Real thrills
Francis King Until the eighteenth century, children tended to be regarded as adults in miniature. Then gradually they were segregated, as almost another species, with the creation of special children's clothes, the writing of special children's books, the devising of special children's amusements and a belief in a special kind of children's 'innocence'. That gap has now again narrowed—largely, n° doubt, because sexual knowledge and sexual experience are achieved with increasing precocity year by year. Children are once more becoming adults in miniature; and children's books, as this selection demonstrates, are becoming adults' books in Miniature.
All these six books are written with a high clegret of professionalism; and all can be assigned to the same kinds of categories as adult novels. Geoffrey Household, for example, is well known as the deviser of highly ingenious and exciting thrillers, such as °glie Male and Watcher in the Shadows. ,c-wape into Daylight (Bodley Head £2.50), nis tale of how a girl and a boy are kidnapped and threatened with death if a ransn'M is not paid and of how, after many vt icissitudes, they manage to escape from heir prison and their sinister captors, is not a.1.1 that different in its essentials from one of °is books for adults. As in them, there is a certain lack of subtlety in his delineation of character; and, as in them, this is amply mpensated by the way in which he makes ',Ile reader feel that he is himself participating in each adventure in turn. James Watson's The Freedom Tree (Gollancz £3.00) an account of how a teenage boy, his father having already died in the Spanish Civil War, joins the Republican cause, slots easily into the category of the adult political adventure story, full of vivid writing but a little ingenuous in its goodiebaddie handling of the issues between the two sides. Prefaced with quotations from John Cornford and Dolores lbarruri ('La Pasionaria'), this is the work of an enthusiastic partisan rather than of a sober historian and probably the better for it.
In Geraldine Kaye's Penny Black (Heinemann £2.10) we have the teenage version of the adult novel, usually a feminine writer's first, about a young girl's discovery of the world and herself. The tone is perky and chatty and the major part of each page is taken up with dialogue. Penny and her chum Sandra are bright but unintellectual (Sandra refers to 'Wordsworth and his pathetic whatsit' and Penny has never heard of Serbo-Croat). Their worst expletive seems to be 'flipping heck'—from which it can be seen that they are really thoroughly nice girls, even if they do sometimes get up to tricks.
The equivalent of the adult war-memoir can be found in Hans Peter Richter's The Times of the Young Soldiers (Kestrel £2.50) —an often moving account, third volume of a trilogy, of the youthful narrator's experiences in the German Army during the Second World War. The boy-officer loses an arm after being wounded at the Front ; then he is involved in the long, dispirited retreat before the final surrender. The book is often extremely grim and would probably not have been regarded as suitable for the young twenty years ago. It relentlessly illustrates its epigraph from Erasmus—Dulce bellum inexpertis Mar is pleasing to those who do not have any experience of it'). Its pacifism is the more powerful for being implicit in the text.
J. M. Scott has written a number of excellent books about exploration for adults. In A Journey of Many Sleeps (Chatto and Windus £2.50) he has produced for children just such an epic of endurance as has always fascinated him. An aeroplane crashes in the snow-covered wastes of arctic Canada and its four passengers, three Americans and an Eskimo boy, must somehow survive against all the odds. The hero is, of course, Martluk, the Eskimo, who after many adventures finds himself at the isolated hut of a trapper. The trapper, somewhat improbably, has a small library consisting of 'some titles which suggested science or philosophy, Shakespeare and Robert Burns, and a few classics sach as Gibbon's Roman Empire. No novels.' Obviously a sensible man.
Peter Dickinson's The Blue Hawk (Gollancz £2.95) falls into the category of the kind of 'own-world' book which one associates with Rider Haggard in the past and Tolkien and Richard Adams in our own times. It is a haunted and haunting book, full of mysterious rituals, implacable Gods, exacting initiations and arduous questing. It is the most remarkable of the books under review and the one most likely to achieve the status of children's 'classic'. But I wonder whether, like so many children's 'classics' from Alice in Wonderland to Swallows and Amazons, it may not be the kind of children's book that only adults can fully appreciate.
The average level of imagination, craftsmanship and readability achieved by these six writers is far higher than that achieved by a similar group of adult novels; and the same holds true, as a general rule, for a group of thrillers or detective stories. I suspect that the reason for this is that the modern 'serious' novelist has tended to move from E. M. Forster's 'Oh dear, the novel tells a story' to 'Oh dear no, the novel should not tell a story' and so neglects the development of a strong narrative technique. But children, like the readers of detective stories and thrillers, insist not merely that a story should be told but that it should be told well. There must be no loose ends; the climaxes must be skilfully orchestrated; and 'And then .. .' must lead on to another 'And then . . .' with no slackening of tension. In their different ways all these writers possess what Trollope called 'the elbowgrease of the mind'—the novelist's capacity to 'make himself sure of his situations, of his characters, of his effects, so that when the time comes for hitting the nail he may know where to hit it on the head'.
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