Ambitions
Mary Kenny
In choosing a book for a young child, one should never be nervous or squeamish. Indeed, the whole problem with modern versions of traditional stories for children, as Bruno Bettelheim has remarked in The Uses of Enchantment, is that they tend to water down the fear and horror that these fairy tales were designed to project. I have in my possession a version of Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood, published by Collins in 1973, which omit vital elements of each story; Snow White leaves out both the incident of the poisoned comb and the details of the sticky end to which the Wicked Queen came (dancing on red-hot bricks until her feet fell off); Little Red Riding Hood has a very anodyne old wolf, who does not eat the grandmother but merely sends her scurrying, and does not wish to cat Red Riding Hood either (the fear of being eaten is essential to this fable), but merely covets her basket of food, and suffers nothing worse than exile from that part of the forest for his audacity. The neutralising of fairy tales like this is to be compared to the bowdlerisation of Shakespeare: you must not remove the guts of a great legend which has successfully represented the collective unconscious of generations of children. It is interesting, therefore, to see a new version of Three Little pigs by Rodney feppe (Kestrel £3.50) in which the fears, insecurity and general discomfort of all the participants in the story are souped-up, not cooled-down; in which the wolf comes to a graphically horrible liquidation and no feelings are spared all round. A mother who read it to her three-and-a-half year old Shuddered at the bald, grim savagery of it all, but the three-and-a-half year old, a gentle little boy, was thrilled with it and has requested the story every bedtime for two Weeks. The mother said that she herself Would never have chosen this book. She Would have thought it much too nasty for a tender-hearted little boy; but the little boy Chose it himself over several other books and has derived real pleasure from it. . In the same league comes a new version of Jorinda and form gel by Jacob and Wilhelm. Grimm, illustrated by Paula Schmidt , (Dent £3.95), (Those who baulk, , Incidentally, at the price of children s books, should compare them to the price of ,O.'ner toys; in the world of television advertisements £15.95 is considered a common Place price for some breakable plaything for the Kiddies Xmas). I had never read i "nritida and form gel before, but I found it enthralling, and it is most successful. with the five to six-year-old _grout/. Is, of CF`urse, terrifying, while loaded with allusion and symbolism. `There was once an old castle deep in the middle of a dark and gloomy wood. It was said that an ancient crone — a witch — lived there, on her own. During the day she changed into an owl or sometimes a cat, but at night she became an old woman again.' The witch's hobby is collecting beautiful young girls and turning them into nightingales imprisoned in cages. `Now there was once a young girl called Jorinda. She was beautiful, and Joringel, a shepherd boy, loved her dearly.'
Needless to say, the witch captures Jorinda and turns her into a nightingale, and in order to rescue her, Joringel has to pass through a dark night of the soul, a difficult quest which involves finding a blood-red flower with a pearl at the centre, and a struggle to overcome the diabolic powers of the witch. True to the prOvenance of the story, Paula Schmidt's illustrations smack rather of German expressionism; this style of illustration is not entirely to the taste of the children on whom the story was tested, but it does convey the mood of fearful forests and dark powers well. Of course, children also have domestic tastes, and they like stories about ordinary life too. My experience with small children is that when they are told fables or fairystories, they like the full treatment; but when they are told ordinary stories of everyday life, they like characters with whom they identify just like adults listening to The Archers. I should think that any little girl could identify with Claire's SecretAmbition (Macmillan £3.95) by Charlotte Firmin, the author of another delightful tale about the child of pop-stars, Hannah's Great Decision. Claire's Secret Ambition is to become a vet, while her mother wants her to become a movie star. This is a shrewd piece of casting, as I am told that every little girl in the country wants to be a vet these days: it has something to do with the television series, All Creatures Great and Small from James Herriot's books, which for some reason appeals more to little girls than to little boys.
Two other books which pleased my own children in the domestic genre are Toby, by Nicholas Ward (Kestrel £3.50) and In the Bin, by Ruth Jennings, illustrated by Nicholas Brennan (Kestrel £3.50). Toby is simply about a little boy who likes to play make-believe all over his own home: the kitchen is a cookhouse of a galleon on the high seas, the cupboard below the stairs is a coalmine, the staircase is the north face of a steep mountain and so On. It is gratifying to learn, even in the age of television, that children can still be immensely stimulated by simple ideas based on imaginative fancy. If you know a child of seven or eight who is quite sophisticated in his reading and conceptual ideas, then Isaac Bashevis Singer's Mazel and Shlimazel, or The Milk of a Lioness, with pictures by Margot Zemach (Cape £3.95) would make a good Present. It is a 'magical romance' about the battle of wits between Maze], the good spirit wranditinSghlisimbtifully aezaeui , the bad spirit. Singer's clear mid I find the unambiguous moral vigour beneath his narrative very satisfying. When Singer was given the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, he gave some of the reasons why he enjoyed writing for children. These included; 'Children read books, not reviews .. . Children have no use for psychology and they detest sociology. They love interesting stories, not commentary, guides, or footnotes. They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation and other such obsolete stuff.'
Previous page
