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| From Times Online
March 15, 2002 A reader's ticket Robert Irwin THE CHILD THAT BOOKS BUILT. Francis Spufford. 212pp. Faber. Pounds 12.99. I have sometimes found it salutary to compare my response to the book I have actually read with the expectations I had of it before I had even opened it. (The blurb, the packaging, the length and the context of publication provide so many clues, and Francis Spufford himself writes of "the obscure signals sent out by the spines of paperbacks".) Before I started on The Child That Books Built, I had constructed in my imagination a lovingly evoked catalogue of Spufford's youthful reading, of bedtime stories prolonged against the darkness, of ripping adventure stories consumed in the long grass just outside the boundaries of the cricket pitch and poetry read in the shade of the apple orchard . . . . That sort of thing. I was vaguely expecting bookmanly, bufferish recollections of childhood reading -something on the lines of an extended essay by Robert Louis Stevenson, or like the short story that opens Walter de la Mare's anthology of verse for children, Come Hither. My vague expectations verged on stark stupidity, for I was already familiar with Spufford's excellent and dauntingly learned anthology of lists, The Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings, as well as his profound account of the history and legends of polar exploration, I May Be Some Time. In any case, as he reveals in the first chapter of The Child That Books Built, in which he describes the curiously self-conscious pantomime he goes through when browsing in bookshops, he is too young to be any sort of buffer: "I'm thirty-two years old as I do my little performance in the bookshop which means I've been reading for twenty six years." Though there is a reasonable amount of affectionate recollection of juvenile literary enthusiasms and the relevant loci amoeni, nevertheless Spufford has produced something much more ambitious and difficult and its prose structure, reflecting the complex arguments it carries, is similarly complex. He has produced an analytically introspective study of the part books have played in forming his own cognitive structures. As the term "cognitive structures" suggests, he is familiar with the classic researches by Jean Piaget into how the child's mind develops and how, stage by stage, a child devises strategies for solving problems, driven by a tension between accommodation and assimilation, between what has been mastered and made familiar and what challenges that familiar but still inadequate structure of knowledge. Spufford has also drawn on Margaret Donaldson's brilliant, revisionist Children's Minds (1987). Among other things, Donaldson has placed more stress than Piaget on registering the interpersonal context of the cognitive tests administered to children. She has also laid heavy emphasis on the role of reading in accelerating cognitive development. She has observed that as "literate adults, we have become so accustomed to the written word that we seldom stop to think how dramatically it differs from the spoken one". Spufford has sought to recreate the original strangeness of the experience of childhood reading and the impact of stories on an only partially formed mind.So The Child That Books Built is not so much the chronicle of an adult's return to childish haunts, but rather an attempt to reconstruct through an unusual combination of introspection and the elements of cognitive psychology, some idea of how one particular child read, why he read and what he was capable of absorbing from books at each stage of his development. After an introductory chapter, Spufford's account of his self-construction through reading is organized around a set of four involutes, though that term is not his, but Thomas de Quincey's, who wrote in Suspiria de Profundis of the involute as follows: "Far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes . . . in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled than ever reach us directly, and in their own abstract shapes". The first of Spufford's involutes is the Forest: the wilderness into which Hansel and Gretel strayed; the Wild Wood of Wind in the Willows; the Looking Glass wood in which things have no names; the dream wilderness where Sendak's "wild rumpus" begins; the Great Forest in which T. H. White's Wart (later King Arthur) had his first adventures; Robert Holdstock's self-consciously mythic Ryhope Wood; and, a most distinguished literary forest, the "selva oscura" in which Dante lost himself. The Forest is a dense, mapless, uncultivated territory in which the isolated individual has to learn to find his or her way. It represents both the world outside and the unconscious within. The Forest is followed by the Island, the Town and the Hole. An Island is a place, a world indeed, into which the child reader can retreat from the world outside the book. Such "Islands" include Tolkien's Middle Earth, LeGuin's Earthsea and, above, C. S. Lewis's magical realm of Narnia. Spufford is an embarrassed evangelist for Lewis's fantasy novels, embarrassed because of the bullying Christian propaganda, rampant misogyny and overwrought intensity, yet still an evangelical devotee of the promised land that lies at the other side of a wardrobe full of coats. In "The Town", Spufford deals with literature's potential to teach young people ethical values and social skills. Here Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Little House on the Prairie and its sequels, provide most, though not all, of the supporting material for the argument. There is an interesting digression on stories set in boarding schools (Greyfriars, the Chalet School, Hogwarts and others), where the schools can be considered as microcosms of towns and, as such, a suitable environment for learning the difference between externally imposed rules and the more serious code of ethics that the child has to discover for him-or herself. "The Hole" is largely about horror and science fiction and opens with memories of creepy tales culled from The Fifteenth Pan Book of Horror Stories being told in the dormitory after lights out. Spufford reveals himself to be unusually susceptible to fantastic fears, and he envies those of his friends who can revel in the horrors of a Stephen King novel and then forget all about it once the book is finished. He cannot. As a small boy, he was so disturbed by the eye of Sauron, featured on the front of the dust- jackets of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, that, whenever he paused in his reading, he was obliged to place the book face down. (I am reminded of an episode in the currently popular television soap, Friends, where Joey Tribiani, a character whose literary culture is somewhat limited, is so terrified by King's The Shining, that, whenever he is not reading it, he keeps the book in the freezer compartment of the fridge. Then, when he is persuaded by a female friend, and against his better judgment, to read Little Women, he has to put that book away in the freezer too, for fear of learning of Beth's death.) However, since this is the last chapter, this is also a chapter about the waning of juvenile enthusiasms, the quest for new reading beyond the exhausted children's library and the early explorations of the more complex pleasures of adult literature. Spufford presents a plausible trajectory, in which Jane Eyre is a common threshold book, followed by Jane Austen, Hardy, Dickens, Scott Fitzgerald and so on, before confessing that this was not in fact the path he took. Such classics as Pride and Prejudice or Middlemarch did not provide him with the materials he needed to construct the sort of person he wanted to be. As a young teenager, he found Victorian literature's "verbal basketwork" off-putting. The classic stories were underpowered and demanded of him that he supply too many of his own interpretations and ethical judgments. Such books could only be slogged through by counting the number of pages that still remained to be turned. In fact, it was science fiction that led him out of "the impasse of nothing-to-read", and he offers a fine defensive polemic in favour of science fiction and other forms of genre fiction. He might have cited Kingsley Amis for the defence (though he does not), for it was Amis who once observed that 90 per cent of science fiction was junk, but then that was true of books more generally. According to Spufford, science fiction offers the reader "space, time, power; an existence answerable to your wishes . . . . This leg up to demi-godhood is very attractive at fourteen". It has been said (by Amis again, I think) that "the golden age of science fiction is fourteen". Though one may carry on reading science fiction as an adult, and Spufford still seems to be doing so, I think it most unlikely that one will ever recapture the youthful excitement roused by the temporal vistas of Olaf Stapledon's First and Last Men, or by the scale and grandeur of Isaac Asimov's Empire of Trantor in the Foundation trilogy, or the topological paradox on which Christopher Priest's Inverted World is based. Books are not only guides to more books. At around the age of fourteen, novels may have another instructional role. "The trembling sense I'd felt at thirteen, that huge yearnings were imminent, was now a constant companion, a yearning buzz . . .". Spufford describes his early encounters with Emmanuelle and the Grove Press series of allegedly neglected Victorian classics. But he is less happy in retrospect with the transgressive nature of reading erotic literature and observes that the angry fantasies projected on to the perfunctory plot lines of pornography, are never lost, for there is no such thing as a bottomless hole and whatever is consigned to the hole will return one day to haunt one. Although The Child That Books Built is not essentially an autobiography, it can be read as one; a story of growing up in 1970s Britain; of sibling rivalry with a sister (who suffered from the ultimately fatal disease of cystinosis) and a resentful flight into reading; of fitting in to school, where it turned out that there was "an actual niche for someone bookish who was willing to play bookish and live up to the images of cleverness that were current in our shared world of comics, and war films and TV programmes". Many of Spufford's inevitably bookish readers will recognize the phenomenon he describes. I also recognized some of the literary haunts he evokes, such as the Westminster branch library off Great Peter Street: "This was an old-fashioned temple of public reading. Tramps snoozed in the reference room. Tired globe-lamps filled the main hall with an oily yellow light that made it feel as if it was always a winter dusk outside, even in June". Westminster Council since closed the place with fair- seeming promises of something bigger and better. Like Spufford, though a decade or two ahead of him, I used to visit the anarchists' Freedom Bookshop in Whitechapel, and, like him, I wore my school uniform when I went there. On one of his visits he asked the man behind the counter if he thought that there would be a revolution soon. "'I certainly hope so,' he said. 'I'm eighty-one.'" There is far more of interest in this brilliant book than can even be hinted at here, but it leaves a question dangling. What, if anything do books do to adult minds? After Children's Minds, Margaret Donaldson went on to write Human Minds. Surely the paths that Spufford has ventured along in his outstanding and highly original The Child That Books Built can be explored yet further. |
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