The Child that Books Built

The toughest problem, when we write about children’s books, is to work out just what an individual reader makes of a book. We can ask the children, or we can look at our own reading histories: both are incredibly difficult to do.

And so it is good to see Spufford, Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1997, a book addict in his early thirties, doing the latter (I should point out that Mr Spufford is not exactly your average reader – he read The Lord of the Rings when he was eight ‘in three transported, mesmerised days’):

I have gone back and read again the sequence of books that carried me from babyhood to the age of nineteen, from the first fragmentary stories I remember to the science fiction I was reading on the brink of adulthood. As I re-read them, I tried to become again the reader I had been when I encountered each for the first time, wanting to know how my particular history…at that particular time, had ended up making me into the reader I am today.

 Does he deliver? Not surprisingly, not quite.

But he does campaign eloquently for the value of reading, sounding like Margaret Meek on something illegal:

…the words we take into ourselves help to shape us; they shift around the boundaries of the sayable inside us, and the related borders of what’s acceptable; their potent images, calling on more in us than the responses we will ourselves to have… They build and stretch and build again the chambers of the imagination.

 We also get pages of potted Piaget, Bettelheim in brief, reading theory in three pages, Shannon’s theory of redundancy in reading, and if you don’t know too much about these things, you won’t be wasting your time (although his breezy self-confidence might cause experts to mutter darkly). We get to know a lot about Spufford’s childhood, his family, his travels, even what sex is like for him. And then there are twenty fascinating pages on Wilder’s ‘Little House’ books, and a lucid account of C S Lewis’s theology – but, it seems, disappointingly little on the actual encounter of the child Spufford with books. And all of this in a style that veers from the elegant to the glutinous, while his ‘an aphorism in every paragraph’ policy can seem more like posing than wisdom.

And yet, when he does actually get to the books he is doing something really special. His impassioned advocacy of myths demonstrates his technique:

Roger Lancelyn Green’s retellings were useless, making all their highs and lows smoothly, mildly reasonable, as if the myths were schizophrenics and he was administering a massive dose of lithium…The God Beneath the Sea had pictures by Charles Keeping. He turned this world of savage impulses into line drawing so kinetic, so full of force, that they were on the verge of mania… We were on holiday in Greece, the heat and the smell of cloves worked their way into the stories, and my parents had just confirmed, in answer to a direct question, that my sister was going to die.

That extract shows, in short, just what the close examination of personal readings entails. We need to have a lot of detail about the person, the circumstance of reading; we need to expect a mixture of mature judgement and visceral reaction; we need to accept large chunks of ego – not only in the solipsistic young reader, but in the adult created by that reading. All these things are in Spufford’s book, and they are all (except the ‘mature judgement’) not what we have been trained to produce as critics. But it is vital that we tackle the challenge of individual meanings, and Spufford points the way.