Not for infants

TOM HUTCHINSON

The God Beneath the Sea Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen (Longmans Young Books 35s) The House on the Brink John Gordon (Hutchinson Junior Books 18s) Good-Night, Prof, Love John Rowe Townsend (Oxford University Press 18s) No self-respecting child over the age of ten, with any spirit and imagination, would want to read this review. 'Children's Books' are not for him or her. Anything specifically geared to what are supposed to be the inclinations of his (or her) age group should automatically be despised : a marketing need of publishers to curb reading appetites into publicity-assailable compartments.

The day of the over-ten locust can and does encompass the Beano and Leslie Charteris, Honey and Charles Dickens, Garth and Ray Bradbury. It is a devouring greed for things above and below what adults might think its literary duty. And quite right, too!

Discrimination is not a vital instinct in the young, nor should it be. We have to try to know everything in general before we can assess what we want in particular. It is not only the old who can be made to feel their age ...

Which is why it seems to me that the three best books for older children from among the annual irruption of 'juvenile fare' (are they only given books at Christmas?) could have been written for any age-group, including adults. Although two of them include youthful heroes and heroines as a necessary lever of plot they all turn upon an axis of intent that spins ideas way out of those compartments labelled Young Books or Junior Books.

The Gad Beneath the Sea by Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen is a collaborative attempt by two distinguished writers to establish a new version of the Greek myths. They have bulldozed through the stories, so long land-locked for the young in school-book cosiness, to reveal an ocean of frightening violence and seminal poetry. Once embarked upon these seas monstrous imagining's loom upon us.

The Titans spawned of Chaos beget the Gods who fashion Man. The artist-god Hephaestus is cast from Olympus, clambers back—linking us to our present Christian ethic—only to fall again because of pride and the tyranny of Zeus. Names such as Zeus, Prometheus, Sisyphus, Persephone resound again, this time with the clangour of immediacy; warning bell-buoys of the rocks within ourselves.

There are so many couplings you feel they could only be properly contained within an Ark, but the narrative-voyage is handled with dramatic, and comic, awareness of the epic voyage into our creative origins. It is a remarkable book for any reader and should evoke a response from anyone clogged within the classics, wanting to see the poetry afresh.

The illustrations by Charles Keeping are totems of potency, so alien and yet so recognisable as ourselves, that they—as indeed does the book—make us grateful for the landfall of an eventual humanity.

After the red raw meat of myth, the introverted theme of John Gordon's The House on the Brink might seem bleached by comparison. But it has a wan magic of its own; the story of something nasty in the Fenland and of the love that dispels the evil trailed like slime into the lives of older people.

Mr Gordon is a powerful generator of terror, but I was mainly taken by the warm characterisation of his young hero and heroine. He traps so convincingly the prickly friendships, the bruised feeling of calf-love, the class distinctions imposed by adults but ignored by teenagers.

It is a subtle, disturbing book that should be read by candlelight.

The love story that is John Rowe Townsend's Good-night, Prof, Lore is as vivid and contemporary as strip-lighting, and a fascinating example of how few holds are barred in today's best writing for older children.

Seventeen-year-old Graham falls for a café-waitress very much out of class socially and sexually, runs away to marry, loses his virginity—and is then recaptured by smothering parents. His hope for the future is in the fact that the girl has made him see life whole and without illusion.

Amid the redbrick mores of their urban imprisonment, the two lovers try to do everything for the best, while the adults assume the worst. The result is a romance that touches reality as well as the heart, because the author does not seem to be cashing in on any particular- market of youth. He writes because he has a marvellous story to tell.

And he writes it, like all the best contemporary authors of books for children, with discrimination. The reader does not need that quality; the writer does.