| Coming of Age in Children's Literature: Growth and Maturity in the Work of Philippa Pearce, Cynthia Voigt and Jan Mark (London and New York, Continuum, 2002 and 2003). ISBN 08264-7757-7 and Darkness Visible: Inside the world of Philip Pullman (Duxford, Cambridge, Wizard Books, 2003).ISBN 0-84046-482-8
Now and then reading a work of criticism produces the same pleasure that can be had from literature itself, so fine is the writing, so thought-provoking are the insights that the writers bring to their task. Margaret Meek and Victor Watson's Coming of Age in Children's Literature gives this pleasure; reading it, you are aware of being in the presence of those who are not only possessed of very considerable critical insight, but of a power with words which is far from common, in any literary discourse. Both Meek and Watson are critically acute, and as capable of thinking with Barthes and Derrida as they are with the earlier work of the New Critics. To add to this, they know their way around children's literature criticism, and the history of the children's book; equally importantly Meek, in particular, speaks with authority about the way children read, a relatively uncommon accomplishment. In Coming of Age in Children's Literature they discuss in detail the ways in which the work of Philippa Pearce, Jan Mark and Cynthia Voigt give an account of maturation, a theme notable for its focus on “reflection, epiphany and the symbolism of place” as Watson has it (6). Watson's introduction takes us from Defoe, in whose work, he argues, we see “the origins of children's fiction” (5) to the novels of Jane Gardam, J.D. Salinger and Aidan Chambers. The issue of maturation, as Watson sees it, is unavoidable in children's novels; both child reader and fictional child character are inevitably caught up in the processes of learning and development--unless, of course, this truth is actively denied, and child characters, and their readers, are left to languish in impossible neverlands. However, the three authors Meek and Watson have chosen to discuss in detail, “reflective and word-perfect writers…meticulous…with the inner and outer lives of their protagonists,” are exemplary in their attention to the necessities and difficulties of growing up (41). Meek's chapter on Pearce follows Watson's introduction. She begins with those books which can be read aloud, and her account of this reading, and of its value, is made simply: “the intellectual and emotional aspects of children's experience [of the world of adults via television and so on] …have been shown to derive coherence and a depth of understanding from the reading of fictive narratives” she says (45). To reading we can add listening: children who have others read to them become good listeners, and later, readers. Meek goes on to show how complex reading really is: “See how many things the reader is invited to notice almost at once,” Meek says, as she begins a close-reading of a paragraph from Pearce's story The Rope (47). In this “noticing” the reader (or listener) discovers that “ imagination makes it possible to hold together two different worlds in …[the]…head at the same time, the everyday one and the world in the story.” If this seems an unlikely proposition, she says, “ask children where they are when they read”; she has clearly done so, and the answer is that they can be in both places, fictional and real, at once (46). Here she is writing about children who have not yet learned, as older children will do if they are to become a competent readers, to “lose” themselves in world of the text, for so long as the text can assert itself. This is surely a vital reminder, and an encouraging one, because it recognizes the child's intellectual capacity, and allows us to think anew about the process of becoming a reader, one which we know very well in the abstract, but may forget when faced with an adult's critical appraisals of, say, fairytales or picture books. We are not in the same place as child readers, and we both expect too little and too much from them if we forget this. With this timely reminder in place, Meek goes on to discuss Pearce's famous novels, including Minnow on the Say , Tom's Midnight Garden, and The Way to Sattin Shore . In her readings of these texts she draws attention to what she calls “latent sense,” found, for example, in a scene in which David, one of the two central characters in Minnow on the Say, is paddling upstream. He passes a couple on the river's bank, the man asleep, the girl picking daisies. The scene takes place in a river which runs through two villages; everyone knows everyone else's business. She calls to David, telling him to beware the weir around the bend; there is no weir, no danger at all. “David is still too young, too preoccupied, to interpret the scene of the two people who probably believed they wouldn't be seen,” Meek writes (62): the girl deflects David by suggesting there is danger ahead. Thinking with Frank Kermode, from whom she takes the idea of latent sense, Meek suggests that it is in such moments that the author's skill and insight, the capacity to produce a narrative of depth, is discernable. While unarticulated, this “depth” is nonetheless experienced, an experience which allows the maturation of the child reader's imagination. The child reader's agency is as much an issue for the older reader, then, as it is for the younger, who is, according to Meek, capable of being in two places—real and fictional—at once. For an example of how to write readable, jargon-free, and thought-provoking criticism while in full possession of an arsenal of theory and experience, keeping the child reader in view all the time, you can't do better than turn to the work of Meek and Watson. Nicholas Tucker's book “looks at the world of Philip Pullman” as the blurb has it. It tells of Pullman's life so far, and seeks to identify the influences for his work, notably, but not solely, in the novels which make up the sequence His Dark Materials . The first two-thirds of the book gives, first, a brief biography of Pullman, and then outlines the plots, themes, and characterizations in Pullman's published work. The final third begins with “Influences and Comparisons”; Milton, Blake, von Kleist and C.S. Lewis are discussed (the latter, we are told, Pullman is on record as despising, though, rather frustratingly, we aren't given any fuller account of this “record”); Pullman's philosophy follows. Without a bibliography or index, this book does not offer the same scope for the specialist reader or researcher as does Meek and Watson's. It seems likely that Tucker's book hopes to interest the general reader; given the popular as well as literary success of Pullman's novels, the existence of such an audience seems likely. There is no doubt that Pullman has become, among other things, a celebrity writer. As a book for those who want to know about this author, Tucker's work is interesting and insightful. What it can be for the critic of children's literature depends, I think, upon where that critic is coming from: there are many exits and entrances to such criticism. Valerie Krips |