Stories to transport housebound kids
The heroines of literature might just be the respite children need, writes James Antoniou.
Amid the boredom and frustration facing housebound children right now, the heroines of literature might well offer respite. Inspired by characters such as Anne Shirley or Mary Lennox – either in book form or on screen – small, secret gardens of imagination can emerge from the chaos.
Mary Lennox, from The Secret Garden, was due to come to us in a new film adaptation before Covid-19 closed cinemas (an excellent, earlier 1993 version is available to rent via YouTube).
It’s a strange coincidence that Frances Hodgson Burnett’s enchanting 1911 book also begins with an epidemic – an outbreak of cholera in India.
After her unkind parents die of the infection, the sour, 10-year-old Mary is sent to Yorkshire to live with her reclusive uncle at his moorland manor house.
There, she discovers a walled garden, which slowly helps her to overcome her bitterness and heal her wounds. With her friend Dickon she uncovers the secrets of her family and learns of life’s wonder for the first time.
It may be one of the greatest and best-loved children’s books ever written. With its tenderly realised characters and poetic descriptions of natural beauty, the book offers ‘‘magic’’ of the kind that the writer Eden Phillpotts was talking about when he wrote that ‘‘the world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper’’.
From Alice to Dorothy, Heidi to Lucy Pevensie, writers have been crafting inquisitive, sparky, adventurous girl heroes for more than a century who have guided young readers through the wonderful and frightening terrain of childhood.
Now, with the novelistic scope of long-form television, the most famous of these girls are more visible than ever.
One prominent heroine to make it to the small screen is Lyra from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (available to stream on Neon in New Zealand), adapted last year by the BBC and HBO.
She is the quick-witted and plucky protagonist who lives in an Oxford of a parallel world and is thrust into a high-stakes, multi-dimensional adventure featuring a steampunk-infused London, armoured bears, a tyrannical theocracy and ‘‘Dust’’, the elementary particles that are attracted to human consciousness and underpin the whole saga.
Pullman’s masterwork is an unwieldy one when it comes to adaptations, because in spite of its abundant imagination it does not fit entirely comfortably into the genre of fantasy.
Its avowed forebears being Milton and Blake, it has less in common with the likes of Tolkien and C S Lewis than many would imagine.
While it’s unlikely that any adaptation could improve on the books – which combine an unparalleled narrative tightness with an aesthetic splendour and metaphysical depth – this TV adaptation gets many things right. It’s rather chaste and gets off to a slow start, but the pace and excitement build quickly.
Dafne Keen as Lyra grows into the role, but in the end it’s Ruth Wilson as the brooding Mrs Coulter who steals the show. If they are in line with the books, the next two series promise to be even more ambitious and visually rich.
In the context of literary fiction in general, one thing Pullman reminds us of is that children’s literature for the past few decades has exhibited a much greater mastery of narrative than many ‘‘adult’’ writers around today.
Children, immune to pretension, will not tolerate a bad story – and Pullman’s storytelling is certainly among the grandest of a generation.
Those who believe in good old-fashioned narrative craft may not appreciate Greta Gerwig’s much-vaunted 2019 film adaptation of Little Women (now available to view on Lightbox, Sky Box Office and iTunes) quite so much. The original novel by Louisa May Alcott, serialised in 1868-69, is a mixture of 19th-century soap opera and bildungsroman, and follows the lives of the four March sisters from Massachusetts.
Unlike the novel, with its long and episodic plot, the film gambles on a coiling structure, jumping from scene to scene across years and continents.
It’s best to have read the novel – one confused 10-year-old sitting next to me in the cinema had to ask his mother ‘‘What just happened?’’ throughout.
The vignettes and post-modern wryness weren’t to everyone’s taste, but no one could deny it was visually sumptuous. And if Emma Watson and Timothee Chalamet seemed like awkward Millennials in 19th-century garb, that explains why it spoke to modern audiences so deeply.
A rather less stylish recent adaptation of a children’s book was CBC and Netflix’s Anne with anE (2017-19), based on the Canadian classic Anne of Green Gables by L M Montgomery.
The book is delightful, and follows the redhaired orphan Anne Shirley (played here by Amybeth McNulty) as she moves in with the elderly siblings Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert at their home on Prince Edward Island.
Anne is a loquacious and intense character whose imaginative soliloquies sometimes take up whole pages of the book, surging over the narrator.
If one of literature’s main duties is to dig up the emotional truths that have been buried by the messiness of real life, the novel succeeds on a grand scale, painting a complex picture of the bond between the extroverted Anne and her shy and relatively inarticulate carers.
It’s also a very funny book, largely leaving Anne’s past as subtext; her romantic and fanciful nature, which leads to some wonderful misadventures, is clearly a life-affirming defence against the brutality of her earlier circumstances.
It has been adapted many times before, particularly in Canada, and Anne with an E tries to distinguish itself by interpolating grim flashbacks to Anne’s traumatic past. That’s a world away from Montgomery’s vision of Anne, with all her spontaneity and joy.
In this sense, it’s rather like Return to Oz, that 1985 sequel to The Wizard of Oz that was so dark it gave countless children nightmares.
In the end, Anne with an E was cancelled after the third series, but it does at least remind us what a gem the novel is, and the fresh air of Anne’s Avonlea may help to ease the worst effects of quarantine-induced cabin fever today.