The Book that Made Me Page 4

  I guess we may see even more interesting things with the development of ebooks, but returning to the traditional picture book – words and images printed on a few pieces of paper – it’s a pretty timeless format and hard to beat. Books are actually objects, and that’s a big part of their appeal. Their physical limitation also inspires much creative problem-solving too – my best work grows out of formal restrictions. I’ve dabbled with a lot of other things, but always seem to come back to picture books as a perfect vehicle for creating very simple, complex little worlds that everyone can enjoy, and easily revisit at different times in their life.

  Thwack!

  Fiona Wood

  By the age of ten I was addicted to books and reading. E Nesbit, Joan Aiken, Enid Blyton, Noel Streatfeild, CS Lewis and Louisa May Alcott were among my favourite writers. But if I had to choose just one book from that time, it would be LM Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, which I re-read at least six times between the ages of ten and thirteen.

  Eight extremely useful things I learned from Anne of Green Gables when I was ten:

  1. Love is definitely a thing and some people speak about it.

  More than anything, Anne of Green Gables is about love and its transformative power. It’s the story of Anne Shirley, an orphan, who is adopted when she is eleven by sister and brother, Marilla and Matthew, both in their late middle age. They were hoping for a boy to help with farm work, but instead, through a mistaken message, take delivery of a curious, imaginative, passionate girl who has a great hunger to love and to be loved. Through the adoption Anne is, ostensibly, the character with the most to gain. But the story is as much about the transformation of the lives of Marilla and Matthew, as it is of Anne’s.

  Anne’s effusive expression of love counterbalances Marilla’s inability to articulate her own feelings, and Matthew’s understated tenderness. Marilla would have given much just then to have possessed Anne’s power of putting her feelings into words; but nature and habit had willed it otherwise, and she could only put her arms close about her girl and hold her tenderly to her heart, wishing that she need never let her go.

  When I was a child, nobody spoke of love. It wasn’t the done thing in my family, and perhaps such reticence was typical of the time. I had clothes, a roof over my head, food on the table, and my mother tucked me into bed at night – so I could certainly infer a level of care and support. It was not an era of praise or affirmation, either. And I was given short shrift if I ever said I was scared. In fact, emotion of any description called for control, not expression. Much of what I knew about love, at ten, I learned from books.

  2. Daydreaming is good for you.

  Anne is drawn as an imaginative and responsive character. She apprehends the world with the aesthetic appreciation of an artist. She is frequently lost in a reverie of one sort or another – and so was I. Daydreaming was not well received in my world. At home, where it was called “moping about”, I’d be told to go outside and play; at school it meant being in trouble for not paying attention, so the representation of Anne’s musings provided a comforting affirmation that daydreaming was okay.

  I wonder how I would have responded to some of the rapturous descriptions of the natural world, or the more whimsical metaphors LM Montgomery gives to Anne, had I first encountered them as an older reader. I’ll never know; I have just re-read the book alongside my ten-year-old self, who loves that rapture and whimsy unreservedly, and always will. In the same moment I re-experience, and I am nostalgic for, my innocent first readings; the echo brings tears to my eyes.

  3. Your kindred spirits are out there somewhere.

  “I love Diana so, Marilla. I cannot ever live without her. But I know very well when we grow up that Diana will get married and go away and leave me. And oh, what shall I do? I hate her husband – I just hate him furiously.”

  Fiction has always explained to me things outside my direct experience. At ten I had people I called friends, but I had yet to meet a “kindred spirit”. In Anne’s world, kindred spirits are friends between whom there is a meeting of hearts, a strong bond of sympathy, and perfect understanding, regardless of age or gender. The book established an ideal of friendship; it sent me a promise that such friendships could exist.

  4. Feminism will save you.

  Published in 1908, before full women’s suffrage in Canada, and decades before the word “feminism” was coined, Anne of Green Gables stands out as an early example of children’s literature representing equal rights for women. (Edith Nesbit was also flying the flag around this time in her children’s fiction; and earlier novels such as Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, 1847, and Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, 1868, had criticised gender constraints imposed on women). In a household where one of my jobs was making my brother’s bed, Anne of Green Gables was probably my first encounter with feminism.

  When Anne and some fellow classmates have the opportunity to sit the entrance exam for Queen’s (a teaching academy), Marilla’s response to the prospect of further study is: “When Matthew and I took you to bring up we resolved we would do the best we could for you and give you a good education. I believe in a girl being fitted to earn her own living whether she ever has to or not.” Anne not only duxes the entrance exam – “Anne, you’ve passed,” [Diana] cried, “passed the very first – you and Gilbert both – you’re ties – but your name is first. Oh, I’m so proud!” – she goes on to qualify for the two-year course in one year, and wins a scholarship, which will allow her to do a BA at college. What an endorsement for women’s higher education and economic independence. And how important for girls of the era to see this narrative played out. More than a hundred years later, Anne’s ambitions and triumphs are still a delight to read.

  5. Romance doesn’t look like that, it looks like this.

  And then – thwack! Anne had brought her slate down on Gilbert’s head and cracked it – slate, not head – clear across.

  In the years before I encountered Anne of Green Gables, my toys included a teddy bear, dolls, a baby doll, dolls’ clothes, doll’s cot, doll’s pusher … I could not have had a more gendered toy selection. Despite evidence to the contrary in the hair-raising fairytales of Charles Perrault, which I read at age nine, I believed that charming princes played a part in happy endings and that romance–love–marriage–children was a girl-destiny default setting, whatever else I might do. (I didn’t have a clue what that would be, though my stock answer at ten was: write and illustrate children’s books.)

  I’ve never smashed a slate over anyone’s head, but I was attracted to this clear signal that Anne had agency in establishing the terms of her relationship with Gilbert Blythe. She and Gilbert would, over the course of many more books, be depicted as equals in every respect, though, with this decisive thwack, Anne held the balance of power for some time.

  As well, Anne is portrayed as being unabashedly competitive with Gilbert for academic success, and this is expressed in very positive terms. There’s no coming second, or being less ambitious. There was open rivalry between Gilbert and Anne now. Previously the rivalry had been rather one-sided, but there was no longer any doubt that Gilbert was as determined to be first in class as Anne was. He was a foeman worthy of her steel.

  Anne’s feistiness was an adrenaline shot, a much-needed antidote to my pink-is-for-girls-sugar-and-spice early indoctrination. When boy time came around, I had snark when I needed it. I also had the representation of a romance between equally matched partners – no rescue by charming prince required. When I finished my Year Twelve exams, I gave myself the treat of re-reading Anne of the Island, the volume in which LM Montgomery finally unites Anne and Gilbert.

  6. It’s not the end of the world if you mess up.

  “Oh, don’t you see, Marilla? There must be a limit to the mistakes one person can make, and when I get to the end of them, then I’ll be through with them. That’s a very comforting thought.”

  Anne frequently acts impulsively, makes mistakes and ruefully recognises
her own shortcomings. Losing her temper and lashing out at Mrs Lynde; serving currant wine instead of raspberry cordial to Diana, resulting in being banished as a suitable companion; taking a dare to walk along the ridge of a roof, and falling off; flavouring a cake with liniment instead of vanilla; dying her hair green instead of black.

  As child I was shy, self-conscious and timid, and often felt foolish: the rules of the world were mysterious to me. I agonised over saying or doing the wrong thing. It was hugely liberating to see a character like Anne making large-scale mistakes and recovering from the grief, injury or embarrassment that ensued. Anne was self-reliant and self-directed: she came up with her own solutions. She forgave herself and was forgiven. And she could laugh at her mistakes, given a little time for reflection.

  7. Read on!

  Anne of Green Gables taught me about delayed gratification as a reader. My first encounter with the first chapter was very disappointing. It’s full of old people! What a relief (a few pages into chapter 2) to finally meet Anne. This “boring” first chapter became part of the delight of re-reading. I never skipped it. I read it knowing that things were about to get interesting. Not a bad habit to be in, when you think of all the good books that take a bit of time to warm up – Wuthering Heights is one that comes to mind.

  8. You’re not the only unholy girl in the whole world.

  I was brought up as a Roman Catholic, but never believed in God – not even as a small child. An early memory I have is casting my eyes down and trying to look pious at my first communion ceremony, because I knew it was expected of me.

  Perhaps it would have been different if we’d had a more interesting parish priest, but ours was a droning windbag and everything he said had the strong odour of malarkey.

  The older character of Anne is certainly depicted as having religious faith. But I was drawn to the early Anne, who had not been a regular churchgoer or Sunday school attendee. It was her careless irreverence that thrilled my faithless heart.

  My lack of religious belief was not something I would have dreamed of speaking about, but reading Anne of Green Gables gave my undisclosed scepticism some welcome company.

  “I never say any prayers,” announced Anne. … “Mrs Thomas told me that God made my hair red on purpose, and I’ve never cared about Him since. And anyhow I’d always be too tired at night to bother saying prayers.”

  Becoming Human

  Bernard Beckett

  Woody Allen once said, with his typically self-pitying brand of humour, that every film he made started out in his head as a piece of art, and then as production began and the first truckload of compromises arrived, step-by-step transformed itself into something shabby and real.

  I have to say, I like the image much more than the sentiment.

  Compromise, it seems to me, is a thing to be celebrated, not bemoaned. Purity of purpose is for the lunatic who refuses to accept that any work is ever finished, or any effort is ever worthy. It is a kind of self-delusion, based as it is upon the assumption that greatness beckons. For those of us wallowing in the quotidian, compromise is the very stuff of life: the rock from which our greatest moments of creativity are hewn.

  You don’t need to be a filmmaker or a novelist to recognise this. You only need to bake a cake, plan a party, plant a vegetable garden or attempt to raise a child, to find a kind of beauty in the natural tension that develops between our base impotence, and the picture on the tin.

  Before I had children, the words I would have most readily associated with parenthood would have been: nurturing, stimulating, bonding, entertaining, interacting – purposeful, virtuous verbs, calling to mind the super-parent, shaping both child and the world around them. Now, with my twin boys almost ready for school, I realise a more apt list would include: distracting, separating, enduring, collapsing and even, say it quietly, ignoring. Because they’re exhausting little blighters, and a person has only so much energy, patience and spare hands to offer. What’s more, if we didn’t embrace compromise, think what creatures we would become, and how our children would suffer it. Yes, children need stimulation, but not too much. They need a parent who loves them and wants what is best for them, but not one who is neurotic. They need to be protected, but not hovered over; after all it is only when they are left to make mistakes that they can learn the art of assessing risk. They need to be supported in their education, but not to the point where they feel their parents living vicariously through them. It’s not their job to please us. In other words, our commitment to compromise, the need to sometimes just get them the hell out of our hair so that we can get something done, provides exactly the sort of balance the child needs. (The writing of the above paragraph was interrupted by my son calling out from his bed. “I felt something coming in my brain,” he told me. “What?” I asked. “Being thirsty.” Now he’s had his water and has fallen silent again.)

  Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to a recent car journey. We, the family of four, were driving about the countryside, in search of a new car: a process that is tedious for an adult, and bafflingly so for a child. Still, needs must and as the kilometres and hours passed by (not just any car, you see, it had to be the right car) the boys grew restless. Super-parent might have responded with a spontaneous singalong, a diverting game of I-spy or pulling over to the side of the road for a scrumptious beetroot and quinoa salad. Compromise-parent fumbled through the CDs, in search of something, anything, that might shut them up. Enter stage left, the inimitable Roald Dahl, and a rather beautiful reading of George’s Marvellous Medicine (thank you, June Whitfield). Now, our boys are well used to distractions of this nature. Even at their tender years, they have a deep appreciation of the classics (Toy Story, Shrek, Fantastic Mr Fox, Wall.E, you know of what I speak). Up until that point of the road trip I had seen them sit entranced as these movie-stories had unfolded. I had heard them gasp, laugh and shout, and sing along as the masters of children’s cinema had woven their magic. But never, I swear, had I heard them laugh in the way they laughed at that story. It was a kind of out-of-control, infectious giggling that took hold of them, and I glanced in my rear-view mirror to witness each turned in his car seat, eyeballing the other, feeding off the reaction. And that moment reminded me of something that I, as a writer, should never have needed reminding of. That storytelling in its purest form – some words, a voice – is compelling in a way that no other medium can be.

  Who was it who said that “literature is the only art form in which the audience provides the score”? I don’t remember, and Google is being unhelpful. Nevermind, the point is an important one. When we read a story, or indeed listen to one, the only way to comprehend it is to fully engage with it. The words must become alive inside our heads, sounds that denote nothing more than symbols become chickens, grandmothers and explosions. And it is the work being done by the reader, a process so oblique that any attempt to deconstruct it seems doomed to failure, that ensures a relationship between the work and the audience that is closer and more committed than it is in any art. We own the story because we are, to such a large extent, creating it. (Theatre, I must concede, has its own claim to emotional primacy. The palpable presence of the flesh-and-blood characters before us creates its own sort of magic.) To look back at my boys and see the intensity of their connection with the text, was to experience the magic of story in a way that I, as an adult, had all but forgotten.

  Children, of course, have a capacity to commit to imaginary worlds that adults struggle to match. Many days my boys appear to spend more time in roles than out of them. Not the subtle versions of ourselves we self-consciously present to the world, but full-scale transformations to ballerina, superhero, train driver or marine biologist. They cope with these nested identities without a blink: “No, I am Sebastian being Gold Boy pretending to be Freeze, but really I am in disguise as Bat Boy.” There is something weirdly compelling about that fantastical living, and I feel more than the odd pang of jealousy when I see it. To watch a child succumb to a story is to be r
eminded of the magic that resides in a world still protean and malleable. In part it explains the depth of my joy when I heard them laughing.

  Still, there are layers to my response to my boys’ reaction to June Whitfield’s reading of Roald Dahl’s story, to continue with the nesting theme. There is a part of me that refuses to let go of the idea that the very habit of storytelling, and story receiving, is of itself virtuous. There is undoubtedly a little bit of prejudice and nostalgia in play here, but I think it goes deeper than that. Not only does story demand that we imagine whole worlds into existence, but it forces us to imagine something much more specific: the existence, and motives, of other people. It is through story, be it a novel or a good gossip with a friend, that we develop and refine our theory of mind. We go looking for the perspective that resides in another’s head. And by trying on for a moment their fears, their desires, their habits and their constraints, we become more human, more empathetic. Remarkably, the human brain, when observing or indeed imagining the experiences of others, brings into play the exact same structures that fire when it is having the same experience itself. This, for my money, even more than language or sense of self, is the quality that defines, and by implication, raises us. To see your children become lost in a story is to watch them exercise their most sacred capacity. And that’s true even when the story itself is so gleefully brutal.