We’re taught that growing up means putting away childish things. That includes trading the magic of fairy tales for serious adult novels. But what if turning our backs on children’s literature is a mistake?
“A children’s book can remind you not of things you’d forgotten — that’s easy,” said Oxford University professor and children’s author Katherine Rundell. “It can remind you of things you’ve forgotten you’d forgotten you’d forgotten; It can be a spark of light where there doesn’t seem to be much light for many, many people.”
Rundell specializes in Renaissance literature and the poetry of John Donne as a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. She’s also become the first children’s author since J.K. Rowling to simultaneously reach number one on the U.K. and U.S. sales charts.
The newest book in her “Impossible Creatures” series, “The Neverfear,” comes out Sept. 1, after Rundell secured a seven-figure deal with Disney to adapt the series to film.
Rundell’s book-length essay, “Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise” also comes out with a new edition Sept. 1.
6 Questions with Katherine Rundell
Why do you think adults stop reading children’s books?
“I think we have been embarrassed by the idea of children’s fiction since children’s fiction began. Martin Amis famously said, ‘People ask me if I ever write a children’s book, and I say, ‘if I had a serious brain injury, then I might write a children’s book.’
“But my argument would be not only the children deserve a very finest work, because every time you write for a child, you might be writing someone for whom you are the first book they have ever read in its entirety, but also the greatest children’s books can speak to us about huge themes like power, endurance, fear, faith, care, love, doubt, passion.
“All of these things you can find in ‘Northern Lights,’ in Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Earthsea,’ in ‘Pippi Longstocking,’ in ‘Paddington Bear,’ in ‘Stuart Little.’ If you turned to children’s fiction, you can, I think, find what endures when all our adult compromises and poses are stripped away. You can, I think, find the very meat of the human heart.”
Who do you write for: your 12-year-old self or your adult self?
“I think I am writing for both simultaneously. And of course, for the child of this moment as well. So I think I write for three people, for what I longed for when I was 12 and that would have been big adventures, peril, food descriptions, jokes — I longed for jokes on every page.
“As an adult, I want reality. Not necessarily reality of plot, reality in the sense of truth, the truth about our aggression, our capacity for darkness. But then I also write for children right now; I do think a lot about what they need. I try not to write for kids 30 years ago. I try to write books that will salute how clever they are and how much they deserve.”
What do you say to elites of the literary fiction world who dismiss children’s literature as frivolous or escapist?
“The thing I always say is it is not escapism, it is findism. It is seekism. It is a way of searching out large ideas, questions, answers. I think one of the things that children’s fiction can do is it can unashamedly think about hope.
“The best children’s fiction does not deny that there is darkness. Though the world burns, it is on fire, and there will be more to come, it is always worth teaching children how to rejoice. If you think of the joy in children’s fiction, it explodes from those books. It is a kind of stick of dynamite of hope.”
You say the earliest children’s books were more like behavior instruction manuals. Tell us about the history of children’s books in English.
“Absolutely. So as you say, the very earliest children’s books, which we find in the Middle Ages, were sort of mostly fixated on controlling children. They were very much focused around getting children not to spit on the ground or pick their noses. That was a real theme.
“Then you see the idea, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, of a child is somebody whose morality is to be constantly shaped. That is what children’s literature is for. It is not for delight. It is not to try to entertain or captivate. It is to instruct. And it is in many ways to control. And then with the great golden age, you start getting the sense of writers who are in the form of Lewis Carroll, [Rudyard] Kipling, J.M. Barrie, E. Nesbit. — looking a child clearly in the face. Looking at what they actually are.
“Alice and ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is a difficult girl who doesn’t obey the rules. The children in Nesbit bicker like actual siblings. And so you start getting this sense that children’s fiction is being unhooked from the schoolroom and the pulpit and set free. That, I think, is where children’s fiction starts to become one of the most exciting art forms that we have ever created. You start getting ‘Mary Poppins,’ you get ‘The Tiger Who Came To Tea.’ You start getting things like ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,’ an extraordinarily bonkers book with extraordinary power.
“I think one of the things that I love that children’s fiction has been doing since it became for children rather than for adult anxieties about children, it has been saluting the child heart, its wildness, its strangeness, its idiosyncrasy. Children are stranger than adults because they have not yet learned to conform. And that, I think, has power in it.”
Let me ask about how you’ve put your thoughts into practice in your own books for young readers. “The Neverfear” is the third in your “Impossible Creature” series. The book is named after a ship in the story. One thing about this ship is that it gets broken over and over and gets rebuilt. Is “The Neverfear” a metaphor for rebuilding ourselves when we’re shipwrecked by adulthood?
“Exactly that. In their journey, which is around the idea of two children suddenly being asked to perform tasks which no child expects to be asked — that are very literally Herculean, they draw on the tasks of Hercules — then they fail at one of the tasks.
“Failure looks like it might be absolute despair. It might mean that they have lost one of the people they love most. And in that moment, they face real sorrow, real horror. And I wanted ‘The Neverfear’ at that moment to be something which gives them a sense of hope, a sense that, yes, we will all be shipwrecked. Nobody makes it through adult life without shipwreck.
“Then if you are lucky enough, maybe you rebuild a little bit less glossy, but you rebuild faster and tougher with a kind of flair and a kind of sweep and skill that you didn’t have before. And that is a thing that I hope a child reading it, some of them will just take the adventure. But some of them might also take the idea that it’s not going to be easy, this being human, but it is going to be a thing to be cherished.”
Let’s circle back to the central argument of “Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise.” Could you make your final pitch for what children’s books can do for us that books for older audiences can’t?
“If you find yourself a little lost, if you find the world a little flat, if you find that despair is starting to clutch hold of your ankle, I think a children’s book can remind you that there are other truths, that joy is also a truth. Going back to a book that you loved as a kid is to remember what it was like when new discoveries came daily.
“Remember that the imagination, which, in adulthood, we sometimes treat as a kind of optional extra that you can safely discard, is actually at the heart of everything. Imagination is at the center of political change. It is necessary for love to be able to imagine another person’s inner life. It is at the heart, I think, of the great civilizations.
“And so a children’s book, which is a book that traffics most passionately in imagination, can be a defibrillator for the imagination. It can kickstart it again into being. It can be a great salute to what it is not just to be a child, but to be a person, an adventurer in a difficult but beautiful land.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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James Perkins Mastromarino produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Micaela Rodríguez. Perkins Mastromarino also produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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