. When kids play they don't 'play', in inverted commas. They pretend to be pirates, superheroes and so on, but they do so immersively, full-throatedly. They do not symbolically stand-themselves-in for a pirate or a superhero; they incarnate those characters for the duration of the play. If this looks like a sideswipe at Christian doctrine, as if I'm suggesting that God was only 'playing' at being man when he incarnated as Christ ... well, I don't think it is. I think saying so dignifies the importance of childhood play rather than denigrating the divine manifestation.

[2011] Nevertheless, though not allegorical, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe clearly adumbrates a Christian story, and does so because Lewis considered that story true. Some find the way this religious proselytising is handled in the novel to be sneaky; and I know people who talk about how disappointed they were when they grew old enough to spot, or had people point out to them, the Christian burden. I don’t see that myself.

It is striking, mind you, how bourgeois the fantasy is—the extent to which, indeed, the fantasy is precisely of bourgeois life. A faun with an umbrella and a pile of department-store goods under his arm, good food (easy to overlook how intense the craving for good food was in Britain in the immediate aftermath amongst WWII), fine clothes, pets—all of which presumably means there are department stores in Narnia; and that tea—which Mr Tumnus has—is imported from somewhere. (Incidentally: Tumnus knows what tea and cakes are, wears a scarf and owns an umbrella; but he has no idea what a ‘spare room’ is? Pull the other one). Above all, this book prizes the sanctity of the family unit. The family unit in this novel is so important it even takes precedence over the life of God; for Edmund’s venal failings must be bought-back by Aslan’s death. The pets thing is crucial too; Lewis was, from an early age, fascinated and charmed by the notion of talking animals, and he wrote his fantasy in part to give himself an imaginative platform for the elaboration of this dream. But the talking animals of Lewis’s world are much more house-pet-like than they are (say) the numinous god-like talking animals of Norse or Egyptian religion, or the uncanny unsettling talking animals of folklore. To grow up with a loved pet is, surely, to enter, half knowingly, into the belief that your cat or dog or hamster is, in some sense, a person; that you talk to them and they look just like they can understand you. This is the mode of anthropomorphisation that informs Lewis’s vision. Even Aslan is, in effect, a housecat on a large scale: the book’s repeated stress on his ‘wildness’ notwithstanding. I could add that I’m not necessarily deprecating the book when I say this—religious observation may be no less heartfelt because it happens within a comfortable middle-class milieu, and the love people (and especially children) feel for their pets can be as genuine and as intense, or intenser, as that they feel for other people. It would be clumsy and insulting to sneer at this: love, after all, is love.

[2014]: There's more (much more, actually) to say about the mid-century bourgeoisification of Fantasy, of which this title is a prime example. See also: the 'burglar'/'bourgeois' stuff in The Hobbit (pace Tom Shippey) up to and including the triumph of nice middle-classitude against the forces both of dubious proles and haughty aristos in Harry Potter. No space to develop the argument here, though.

[2011] Nonetheless, I’ve always felt it is the metamorphosis of Lewis’s re-imagining of the Christian story that is the most interesting part of the novel. Gender-bending the traditional maleness of Satan, such that your cosmos’s principle of wickedness becomes a proud but sexually alluring woman is not ideologically neutral, of course; and there is a strain of sexism (in places it touches on active misogyny) running though the Narnia books—most egregiously where poor old Susan gets excluded from heaven at the end of the series because she starts wearing lipstick. A similar pressure of deformation elevates the Lion of Judah, an aspect of Christ only marginally adumbrated in the Bible, to the central expression of the messiah’s nature. The lamb pops up too, from time to time, in the later books; but you can’t help feeling that, subconsciously, Lewis just wants a more carnivorous Jesus than the one supplied by his actual Bible. A Christ with bigger teeth.

This is political too, of course; and for many (genuine, devout) Christians part of the struggle of their faith is precisely to find a way of decanting off all the hippy, Communist, wimpiness with which their saviour is characterised in the NT. There is a certain type of Conservative for whom, the cosier he is at home, the more he feels that Christian values of ‘love’, ‘mercy’, ‘forgiveness’ and ‘turning the other cheek’ are best manifested in the world via helicopter gunships, drone-strikes and the sanctioned torture of tan-skinned detainees. Lewis isn’t quite in this camp; but it is a striking thing that Aslan in Narnia neither (apparently) requires nor is offered worship by the other creatures. They speak highly of him, follow him as a warlord and leader (although it is the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve who, it seems, must actually rule)—but there are no churches or temples to Aslan, and he provokes no soul-shaking terror and wonder in the hearts of his people. It’s tempting to ascribe this to a littleness in the scale of Lewis’s imaginative conception (this is a kid’s book, after all); or to spin it more positively, a sort of modular simplification of the larger questions of belief.

[2014] OK: this was where the commenters on the original blogpost made a number of very thought-provoking interventions. I concede that the version of NT theology I touch on in this paragraph is just that: a version. Now, it does seem to me that Jesus in the gospels goes out of his way to stress non-violence as the way; turn the other cheek; miraculously sealing back on the Roman soldier’s ear that rashly belligerent Peter had chopped off with his sword; the lamb, not the lion, blessing the peacemakers. This, I suggested, was at odds with a midrash of the gospel story in which ‘Aslan rides into battle with a big fuck-off army that slaughters thousands of bad guys, before Aslan himself, personally, kills the White Witch. That’s not in the New Testament.’ But Mike Taylor pointed out it is indeed in the NT: in the book of Revelation. And where I might quibble that Lion, Witch & Wardrobe is not Lewis’s ‘Revelation’ book (that’s The Last Battle), there are other places in the gospels (Mike T. points to e.g. Luke 12:46, and 19:27 as places where Christ talks about having His enemies brought before Him and killed). So, yes, it would be ridiculous of me to insist that the hippy, Communist, peacenik ‘turn the other cheek’ Christ that I see when I read the Gospels is the only one. And another point occurs to me: elsewhere I am tacitly arguing that the most fertile way of reading these novels is as articulations of childhood; and one thing we have to concede where kids are concerned is that they are not peaceniks. They are closer to their anger than the more repressed adults around them; quicker with the ‘I hate you!; and the tantrum and the little fists pummelling your chest. They’re perfectly comfortable playing at war and killing, and, if denied toy-guns by their well-meaning liberal parents (ahem!) will pick up sticks to use, or bite pop-tarts into gun-shapes, and carry on from there. The only leaven to the grimness of this play-acting of mass killing is that kids’ play believes it possible to die and then stand up alive again. But, if it comes to that, this is also what Christian doctrine believes.

The other point had to do with poor old Susan. Philip Pullman is the most prominent figure (followed by J K Rowling) who has deprecated the Narnia books because, in a nutshell, everyone gets to go to heaven except Susan, and she is excluded because she has discovered lipstick and nylons and boys—that is, sex. Mike T. said ‘I do wish that critics with the wit to know better would stop perpetuating this pernicious myth. You don't need to read Rilstone's (brilliant) essay Lipstick on my Scholar to recognise that the plain text of The Last Battle simply does not support Pullman's reading of it. That someone as widely influential as J. K. Rowling uncritically parrots it is distressing; that someone as insightful as you would do the same is merely mystifying.’ Farah Mendelsohn agreed: ‘Susan really, really isn't banished from Real/Final Narnia. I've re-read this several times because Pullman so infuriated me. No one can be banished until they look on the face of Him (Aslan/Jesus) and reject him for the final time. Susan hasn't done this. At the end of the Last Battle several dwarves who have denied Aslan look on his face for the last time, and their faces light up and they are admitted through the door into Aslan's world. The message is very clear (and is there in the Screwtape letters as well), there is always the opportunity for redemption.’

Mike T. then elaborated his point: ‘When asked why Susan was excluded from Narnia, Peter's response is not because she now uses lipstick, etc. Rather it is because she "is no longer a friend of Narnia". As the discussion continues, we're first told that she denies Narnia exists, and then that she cares for nothing else except lipstick, etc. It's fairly clear that the main issue here is her rejection of Narnia, a symptom of which is her preoccupation with her appearance. This fits well with Lewis' repeating theme of wanting to become part of the "Inner Circle". That is, rejecting goodness in order to obtain the acceptance of those around you. His treatment of erotic love in "The Four Loves" is a pretty good indication he had nothing against sex in itself.’ This is what I said:

I do not claim that Susan is forever banished from heaven; I say that at the end of the Narnia books she is excluded, and so she is. Rilstone makes a lot of play with the (he claims, wrong) view that Susan is excluded for liking lipstick. He insists that Susan is not excluded for wearing lipstick; she is excluded for "interested in consumer beauty products to the exclusion of everything else" (and also ‘for talking about Narnia as a childhood game’, and for preferring being 21 to being 11 or 71). I do agree that, in Lewis's larger theology, being interested in anything to exclusion of being interested in heaven is the root of all sin. It's also true that in a letter of 1957 Lewis says: 'the books don't tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there's plenty of time for her to mend and perhaps she will get to Aslan's country in the end... in her own way.' And maybe she does. But that's not what the books say: the books say that the other Pevensie children get to go to heaven, but that Susan is excluded from that because 'she's interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations.' Two things occur to me. One is that if we're going to bring in extra-textual material, such as the non-Narnia stuff Lewis wrote, then we're going to want not to cherry pick; and I'd suggest the conclusion we'd come to is that, even for his day and class and religious views, Lewis's attitude to women was pretty messed-up. The thread to Rilstone's essay has some examples of this: but there is a very unpleasant mixture of condescension and irrational fear in the way he viewed femaledom; women were simultaneous patently inferior to men (the whole 'slaves go back to your masters, wives go back to your husbands' thing) and alarming, destructive, dangerous. In the Narnia Satan is a sexually alluring woman: that's more extreme even than most Fundamentalist theologies.

Thinking again about this, I’m minded to suggest that there is a caricature of Lewis as a misogynist and sexual puritan that’s fairly widely current, and a concomitant misreading of the novels that infuriates some fans. And with good cause. I don’t actually think Lewis was a sexual puritan; and whilst I don’t share his conservative views on woman’s role I’d stop short of suggesting they were informed by simple misogyny. If I were writing the 2011 blogpost from scratch today I think I’d raise the Susan question differently. I tend to think, nowadays, that this is better contextualised in terms of the problematic of time-passing in children’s literature more generally. I discuss this a little in my Blyton posts, in another place: the famous five start pre-pubescent in 1942 and are still precisely the same age, and moving through pretty much exactly the same world in the late 1950s. Neither they nor their world grow or develop. I suggest a second version of this (very common) trope in Bart Simpson: he stands, Tin Drum-ishly, outside individual growth and development, he is still the same naughty 10-year-old boy he was when the series started last century; but the world he occupies slides chronologically on around him. Bill Clinton is no longer President; Obama is; everyone at Springfield Elementary has smart phones and so on, yet Bart is still the same age. Rowling composed her series as a deliberate rebut to this; and one of the things fans love are the ways her characters grow and develop. Of course this means that they must pass through puberty, and there’s all that snogging and pairing off in the later books. This is all the stuff that makes my 6-year-old lad stick his tongue out and go ‘yeuch!’; and there is at least some point in noting that such a strategy—although satisfying to those readers who are following the series in, as it were, real time; growing and changing as the characters are doing—is by definition the dissolution of ‘children’s literature’ as such. We move into adult territory. Maybe it’s right we do; although one need not be a head-in-the-sand social conservative to wish that kids could do with being a little less saturated in images of adult sexuality than they presently are. Which is a roundabout way of saying that maybe all that’s happening is that Lewis is taking seriously the Gospel injunction to become again as little children.

Another way of saying this is to revisit the question, posed by Peter Coveney in his Image of Childhood book. It is a matter that seems to me more and more important the more children’s lit I read. So: Coveney distinguishes between (as he sees it) ‘good’ representations of childhood, that take it as a process of growth, on its way somewhere important—his chief model of this is Wordsworth’s Prelude—and ‘bad’ representations (he cites: Alice, Peter Pan) of childhood as stuck forever at a certain age, arrested like the figures on the side of Keats’s Grecian urn, which he sees as morbid and regressive and deplorable. I sort of take his point; but it occurs to me that Lewis is, tacitly, proposing a third model. Not that childhood is stuck forever at a certain chronological term, but rather that the (spiritually) healthy trajectory is from adulthood to childhood and not the other way around. Susan’s problem isn't sex as such; it’s that she’s moving in the wrong direction. She ought to strive to become again as a little child. So should we all. Hence: writing children’s fiction in the first place. Hence: Lewis putting himself, imaginatively, into that space.

If that looks like a fairly regressive thing to believe, all I can say is: I suppose it is, but I also suppose that Lewis wouldn't think that a bad thing. The Pilgrim's Regress, and all that. As he puts in it the preface to The Great Divorce (1946): 'a sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never simply by going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot "develop" into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, "with backward mutters of dissevering power" -- or else not.' This, it occurs to me, is Lewis's understanding of the 'become again as a little child' injunction. It is not that Christ wants us to be evermore childish, to live in a Peter Pan afterlife of infinite immaturity. It is that Christ wants us to go back, so that we can grow again better. This, at any rate, might be Lewis's posthumous reply to Coveney's point.

Crom! Reading great slabs of italicised font is hard going, though, isn’t it? .

[2011] It’s Lewis’s fantasy, and he can do what he likes, of course (I can go further: the fact that so many scores of millions of people have bought his fantasy suggests that he was in tune with very widespread views). But I always used to wonder—what does Aslan eat? In this world the animals are all of them more than sentient: they are intelligent. They have, in a word, souls. Eating beings with souls is called cannibalism. Is that what we’re dealing with here? It moves our thought in a rather startling direction; because, I suppose, the answer to the question what does God eat? is liable to be—us. The good shepherd looks after his flock, of course; but he doesn’t do so just for the sake of it. On the contrary; he does it because the sheep are valuable comestibles. The good shepherd enjoys roast lamb as much as any of us.

[2014] Several comments on the original post pointed out that Lewis addresses this matter of eating in the later Narnia books. Lots of Narnian animals can't speak; it's legitimate to hunt and eat them. Bad news for Helen Keller, but also (not to be sarcastic) for the conceptual gnarliness that gives the first book its distinctive potency. So I still think my point here holds, to a degree. Viz: ...]

[2011] You might feel that this is to miss the point of the book, and I might (almost) agree with you—Lewis’s worldbuilding is not predicated upon a logic of internal consistency. To ask ‘what does Aslan eat?’ is no more to unpick the world described in the novel than to wonder, as I do above, how a fundamentally medieval world supports a trade in tea or the manufacture of umbrellas. To be a little more precise: as the series goes on, Lewis becomes patently more concerned with internal consistency: the Narnia of Prince Caspian or The Horse and his Boy is much less interpenetrated by marks of bourgeois prosperity, and The Magician’s Nephew goes so far as to explain away the most egregiously anachronistic feature of Lewis’s medievalised realm, the cast-iron lamp-post. But by doing so the books lose something, too; a sense of the way fantasy exists not as a locus of radical otherness, but on the contrary as a holey-space that precisely intersects our world of middle-class comforts, restrictions and anxieties. Tolkien does something similar in Lord of the Rings, except that he separates out his bourgeois eighteenth-century hobbits geographically from his medieval Gondorians and tenth-century Rohan riders. Lewis, by jumbling it all in together, Cair Paravel next to the department store that Mr Tumnus has just visited, makes a bolder imaginative alloy,

My real criticism of this novel relates to a different matter. It is that it ends just when it is getting interesting. The Pevensie kids become the kings and queens of Narnia: King Peter the Magnificent, Queen Susan the Gentle, King Edmund the Just and Queen Lucy the Valiant. They grow to adulthood in this world, until, many years later, they chance upon the lamppost again, and tumble back into our world, no longer adults, now children. Only a few hours have passed on Earth, for all the year (decades?) they spent in Narnia. Then Lewis stops; but this is where the story starts, surely—what would it be like to have an adult consciousness inside the body of a child? To have passed through puberty, and then suddenly to have the hormone tap switched off? You could hardly go back to you former existence; but neither could you expect to live as an adult. Would you go mad, or use your beyond-your-seeming-years wisdom to some purpose? How would you cope? Would you try to explain? Would you betray yourself, and reveal the Narnia portal to the world—would governments attempt to exploit it? The psychological interest in the story begins at the end; but that's exactly the place where Lewis drops the bar down and ends things. Grrr!

[2014]: Yes, rather unfair point to end on: to twit Lewis for not writing a book he never set out to write in the first place. So instead let me mention something else; or more specifically quote someone else. Susan Ang [in Victor Watson (ed), The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English (CUP 2001), 150-1] notes how like Edith Nesbit Lewis's children's writing is, The Magician's Nephew most especially. But there are differences: 'David Holbrook has criticised the inherent sadism, the infliction of pain, that is permitted within the [Narnia] series, and also the fear which the works are capable of evoking. The visit of the Babylonian Queen to London in Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet (1906) is treated comically, and the magic that (temporarily) transforms London is benign. The episode is “reworked” in The Magician’s Nephew, when the Witch-Empress Jadis follows Digory and Polly to London; but the scenes that follow are anything but humorous; they are in fact violent and frightening. The witch throws Aunt Letty across the room; later she wrenches the top off a lamp post which she uses as a weapon. This is rough magic compared to that which operates in Nesbit’s fiction … ' There's something in that , I think. Ang thinks its Lewis's way of saying 'there's a cosmic war going on you know, between Good and Evil, and we mustn't trivialise that.' Which may be right. But I wonder if, again, the way to read this isn't, actually, to do so in terms of childhood. Precisely because they don't really understand what violence entails, kids are often play-violent. See also this old post of mine on Christianity, Maturity and Bombs.

January Style Masterclass: Chapman Pincher, Not With A Bang (1965); Philip Kirk, Chinese Roulette (1984).

I had no idea that Pincher wrote SF. I did read one of his fourth man, fifth man, nineteenth-man, whatever it was factual spy books, which argued that Harold Wilson was a mole or something. I chanced upon Not With A Bang in a selection of books for sale at 10p a go on a shelf in a sports centre (where my son was attending a 6-year-old friend's trampoline party) and read it out of curiosity. The west develop immortality drugs, and perennial youth puts various strains on marriages and society as a whole. But then the evil Soviets poison our eternally young with nuclear radiation, causing them to turn into wizened gnomes. These poor souls commit mass suicide by walking into the sea from the beach, with the as-yet-untreated young standing by screaming in horror. But it all ends well, as the Chinese invade Russia and the two nations rather arbitrarily destroy one another leaving the world free for capitalism. And then there's the prose. The prose!

For a zoologist, a profession which tends to recruit the plainer girls, Shirley was outstandingly attractive. [9]

Like many scientists, only about a quarter of his wakened time could have been spent in the presence of any wife. [14]

The terror of impotent old age manifested itself in a mushrooming of Darby and Joan. [97]

The dead men’s shoes remained filled by agile feet. [131]

He watched her drift out of earshot, her bottom, which had a life of its own, giving her dress a delightful motion. [146]

[At the aforementioned seaside mass-suicide] On the shore, some of the young watchers screamed out hysterically, pressing their clenched fists to their faces, as they had done so often under happier circumstances. [243]

Which brings us to:

‘Somebody had perfected the ultimate weapon! Butler’s mission: search and destroy!’ This title wins the month's ... well I was going to say 'Bad Sex Award', but actually it's more like the 'Surreal and Bafflingly Described Sex Award':

Butler pumped hard now and felt himself getting crazy. Somebody had stuffed eight pigeons up his ass and he felt like he was going to explode. The pigeons flew through his penis and he bit his lip as they flew out the tip. He hung onto her shoulders for support and she fell back against the mirror on the wall, her eyes rolling in her head, because the pigeons had flown into her egg roll and were flapping their wings around in there. [38]

I especially like the specificity of that 'eight'.

Award Season 2014

If you're a BSFA member, go nominate your pick of last year's best SF/Fantasy. If you've registered for Loncon 14, toddle off to post your nominations for the 2014 Hugo Awards and the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer, as well as for the 1939 Retro-Hugo Awards. The more people get involved, the greater the wisdom-of-crowds wisdom that can be brought to bear on the matter. Awards are, at their best, a symptom of the genre's rude health, of reader engagement and celebration, belweathers of the best in today's writing. My advice would be: think about it; google around; mull over what you have read but just as importantly use the time (not to mention, the preternaturally clear-headed energy you are currently experiencing thanks to that successfully executed New Year's Resolution to stop the drinking) to sample as widely as you can amongst the stuff you haven't yet read. I wouldn't be so impertinent as to tell you what to nominate: you're perfectly capable of making up your own mind, of course. The most I would do is prompt you not to ignore the kind of work that gets pushed to the edges by the marketing juggernauts, most especially writing by women, by writers of colour, writers who work in languages other than English, and above all work by that most oppressed and put-upon minority group -- writers compelled to grow enormous neckbeards in an attempt to stem the crippling self-esteem collapse caused by their male-pattern baldness.

Not that last one, obviously.

So, yes, I know: there isn't a way I can make that perfectly sane point without sounding condescending, or smugly PC. It's worth making, though. I take it as axiomatic that the only reason to nominate a book, story or film is the merit of the book, story or film itself. Vote for the text not the author, and most especially not for how efficiently ubiquitizing the author's publicity machine has proved. I also take it as axiomatic that the best writers are just statistically really really unlikely to be found all in one white, male, western demographic. Beyond that, and I think not incompatible with it, is my belief that one of the strengths of SF/F is its diversity, the fact that it is centrally about the engagement with otherness. Not everybody sees genre that way, of course; but it's how I see it, and why I write it.

Which brings me to: self-pimpage. Award season is also the start of the 'for your consideration' blogposts, in which writers large and small draw potential voters' attention to all the things they have published during the relevant period and try, with varying degrees of success, to find endearing or witty ways of making VOTE FOR QUIMBY sound less self-serving than it actually is. I used to find all that blather annoying and vulgar. Nowadays I find it more directly loathly, because it seems to me directly and negatively distorting of the award shortlists that follow. Like cigarette advertising, people wouldn't do it if it didn't work; and like cigarette advertising (though with less specifically health-harmful consequences for social morbidity) it shouldnta oughta be alloweda work. Awards should reward the best books, stories and films, not the authors with the biggest megaphones or largest body of loyal minions.

SF Awards have, as a rule, much to recommend them; but they have two big flaws. One is the loyalty implied in the descriptor 'fan', in which a shitty work by an author of whom (or a shitty episode of a show of which) one is a fan gets your vote because that's what being a fan means -- it means sticking with your team. Ditto: voting for an author rather than voting for a text. Here the niceness or popularity of a given author may overshadow the merits of the books said author has actually produced. We can all think of examples of this sort of thing on recent awards shortlists without needing to get personal by citing specifics *coughs*HUGOS*coughs*. There's no shame in being a fan; I'm a fan myself. But the sports analogy is misleading. Awards are not about asserting your fan-loyalty, but about celebrating the disinterested endeavour after artistic perfection, the best that has been said and thought in the world.

The second flaw is the way people often vote for what is shiny and directly in front of their faces, not necessarily because they are idiots, but perhaps because their time is short, they want to be involved in the process but don't want to bother researching the full gamut of possibles, because they don't care all that much, or a hundred other explanations. It means that works can get onto shortlists not because they are necessarily very good, but merely because that have been dangled directly in front of people, by (a) expensive marketing campaigns, hype, or being on the gogglebox, or (b) the aggressive self-promotion of energetic authors strenuously seeking to maximize their online profile. I'm not suggesting that (what we might call) ordinary self-promotion, something of which I am myself often guilty, is to be deplored. Ordinary self-promotion projects the writer into the realm of commercial argy-bargy. That's about sales. Awards self-pimpage uses the same tools in an idiom that is not about sales, but merit (or should be: or else we might as well do away with award shortlists and just give our prizes to the year's best-sellers).

There are various defences offered by self-pimpers, One is: hey it's just a public service, making it easier for fans to see what their options are when it comes to voting. What this actually says to me is: 'making it easier for the guy with the loudest megaphone to shoehorn his way onto the shortlists'. Two is more anxious-sounding: everybody else is doing it, if I don't do it I'll be overlooked. Specious logic, I think, precisely because everybody else is not doing it. It's a structurally insecure piece of reasoning; on a par with 'hey, everybody else is fiddling their taxes' and 'hey, everybody else is stealing office supplies'. It tacitly concedes that awards-pimping is not really desirable behaviour, but thinks that the problem can be addressed by universalising it: if everybody else pimped their work at awards time it would level the playing field. An equivalence is if nobody pimped their work at awards time it would not only level the playing field but do so, but more fairly and with less effort all round. We can't outlaw it, but we can delegitimise it, by frowning upon it and refusing to nominate works so touted. Imagine if the only people allowed to recommend works for award nomination were the people who hadn't actually written those works! It's easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky and so on and so forth. I'm not especially enamoured of the third option, a kind of compromise where Author A pimps his/her (by and large it's his) eligible titles, and then leaves the comments-thread open for others to nominate other people. I'll confess I find that just jarring. The first part of the strategy tugs wheedlingly at your lapel like Muttley desperate for medals; the second part has a seigneurial 'see how graciously I permit the lower orders a few small parps on my megaphone' aspect to it.

So I won't pimp my stuff for awards. The cynical amongst you might note that this leaves me with a face-saving counter-factual for when I'm not shortlisted for any Hugos: I can say 'well, who knows what might have happened if I played the self-pimpage game! Of course, I'm above such vulgarity ...' Whereas if I self-pimped and still didn't get nominated I'd be forced back on uncomfortable reflections concerning the inadequacies of my work, or my public personality, or both. And this is, actually, exactly the preening foppish tone I adopt when I do talk to myself, although I repudiate your cynicism nonetheless. I'm perfectly well-aware that self-pimping or not self-pimping will have exactly the same effect as far as me getting any Hugo noms goes. This fact, of course, makes it easier than it might otherwise be for me to abjure pimpage. For others, those with a real shot, it may not be so easy. I understand that.

Still, though I won't self-pimp, I will pimp for others: not (as I said above) to tell you what you nominate, but to lay out various worthy possibles. I'll recommend the Strange Horizon reviewers' best of 2013 list, for starters: lots of good things there. Usually I contribute a piece to it myself; I didn't this year because The Guardian got to me first: here's the round-up I wrote for them. All worth thinking about, I'd say. There are a few things that I didn't put on that list, either because at the time of drafting it I hadn't got around to reading them, or for more lamentable reasons. Into the first category I would add Kate Atkinson's Life After Life (which recently picked up the Costa award), Steve Baxter's Proxima. In the second category I would add Ian Sales's The Eye With Which The Universe Behold Itself and Peter Higgins' Wolfhound Century, both of which I read as advance copies in 2012 and which my brain refused to allot to the proper publication year; and Tom Pollock's The Glass Republic, even better than his series' excellent first instalment, The City's Son. I can't remember why I didn't include it in the Guardian list. Perhaps because my brain is made of cheese. Several of these writers are friends of mine, though; so you need to take these recs with a pinch of salt. For non-fiction I'd recommend Ytasha L Womack's Afrofuturism, Aris Mousoutzanis and Nick Hubble's The Science Fiction Handbook (though I have an essay in this collection, so my recommendation is a little tainted), Justin Landon & Jared Shurin's Speculative Fiction and (ITMA!) Shurin's excellent series of Gemmell Award reviews.