The wood of Sam Leith’s title sounds paradoxically and suitably welcoming. Are not the forests of fairy tale, romance, and children’s writing, Brocéliande, Arden, the Forest Sauvage, Mirkwood and Lothlórien, the Wood Between the Worlds, right down to the scarcely ever actually if always expressly Forbidden Forest of Hogwarts, all sites of dual nature, chilling and warming, louring and tempting? And what is the experience of losing and finding one’s way in any children’s book worth the night-light if not a thoroughly benign haunting? Leith does not lark around with the dark road and the lantern. There is caution, sobriety, yet underlying confidence in the care with which he sets out his terms for the “indescribably vast” quest ahead. He demarcates his remit around British childhood’s “distinct tradition,” but that is not to say that literary tariffs are to descend untimely. We are to set sail in a private boat from a well-stocked, generous, and cosmopolitan bedroom.
Leith’s genial litotic prose allows him to function as the ideal game-raising tutor. Who could resent encountering the Soviet theorist Vladimir Propp, on the face of it a little alarming while on the highway to Narnia, in the company of a sympathetic preceptor who admits him to be “comically dry”? Thus mollified, we follow Propp’s actual arguments and are all the readier to surrender to a punchline featuring Shrek. This deft juxtaposition of learned allusion and popular callback is at times reminiscent of a more inevitably known export of the Spectator and other places. But here the cocktail’s proportions are quite different, the emphasis on the actual flavor rather than the mixologist’s performative flair.
After a couple of more strictly architectural chapters encompassing Apuleius, Rousseau, and (necessarily enough) the Brothers Grimm, we alight in the dubious glades of the post-Romantic nineteenth century. Leith’s powers are crescent on Lewis Carroll; his identity of Alice in Wonderland’s author with its White Knight is a delightful, only retrospectively obvious breakthrough. Leith takes at polite face value the Norman French motto Honi soit qui mal y pense, scribbled on Carroll’s, or Charles Dodgson’s, secret envelope of risqué photographs, without bringing the Countess of Salisbury or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into it. Passing to Charles Kingsley, with whom Dodgson had it seems much in common in talent, milieu, and peculiarity, Leith settles on a favorite and significant, if today rather ubiquitous, theme, that of scientific and literary interplay. Like Michael Taylor, author of Impossible Monsters, Leith notes both Kingsley’s friendly interest in Darwin and his parallel vein of satire towards “a science that leaves no room for enchantment.”
When we arrive at Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Leith sets in motion his study’s most constant pendulum, between fantasy and realism. If it is tempting for a moment to imagine the author as “the vulnerable and bookish new boy,” Leith is in fact very good at schools and their stories in a way that implies a crucially well-remembered and tolerably enjoyable intellectual life within them. He must be the last critic to know the correct pronunciation of Angela Brazil’s surname (a treat I will not spoil), strikingly reveals a minor exponent of the genre to be “the most prolific author in human history,” and catches marvelously specific echoes of Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle’s matchless Molesworth series in Harry Potter.
Leith’s conscientious command of history, both literary and social, its chronology and its aesthetic and philosophical eddies, leads him to the surprising mixed bag of the late nineteenth century, including Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson. Though Kipling was younger and much longer lived, scarcely more than a decade separates Treasure Island from The Jungle Book. Yet it is deceptively easy to conceive of Stevenson as essentially a Romantic, even a holdover from the end of the eighteenth century, and Kipling as a fin de siècle survivor into the twentieth. This second assessment is better moored; Leith reminds us that Kipling’s literary career continued to the brink of the Second World War. His unfailing ear classifies Kipling’s jungle as “a ruly place”; Leith ventures (in one of his occasional but coherent deviations into politics) that “it is easy to imagine what Kipling would have made of Nigel Farage.” Maybe, though the late Javier Marías found in several Brexiteers an ambiguously authentic love affair with their own Englishness, one that the Anglo-Indian Kipling surely shared.
Leith describes Treasure Island as a “jolt of electricity.” Despite, or more likely because of, its lowly origins in the children’s serial Young Folks, the novel came with mythomaniac launching power to equal Sir Walter Scott’s, birthing “the whole peg-leg, avast-me-hearties shebang.” Its taut literary structure and allusive preoccupations land up in Leith’s butterfly net: This is a “story shadowed by the idea of stories,” Shakespearean in timbre, calling The Tempest and Othello from the vasty deep. This, Leith concludes, is a tale “quite uninterested in moralising,” animated in particular by its antihero Long John Silver’s “amoral charm.” If Silver is Satan, he is a Miltonic one. Silver’s portrayal is, though, interestingly in tune with the by now banal prevailing tendency of children’s fiction to sympathize with the dragon (and of course the princess) over the knight, on class and/or gender grounds. The old rogue’s hard-earned private fortune is entrusted to his common-law wife of color at Bristol when he goes a-voyaging undercover as the ship’s cook; while Squire Trelawney is not just a central casting patrician booby but almost certainly a slaver into the bargain. Perhaps one should think here of Dr. Johnson and the ancient, even defining alliance between high Tory romance and what became the 1619 Project.
Continuing by sea we find ourselves aboard that lastingly curious work Moonfleet, where Leith surpasses himself. Here is more Eng Lit reception, a “baptism into the Gothic tradition,” along with another wholesome dose of the metatextual, as the young hero’s “head is full, among other things, of the Arabian Nights.” Our Virgil pinpoints the awkward conjunction of the “implausibly pat ending” with the central theme of the “irreversible, unforgiving march of time,” a combination resembling the notoriously unquiet resolution of Wuthering Heights. Elsewhere a deft deployer of the brief life, Leith does not mention the extraordinary biographical trajectory of Moonfleet’s author, John Meade Falkner, pedagogue by profession, arms dealer by marriage, in which I surmise one key, at least, to his story’s discordant qualities might be found.
As his Wood begins with fairy tales, so Leith continues to track them through evolving thickets. He stands aside to comment on the sheer oddity of our society’s tendency, taken at face value, to meld infant and predator—“very nappies . . . festooned with long-lashed crocodiles”—and so shows us into the front hall of Miss Beatrix Potter. Hers, however, was an earlier, implicitly more honest attitude, “interested in animals as animals” (it might be added, in prose as prose—Sir Steven Runciman always claimed to have modeled his style on hers). The baroque elaboration of this process is found in Black Beauty. Leith recalls the experience of reading it with fond irreverence, “like clopping along a country lane with an equine Sunday-school teacher,” but simultaneously displays a sort of mingled outrage at and prostration before the author’s “literary chutzpah”: “Take it from me, writes Anna Sewell—I’m a horse.”
“Children’s stories,” unlike well-trained horses, Leith observes, “tend to resist doing what they’re told.” With that observation in mind, we watch him follow his literary map while making occasional detours into the untidy historical terrain around the edges of the reading. At times we find him making isolated, unexpected landings on social developments—for example, the introduction in 1908 of a legal drinking age of five years—and observing the larger comings and goings of the zeitgeist: “the last Calvinist cobwebs of the moralising tradition,” “the public delirium of joy” that lent Lord Fauntleroy his aureole. If stories and people may not be obedient, Leith intimates, it’s worth watching where and why they stray.
After a dash through the life and works of Fauntleroy’s demiurge Frances Hodgson Burnett, Leith entirely surrenders to the complex Bohemian drama of Edith Nesbit, whose memoir articulates one of what will end up as Leith’s recurrent, definitive precepts: that children “cannot be understood by imagination, by observation, nor even by love . . . only . . . by memory.” Nesbit apparently prayed as a child “fervently, tearfully, that when I should be grown up I might never forget what I thought and felt and suffered.” The principle is established—unfettered access to one’s own earliest past is what makes for communicating viscerally with children. Besides this hungry, insistent knowing, Christianity, morality, empathy, affection, and sentiment (that ruthlessly dismissed “even love”) are as nothing.
This strain of cruel sharpness seems in Leith the dominant one in Peter Pan, which was, he notes, already a much retold myth well within J. M. Barrie’s lifetime. It is a fable, he summarizes with an intoxicating whiff of Fitzgerald, not of childhood innocence “but childhood carelessness.” Leith’s allusion-hunting comes good again in his survey of the career of Captain James Hook, which overlapped with the chief pirate of Treasure Island’s own internal past, Captain Flint (more recently the chief ornament of his own T.V. series, Black Sails). We see the gladiatorial power Barrie appears to hand to his young readership—“Let us now kill a pirate.” Death, if “barely available to the imagination” in childhood, is all the readier to be press-ganged. The poet Claire Pollard in her own book on children’s literature, Fierce Bad Rabbits, notices that the safest, most comprehensible form of dying or killing to children is eating and being eaten, but Peter Pan glitters with harder hearts even than the crocodile’s.
Leith is fond of the word “swerve”—the signature, endited by Stephen Greenblatt, of new historicism, which in Leith harmoniously melds with Seventies-style close reading. He now pulls off another such swerve with immense style, back to innocence again by water, with Kenneth Grahame and The Wind in the Willows. As Grahame himself put it, his anthropomorphism’s purpose was quite instrumental, “using the animal, to get away at once from weary sex . . . & other problems, & just do jolly things without being suspected of preaching or teaching.” Grahame (like Nesbit) had much adult “weariness” to evade, and by Leith’s judgement the riverbank did not effect a valid baptism. Exploratively rather than insistently, The Wind in the Willows is set beside certain contemporary therapeutic readings, so that Toad is not just “a little warty Falstaff” but a study in addiction, possibly modeled on Grahame’s father: Rat helps Mole “(if you like) to own his feelings.” Of course you may not like, but the experiment seems reasonable enough and far from incompatible with more canonically rooted, aesthetically driven interpretations. It had not occurred to me that, like Joyce, Grahame included episodes “whimsically patterned on The Odyssey,” including an inversion of the Lotus-Eaters. And Leith acknowledges—how could he not—the novel’s “intensely conservative world.” (THE LAMP’s own outing of Badger as an anciently bred recusant seems, for example, far from disproven.)
Larkin provides Leith with his Edwardian section title, “Never Such Innocence Again,” so the fall is to be found in the Great War: this history of (mostly) British childhood reading thus becoming near-identical, at this point as at others, with the history of Britain herself. Leith permits himself a quick and moving entrance in conversation with his distinguished Telegraph colleague Bill (W. F.) Deedes, who diagnoses the post-war trauma and grief of Evelyn Waugh’s and his own generation. This makes sense of Hugh Lofting’s freshly didactic Doctor Dolittle, the incarnation of a humanely intended, if I think basically misconceived, anti-chivalric scheme: “[War] is still bloody, but you don’t gallop. . . . Since that kind of battlefield has gone, that kind of book—for children—should go too.”
This protective, negative literary pacifism was yet to be implicitly and triumphantly overturned by two grief-stricken, irenic First World War veterans, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, the second of whom (without Lofting’s Dolittle, as far as I know, in mind) also explicitly rebuts it: “I think it possible that by confining your child to blameless stories of child life in which nothing alarming ever happens, you would fail to banish the terrors, and would succeed in banishing all that can ennoble them.” A. A. Milne also falls, for me, into this understandably but multiply bloodless category. Leith finds a passage by Geoffrey Grigson intending to joust against it in serviceable refutation; I found it rather brilliantly lingered. Children, Grigson says, find Milne “nauseating, and fascinating . . . poems by a parent for other parents, and for vice-parental nannies,” busy “with a war to forget, a social (and literary) revolution to ignore, a childhood to recover.”
Fate would associate Milne in unfriendly fashion with an even more potently prelapsarian writer, P. G. Wodehouse, one of whose persecutors Milne became after Wodehouse’s unfortunate captive effusions on German radio. And is there perhaps a touch of Milne in the syrupy cadences of the saucer-eyed Madeline Bassett? Wodehouse is not present in Leith’s Wood on his own behalf, presenting as he does a tricky anomaly, an ageless land designed for the childish entertainment of adults, if equally enjoyable for even mildly precocious children.
After zipping through the “never more than workmanlike” Biggles, Leith gamely confides to us an early example of his critical antennae in his passion for Nancy Drew: “I was besotted with the plucky, red-haired girl detective. I would have no truck with The Hardy Boys, which I considered an inferior literary product.” In bitter maturity he would learn both the series were spawned by the same writing syndicate. In a manner that is subtly, daringly artistic and elitist, Leith associates this mechanical, capitalistic, intensive form of writing as industry with the emergence of Enid Blyton. For if The Haunted Wood is compared to a conventional British social history, Blyton is cast in a (slightly early) Mrs. Thatcher–like role: all-conquering, unignorable, and a uniquely acceptable locus for value judgements. Yet unlike the University of Oxford, Leith is not unthinkingly snobbish here. He has nothing against the hardy formula or the Stakhanovite turnover in itself. Witness his happy appreciation of the three hundred ninety-five short stories and sole novel that (I learn) constitute Richmal Crompton’s William Brown corpus. Always a literary genealogist without equal, Leith sees in William the first ancestor of Dennis the Menace (hanging on to this day, in a sadly dilute form, as the star player of Britain’s oldest weekly comic, the Beano). William is “a final rebuke to the late-Victorian ideal,” “not so much naughty . . . as borderline criminal.” Crompton’s stylish, knowing prose and comic gift for exactitude of dialogue is precisely anatomized—see, for example, the despairing veteran upper servant’s unanswerable statement: “It’s all boys ever do—eatin’ an destroyin’ of their clothes.” Leith chronicles Crompton’s almost Narnian manipulation of her timeline while later noticing, not really critically, the “slapdash” details of her universe. These, too, might be fairly likened to those of C. S. Lewis, and set against the obsessively thorough background craft of Tolkien or for that matter (Leith’s own point of comparison) J. K. Rowling.
From William’s real if loveable delinquency we float (Leith’s Wood sometimes seems more of a Venetian lagoon) to Arthur Ransome’s pushback against a malevolent universe. The heartlessly permissive words of the offstage father in Swallows and Amazons (“BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON’T DROWN”), gleefully translated by his children as “Yes!,” brings to mind the celebrated telegram by Captain Simon Raven to his indigent wife, “Sorry no money suggest eat baby,” sent shortly before a threatened court-martial over a gambling debt. Ransome, in Leith’s tricolon “weak, prickly, and unhappy,” disappointed a father and two wives; what could be more fitting than his gift to England, as Ian Jack has it, of “its jolliest idea of Utopia”? Far from coincidentally, Ransome almost certainly betrayed that England to Russia for a protracted period.
Mary Poppins is arraigned irrefutably for the crime of gaslighting—invented contemporaneously by Patrick Hamilton—and we get a glorious two-parter of P. L. Travers, her fittingly heterodox creator, haranguing the struggling and earthbound Uncle Walt, whose motion pictures throughout this work provide Leith’s keen lance with quintains. It should be better known, I think, that Tolkien and Lewis once went to see Snow White in Oxford, with characteristic, revealing reactions. Tolkien’s violently allergic response coalesced as the doughty dwarf archetype still prevalent in modern fantasy; Lewis sort of enjoyed himself, and the film found its way not just into Narnia but also his literary criticism.
Perhaps Leith’s single most controversial excision is The Lord of the Rings: “it both belongs, and it doesn’t”; it is, he says, “more likely to be found on the student than the nursery bookshelf.” This rash decision seems to stalk Leith, who later comments that a battered childhood copy of Tolkien’s saga was one of the few personal possessions that accompanied J. K. Rowling through her Portuguese wilderness period. Like Narnia, The Lord of the Rings can theoretically be discovered in adulthood with rewarding enough results, but it surely fulfills its primary purpose as part of the formation of a bookish child. Indeed, the trilogy—often later, oedipally cast aside—has become perhaps the most outstanding marker of the future writer. It even features, for instance, as an icon of literary adolescence in Sylvia Waugh’s wonderfully disturbing novel about living dolls, The Mennyms (a less surprising if still regrettable omission from Leith’s panorama). Finally, The Lord of the Rings, as Leith is evidently all too aware, perfectly illustrates his dominant preoccupations of influence and historical context. It is so very clearly one of the many great Second World War trilogies—of a piece not only with Evelyn Waugh’s three wartime novels, Olivia Manning’s brace, the three volumes of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time that actually cover the war, but with T. H. White’s Once and Future King (a tetralogy, but one whose final part is unfinished, post-war and qualitatively wan), to which Leith gives full justice.
At least The Hobbit, “squarely a children’s book,” need not duck the lintel (if only Peter Jackson had understood this structural and thematic reality). Leith astutely recognizes it as a product of the Thirties (a famous letter exists in which Tolkien courteously eviscerates the anti-Semitic impertinences of his German publisher). Some passages of The Hobbit were rewritten after the war to bring them tonally as well as narratively into line with its vast younger sibling, especially those dwelling on the nature of the Ring and its worst-affected owner, Gollum. Re-reading a Seventies edition, I was recently struck by a clear parallel between the lowered spiritual state of Bilbo, living invisibly with the Ring on stealing from the wood elves, and the debased life of Gollum, surviving on the sneak murder and semi-cannibalism of goblins, both of them in subterranean realms. I haven’t yet checked whether this eerie mirror is so obvious in the cheerier first edition.
In any case, Leith’s wider perspective allows for some skillful catches further afield, such as Tolkien’s clear debt to Wind in the Windows. Most importantly, Leith’s knowledge and love of the great tradition allows him to chart this slight-seeming novel’s considerable aesthetic voyage; whether its increasingly “graver accents” and “ornate registers” (“Dain dealt his treasure well”), or a “straight lift from Beowulf” (supporting Leith’s general contention that sheer originality is an optional ingredient in great children’s writing). Like almost all heroic settings, that of The Hobbit is autumnal; the wizard Gandalf comments on its scarcity of warriors and heroes. Though not perhaps yet fully developed as the work’s divine messenger, Gandalf also appears to provide the story with its moral by his reminder that its titular hobbit “is marked out for no special providence,” which Leith takes to be a definition of adulthood—its acceptance of non-heroism and non-centrality. This elegant-sounding lesson is of course completely overturned in The Lord of the Rings (and even more so in the deep cut of Unfinished Tales, wherein Gandalf personally confides exactly how pivotal to everything Bilbo in fact was).
In effect, Leith’s personal canon forces White’s Once and Future King to stand in for The Lord of the Rings, a task to which it is, in its very different manner, entirely equal. Certainly of these two capacious wartime tapestries White’s is the more Leithian. One senses in Leith’s enthusiastic enumeration of White’s virtues an endearing (and proper) reverence: “Rich and eccentric . . . worldly, witty, wise, joyous, mournful, serious and flippant.” Of this catalogue three adjectives, and their accompanying paradoxes, neither apply to, nor would have attracted, Tolkien—“worldly,” “witty,” or “flippant.” Tolkien was regarded even by Oxford dons as pretty heavy going, while White was an undergraduate blagger and star at Cambridge, a popular schoolmaster and chaotic aesthete whose biographer was not Humphrey Carpenter but Sylvia Townsend Warner.
White absorbed and transmuted modernity (in the form of Freud, for example) rather than standing, Beorhtnoth-like, in its path; and he was far more ludic than Tolkien in his use of his predecessors. At Cambridge White won one of those poetically disgraceful laurels that spangle British academic history, for an essay on Malory he had written before reading the Morte D’Arthur. But his subsequent love of the knight-prisoner was sincere and passionate, and he ended by making of his major source a minor character (the pageboy “Tom of Newbold Revel”). A more recent forerunner, the Kipling of Puck of Pook’s Hill, also gets archly press-ganged. A line from “Puck’s Song,” “Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye,” excerpted in one of White’s epigraphs, refers in Kipling to “grammar” in the archaic sense, identical with “glamour” or magic. White transposes (or, just possibly, misunderstands?) Gramarye, which becomes an ancient name of Britain itself. Like Crompton and Lewis, and unlike Tolkien and Rowling, he is relaxed and unsystematic about time and background: his story is set “in the twelfth century, or whenever it was,” as “we care very little for exact dates.”
Leith shrewdly remarks that The Once and Future King “doesn’t look much like a children’s book at all”; and he might have added that in most ways it both looks and reads far less like one than does The Lord of the Rings. White himself is quotable as ever on this quandary: “It seems impossible to determine whether it is for grown-ups or children. It is more or less a kind of wish fulfilment of things I should have liked to have happened to me when I was a boy.” Was it something about the war that induced this blurring of categories? Among White’s most articulate and distinguished followers was Ursula K. Le Guin, whose writing materialized long after in Second World War, during the cultural conflicts of the Sixties and Seventies. She would come actively to resist her relegation, as she saw it, to the children’s literature department:
A recognized tradition . . . of fantastic tales and hero stories, which comes down to us like a great river from sources high in the mountains of Myth—a confluence of folk and fairy tale, classical epic, medieval and Renaissance and Eastern romance, romantic ballad, Victorian imaginative tale, and twentieth-century books of adventure such as T. H. White’s Arthurian cycle and Tolkien’s great book. Most of this marvelous flood of literature was written for adults, but modernist literary ideology shunted it all to children . . . [who] could and did swim in it happily as in their native element, at least until some teacher or professor told them they had to come out.
Le Guin, qua theorist on this subject the most quotable of them all, is the writer under discussion who comes closest to hijacking or overwhelming Leith’s usual serenity. This passage encapsulates the marmoreal strengths and venial flaws of her most lasting work—its idealism, its generosity, its aesthetic power and moral charisma, all packaged with a certain defensive pomposity and a humorlessness that makes Tolkien seem like, well, White. And in her combination of social radicalism and literary reaction, Le Guin was, though White’s votary, in some ways his opposite (a Leithesque grappling hook thrown to the similarly contrasting Bob Dylan and Joan Baez suddenly asserts itself). What would poor Geoffrey Grigson, with his sadly neglected, mutually associated social and literary revolutions, make of this strange declivity?
The towering figure of C. S. Lewis benevolently oversees the wide domain between Tolkien and White. Lewis was a better, more definite children’s writer than Tolkien, possessed of greater charm of style, and a rangier, more glistening critic (as well as, what he considered increasingly indivisible from all the rest, an astonishing popular theologian). He was decidedly Tolkien’s inferior as a poet or a philologist, all-consuming talents as these are, less suited to Lewis’s irrepressible generalism. Put instead beside White, Lewis oddly presents more obvious affinities than differences, whether in his intense sadomasochism or his capacity to laugh at himself and to whirl off immortal jokes about the world, books, and everything in either. If Lewis was, like Tolkien, trying to hold the beach of Maldon against the future, Leith yet draws attention to his simultaneous interest in science fiction, physics, space, and what in general he would probably have thought of as natural philosophy. Though a stern ultra against Darwin a century too late, Lewis quietly beat Roland Barthes to the Death of the Author conceit—what he called denouncing the Personal Heresy—by some years. Perhaps the best documented of all the figures in Leith’s gallery, in the exquisite field of criticism of children’s literature Lewis has recently benefited from Katherine Langrish’s personal and penetrating book From Spare Oom to War Drobe. There is, as Leith says, “no getting around Narnia.”
There sounds that just faintly grudging note. Why should anyone want to get around it, and is it really children or adults seeking so to do? Two of the most prominent later writers to respond to Narnia, Rowan Williams and Sir Philip Pullman, came to it as adults. Williams, as good on Narnia as he is on anything, is nonetheless lacking in that redoubled yield, described by Langrish in her book, analyzed by Leith in his, of the child and then the adolescent and adult re-reader (Lewis himself was one of the greatest exegetes of the pleasure of re-reading). Sir Philip is patently limited by how and why he found the wardrobe, for reasons Leith is basically too courtly to pursue. While gesturing in all the requisite directions—“Christian arm-twisting,” “heavy-handed” Calormenes “coded as Arab Muslims,” the “serious charge . . . of misogyny”—Leith finally writes of Aslan, the emphatic heart and (not altogether) monotheistic deity of the Narnia books, that “Lewis seems to me entirely successful.” His verdict on what Lewis is trying to do—“something rather different from, and more interesting than, offering an allegory of the Christian story”—actually exemplifies his own technique: an imaginative and conceptual amplitude disguised as unpretentious avoidance of exactitude. We find a lot of somethings in Leith, most of them feelingly eloquent ones.
Geography briefly captures the tiller from history as a Scandinavian detour—Tove Jansson, Astrid Lindgren—leads to that ferocious Gallo-Norseman Roald Dahl. It is in handling Dahl that Leith bravely emerges as a writer and father with time for “the Idiot Box” or “one-eyed childminder.” The morality ditty by which the Oompa Loompas condemn Mike Teavee simply “isn’t a very good song,” Leith says. “Dahl was wrong.” The relationship between television and children’s literature is, as Facebook used to say, “complicated” rather than “simply antagonistic.” T.V. has not routed reading, any more than video games, “the moral panic of our own day” and Leith’s self-confessed vice of choice, have seen off T.V. “In the 18th century fairy stories caused the same anxieties as T.V. in the 20th. . . . Children’s books have always existed, where they get the chance, in more than one medium, and spilled between them.” This is all quite persuasive and, to this bibliolatrous, paranoid, screen-averse father of a seven-year-old, reassuring; but I hesitated when Leith invoked in his argument’s defense the wholly capitalistic development from “own brand Space Lego to Star Wars.” Surely our humanistic author can see that this is an objectively less artistic direction of travel, invading the generic void where the imagination should expand in peace, mentally as much smaller as, say, Blyton is than Crompton?
Fogeys young and old thus disconcerted, Leith momentarily beholds yet more dizzying horizons—“role-playing games . . . choose-your-own-adventure books,” an “ecosystem” that is “roomy” enough for “potentially endless diversity”—before recovering in the not unfitting company of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper, bards of the mysteriously quotidian. Leith connects Garner to the heyday of the grammar school system, an educated writer conscious of alienation from the beloved grandfather, “an unlettered blacksmith,” who had bequeathed him his best material. A vaguely Yoda-esque snippet of early Garner (“We have not time for gossip: come”) is perhaps unfairly memorable, and, not having got on with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen or even the apparently more refined Owl Service, for the present I accept on trust Leith’s judgement that Garner eventually reached a style “closer kin to Browning’s Childe Roland than to The Hobbit,” if not conceding that this is necessarily in and of itself a good thing.
The Garner/Cooper “palimpsest in which magical and mundane share space” clearly anticipates in slightly different ways two later heavy hitters, Rowling and Pullman; but before they are invoked it is time for another “swerve” back to realism. I found Leith’s juxtaposition of Malorie Blackman and Jacqueline Wilson, neither of whom I have previously read, especially germane to the workings of the Wood. They are brought in together on honest grounds of social justice, relating respectively to race and class (pace the truism about America and Britain, both writers are British and employ in their different ways an explicitly British setting). Blackman as Leith sees her is, in terms of the famous Isaiah Berlin dichotomy, a hedgehog rather than a fox, and the length to which he quotes her is not to her benefit. Wilson, on the other hand, is shown to contain wide realms of nuance and sophistication: “Poignantly the reader knows that [Wilson’s narrator] only half believes her own lies.” Unlike any of the other authors here discussed, Wilson deliberately pitched even her memoir at children without compromising the delicacy of her material or the lucidity of her style. From Nesbit to Wilson, it seems to be such munificence with early memory that marks out, for Leith, a children’s writer of authentic, timeless power. It is a test that J. K. Rowling, like Jacqueline Wilson, also notably sails through: “I remember vividly what it felt like to be eleven and every age up to twenty.”
“The present, for literary historians, is a moving target,” but every canon needs at least a temporary close, and Leith selects J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman as his most “unignorable” titans of the turn of the millennium, a final, parting “swerve towards high fantasy.” These writers, “as eagerly consumed by adults as children” in a continuation of the Tolkien/White/Le Guin conundrum that seems particular to fantasy, addressed a specific cohort of children as their first readers, including this reviewer: “the last generation . . . to be born before the internet.”
Leith charts Rowling’s emergence within a framing, if predominantly factual, fairy tale, “part Cinderella, part Bluebeard.” Her twilit wood was a train in Manchester, where (somewhat proleptically) she found herself overcome by “the basic idea of a boy who didn’t know who he was,” a beginning she sheltered from the violent Portuguese journalist to whom she had become suddenly married, showing a certain amount of physical and mental endurance and tactical resourcefulness worthy of her characters. The Harry Potter series is rightly described by Leith as the “natural terminus” of “a Whig History of children’s books,” though his felicitous use of the conditional suggests this is not what Leith intends to have or believes he has written. Nevertheless, Rowling supports Leith’s unassertive but constant theses in her relative indifference to the virtue of originality, her willingness to “swim in the great torrent” of the tradition hymned by Le Guin (who for her part recognized Hogwarts, with some asperity, as a variation on her own school of magic in the Earthsea Quartet).
Leith touches with regret and fairmindedness on Rowling’s more recent trials (witch trials, in her words), partly proceeding, he avers, from the subjection of her work to “almost theological scrutiny.” Though sympathetic to her plight as a hate figure over the transgender debate to many of the children she once freed into the latitude of the written word, he is too good a critic to miss its dramatic irony: that Rowling instilled, and then has suffered from, “a sorting-hat view of human nature.” This is not so far off from the attitude of Pullman, who has not paid a similar price for it. In respectful and proportionate language, Leith tells the story of Pullman’s fervidly seventeenth-century Puritan treatment of Lewis, including Rowan Williams’s slyly Anglican retort that Pullman’s Dark Materials are in fact “a tribute” to the Narnia stories, proving that there is “enough imaginative bounce and energy in them to demand a serious response.”
Pullman, like a more substantial spiritual combatant, William Empson, comes across not as a true atheist but as a committed antitheist, all too convinced of and preoccupied by the Almighty’s malign reality, “fully and consciously signed up to the Devil’s party . . . in service of a stridently moral liberal worldview.” Indeed, having killed off both a senile, formerly supreme deity and his fascistic regent in his third volume, Pullman now seems to be struggling to repeat the process in his trilogy of further sequels. As applied less to God or Narnia than to a surely already long past dream of childhood, Leith finds his an honorable program: “an assault on the nature of children’s literature [when it] seeks to fetishise childhood innocence, set childhood in amber, portray growing up as a tragic fall from grace.”
Leith’s own achievement is easy to live with and hard to leave. Perhaps it was so for him too, for he supplies it with a couple of envois: one on picture books, in which we sight him interviewing the late Judith Kerr and being told that The Tiger Who Came to Tea is about a tiger who comes to tea, and one mulling over the survival prospects of all of the above, and so, logically, of reading itself. His longue durée gaze enables him dispassionately to report that the apparently proximate, dire collapse of literacy within a sheltered, monied, cultivated minority represents not a dystopian future but a drastic return to the past, “what started out as a luxury activity for the children of middle-class parents.” He wonders whether he has composed not a Whig History but a massive obituary for children’s literature: “I hope and believe not.” Yet his characterization of new media as “super sticky” beyond the point of being medically “addictive” rings true, and I am not wholly with him, or even quite sure that he himself is, when he insists that video games are “weak where ink and paper storytelling is strongest.” Has he never have tried Planescape: Torment?
A little Panglossianism notwithstanding (perhaps it’s necessary to get a literary editor up in the morning), Leith’s instincts are as unerring as his inventory of childhood treasure is hefty, and he departs only after a few more choice epigrams of lasting wisdom: “Children just need to know pleasure is available and how to access it,” a process which “requires a will” and “won’t just happen. We, their elders, are a sorry pack of Tartuffes, “distracted by the constant bleating of smartphones” who “need to enter worlds of books with our children.” Indeed. Though Leith’s great forest is probably most likely to enchant the already chronic among the ink-addled, whether among parents or mere ex-children, it will encourage many, accompanied or not, to rejoice in both familiar and fresh thickets.
