The best books for children have no need of celebrity stardust
For a celebrity whose glittering career feels in need of a little extra lustre, a range of profile-boosting opportunities exists. A messy divorce, a well-publicised retreat to rehab or a stint in a reality show are sure to find our celeb trending on social media. Alternatively, stars hoping to raise the wattage of their twinkle can opt for the more wholesome option of writing a children’s book.
From early adopters, such as the Duchess of York (Little Red, Budgie the Helicopter) and Katie Price (Katie Price’s Perfect Ponies), to national treasures Miranda Hart, Clare Balding and George Galloway – all newly-fledged children’s authors – writing for children offers a return to a prelapsarian world of innocent imagination, simple pleasures, and the chance to earn a fabulous amount of money.
But the drab reality is that for every celebrity author who makes it big (David Walliams, with 11 million books sold to date) there are dozens who discover that writing for children is not child’s play. Unreadable and unloved, their charmless effusions are doomed to a dismal half-life on the charity shop bookshelf.
What is the mysterious quality that distinguishes a future classic of children’s literature from a dud? It isn’t just good writing: critics of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series moan endlessly about her workmanlike prose, while Enid Blyton’s leaden banalities, still so mysteriously captivating to children, are toxic to adults with fastidious literary tastes. Children are equally indifferent to modish social theory. The Thomas the Tank Engine television series may be undergoing an overhaul, designed to bring it into line with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals by introducing gender balance and a global perspective. But as with the various disastrous reinventions of Coca-cola over the years, I suspect that the Rev W Awdry’s original formula will remain the standard: perennially beloved by children and detested by adults for its inimitable tone of sturdy provincialism.
Philip Pullman, whose new novel La Belle Sauvage is published this week, has recently excoriated the “sickly nostalgia” of popular classics, including A A Milne’s Winnie-the-pooh,
E Nesbit’s The Railway Children and Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows. Here we stray into the debatable realm of which books are beloved by children and which are admired by adults. Twenty years ago, revisiting the books of my childhood in the hope that my young son would love them too, I was intrigued to find what had retained its charm and what seemed passé. Even as a child I was sceptical of Winnie the Pooh, inclining to Dorothy Parker’s brutal assessment of Milne’s saccharine sentimentality (“Tonstant Weader fwowed up”). But I was surprised to discover the pinchbeck meagreness of some of my favourites, including CS Lewis’s Narnia series.
The books that retained their magic combined elegant writing with an anarchic comic sensibility and a touch of melancholy: Beatrix Potter’s dark comedies, Phyllis Krasilovsky’s haunting account of growing older, The Very Little Girl; Babar the Elephant’s moral struggles, the tragicomic collisions with everyday life of Dorothy Edwards’s My Naughty Little Sister; Laura Ingalls Wilder’s accounts of a pioneering childhood in 19th-century America, and Noel Langley’s riotous Oriental mash-up, The Land of Green Ginger. None of them, oddly enough, was written by a celebrity.