Fierce Bad Rabbits,
NAKUL KRISHNA Fierce Bad Rabbits By Clare Pollard Fig Tree £14.99
Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise
By Katherine Rundell Bloomsbury £5
Clare Pollard’s Fierce Bad Rabbits is, as its subtitle says, about The Tales Behind Children’s Picture Books.
Despite the large type in which it is set, it isn’t intended for the hands of the child readers of Goodnight Moon and The Tiger Who Came to Tea. For one thing, it has very few pictures. It’s likelier to be aimed at those exhausted but intrigued readers-aloud who’ve long had an inkling that there’s something intelligent to be said about how these books work and how their effects persist into adulthood. I have friends with doctorates who still shudder with terror and ecstasy at the memory of The Elephant and the Bad Baby by Elfrida Vipont.
As with fairy tales, even when a far-fetched explanation is held up for
derision, the very thought of it darkens the experience. I’m not sure I’m better off for hearing that Judith Kerr’s teaguzzling tiger might really be a child’s fantasy to explain why her gin-soaked mother’s kitchen cupboards are always empty. Or, worse, that the tiger is supposed, as Michael Rosen suggests, to evoke the Gestapo – ‘dangerous people who come to your house and take people away’. Pollard isn’t convinced enough to say, as Kerr did, that ‘sometimes a tiger is just a tiger’: if he were, he wouldn’t be drinking tea. As she rightly says, ‘Tigers in stories are never just tigers. They are human inventions, puppeted by human longings.’
Pollard moves briskly from book to book, drawing on strands of scholarship and criticism where she can find them. C S Lewis and G K Chesterton are
frequently quoted, as is Marina Warner’s work on fairy tales.
But on the whole, Pollard seems to be working from scratch. She’s probably right to say there isn’t much criticism of picture books to be found beyond bland parental reviews. Parents, she finds, seriously underestimate the cognitive faculties of the average toddler. They treat picture books as an acceptable alternative to the opium they used to give bawling babies to keep them distracted or quiet.
Pollard takes her subject matter very seriously, insisting that picture books ‘are teaching our children how they should be’. She is shocked by the classic books’ reliance on images of dehumanised non-white people, and ambivalent about the ways the books encourage us to think about animals.
I’m not sure her many insights add up to the systematic treatment the book sometimes promises. The transitions feel undermotivated and the passages of autobiographical revelation are awkwardly integrated into those of history and criticism. The thing feels on the whole like an anthology of suggestive fragments. I hope it ends up inspiring more, and more extended, treatments of a subject for whose gravity she makes a persuasive case – not least perhaps a treatment from Pollard herself, who gives the impression of having more of worth to say than she has managed to say here.
I’m less sure who Katherine Rundell’s book is for. ‘Book’ isn’t really the right word for Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise. Hardback essay is more like it. It belongs in a medium-sized stocking, coupled with something more substantial – perhaps something from Rundell’s growing corpus of children’s books, for which her essay serves as an apologia. (I can warmly recommend The Wolf Wilder and have The Explorer packed away for my holiday.)
I suspect her essay is unlikely to persuade anyone already set against its main thesis. Martin Amis, asked if he might write a children’s book, replied, ‘If I had a serious brain injury.’
The ‘should’ in the title would work better as a ‘may’. Rundell’s arguments, like those of theologians, won’t convert the hostile. They may provide reassurance and insight to those for whom these books have until now been a guilty, or merely nostalgic, pleasure.
Adults, she says, want many of the things children do – ‘autonomy, peril, justice, food’ – and a few others: ‘acknowledgements of fear, love, failure; of the rat that lives within the human heart’.
She aims, she says, ‘to put down in as few words as I can the things that I most urgently and desperately want children to know and adults to remember’.
I suspect Rundell is trying, as Wordsworth put it, to create the taste by which she is to be enjoyed, while attempting a daring Arthur Ransomelike rescue of her childhood pleasures from the enormous condescension of maturity.
C S Lewis’s remark, quoted in Pollard’s book, comes to mind: he didn’t stop liking lemon squash once he learnt to like hock. ‘I have been enriched: where I formerly had only one pleasure, now I have two.’
If Rundell is right, the two pleasures are really one and the same.