Mind the gap

Anthony Browne is being blogged throughout his Children’s Laureateship.  I like his introductory words about  ‘a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words’ :

‘I hope to encourage more children to discover and love reading, but I want to focus particularly on the appreciation of picture books, and the reading of both pictures and words. Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader’s imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.‘

I’ve picked up a couple more links from the site – to a penetrating article by Sarah Crown on an interview with Browne which points to his ‘darkness’

Browne’s greatest strength is his willingness to let the darkness in. His work traces a line back through the threat and promise of Jan Pienkowski, Maurice Sendak and, ultimately, Lewis Carroll, marrying surrealist wit with real, honest-to-goodness menace in drawings in which kettles sprout ears, faces scream out of tangled branches and shadows bulge and slide and unpick themselves from their owners. It is the resultant atmosphere of ambiguity – the implication that nothing, not even what’s before our eyes, can be relied on – that lends his work such complex and enduring appeal

In the interview Browne also relates his father’s death, in front of his own 17 year-old eyes; and how he got bitten by a gorilla.

More cheerfully, the site includes a useful link to the Book Trust’s Big Picture website with its delicious illustrators’ gallery.

Anthony Browne interviewed

.. for the London Book Fair. He talks about his career, and the enjoyment, importance and vitality of picture books. See the video here.

Getting lost in the woods

You know how it is: you start thinking about something (Little Red Riding Hood, for instance) and suddenly it’s everywhere. There must be a word for that.

There have been innumerable re-tellings of LRRH, it seems. It’s no kindness to send you to this article (restricted access – but you can get there with your OU login) examining some Victorian versions – it’s very long, and unnecessary for TMA1. But there, I couldn’t resist it. Don’t go there! You could get lost for weeks…Anthony Browne’s Into the Forest on the other hand is wonderfully brief: new to me, and I was interested by the (sort of conflicting) Amazon.com reviews by the School Library Journal and the American Library Association. And their comments on Browne’s artistry might come in handy for Block 5 (Words and Pictures).

But what are fairy tales for? The wonderfully entitled ‘Breezes from Wonderland’ blog helpfully alluded to the Bettelheim (week 3) interpretation of fairy tales:

This week, in my course on the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, we read Bruno Bettelheim on the uses of enchantment and what he calls the “struggle for meaning.” Robert Darnton’s famous essay “Peasants Tell Tales” has the subtitle “The Meaning of Mother Goose.” The psychoanalyst and the historian provide competing models for constructing the “meaning” of fairy tales, with one arguing that children make psychological sense on their own of fairy tales, and the other making the case for the fairy tales as repositories of folk wisdom and programs for survival.

The posting is also picking up on another ‘competing model’ for the purpose of fairy tales: some psychologists’ research reported in The Guardian* that experience of the surreal sends our brains back to reality with a hunger to make sense of our surroundings.

On a much simpler level, I take  comfort in the idea that ‘reading for pleasure’ is suggested as  a predictor of success in life.

* Edit: also reported in the NY Times:

“We channel the feeling [of disorientation] into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”

Happy endings?

Anne Fine is reported in yesterday’s Times* as ‘[deploring the] ‘gritty realism’ of modern children’s books’:

In the Fifties, when a strong child was dealing with difficult circumstances, there was always a rescue at the end of the book and it was always a middle-class rescue.

The child would win a scholarship to Roedean or something, and go on to do very well. That was felt to be unrealistic and so there was a move away from that. Books for children became much more concerned with realism, or what we see as realism.

But where is the hope? How do we offer them hope within that? It may be that realism has gone too far in literature for children. I am not sure that we are opening doors for children who read these books, or helping them to develop their aspirations.

The article goes on, however :

Amanda Craig, who reviews children’s books for The Times, said…. that Fine was also capable of producing “utterly bleak” books such as Road of Bones, about a boy growing up in totalitarian Russia. The title of the book, which was shortlisted for a Carnegie Medal in 2007, refers to the bones of political dissidents who dared to oppose Stalin.

So just within the article there is evidence that Fine’s views are more nuanced than the reporting suggests. And a blogger who was also present at the Edinburgh book festival event where Anne Fine was speaking writes

I’m of the opinion that she spoke exactly those words that were quoted in the Times yesterday, but I didn’t feel then that she meant it quite as people are interpreting it. (Bookwitch)

Fine herself has written, on her website biography page:

I studied Politics and History at University, and the interest in political issues shows up in many of the books.

I don’t  believe that Fine’s views can be as simple as represented.

Mind you, I have An Interest. One of my favourite books is her Book of the Banshee (a breath of fresh air and sanity for anyone with teenage children). And I was thoroughly impressed by her when she turned up – years ago – at my tiny local library to give a talk.  She spoke eloquently and passionately to her packed audience for an hour, proving in so many ways her dedication to the public library service and to books for children.

I admit to warming to her particularly because – elegant as she certainly is – she started then by explaining “This is how I look without the makeup that those lovely publicity people at the publishers do for their ‘author photos’.”

* You might like to check out this article because it also quotes Melvin Burgess and Anthony Browne, authors on our set books list.