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| Vol. 2, Issue 09 September 2010 |
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Books |
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Essay |
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Into the Enchanted Forest and up the Faraway Tree
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| Why is there a corner of the Indian Heart that is forever Enid Blyton? |
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By AMY ROSENBERG
Published : 1 March 2010 |
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AM ADVANI BOOKSELLERS sits in the heart of Hazratganj, an upscale shopping district in Lucknow, India. The store opened in 1947, just a few months before Partition, when Ram Advani fled Lahore, in the newly forming Pakistan, and set up shop in his new (old) country. In a city known at the time for its devotion to highbrow culture, aristocratic pleasures, |
and courtly manners, the place quickly became a destination and meeting point for the intellectual crowd, and Advani, now 88 and still running the business, acquired a reputation as an erudite host, known particularly for hand-picking recommendations for his customers based on long discussions with them.
Advani’s son, Rukun, who spent much of his childhood in the store, remembers the refinement and polish of the place, the neat rows of books, and the near-constant flow of learned patrons seeking to converse with his father. What he recalls most, however, is the single shelf in the children’s section that prominently displayed the work of the British children’s author Enid Blyton. “I was all of eight and a half years old in 1964, when I took The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage off the shelf,” says Rukun, who now runs Permanent Black, a well-known publishing house in Delhi. “I hadn’t read anything as good as that book before, ever, so I was hooked and read everything else by Blyton that I could lay my hands on for the next three or so years.”
At the time, Blyton’s books were just starting to become widely available in India, though Ram Advani recalls having seen stray copies in the 1940s and 50s. “I stocked these books,” Advani says, “because there was a demand, and it was taken for granted that a store like mine, which kept only books in the English language, would have the whole lot of the Enid Blyton series on hand. I confess I never read them.”
British children had been devouring Blyton’s work since the early 1920s. A poll recently conducted by one of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious literary prizes, the Costa Book Awards, identified Blyton—who produced more than 700 books and 5,000 short stories during her 45-year career—as Britain’s most beloved writer of all time, ranking her above Jane Austen (fourth), William Shakespeare (fifth), and Charles Dickens (sixth). (Two other children’s writers, Roald Dahl and JK Rowling, ranked second and third, respectively.) Judging by sales figures alone, Blyton is adored not just by Britain, but by the entire world. Her books still sell more than eight million copies a year worldwide, for a running total of over 600 million copies sold. She’s the fifth most translated author in the world (behind Shakespeare and before Lenin).
What that means, of course, is that the majority of the kids reading Blyton in the second half of the 20th century were not British. In fact, most of them were the children of former British subjects. Life, for many of them, was something vastly different from the life Blyton portrayed, one in which childhood was a fun, glorious, liberated, comfortable, empowered experience. In his essay The Lost Childhood, published in 1947—the same year Ram Advani moved to Lucknow, Partition began the end of the British Empire, and Blyton published no fewer than 21 novels—Graham Greene wrote: “In childhood, all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and, like the fortune-teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water, they influence the future.” For many of Blyton’s young readers in places far away from the author’s home in the southwest corner of England, her books created a future, forging in them a passion for narrative, for written suspense, for words; shaping early ambitions and providing models; and planting the seeds for complicated literary relationships with the West.
Her books, as you probably know (unless you grew up in the United States, where Blyton remains puzzlingly obscure), typically feature groups of four or five children, often accompanied by a preternaturally smart and much-cherished pet, who find adventure and suspense, overcome obstacles, and generally have a jolly good time in ancient castles, on the Channel Islands, on ships, at boarding school, on mountaintops, by the sea. Her most popular volumes belong to series—some with as few as three books, some with as many as 33—in which recurring characters repeatedly engage in exploits that follow a formula established in the inaugural volume. There’s The Famous Five (21 books), for example, in which four kids and a dog get together when school’s out and set about becoming entangled in a mystery—not to be confused with The Five Find-Outers (15 books), in which five kids and a dog meet up on school holidays and become entangled in a mystery.
Other series place less emphasis on suspense and more on relationships among children, such as the St Clare’s and Malory Towers books, set at girls’ boarding schools. Some feature fantastic worlds, like The Faraway Tree series, about three children who climb to the top of a tree, where they find strange lands full of wizards and fairies, goblins and trolls. All of Blyton’s books have one key element in common: their child protagonists are free from adult interference. Though mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles appear, they’re usually too bookish and distracted (fathers and uncles) or too overworked and tired (mothers and aunts) to pay much attention to what their charges are doing. In addition, almost all of Blyton’s books share a foundation in an idealised English childhood. Though some of her protagonists experience difficulty in their lives (mild poverty, parents long dead, peevish guardians), their stories have happy endings (treasure is found and restored to its rightful owners, usually the children’s families; parents thought to have been killed in plane crashes turn out merely to have been stranded on deserted islands), and their days are filled with carefree picnics in the woods, holiday feasts, school competitions, visits from fun-loving cousins. Blyton’s children are so happy that their eyes are constantly described as “shining.” In other words, though her protagonists often find themselves in challenging, potentially dangerous situations, they generally lead safe, fulfilling, structured existences, where there’s plenty of food, a place to call home, and the general benevolence and care of grown-ups. | | | |
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