Children's books are drowning in a sea of contemporary ideology
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The psychologist Bruno Bettelheim knew what made a good children’s book. “It must stimulate his imagination,” he said in his essay The Uses of Enchantment, “help him to develop his intellect and clarify his emotions, be attuned to his anxieties and aspirations.”
What you want from a child’s book is an overpowering desire to find out what happens next.
Photo: Peter Rae
So what did Bettelheim recommend? Fairy tales, that’s what. Unexpurgated, bloody, gory, preferably by the brothers Grimm. It’s hard to imagine what he would make of contemporary children’s books, though I think I can guess. Geraldine McCaughrean, who has just won the Clipp Carnegie Medal, used her acceptance speech to lay into the publishing industry for its prescriptive approach to writing for children.
“With a book that’s going to be sold into schools you get a list of things that are unacceptable – no witches, no demons, no alcohol, no death, no religion,” she said. “It really does cut down what you can write about.” I’ll say. That’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe done for, just for starters. And I wouldn’t put money on The Arabian Nights getting published now either – that’s full of djinns.
Publishers, says McCaughrean, have a downer too on tricky words, especially in younger fiction. If she’s right, this goes a long way to explaining the inanity of an awful lot of children’s books.
I review children’s books, from tinies up to young adult, and I can tell you what was in the latest batch this morning: a story about a gay teenager recovering from his father’s suicide; a picture book about environmental love; a story about girls doing Stem (science, technology, maths and engineering) described as “near future feminism”; and a feminist retelling of Beowulf.
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