One of the most celebrated comic texts in modern English, 1066 And All That was written by Punch contributor Robert Yeatman and history teacher W C Sellar, with illustrations by John Reynolds. It apes the form of a school history textbook, but one that’s been written by an distracted child staring down the barrel of an end-of-year exam. It presents a mangled, otherworldly version of English (never British) history from the arrival of Julius Caesar to the end of the First World War, confidently identifying ‘103 Memorable Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Memorable Dates’ along the way. The authors declare at the beginning: ‘History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.’

The first memorable date

In 1983 I was 12, and learning about motte and bailey castles at school. I didn’t care much about the ins and outs (or rather, the ups and downs) of castle construction then, and I still don’t care now; but I was paying close attention, because our teacher, Mrs Twombley, was one of those teachers, and she had me in a trance. It was the first time I’d been taught history as a discrete subject, and I was discovering that I really liked it. I was also discovering that Mrs Twombley had a lot of strong opinions about Mrs Thatcher: opinions that were not entirely relevant to the context of the thirteenth century. Lots of history teachers, in my experience, have strong opinions about Margaret Thatcher. I suppose she was just a historical sort of person.

It was around this time that I bought 1066 And All That from our local bookshop, using my own pocket money. I hadn’t heard of it, and I don’t think my parents had read it. But in the way that you do when you’re entering your teens, I’d decided that something (history, in my case) was going to be one of my ‘things’, and this tiny little volume full of jokes felt like that kind of thing a History Person should own.

In this I was completely right, although it took me a few decades to work out why. Although it’s only 125 (small) pages long, 1066 And All That is one of those books that repays close reading over a lifetime, because the more you know, the funnier the jokes become. My most well-developed opinion about it — aside from my belief that it’s a work of genius, and should be in those capsules that we send out into space in the hope of explaining ourselves to aliens — is that it’s one of the most accomplished surveys of English history ever written. For starters, it takes a genuinely unusual and wide-ranging level of knowledge and understanding to write jokes this good. And I have never read a better commentary on the mistakes we make with history, both in the general and in the particular. The riotous confusion of the text satirises the fallacies, prejudices and anachronisms of all truly popular histories, formal or informal; and it is also a devastatingly effective demolition of the peculiarities of English national self-regard.

In my early teens I had enough knowledge to understand the parts about the Tudors (‘Broody Mary’) and Henry VIII’s succession troubles (‘Anne had a girl too, in a way (see Elizabeth).’) But, being a student at a comprehensive school in the 1980s (and not a boy at a boarding school in the 1910s), most of the book was riffing on periods of history that I knew absolutely nothing about. Much of the section about Anglo-Saxon England, for instance, with its mentions of the ‘Venomous Bead’, went straight over my head. It was literally last month, when reading Marc Morris’s The Anglo-Saxons, that I understood one of these jokes (‘Non Angli, sed Angeli’ — ‘not Angles, but Anglicans’) for the first time.

But even so, lots of the individual jokes (‘A Wave of Egg-Kings’) were still funny, because Sellar and Yeatman had an eerie talent for language that is funny in itself even when shorn of meaning. You don’t, for instance, need to understand anything to be made delirious by the end-of-chapter tests (‘How angry would you be if it was suggested that the XIth Chap. of the Consolations of Beothius was in interpolated palimpsest?’) The proof of its universality is that so much of it has become part of the British comic lingua franca: Wrong but Wromantic, the Boer Woer, ‘Do not attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once’. The tropes are uncannily accurate to this day; most British people do mentally categorise their monarchs as either ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’, and the English obsession with being Top Nation isn’t so much a joke as a material fact.

You can find perfectly serious analyses asserting that 1066 And All That is both postmodern and anti-imperialist, and the thing is, I’m not even sure they’re wrong. Don’t take it from me: take it from History Today, which noted that it ‘gleefully rips apart the idealised conception that imperial England had of itself. “War against Zulus. Cause: the Zulus. Zulus exterminated. Peace with Zulus”, runs a line on Victorian history.’ It’s this sense of revelry in Britain’s humiliation that’s notable in a text written a century ago by two Establishment-class products of High Imperial Britain. Long before the Tehran Conference, long before Suez, Sellar and Yeatman saw that British global influence was coming to an end (and thus that ‘History came to a .’), and they seemed entirely cheerful about it; the unwritten code of 1066 And All That is that England’s pretensions to power have always been ludicrous. (It took Britain’s political class another three decades to resign itself to the end of Empire, and some of them haven’t got there to this day.)

The postmodernism is right there in its famous declaration that ‘History is what you can remember’, an assertion that provides more than enough material for a PhD thesis. It’s also in the jokes that overflow the main text and embed themselves in the frontmatter. From the title page (‘ROBERT JULIAN YEATMAN, Failed M.A.. etc., Oxon.’) to the acknowledgements (‘The Editors’ thanks are also due to their wife’), the formalities are disrupted and <steeples fingers> interrogated. This meta approach wasn’t new to me in 1983, because the other publication I was obsessed with at the time was Smash Hits, another text in which the ‘serious’ and the ‘silly’ were wrapped around each other like a double helix. Both publications signal a kind of full-body commitment to the principles of the thing: that the formal structure exists only to hold the material, and that you can bend that structure into any shape you like, if the material is good enough. It’s significant, then, that there isn’t a duff line in the whole book.

I have no doubt that the Smash Hits luminaries — Neil Tennant, David Hepworth, Mark Ellen, Tom Hibbert — knew 1066 And All That like the backs of their hands. It’s that kind of book: beloved of the upper-middles, available in all grammar school libraries, namechecked by broadsheet journalists on social media. It has the same slightly exhausting cultural valence as Molesworth, and I know (from having never read Molesworth) that if you don’t build up an intimacy with these things at a young age, the constant references (usually made by people who went to better schools than you) can feel exclusionary and snotty. But I’m here to tell you, straight from Mrs Twombley’s slightly shabby classroom, that — like the works of Shakespeare and Tom Holland dancing to ‘Umbrella’ — 1066 And All That is so good that it belongs to all of us, whether we know it or not.

The second memorable date

Slightly shamefully for a history graduate, I’m very bad at retaining information. The moment I stop actively learning about something, 90% of the relevant facts simply flee from my head. I say this is shameful ‘for a history graduate’ because I’m not any other kind of graduate, and so I can’t say whether it matters so much for other subjects; but history, done right, is a vast multi-dimensional matrix of information, in which Henry the Lion getting out the wrong side of the bed in Saxony could result in chaos anywhere between the Welsh Marches and Jerusalem. If you can’t firmly affix the points in your matrix — if you can’t remember that Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses roughly coincides with the last years of Leonardo da Vinci, the departure of Magellan, the arrival of European adventurers in new (to them) areas of Mexico and Bangladesh, and a significant expansion of the Atlantic slave trade — then you’re just not going to be very good, as a historian.

As a result, I’m always wildly impressed by people who can read something once and just remember it. For instance: about 15 years after discovering 1066 And All That, when I was 27 and working in publishing, I overheard the following conversation between my boss and an author:

My boss: So when do you think you can deliver the manuscript?

The author: Well, as someone once said: ‘Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.’

My boss [posh murmured laugh]: Oh, quite. Niels Bohr, wasn’t it?

In that moment, my boss seemed to me devastatingly debonair. I mean, I’d never even heard of Niels Bohr, and yet my boss was, evidently, familiar with all the notable things Niels Bohr (who?) had said and done; furthermore, he was able to pull that knowledge out of his arse at will. He had, I marvelled, reached a pinnacle of generalist fluency; an unfathomable number of facts clicked in his head, like tiny marbles.

And then, quite recently, I realised that this incident took place roughly two months after Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen — a play about Bohr — had opened in London. And my boss was exactly the kind of guy who would get tickets to the hot new play at the National in 1998. In other words: my boss didn’t have a brain like a card catalogue, with all the world’s most important facts codified and memorised and cross-referenced. (Some people do: the other Tom Holland seems to have a brain like this.) He had merely remembered something from a play he had seen a few weeks before. My memory is sub-par, but — and this is important — lots of other people’s memories are sub-par too. Most of us are living error-strewn lives, surfing along on mangled fragments of half-remembered bollocks; and that’s OK.

This spirit of comfortable self-deprecation — the cheerful middle-aged admission of general ignorance and defeat — pervades 1066 And All That. It’s a tone that says: don’t feel bad because you don’t understand the relationship between the Picts, the Irish and the Scots. At least you’ve paid your tax bill and you know where your stopcock is. The fundamental joke of 1066 And All That — that none of us can remember a bloody thing, and it doesn’t matter — acts on the fiftysomething reader like a hot water bottle applied to the lumbar region. As Sellar and Yeatman say in their Compulsory Preface (‘This Means You’): ‘Histories have previously been written with the object of exalting their authors. The object of this History is to console the reader.’

This consolatory proposition underlies much ‘wry’ humour, which is why wry humour tends to find favour with the middle-aged. (Younger people still have hope that they will turn out to be exceptional.) The British humorist Alan Coren deployed this tone regularly, and was extremely good at it; around the time I first read 1066 my father was reading Coren’s Golfing for Cats (1975), with regular breaks to lie down on the carpet and weep with laughter. (Coren called it Golfing for Cats because he’d observed that best-selling books tended to be about cats, golf or Nazis. In a move that absolutely would not be countenanced today, the cover of the first edition sported an enormous swastika.)

I find most wry humour insufferable; all those sloppy toilet books written by people who seem to truly believe that they know everything, and who in fact know little aside from laziness and a lack of self-respect. Most people should be firmly discouraged from looking sideways at things, at least until they’ve learned to look properly, straight-on. But in the right hands comic writing about serious things is a life-enhancing practice, precisely because the nature of things does matter. Well-executed wryness scours the line between the ephemeral and the important. Sellar and Yeatman both fought in the First World War (Yeatman was severely wounded, shot through ‘like a colander’, and won the Military Cross). You’d never know this from the way they write about it (‘Though there were several battles in the War, none were so terrible or costly as the Peace signed in the Chamber of Horrors at Versailles’), but it surely informed their sure-footedness; 100 years later you can read their summation without experiencing any embarrassment on their behalf.

Although I have read 1066 And All That literally hundreds of times, I haven’t finished decoding it yet. Even to a relatively well-read fifty-something, it’s still full of arcana. On the imprint page, in tiny 6-point print underneath the catalogue information, there is a dedication: ‘Absit Oman’. It turns out this is a play on the Latin tag ‘absit omen’ (‘may what I have written not come true’); and it is a joke about Charles Oman, a celebrated Edwardian military historian whose books Sellar and Yeatman probably had to read at school (Fettes and Marlborough, respectively).

In 2026 it took me about two minutes to find this out, but in 1983 I wouldn’t have had a hope in hell. Nobody I knew had heard of Charles Oman, or understood Latin tags. I would have read it, thought ‘that’s probably a joke, but I don’t know how’, and moved on. Like so many things, 1066 And All That is the product of a lost world, a world in which people sometimes had to just not know things, and nevertheless pick up the shreds of their dignity and move on with their lives. What was the date of the Pheasants’ Revolt? Was it King Alfred or King Arthur who married the Lady Windermere? What is the explanation for Lamnel Simkin and Percy Warmneck? The quiet humility of knowing that you don’t know, and that you might never know, was good for the soul. In one of their terrifyingly hostile quizzes, Sellar and Yeatman suddenly demand: ‘What have you the faintest recollection of?’ Not much, to be honest. But that’s OK.

Some jokes, though, were not just comprehensible by 12 year olds, they were written by them.

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

An unimaginably powerful object, possibly from another universe, has appeared in an obscure corner of the galaxy and is attracting the attention of interstellar civilisations including the cruel and colonial Affront and the hippie explorers the Zetetic Elench, and the great, star-faring meta-civilisation The Culture. The Culture is essentially a collection of continent-sized starships run by god-like artificial intelligences called Minds. These Minds are now scheming about how they might take advantage of this new alien artefact, which they term ‘The Excession’.

Preface

The ‘M’ in Iain M. Banks is significant. He had a parallel life as the un-emmed mainstream author Iain Banks, but adopted the middle initial to signify to readers when he was indulging in science fiction. His conventional novels were frequently magical realist, or tinged with science fictional ideas or gothically grand guignol; but once he donned the M he became properly space operatic, all lightspeed spaceships and alien races and silly names.

What’s significant was that he had to signify this separation at all: that it was considered useful to demark which of his novels were ‘mainstream’. That there are some fictions that are ‘genre’ and some that are, inexplicably, not. That science fiction needed to have that ‘M’ stuck on it like a warning label. For imMature audiences only.

Science fiction has a bad reputation, literarily speaking. This is largely because of its origin. The term first emerged as ‘scientifiction’, a label coined by Hugo Gernsback, the editor of Amazing Stories magazine, in 1926. Gernsback was also an electronics entrepreneur and stipulated that the genre should include ‘scientific fact and prophetic vision’.

This was fiction by and for engineers, men (so many men) gifted in maths and science but not necessarily in literary style. Men like Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke, who could conjure fascinating scientific possibilities but who couldn’t write believable dialogue. These were books of plot and concept, not psychology or character.

Gernsback was also, incidentally, the publisher of a magazine called Technocracy Review (1933) which championed the then-fashionable idea of ‘Technocracy’, a society designed and run by engineers. One prominent member of the Technocracy movement was Joshua Norman Haldeman, the maternal grandfather of Elon Musk. Musk, in turn, is a massive science fiction fan and has named several of his SpaceX vehicles after spaceships from Iain M. Banks’ books.

Sci-fi might have had its roots in scientific experimentation, but the genre grew. Writers like Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut attempted the previously unattempted experiment of writing well. The New Wave of the ‘60s brought writers like Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard who went for more formal, structural, literary experimentation. Meanwhile writers like Ursula K. LeGuin and Philip K. Dick (look at all these middle initials) seized on the genre as a way to conduct thought experiments in psychology.

This is precisely what Iain M. Banks did, too. Most of his science fiction books concerned The Culture, a pan-galactic meta-civilisation that has mostly abandoned conventional planets and solar systems to live on giant spaceships and artificial habitats. The Culture has also, more importantly, abandoned conventional politics and economics. This is a post-scarcity society in which anyone can have anything they want, whenever they want it. There is no work, no money, no hierarchy and very little class differentiation. The civilisation is almost entirely run by the Minds, immeasurably intelligent artificial beings who pander to everybody’s whims and still find time to run the galaxy.

What interests Banks is how this utopia might be flawed. Having created a perfect anarchy in which the only laws are individual morality and the bounds of social relationships, he questions how that might actually run and what it might mean for people living in it. This in turn throws up fascinating insights for our own contemporary, real world cultures.

Not that Banks is immune to a little ‘prophetic vision’. Rereading this thirty years later in 2026, his vision is a little too familiar. This is a world run by inscrutable and frequently incomprehensible artificial intelligences; a world in which the majority of people live happily in a haze of drugs and sex and interactive entertainments; a world in which artists are seen as exhibiting ‘a pitiably archaic form of insecurity and a rather childish desire to show off’. Sadly, we still have the capitalism, though.

Contents

The first three books set in the Culture skirt round the edges of it. They tell the stories of people and civilisations outside of it, observing it or being acted on by it. Excession was the first book to properly bring the reader within it, to consider its workings. In one core strand we are caught up in the machinations of the various Minds, trying to keep track of their cabals and connivings as well as their sardonic names (Serious Callers Only, Ethics Gradient, Not Invented Here, and the war ships Frank Exchange of Views, Attitude Adjuster and Killing Time). In one ‘prophetic vision’ the reader must pick through message threads between ships, like trying to catch up on email conversations after a long holiday.

The other main thread is the story of a handful of humans caught up in all these secret plans. Core to this is the tragic story of Byr Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil Gelian. Once lovers, Byr’s infidelity tipped Dajeil first into a murderous rage and then into isolation. She chooses to hide away on the ship Sleeper Service, remaining pregnant for 40 years rather than give birth to Byr’s baby. The main human plot of the book is the Sleeper Service trying to bring Byr and Dajeil back together, to try and convince Dajeil to finally have her baby and create a new life for herself.

Both these storylines concern themselves with misunderstandings and miscommunication, and with the relationship between individual self-definition and the social function. But they also, crucially, involve lots of cool spaceships, weird aliens and breathtaking outer space stuff.

Hugo Gernsback’s definition of scientifiction begins: ‘a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision’. That romance -- often termed, slightly derisively, ‘sensawunda’ (sense of wonder) -- is another key part of science fiction. Part of the thrill of Excession, for a reader who was already a fan of Iain M. Banks’s science fiction, was finally getting to mingle with the Minds and to explore the ships that are their physical existences. The Sleeper Service is a cup of sea held floating in space by silvery force fields; in the middle of it there is an island that is the ship itself, a 50km slab, its great halls full of diorama of ancient wars featuring the bodies of passengers held in suspended animation.

Another thrill is to follow characters across the strange worlds of the Culture: asteroids hollowed out to create living space; ‘Orbitals’, giant rings of landscape flung into the heavens like glittering bracelets of life; artificial habitats like Tier, intricate interlocking levels of self-contained environments, all rotating round each other. All are peopled by extraordinary characters and aliens and artificial intelligences.

It is no mistake that part of the inspiration for Excession was the computer game Civilization. The titular Excession is what is termed in the novel an ‘Outside Context Problem’, which Banks describes in this way:

An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given… was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered…

This is a situation straight out of Civilization, a game that Banks said he had to uninstall in order to make himself finish the book.

Science fiction is simply another form of game playing, of imaginative exercise. It allows the creative mind to run free, to invent for the enjoyment of invention and the enjoyment of the reader. But play has a purpose. It is a practice as much as a pleasure, a way of modelling reality and thinking about it. The Minds of the Culture spend a lot of time in play themselves, in a virtual world they call The Land of Infinite Fun; but they must always be aware of base reality, because that is where real things happen.

One of the lessons of Excession is that the ideal is all very well, but that reality has a habit of rendering it moot. Theory is admirable but practice is all that matters. It’s fun to wander in the wondrous spaces of science fiction, as long as you return to Earth now and then.

Afterword

A core theme in Excession is a sort of exploration of Popper’s paradox of intolerance: that a truly tolerant society should reserve the right to be intolerant of intolerance itself. Some of The Culture’s Minds want to use the appearance of the Excession as a way of forcing toleration on the hideously intolerant, warlike species The Affront; others argue that this goes against their own principles of toleration, particularly since the ruse involves tricking The Affront into a war with The Culture that they will definitely lose. A war to enforce peace; an act of punishment in the cause of toleration.

This is just one of many of these juxtapositions of theory and practise throughout the book. One significant theme is the dichotomy between the intellectual and the biological: the disembodied Minds struggle to understand the actions of their human counterparts, while human biology undermines their social ideals. Ulver Seich, a sort of space influencer, is a descendent of the founders of her home vessel, which gives her a sort of class distinction in defiance of The Culture’s flat social structure. Ulver’s emotional intelligence also helps her solve the relationship between Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil, a solution that eluded the super-intelligent Sleeper Service. (The book is full of these highly gendered characterisations: Ulver is highly emotional, whereas the hermit Gestra Ishmethit is the archetypal male nerd, hiding away on his lonely space station making model ships. Genar-Hofoen is a childish, shallow Lothario; Dajeil is an instinctively monogamous perpetual mother.)

But then, members of the Culture can change their biology as they please. When Genar-Hofoen commits the infidelity that causes Dajeil to attack him, she is a woman. The problem, Banks seems to be suggesting, is not aliens and humans or minds and bodies or men and women; it is people. Another person’s consciousness, their personality and intelligence, encountered from inside our own consciousness, is the ultimate Outside Context Problem. It is perhaps possible for us to encounter other people in much the same way as ‘a sentence encounter[s] a full stop’, but what matters, of course, is how we adapt our theories to that practice. How we can create a culture that embraces that diversity to make it a strength. If not to rule the galaxy, then at least to get through the day.

We’ve covered Iain Banks before, without his' ‘M’, with the book that earned him to right to get on with his science fiction: The Wasp Factory.

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

It’s bloomin’ Christmas Eve again. Father Christmas wakes up in his terraced two-up-two-down, makes breakfast, goes to the loo, feeds the animals and loads up the sleigh. Then it’s ‘good bye cat’ and ‘good bye dog’, and he’s off into the bloomin’ weather to do his rounds. On through the night he slogs, squeezing down chimneys, stopping for a sandwich between chimney pots, and bumping into a milkman. Finally it’s all done and he can go home, make his Christmas lunch, open his presents (Cognac! Good old Fred) and go back to bed.

Down the chimney

Father Christmas isn’t Raymond Briggs’s best known Christmas book; thanks to the famous Channel 4/David Bowie (??) animated movie, that would be The Snowman (1978). But Father Christmas came first. (And anyway, Briggs himself always said that The Snowman wasn’t supposed to be particularly Christmassy.)

It inaugurated his great innovation: the use of comic book layouts in a picture book. This approach enabled Briggs to pack in more story. It also meant he could make full use of visual storytelling, building the narrative frame-by-frame where necessary. He does this so well that the text becomes additive rather than explanatory, a bravura technical achievement that culminated in the entirely wordless Snowman.

Not that Father Christmas has a dramatic story arc: it’s simply the events of one Christmas Eve told from Father Christmas’s point of view. And this isn’t the moral and mysterious Christmas Eve of A Christmas Carol (1843), or the wondrous and whizzy Christmas Eve of The Polar Express (2004). It is a realistic, hard-working night-in-the-life of a realistic and hard-working Father Christmas: one who swears at the rain, puzzles over how to get into a caravan, and nods off at the reins of his sleigh.

The simplicity and directness of this vision feels extraordinarily brave. To take something so straightforward and plotless and make it work required Briggs to place a great deal of trust in his own talent. He was, of course, entirely right to do so. He was a truly brilliant illustrator, marrying a cartoonist’s eye for character — all dynamism and economy — with exacting, accurate details in the backgrounds.

The specificity of the detail is where Briggs shows that as well as knowing and trusting his own talent, he also knows and trusts his audience. Small children live in a small world; small matters such as household brand logos — mysterious, impenetrable, laden with occult meanings — receive the full focus of their attention. The settings in Father Christmas are beautifully specific. The big man’s house is full of recognisable branded goods (a box of Corn Flakes for breakfast, an empty ‘Uxo’ tin for his sandwiches). When he flies over the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace they are architecturally accurate, greebled about with inky crenellations. There is even, on one spread, a legible fingerpost that precisely places one house as being somewhere on Underhill Lane at the foot of Ditchling Beacon under the South Downs, not far from Raymond Briggs’s own house.

This is just one way in which Briggs uses familiar tools, forms and settings to reveal the enchantment of the everyday. He uses coloured pencils a lot — like those Caran d’Ache pencils you might get for Christmas — and they give the book a friendly beauty, full of bright colours and soft details. And he composes brilliant cut-throughs; houses are opened up to show Father Christmas worming his way down chimneys past stuffed attics and sleeping children, and emerging into sitting rooms lit by the soft light of Christmas trees.

The kind of pencils you might have at home; a comic layout like The Beano; a story set in recognisable homes. The everyday is exploded: hidden spaces are made visible, reality is reconfigured, and the secret workings of the world are revealed.

Among the gutters

As well as revealing the enchantment of the everyday Father Christmas also injects magic into the humdrum, capturing the way a child’s world is made (even more) mysterious and wonderful by the season.

Briggs’s comic book format uses very wide gutters (the white spaces between illustration panels). Gutters play an interesting role in comics. They serve to contain the imaginative space of the story, isolating the specific moments of the visuals from each other. They are also, however, a magical imaginative space, in which time and space become flexible, so that panels can be both sequential and singular. (In this way they are different from page turns, which are definite endings and reveals, and are the traditional locations of twists and cliff-hangers.)

Gutters are, literally, liminal spaces, defined by and outside the lines. What’s interesting is that Father Christmas constantly intrudes into them. Things — legs and arms, the sleigh, bits of scenery, speech bubbles — are forever poking out of the frames into the snowy white gutters. The story is escaping the confines of the book; the world of the imagination is irrupting into the world of the reader.

This is appropriate in a story about Father Christmas, an apparently fictional character who nevertheless manages to leave a delightfully tactile and splendidly real stocking on the end of your bed every Christmas morning. And it is appropriate to Christmas, the season in which we take ordinary trees, dull suburban cul-de-sacs and humdrum high streets and turn them into objects of wonder. We literalise friendship and love in the form of presents; we dramatise community and conviviality in feasting and celebration. We take the physical and make it mystical, take the emotional and make it physical.

Part of the joy of Christmas is that it suggests this enchantment is there all the time, just out of view. This is where Briggs’s specificity collides delightfully with the subject matter. By depicting a recognisable and familiar world, and making Father Christmas himself a recognisable and familiar grumpy old man, he is insisting on this most mysterious quotidian magic.

Across the rooftops

Apart from a few interludes (an igloo, a lighthouse), Father Christmas takes place in Britain. In southern Britain to be precise: in and around London and Sussex. Even Father Christmas’s house — which should be somewhere far away, judging by the flight times — is a recognisably British terraced house. This is because it was modelled on Briggs’s parents’ house; that’s his milkman father who bumps into Father Christmas in the early hours of Christmas morning. And that’s an electric milk float that his father is driving, a distinctly British vehicle.

And this book isn’t called Santa Claus; it’s called Father Christmas. Santa Claus is an invention of the Dutch heritage of New Amsterdam, and is more recent than Father Christmas (or, as Ben Jonson rather splendidly named him, ‘Captain Gregory Christmas’). This latter fellow was once associated with a more adult vision of Christmas, full of feasting and foolery. He was crowned with holly, as often dressed in green as in red, and brought beer and song rather than presents.

Raymond Briggs’s muse isn’t quite Captain Gregory Christmas, but he isn’t quite Santa Claus either. He’s a recognisably British character, and not just because he’s mostly landing on roofs in southeast England. The book is a little memento of a time when British and American culture wasn’t quite as intertwined as it is now; when Bonfire Night was more important than Halloween, and when none of us knew what a ‘Black Friday’ was.

This is not to make a tedious Facebook point. I’m not saying life was necessarily better and more pure back in the days of power cuts and Fingerbobs and open-access landfill sites. I’m just pointing out that there was a time in Britain, not that long ago, when ‘Santa Claus’ was not the biggest name in nocturnal present-delivery logistics. When I was a child in the ‘70s, it was Father Christmas we visited in Hamleys every year, Father Christmas to whom we wrote letters, and Father Christmas who left me a copy of Father Christmas when he visited my house on Christmas Eve, 1973. It had not been a cheerful year in Britain. As well as the Cod War and strikes and IRA bombings, the oil shock that followed the Yom Kippur War resulted in mandatory measures to conserve petrol and electricity.

Father Christmas, inspired by Briggs’s father’s own experiences as a milkman, is a fully recognisable British working man of the period, begrudging and swearing his way through the night shift. He’s every grumbling grandfather, and every dyspeptic uncle round the Christmas dinner table.

But, Father Christmas reassures the child reader, these gruff characters aren’t cross with us. Father Christmas may curse the rain, but he still struggles through it to bring the presents. He cares about doing his job properly, visiting every child in every domicile, from caravan to palace. And he still, for all the rain and drudgery and effort, leans out from the panel to personally wish us a ‘Happy Bloomin’ Christmas’ at the end.

Tobias is laid up in bed with the ‘flu and has unwisely left the formatting of this email to Rowan, which gives me an opportunity to commend to you one of his best Christmas Stories. ‘An All Too Magical Christmas’ is the tale of a middle-ranking government magician who takes the Christmas duty rota in the City of London hoping for a quiet bit of overtime but — like a social media intern left in charge of the corporate X account — becomes catastrophically overwhelmed by a chaotic eruption of malignant ancient Magick. Features trolls, geese, Puss in Boots, Herne’s Hunt on fixed-pedal bikes, an enchanted miniature toyshop, and some splendidly confused nutcracker soldiers.

Christmas Stories

An All Too Magical Christmas #1

When a magician (second class) chooses to do Christmas duty in the City of London, it's because he's hoping for a nice, quiet, seasonal time, not for ancient magic to break loose and the enchanted city to be filled with ghosts, monsters, wonder and danger. Not on his watch. Not when he's going to have to deal with it all on his own. That would be an all…

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2 years ago · 3 likes · Tobias Sturt

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

The title ‘Tales of Mystery and Imagination’ has been used for various posthumous collections of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. These collections usually contain doomy gothic weirdnesses (‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘Ligeia’), detective stories (‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, ‘The Purloined Letter’), tales of psychopathic revenge (‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’) and puzzle-driven mysteries (‘The Gold Bug’).

Tales of Mystery

When we found ourselves stranded in Philadelphia by snow, m’colleague Adam and I had to find some way to pass the time until we could get on a flight home. We ate cheese steaks and scrapple, went to look at the Liberty Bell and the Rodins, and toured the Penitentiary and the Mütter Museum. I have never seen Rocky so the outside was lost on me, but the inside of the Philadelphia Museum of Art is excellent.

We also went on a pilgrimage to find the houses of two of America’s great conjurers of the uncanny, because Philadelphia — the city of brotherly love and rational government — was also some time home to both David Lynch and Edgar Allan Poe. This, the city of eagles and bells, is where Poe wrote ‘The Raven’, the poem that made him famous.

‘The Raven’, though, is not how I know Poe. I get the impression he is something of a national treasure in the States, but he was not taught in England when I was at school. I had to discover him for myself, and I discovered him through his stories, collected in an edition of Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

This made him something of a mystery. He was not of the canon of literature I was being taught. He was from the wrong continent, and was somewhere in between the solitary fancies and conscious archaisms of the Romantic poets, and the teeming streets and grim realities of the Victorian novelists.

His style straddled these influences. The prose of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) is as obscure and convoluted as the monstrous house and monstrous people it describes; its paragraphs are as cluttered as a Victorian sitting room, full of dark furniture and unexpected impediments to progress. ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842) it is a story of strange and disconcerting vibes, set in the no-place of the gothic, outside of real history or geography, and infected with a sense of creeping wrongness that sickens the narrative until it can bear it no longer and ends in a sudden swoon.

The style of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (1843) on the other hand, is horribly stark, the meticulous unreason of a disordered mind (‘why will you say that I am mad?’) captured in nervous, hectic thoughts. Rather than mazing you with an inchoate uncanny, the immediacy of the narrator forces you into the horror, first hand and all too real.

But the real mystery was the man himself. The strange trajectory and the many miseries of his life make him the goth-father. As famous in his lifetime for his acid criticism as he was for his doomy verse, he was the ultimate self-aggrandising, self-pitying, vituperative and wounded young man. As Wikipedia summarises it: ‘He is the first well-known American writer to earn a living exclusively through writing, which resulted in a financially difficult life and career.’ Same as it ever was.

His life was one of his stories; or, his stories were his life. He was the child of actors, but by the time he was three his father had abandoned him and his mother had died. He was taken in by the wealthy John Allan, who forced his name into the young Edgar Poe’s. This was both a gift and a proprietorial imposition, which appears to neatly summarise their relationship. His life after this point was a series of fallings out with authority figures, publishers, other writers, and the Army.

Then there was the disturbing marriage to his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm when he was in his twenties, and his descent into alcoholism after her death at 24 from tuberculosis. Poe’s own death was considerably more bizarre: he was found unconscious in a Baltimore street, wearing someone else’s clothes, and didn’t regain consciousness long enough to explain what had happened to him.

His afterlife was a bizarre tale of revenge. His literary enemy, a man with the splendidly sinister name of Rufus Wilmot Griswold, managed to gain control of Poe’s literary estate and proceeded to try and ruin it, publishing a lurid biography and forging letters to ‘prove’ his lies. This served to make Poe even more mysterious, the truth of the man hidden behind a swirl of rumour and slander.

It backfired on Griswold in the end: as with Byron, the promise of thrilling stories written by a ‘bad’ man proved irresistible. It certainly was to me, a goth teenager stumbling across these stories in the school library. (It also helped that Poe had, like me, gone to school in North London.)

Tales of Imagination

According to Keats, reading George Chapman’s translation of the Odyssey was like being an astronomer who had discovered a new planet:

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
- John Keats, ‘On First Opening Chapman’s Homer’

Reading Tales of Mystery and Imagination for the first time was more like Speke and Burton following the Nile to its source, or, more appositely, Marco Polo travelling down the Silk Road to China, finally arriving at the court of Kublai Khan. All my life I had been consuming goods from this unguessed-at and fabulous land; finally I had arrived at the source of treasure and wonder.

A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Kublai Khan’

Romantic poetry is where Poe seems to start, but what follows him matters more. So much popular pulp fiction begins with Poe; if he did not invent it, he defined and refined it. This is particularly true of genres I loved as a small boy: tales of the uncanny, science fiction, detective stories. You can discern the atmospheric, lyrical creepiness of Ray Bradbury in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, the mounting dread and cosmic horror of H. P. Lovecraft in ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, and the twisted psychology and visceral gore of Stephen King in ‘The Tell Tale Heart’.

Jules Verne — who has a decent claim to be one of the founders of the science fiction genre — was deeply influenced by Poe’s proto-science fiction stories, and called him ‘le créateur du roman merveilleux scientifique’. Meanwhile, one of the few mysteries never investigated by Sherlock Holmes was how his whole character came to be swiped from Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, the first in a long line of analytical amateur detectives.

One can even spot the structure of an old-fashioned point-and-click game in ‘The Gold Bug’ (1843). The story, which involves the decoding of a pirate code and the search for hidden treasure, inevitably reminds the twenty-first century reader of the puzzles in the game Myst (1993) or one of the more cerebral shrines in Breath of the Wild (2017).

I may be slightly over-reaching when I detect traces of the Joker in the motley-clad narrator of ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (1846), but the transatlantic gothic of Poe’s stories has so saturated American popular culture that it’s hardly surprising there’s a Batman villain called ‘The Red Death’, and that Batman and Edgar Allan Poe have teamed up to solve mysteries in the comics. These dark and tormented East Coast orphans are all the same.

This was why finally reading Tales of Mystery and Imagination was such a revelation. The traditional image of Poe is of a lone, mad genius, the Bohemian stereotype of the artist. But in reading him I saw how storytelling was a process, a conversation down the ages, a handing on of ideas and tropes, to be adapted and renewed by each succeeding generation: from Medieval fabulists and Gothic novelists and Romantic poets to Poe, from Poe to the pulp writers and modern mythologisers who followed him.

Which is not to say that Poe wasn’t a significant and unique contributor to that conversation. In ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, Dupin, the detective, delivers a paradox about chess and chequers. Chess, he says, is a game of complex rules that takes concentration and intelligence to master but which then becomes about those rules. The player is constantly thinking of possible moves, available strategies within those rules. They are playing against the game. In chequers, Dupin argues, one plays against one’s opponent. The game is so straightforward, the rules so simple, that a match becomes a contest of psychology, of context and understanding, of imagination and mystery. The simpler the rules, the more flexible the game becomes.

At first sight the short, creepy story seems much simpler than the complex literary novel, but Poe brings to bear his imagination and understanding to this apparently undemanding game and works endless variations. He works them into detective stories, or dream narratives, or horrifying psychology, or puzzle cracking games. And in doing so, he invents whole new forms for those stories to follow ever after.

This man, writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, defined many of the genres and tropes of the twentieth. Conjuring visions of an imagined and impossible past, he invented the pop culture of the future. Countless books and films and TV series and comics are still recreating his creations and developing his themes.

There, at the headwaters of all these widening tributaries of pulp fiction which have flooded the following centuries in their weirdness and fantasy, above a bubbling spring of imagination, is a bust of Edgar Allan Poe. And perched on it, a raven, who quoth, ‘Evermore’.

Spooky Victorian stories are possibly the best way of consuming horror: all the creepiness, none of the actual scares.

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

Californian parvenu Richard Papen falls in with an exclusive clique of tag-dropping, snook-cocking Classics scholars at a minor college in the Eastern US. Gradually he worms his way in with the incestuous twins Camilla and Charles, aesthete Francis, and the brilliant, chilly Henry. He discovers that the four of them have torn apart a local farmer in a Bacchic frenzy and, under their spell, helps them kill their mutual friend, the clubbable (sic) Bunny, who has been threatening to reveal their secret. They appear to get away with the murders, but then the guilt slowly drives them all insane. The furies descend and their hubris dooms them, summoning our terror and pity, like all good Classical tragedies.

Arcana

For a book about a group of students determined not to have anything to do with the zeitgeist, The Secret History was remarkably well timed. For me, at any rate. I graduated in 1992, the year A Secret History was published; indeed, it would have been about the time the narrator might have graduated, if he hadn’t been so busy murdering his fellow students.

The book is carefully vague about when it is set, but a lot of pop cultural references place it in the ‘80s, and the Dean of Studies refers to the clique’s charismatic tutor as ‘Hampden’s own Salman Rushdie.’ The Satanic Verses was published in ‘88, and the fatwa against Rushdie was declared in ‘89. This raises the intriguing possibility that the book is actually science fiction, narrated in the future by an older Richard who is recounting his youth in the early ‘90s.

Not that anyone (other than me) has accused The Secret History of being anything so vulgar as science fiction. With all those Latin tags and Greek asides, it is self-evidently highbrow stuff. Or at least high-middlebrow: a heightened brow, somewhere — appropriately — above the temples.

At the surface level, the story would have worked equally well if the students were studying drama or medicine; Tartt could still have worked in all the tragedy and blood. Ostensibly, it obeys Mike Royce’s dictum: ‘you can do whatever the fuck you want as long as you’re also trying to solve a murder.’ But the murder is not incidental, and nor is the students’ choice of Classics. The action of The Bacchae, the mechanics of Greek tragedy, and the hermetic isolation of Classics students on a twentieth century campus are all integral to the functioning of the book.

Also, a book about drama students wouldn’t have been nearly so interesting. I had been one of those (more or less), titting about in a scuffed ecru breeze-block studio on a Brutalist campus. There was very little magic in it. The burning of the topless towers; the dipping of oars in the wine-dark seas; the seductive mysteries of the gods in the panting and panicked woods… they all beat a £1 bottle of Merrydown in the college bar.

A great deal of the initial appeal of The Secret History can be summed up in the figure of the teacher, Julian Morrow: ‘Julian’ for the Apostate, surely, the Emperor who defied convention and returned the Empire to paganism; and ‘Morrow’, a conjunction of future and past, tomorrow and the archaic ‘Good morrow!’ His classroom, the ‘Lyceum’, is set apart from the rest of the campus, a secluded idyll of books and art and conversation. This was the experience of university we all craved, and that few of us got: a kindly sage who would welcome us into his wood panelled sanctum, guide us through the labyrinth of the crepuscular library, and uncover the secrets that would allow us to make history.

And what could be more literally academic than Classics: the source of the academy, and almost perfectly useless outside of it (unless you want to explain a Renaissance painting or put a grammar school boy in his place). It is the epitome of apparently useless knowledge that also happens to underlie a great deal of the cultural, political and social structures of European and American ‘civilisation’. It is perfectly outré.

The characters in the novel regard the academic mainstream of the time with disgust; Richard thinks an artist who uses the term ‘postmodern’ is a ‘swine’. What more splendid way could there be to épater les bourgeois critical theorists than to revolt into conservatism and study the classical canon in a classical manner? What better way to establish your outsider status than to rebel against the cultural rebellion?

That exclusivity is part of the appeal, just as the exclusivity of friendship is. Richard Papen is very obviously a descendent of Charles Ryder from Brideshead Revisited (1945), the bourgeois striver trying to climb in through the window of the aristocracy. The book is extraordinarily interesting to a British reader to whom the structures of the American upper class, of wealth and status, are opaque.

But the theme of class is as much a theme of exclusivity. The exclusivity of Julian Morrow’s group is one of taste and background. And how else would one describe any university friendship group? This was the other half of the university fantasy: that one would find friends with whom one could, if not conduct a murderous Bacchic orgy, at least do a modern dress performance of The Bacchae in the Drama Barn.

Historia

As well as being well timed, A Secret History was very much of that time. It is a novel about late-‘80s/early-’90s students who talk almost exclusively in references and quotations. The book makes fun of Richard’s fellow Californian Judy Poovey, who is recognisably Gen X: her conversation is peppered with references to TV and Philip K. Dick, and her room door is ‘adorned with photographs of automobile crashes, lurid headlines cut from the Weekly World News, and a nude Barbie doll hanging from the doorknob by a noose.’ But Richard’s clique, of course, is endlessly quoting too; they’re just doing it in dead languages. Not so much the ‘quotation generation’ as generatio citationum.

Tartt, though, doesn’t confine herself to classical allusions, or even to literary ones. Beyond the textual references to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, there are more subtle, wider pop cultural traces. That description of Richard’s fellow students’ doors mentions a ‘poster of the Fleshtones’, surely of their 1982 album Roman Gods. Clique ringleader and supreme intellectual Henry claims not to know that man has landed on the Moon, a blatant callback to Watson’s discovery in A Study in Scarlet (1887) that Sherlock Holmes does not know the Earth orbits the Sun.

Above all, the book is a prime example of the Gen X habit of taking a pulp medium seriously. It is essentially an episode of Columbo with pretensions, a why-dunnit in which the mystery is not who committed the crime, but what led them to do it and how they might escape it. It even puts the reader in the place of Lieutenant Columbo, an autodidact working class stiff who discomforts the comfortable elites with his shabby affect and sharp mind. Detection, after all, is an exercise in applying intellect and analysis to emotional, irrational actions. It reassures us that chthonic motives can be arrested and contained. The Secret History gives us a crime motivated by intellect, in which the analytical is defeated by the irrational. The protagonists are brought down by their own high intelligence and their inability to understand their own emotions. They are destroyed by their own intellectual and cultural hubris.

Even the cause of that downfall, the Bacchic frenzy that precipitates the murders, felt extraordinarily relevant in the age of rave, as great groups of young people gathered secretly in bosky woods to lose their minds and thrash about under the influence of an irrational power, while the government wrung its hands within the city walls like Pentheus in a grey flannel suit.

A detective story that was secretly a history of philosophy and mysticism; a book that was a Borgesian library of other books, of references and allusions and quotations; a book that was a paean to dark academia, to fierce friendship, to outsider self-indulgence and to being a little weirdo; a book that was, above all, incredibly readable and engrossing. No wonder it was so successful.

Although success, as we know, is the least Gen X achievement of all.

You know who absolutely would have caught the murdering Classics students of A Secret History? Inspector Morse. Although the more Gen X appropriate version, thick with allusions and its own secret version of pop cultural history, is surely the prequel Endeavour.

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

Tintin, Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus (and Snowy the dog, of course) are on their way to Sydney when they are offered a lift there in the personal jet of millionnaire Laszlo Carreidas. En route, however, the plane is hijacked and flown to a remote Pacific island where their old enemy Rastopopulous is planning to hold them hostage and force Carreidas to hand over his fortune. Naturally Tintin, Snowy and Haddock foil his plans, in the process discovering that the island isn’t just a base for international criminals but is also for visitors from far further away: flying saucers!

Complicated stories

Do I need to introduce intrepid boy reporter Tintin and his white fox terrier Snowy (or Milou for our mainland readers)? You can probably swear along with Captain Haddock (“Billions of blue blistering barnacles!”) and are all too familiar with Calculus’ strange contraptions and the comical incompetence of Thompson and Thomson.

Created in the late ‘20s by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi (his pen name is his initials reversed, as they would be pronounced in French: R. G.), Tintin was still default reading for kids fifty years later, when I started obsessively reading them in the 1970s. A comic you were allowed to read, an easy birthday present, within the value of even the smallest book token.

By why? What was the continued appeal of this tween-the-wars character from a world of steam trains, obscure European princedoms and blank spaces on the map? What is his continued appeal, because he’s still there, in the Amazon top selling mystery comics for kids, one hundred years later.

One reason is undoubtedly that these are classic adventure stories. Hergé himself read the great adventures stories of the nineteenth century as a boy: Robert Louis Stevenson and Alexandre Dumas, and the stories he wrote for Tintin are full of classic pulp tropes: treasure hunts, lost civilisations, sinister conspiracies and international criminal masterminds. There are secret passages and disguises and plenty of fisticuffs and the occasional little brush with the supernatural. And cliffhangers. A lot of cliffhangers.

The Tintin stories were originally serialised in weekly comics and even in the collected albums you can feel that breathless pulse, the narrative drive that keeps the reader in suspense between issues and drives them forward in the story. In Hergé's post-War Tintin comic, the stories were serialised two pages at a time, and the rhythm persists, with mini-cliffhangers often at the turn of a double page spread, pulling us to turn the page and see what happens next.

Of course a lot of those tropes rely on the culture that spawned them, a time of slow news and slower travel, of landline telephones, prop-driven planes and some mystery still out in the far corners of the globe. This world was recognisable to me, as a child of the ‘70s, but it was vanishing. The last completed story was Tintin and the Picaros in 1976, and Hergé never finished the final story Tintin and Alph-Art before he died in 1983; perhaps it's just as well. By the ‘80s that world was finally disappearing for good.

Hergé adapts that world, of course. Steam trains go electric, planes sprout jet engines, small European kingdoms fall under the control of communist dictatorships. Tintin goes to the moon. The thing I loved about Flight 714 to Sydney as a child was that it featured a UFO. This was yet more modernisation, of course. UFOs were largely a post war phenomenon, a folklore of the space race and Cold War paranoia. Tintin had already beaten Neil Armstrong to the Moon in the 50s, extraterrestrials were the obvious next step.

Yet even as they modernised, the stories still possessed inheritances from their original culture. The aliens in Flight 714 to Sydney have been visiting Earth for millennia and were worshipped by the ancient human inhabitants of the islands as gods, all of which sounds extraordinarily reminiscent of another book of 1968, Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods. Chariots of the Gods, which proposes that various ancient civilisations were founded by aliens, who helped build the Egyptian pyramids, the Easter Island heads and the Nazca lines, is founded on the racist, colonial, ahistorical assumption that the indigenous people were fundamentally incapable of having built such monuments. It is a direct descendant of Victorian theories of Welsh princes settling America or Atlantean refugees building pyramids everywhere.

That adventurous world of Tintin is full of such assumptions. It is a world in which a young white man can go anywhere he likes around the world and fix how the people he finds are living. The plots frequently hinge on unconsciously bigoted assumptions: Tintin astonishes a group of Incas in Prisoners of the Sun (1949) by predicting an eclipse that he read about in a newspaper, in Tintin in America (1945), the Native Americans are easily duped by a gangster, and then there’s Tintin in the Congo (1931).

The very first Tintin story, Tintin in the Congo is very much a product of its origins. By the time Hergé was writing it, colonial Belgian Congo had been under the control of the Belgian government for twenty years, the preceding direct rule by King Leopold II of the Belgians having been deemed too horrific even for the other nineteenth century Imperial powers.

Hergé does not, at least, give us Tintin in the Heart of Darkness, the boy reporter heading up the river to find Captain Haddock, who has gone mad in the jungle, his methods having proved ‘unsound’. There is no mass murder or the chopping off of hands. But there is a reason that this story very definitely isn’t in the Amazon best of lists. Indeed, there isn’t even an English language version easily available. It reflects ‘opinions of its time’ and the visual depiction of the Congolese is disturbingly cartoonish and minstrely.

Hergé did re-edit some of the story of Tintin in the Congo later, but not the depiction of Africans. After all, he himself had opinions of his time. He was cleared of actual collaboration with the Nazis after the Second World War, but the Tintin strip had continued to appear in a Nazi run paper throughout the occupation. Tintin began as a strip for conservative Catholic newspaper supplement for children Le Petit Vingtième and Hergé himself was evidently an instinctively conservative child of colonial Europe.

But on the other hand Hergé and his background also gave Tintin his instinctive defence of the underdog in the face of oppression. Tintin makes friends wherever he goes in the world, usually with the down-trodden and abused, and his enemies are almost always abusive authority figures, whether state secret police, criminal masterminds or corrupt businessmen like Rastopolous in Flight 714. And the thing that most shocks Tintin about Rastopolous’ plan is that he’s intending on killing all the local rebels he’s tricked into working as his stooges. Tintin, the boy reporter, is one of the little guys himself, and always fights on their behalf.

Clear lines

But what I really loved as a child, and what I still love now, is the art. The small matter of Hergé being one of the greatest cartoonists of all time.

Let’s talk about the meme.

What’s annoying about this meme is not the usual misuse and misrepresentation of the characters (like the awful pissing Calvin) - the dialogue is actually pretty believable for both Haddock and Tintin, especially this early version of the Captain (the frame is from the story in which the two first meet, The Crab with the Golden Claws). No, it’s the speech bubbles. They’re the wrong way round. Tintin speaks second, so his bubble needs to be to the right of Haddock’s, fitting our read order.

This is because the panel has been taken from a sequence in which Tintin speaks first, so he’s always on the left. If the Captain had been leading, Hergé would have rearranged the layout, while still finding a way to concentrate us on the emotional development between the characters and sneak in the joke about Snowy drinking whisky. Because he was an absolute master at this stuff.

And Flight 714 to Sydney is the work of a master at the height of his powers.

Look at this double page spread. Hergé almost always works in four rows of panels on a large French album sized page. This gives him plenty of space for detail and development.

On the left hand side the panels are chopped up and squeezed up on top of each other to create a breathless intercutting between the characters and the circling place. But he is also giving us a really clear geography, showing us the island and making sure we understand how the plane is moving, left to right from the occupants point of view and then right to left from the ground as it turns, bringing us into the landing at the mini-climax of the page break.

Then on the right the panels expand horizontally but time is squeezed vertically into five rows, each moment frozen and seemingly endless as disaster looms. The characters are forced up against the right hand margin, under the inertia of the big panels to their left. The plane hurtles down the rows of panels in successive incidents: touch down, parachute, failure of the parachute, tyres burst, careening on to the end of the spread. They’re going too fast! Quick, turn the page!

Masterful visual storytelling.

But that’s not all. Probably the real reason Tintin has endured is Hergé’s art style. Someone shared this panel on a tumblr blog the other day and I immediately knew it was Hergé: the colours, the line weight, the distinctive curlicues. It couldn’t be anyone else.

Hergé illustrates in what’s known as a clair ligne style - ‘clear line’. He was fundamentally a black and white artist and always apparently slightly suspicious of colour, so his fundamental tool is the solid black line. Characters, scenery, all of it delineated in a crisp, flowing black outline, making them stand out neatly with a legible graphic clarity.

It seems simple, that solid black line, but it's a deceptive simplicity.

Hergé was an absolutely magnificent draftsman, drawing scenery, buildings and machines with an accurate and exquisite detail. Look at the stone idol above, all the hieroglyphs on the crumbling wall, all drawn with minute attention.

But he was also a terrific cartoonist, capable of visualising emotion in simple poses full of energy. Look at the Captain in that second panel, caught off guard, off balance, bringing his gun up in panic.

And look how the two skills work together, the characterful, vital figures in the fully realised world, foregrounded in it and dramatised by it.

Here Hergé’s suspicion of colour becomes a strength. Those solid, distinctive fills for the characters: Tintin’s bright blue jumper and brown plus fours, the Captain’s ever present dark blue roll neck (with an anchor on the front, naturally), these don’t just give them an instant, iconographic recognisability, they don’t just give them a graphic impact, they’re also astonishingly beautiful.

Hergé’s palette is just wonderful, perfect blue skies, perfect green fields, striking red and yellow trains and planes and automobiles, bright, beautiful clothes, everything precisely the right colour and every colour precisely the most beautiful shade.

Each panel is a little jewel box of sharp lines and shining hues. Hergé’s precision and painstaking framing making each a delightfully detailed little diorama, a little display of mid-century modern; the styles, mores and glamour of a past world carefully, safely preserved inside a book.

This isn’t the first time we’ve covered comics (and it’s bound not to be the last - did you notice that Calvin and Hobbes reference in there?)

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

In a hole in the ground there lives a hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, who is tricked by the wizard Gandalf into going on an adventure with a group of dwarves [sic] who want to retrieve their treasure from the dragon Smaug. On the way they meet trolls and goblins, wolves and giant spiders, elves, eagles, and a man who can turn into a bear. And, in a deep cave under a mountain, a creature called Gollum, from whom Bilbo steals a magic ring. (But that’s another, much longer story.)

There…

I do not remember when, precisely, the wise old man Gandalf first knocked on the door of my cosy home and tricked me into an adventure that would change my life.

Memory suggests a connection with Oxford, but that seems too fitting to be true. We went often to Oxford to have our feet x-rayed in the Start-Rite concession on the Broad (this was the ‘70s, when it was customary to irradiate children in shoe shops). Tottering past on our now glowing feet, someone probably pointed out The Eagle and Child – the pub frequented by the authors of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and The Hobbit – and the association stuck.

I suspect, in truth, I simply read my father’s copy at home – or, more probably, he read it to me. It’s a terrific book for reading aloud. Tolkien is a very present, informal, avuncular narrator, leading the unsuspecting child into a world of monsters and marvels just as Gandalf inveigles Bilbo into joining an adventure. At one point early on he interrupts himself to ask: 'What is a hobbit? I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays, since they have become rare and shy of the Big People, as they call us.' With that ‘us’, the reader (or listener) is welcomed into his confidence and made part of the story.

I was already a child much given to fantasy, daydreaming about King Arthur and dinosaurs and Doctor Who. These fantastical worlds, these alternatives to reality, are not appealing to everyone; but for people like me, the escapism is a part of their appeal and as Tolkien pointed out, this taste grows with age.

They are a secret tunnel under the prison camp of the everyday. They offer two equal and contradictory consolations. One is the unfettered wonder of the fantastic world in contrast to the tedious mundane. At the same time, though, it is a fictional world bound by the predictable laws of story, safe from the random tragedies of reality.

But these stories are also full of the real world; how could they be otherwise? They enable confrontation and engagement under laboratory conditions, safely contained within fictional isolation. They also provide the reassurance of a happy ending. Tolkien called this the ‘eucatastrophe’, the surprise of joy.

Bilbo Baggins begins the story as if a child, cosseted by the independently wealthy lifestyle of the early twentieth century English bourgeoisie. His life was quite similar to the life of a bourgeois English child of the later twentieth century: few responsibilities, small duties, and an awful lot of comforting food. In the same way children hear about bosses and taxes and commuter trains, Bilbo has heard about dragons and treasure and wild woods, but doesn’t yet know anything about them.

Then, like a bourgeois child from a wealthy family, Bilbo is plucked from his comfortable home and forced out into the unpredictable wider world. Not long after reading The Hobbit I went away to boarding school, where I slept in unruly dormitories with boisterous rugby-playing dwarves who sang incomprehensible songs and made me take part in their adventures. In the first half of the book Tolkien carefully documents Bilbo’s homesickness, mentioning it in almost every chapter; then, equally precisely, he shows that it has worn off. In Chapter 10, just over halfway through the book, Bilbo is hiding out alone in the Elf King’s palace, surviving on scrounged food and somewhat at a loss; but he does not think of his home once. Without noticing, he has habituated to his changing world.

Beyond the thrilling adventures, beyond Tolkien’s skill at hustling the reader onward, this treasure of metaphor and example is one of The Hobbit’s great, enduring gifts.

…and back again

But there is another great treasure hidden in The Hobbit. The magic ring that Bilbo steals from Gollum is going to prove considerably more important than even the wizard Gandalf suspects. It will result in three long books, three very long films, and – more importantly – a whole subculture of lore and nerdery.

Tolkien did not originally intend The Hobbit to have anything to do with his fictional world of Middle-earth. It is peppered with elements – dragons and elves and long songs about treasure – that recall his expertise in Anglo-Saxon literature. But it did not contain any of the more expansive mythology he was developing for his own amusement. Indeed, at first he barely intended to write The Hobbit at all. He told W. H. Auden that he was marking papers and turned over a sheet to discover that a student had left one page blank. In his relief at not having to read anything for a brief moment, he took his pen and wrote, at the top of that empty page: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' And there he was, in charge of a hobbit. Whatever that was.

Once The Hobbit had become a massive hit and he was asked for a sequel, he began to backfill some of the grander lore that would inform The Lord of the Rings. He used new editions of The Hobbit to adjust some of the story and bring it in line with his larger fictional world. Marvellously, he further insisted on folding these re-writings into the story. The Hobbit is presented as Tolkien’s own retelling and translation of Bilbo’s memoirs; in later editions Bilbo is discovered to have initially lied about how he came across the ring. This meta-narrative extends to The Lord of The Rings, presented as a translation of Frodo and Bilbo’s Red Book of Westmarch, a set of personal reminiscences set within the wider sweep of their history.

These hints of deeper lore only make The Hobbit more magical. Tolkien is wise enough not to overwhelm us with his fictional history; the reader is left to make guesses about this wider world. As his friend C. S. Lewis said, 'The Professor has the air of inventing nothing'. Lewis, the inventor of Narnia, knew a thing or two about ‘secondary world’ fiction; but Tolkien’s was saga and Lewis’s was fairy tale.

In a fairy tale everything is magical, and anything can happen: a lamp-post can stand in the middle of a forest, a lion can be a thinly veiled allegory for Jesus, Father Christmas can show up unexpectedly. The Hobbit begins as a fairy tale, a story of dwarves and dragons, but it later turns out to be a crucial event in a saga of kings and wars and the fate of the world. Tolkien’s careful lore imposes consistency; magic has to follow rules, and legend has a history.

In this transition from fairy tale to saga it forms a pair with a book published one year later, T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone (1938). The story of the young King Arthur’s education by Merlin, The Sword in the Stone is very much a children's book. But White is retelling Malory, and throughout the sequel The Once And Future King the story grows increasingly dark and adult. (Both White and Tolkien began writing their series in the late 1930s, as the real world became unavoidably grave.) This means that the fictional worlds age with the readers. I moved on from The Hobbit to reading Lord of the Rings at school, and to wrestling with the history of Middle-earth as laid out in The Silmarillion as a young adult. From being a book I remembered fondly from childhood, it became a part of my adult life.

This only works because Tolkien is a deceptively good writer, capable of moving between registers almost unnoticed. He prosaically describes the goblins knowing the way through their tunnels 'as well as you do to the nearest post-office'. Then, in the next chapter, Gandalf speaks to the King of the Eagles in high, epic tones: 'May the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks.' The whole of Lord of the Rings follows this register shift, from something very like the informal chatter of The Hobbit in the early chapters into a formal, heroic mode for the grand clashes of civilisations at the end of Return of the King.

It is The Hobbit that allows The Lord of the Rings to work so well. Mr Bilbo Baggins – that sudden interruption onto a blank exam page – injects humanity and reality into Tolkien’s legends. This humanity, which proves pivotal to the plot, comes in the form of hobbits; the small, overlooked, ordinary people who save the world. The fundamental importance of humanity is one of The Hobbit's prevailing themes. Thorin Oakenshield is brought down by ‘the dragon-sickness’, a lust for heroism and legend. Tolkien shows Bilbo’s desire for peace and companionship as being far worthier. He further valorises the joy of making over the greed for having; he praises the jewels created by the dwarves even as he condemns the avarice that wishes to hide them away. Craft should be celebrated, and can only be celebrated by being shared. And this is, perhaps, the great and lasting joy of The Hobbit: its fantastical world is a work of craft, a gift from Professor Tolkien to a child reader, an unexpected present more extraordinary and sustaining than any magic ring.

We’ve written before about the appeal of fantasy worlds and of books with maps in the front:

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

Preface

It is the end of November. Summer is over; Autumn is drawing to a dim close. Six unlikely characters find themselves drawn to Moominvalley, home to the friendly Moomin family. But the Moomins are not there1. So timid Toft, bossy Hemulen, anxious Fillyjonk, ancient Grandpa-Grumble, self-contained Mymble and solitary wanderer Snufkin have to try to make their own family in the deserted Moomin House. Not entirely successfully.

Like the characters in the book, you know the Moomins. Even if you don’t know the Moomins, you know the Moomins. They first started appearing in the corners of creator Tove Jansson’s art before the war, got their first book of their own in 1945, then started appearing in comics from 1947. Both the books and comics achieved international success, but since Jansson’s death they have become truly ubiquitous. Jansson’s niece, Sophia Jansson-Zambra, has created a global licensing empire, introducing Tove’s characters to the world. On my desk right now is a Snufkin coffee cup from the Moomin shop in Covent Garden next to a stuffed Hattifattener I bought from a Moomin cafe in Tokyo.

A great deal of the success of the Moomins as a licensing vehicle is down to Jansson’s artwork. She illustrated her books herself. She was an artist, a very good one, but she was a superlative illustrator. Her pen and ink illustrations for the books are some of the very best. They are deceptively simple, made of clear, fluid lines that are nonetheless delicate and expressive. In a few, quick marks, she is able to create a world that is clearly delineated but remains open to interpretation and investigation.

She is able to summon character and mood from the tiniest gestures and is especially good on light and shade and on the use of the negative space of the blank page. This is particularly true of the Moomin family themselves: Moominmamma, Moominpappa and their son Moomintroll, soft little hippo creatures who, being entirely white, exist mostly as empty space on the paper, ready to be inhabited by the reader’s imagination.

This also helps make them graphically distinctive and an excellent source for branding. But if you only know the Moomins from the branded plates and purses and plush toys, then there’s a lot you don’t know about them.

Because the books themselves are deceptively simple too. The earlier books appear to be gentle, childish adventures, but they are always shot through with a defiant weirdness and a tinge of Scandinavian melancholy. Snufkin, for example, the character on my coffee cup, is an inveterate rebel and loner who, every autumn, abandons his best friend Moomintroll without so much as a goodbye, heading off into the deep woods to enjoy the silence (and pull down any admonitory signs he finds). My soft toy with its little felt hands is one of the Hattifatteners, creepy little ghost creatures that travel in whispering hordes, following electrical storms. Nothing is quite as cute as it seems.

By the time we get to Moominvalley in November, the last of the Moomin books, things have become increasingly dark. Most of the characters are lost and looking for something. The Fillyjonk is paralysed by anxiety and germophobia and looks to Moominmamma as an example of a perfect housewife. The Hemulen bosses people around to cover his own inadequacy, and sees Moominpappa as an ideal of self-contained masculinity. Snufkin is looking for a tune; Grandpa-Grumble, a friend; Toft, a mother. Only the Mymble seems untroubled in her perfect self-satisfaction.

All of them are looking for answers in the Moomins and none of them find them, because they don’t find the Moomins. The family has gone away and so these mismatched strangers are thrown together, trying to deal with each other’s problems when they can barely handle their own.

Contents

All of these characters are, of course, Moomin fans. Just like the reader, they have heard stories of how wonderful the Moomins are and have come to find them, only for Jansson to disappoint them. She has sent the Moomins on holiday from their own book.

One of the characters, Toft, is an awkward loner. His instinctive response to finding himself shut in a house with strangers is to hide himself away with a book. This was always my tactic as a child and I inevitably identified with Toft. But I suspect Jansson also identified with him.

The book Toft has found is a scientific textbook about the evolution of Nummulites, a form of marine protozoa. Like many children, Toft is reading beyond his comprehension and misunderstands the book as fiction. He begins to imaginatively invest in the story of the Nummulite, identifying with its development in a hostile and changing environment.

Eventually he imagines it so intensely that it comes to monstrous life, lurking down the dark end of the garden, grinding its teeth. In fact, it becomes so vivid that Toft becomes afraid of it, overwhelmed by its presence. In the end he has to imagine it away, making it diminish back into the small idea it once was.

Is this what Jansson is doing with this book? Do Toft and his Nummulite represent Tove and her Moomins? Is this Jansson looking at the growing popularity of the Moomins and starting to feel them getting away from her? This is, after all, the last of the Moomin books, happening entirely in their absence, deliberately distanced from them.

At the very least, there is the sense that that image of the happy Moomin family is deceptive. Theirs is not the perfect family that most of the characters imagine it to be. That place where the Nummulite is hiding is the miserable bit of the garden where Moominpappa and Moominmamma go when they’re cross. Toft is resistant to the idea that Moominmamma is ever cross, but this is because he is idealising her, because he has no mother of his own and desperately wants one.

And this is probably the key resonance between Jansson and Toft. Jansson’s own mother died while she was writing the book; she too no longer had a mother. The book is full of loss and yearning, not just for the missing characters but for what they represent to those who remain, the sense of definition and place that the idea of them offers.

All of the characters have lost a sense of family and therefore central parts of their sense of themselves. Even Mymble is missing her sister, the incorrigible Little My, who lives with the Moomins. Their experience of Moominvalley in November is of trying to recreate that family, trying to create their own identities within it.

But the book is also frighteningly clear-eyed on what those families are really like, even the Moomins. Jansson seems intent on reminding Moomin fans, both fictional and real, that the image of the ideal family that you might get from the stories is not the reality.

Afterword

Tove Jansson’s undermining of her own fantasy world extends beyond the Moomins. Like many other children’s books, the creatures of the Moomin’s worlds are racially stereotyped. Just as all of Tolkien’s orcs are evil and all of the elves are good, or all of Kenneth Grahame’s mustelids are thugs, except badgers, so the personalities of Jansson’s characters are determined by what kind of creature they are.

Hemulens are always loud and bossy, Fillyjonks uptight and prissy, Toffles are small and Whompses are chaotic. Indeed these characteristics run so deep when it comes to the inhabitants of Moominvalley that their species and name are inextricable: all Hemulens are called ‘Hemulen’, all Fillyjonks, ‘Fillyjonk’.

These are recognisable types, of course; we all know a few bumptious Hemulens and fusspot Fillyjonks, and this kind of stereotyping is something that we all do. It’s certainly something that all families do: so-and-so is the clever one, so-and-so the cook, she’s the pretty one, he’s the black sheep. At each get-together we’re pushed back into our roles, falling back into the family dynamic even as we chafe against it.

The characters of Moominvalley in November certainly chafe. None of them are happy with their assigned roles. Part of the genius of this book – of all the Moomin books – is how they operate as empathy engines, how they insist on us understanding all of the characters as distinct people. Unlike the orcs or weasels who teem anonymously in the backgrounds of their books, Jansson wants us to know what makes the Hemulen tick, and why the Fillyjonk is how she is.

And also how they might change. By the end of their stay in Moominvalley in November, most of the visitors have learnt something. They have learnt about each other, glimpsing the inner turmoil that they might otherwise have never suspected, and learnt something about themselves. And they discover that, like the Nummulite, they can develop and grow too.

The Moomins never quite return, but the characters discover not just that their ideas about them were wrong-headed but also that they might do without them altogether. By the end it feels that although Jansson might be trying to usher us all out of Moominvalley, she’s only doing so for our own good and is trying to equip us for life in the real world, without the presence of the perfect Moominmamma.

But the book doesn’t end on an entirely mournful note. The name of the book in Swedish is Sent i november, ‘Late in November’. At the very end, Toft, the last of the characters left in the valley, sees the light on the mast of Moominpappa’s boat approaching from across the sea and runs down to the jetty to be there when they return. Right at the end of November.

The Moomins, in other words, will be home for Christmas, as all families should be.

Puffin published a lot of children’s books in translation, not just the Moomins, but also less well known books like Nils-Olof Franzén’s Agaton Sax mysteries

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

Preface

In which we are introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh, a Bear of little Brain, who lives in the Hundred Acre Wood with his friends Rabbit, Owl, Tigger, Kanga and Roo, and most of all Piglet and Christopher Robin. With all of whom he variously has adventures, makes up songs and eats an awful lot. Oh, we left out Eeyore; but then again everyone always does, you know.

Let us be clear from the get-go: we’re talking here about ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’, who has hyphens and is drawn by E. H. Shepherd, not ‘Winnie the Pooh’, who has no hyphens but does have a little red shirt, the voice of Sterling Holloway and animation courtesy of the Walt Disney company. Pooh wouldn’t be rude about the American cartoons; he’d just pretend he hadn’t seen them, and so we shall do the same.

The Pooh of the book arrives coming downstairs backwards (the only way he knows), his head bumping on each step as Christopher Robin drags him along behind him. It’s a delightfully meta introduction. Milne introduces us to fictionalised versions of himself, his son and his son’s toy, before creating a series of fictions within the fictionalised world. Christopher Robin himself gets confused about what’s real and whether he really remembers the events Milne relates:

‘I do remember,’ he said, ‘only Pooh doesn’t very well, so that’s why he likes having it told to him again. Because then it's a real story and not just a remembering.’

Pooh himself had quite a complicated beginning involving two bears – one real, one not – and a swan. There was a real bear called ‘Winnipeg’, who was bought at an Ontario railway station for $20 and became the mascot of a Canadian Cavalry Regiment before being left at the London Zoo during the First World War. There was a soft toy bear called ‘Edward’, who belonged to Milne’s son Christopher Robin. And there was a pet swan called Pooh. Christopher Robin was fond of both the real animals and so changed the name of his toy, with a ‘the’ in the middle, and we all know what that means.

Contents

The main character might have had a complicated backstory, but the stories themselves are deceptively simple. ‘Deceptive’ because they are craftily plotted. Before Pooh, Milne had written a serialised detective story The Red House Mystery, and the Pooh stories share this ‘fair play’ mystery approach. In ‘In which Pooh and Piglet go hunting and nearly catch a Woozle’, Milne shares all the clues to what’s happening in the description; once you know Pooh and Piglet been following their own footprints in the snow, you can go back and re-read the chapter and see it all unfold in front of you. In ‘In which Eeyore loses a tail and Pooh finds one’ E. H. Shepherd joins in, clearly showing us [spoiler] Eeyore’s missing tail hanging up as Owl’s bell-pull in a full-page illustration. If we’ve looked at the pictures on the cover, we’ll know what’s happened even before Pooh figures it out.

And this isn’t the only writerly craft on display. One of the reasons Winnie-the-Pooh has endured is that it is genuinely funny. It is quite hard to make a solitary reader laugh out loud, but rereading the stories for this piece I laughed at least once a chapter.

Milne wrote often for Punch, the ‘humourous’ periodical, and he has the poised comic prose style of Jerome K. Jerome and P. G. Wodehouse and any number of other early twentieth century comic writers with decorative initials in their names. He is chatty and informal, lending himself perfectly to being read aloud. Most importantly he doesn’t spare his stylistic flourishes for the sake of the children. Pooh’s antics – rolling in mud to disguise himself as a cloud and then floating up to a beehive on a sky blue balloon – are amusing, but they are then related with wit and perfect timing.

The bees were still buzzing as suspiciously as ever. Some of them, indeed, left their nests and flew all round the cloud… and one bee sat down on the nose of the cloud for a moment and then got up again.

‘Christopher - ow! - Robin,’ called out the cloud… ‘I have just been thinking, and I have come to a very important decision. These are the wrong sort of bees.’

How beautifully structured that joke is. Milne never tells us Pooh is stung on the nose by the bee; he allows us to construct it for ourselves. Then he finishes it with Pooh’s dissembling, his desperate covering of his own terrible mistake. That arch, sophisticated Punch tone lends itself perfectly to the daft adventures of Pooh and his friends.

It is also a style honed on the niceties and awfulness of the British social structure, as much of that early twentieth century comic writing was. The occupants of the Hundred Acre Wood are recognisable British middle class types: the community bossy boots Rabbit, the bumptiously hearty Tigger, the petit-bourgeois striver Piglet. However, they are also all, recognisably, children. There is little moralising; few lessons are learned. Yes, the animals are best friends, but they are also instinctive ego-maniacs in the way that small children are, mostly focussed on what they want and all vying for the  affection of Christopher Robin, in the way that siblings vie for parental affections or villagers for a kind word from the squire.

This is, of course, another key to the stories’ longevity. We all recognise that experience, just as we recognise the characters. We all know a self-appointed know-it-all like Owl and a moaning cynic like Eeyore, whose misery is pure self-aggrandisement. We all identify with Pooh, the gentle, self-effacing and much-derided bear of little brain who is nonetheless the only person who ever gets anything done around here, and is definitely the one Christopher Robin loves the most.

Afterword

Winnie-the-Pooh is a ‘classic’, which is a curse as much as an honorific. Classics are set up to be knocked down or, worse, confined to a display case in a distant gallery where they might be stumbled upon only by the most diligent browser.

The narrative of art since Modernism has been one of rolling revolution, the lone Bohemian genius upending the staid strictures of the Academy to produce never-ending novelty. The classics are there to be kicked against; how can one be an iconoclast without icons to deface? The classics of the previous generation must become the deluded follies of the temporally disadvantaged.

One of the salutary bits of growing up is the discovery that classics are often classic for a reason. The Seventh Seal isn’t a pretentious piece of European pseudo-intellectualism; it’s a moving cinematic exploration of life, love and death. Rembrandt wasn’t a painter who produced pictures of crinkle-faced tramps in a brown Windsor fog; he was a magician who could conjure human souls from paint and fold time to carry them down the centuries. Dickens’s novels aren’t grinding slogs; they are encapsulations of a whole city, full of teeming, various, sad and hilarious humanity.

Experiencing the classics matters because classics are integral to the culture. Through being read and thought about and esteemed, they have become influential and important. Knowing them is key to understanding one's culture, enabling you to decode assumptions and references. If you have a little familiarity with Greek myth and Bible stories, suddenly all the paintings in an art gallery make more sense.

But it’s also important to consume the classics because they are very good, often in a way that defies their reputation. Winnie-the-Pooh is not the syrupy, cosy collection of bedtime stories that Disney animations and toys and duvet covers might suggest. Or rather, it is not only that. It is also funny, wise and sometimes startlingly astringent. It manages to be both justly sentimental about childhood and admirably clear-eyed.

In the final story of the second book of stories, The House at Pooh Corner, Christopher Robin is going away to school and says goodbye to the animals. He knows he will not be allowed to do ‘Nothing’ in the woods with his friends any more. He and Pooh go up to their favourite spot and Christopher Robin makes Pooh promise to visit it when he has gone. As a child who went away to boarding school myself I find this sequence unreasonably heartbreaking, and just writing this paragraph has used up all the tissues in the house.

We all have to leave the Hundred Acre Wood. We have to grow up and stop doing Nothing. But it is reassuring to know that Winnie-the-Pooh is still up there on the shelf, keeping one tiny slice of childhood safe for us.

For more childish humour, there’s always the Crack-a-Joke book:

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

Preface

An oral history of one of the most influential bands of all time, from their formation to their relationship with Andy Warhol to everything grinding to a halt as the amphetamines wore off. Given the impossibility of describing the music, expressive dancing, light show and polygonal affairs everyone was having with everyone else, the book largely concentrates on mixing interviews, quotes and diary entries with a lot of photography.

At some point in the mid-’80s, I walked into a friend’s bedroom and into a wall of noise. There was guitar feedback squealing, leaden drums thumping helter-skelter, bass and rhythm guitars grinding and over the top of it all a tired, acerbic voice speak-singing: “I heard her call my name”.

It’s hard to believe that the first time I heard The Velvet Underground I knew nothing about them. After all, no less a person than David Bowie called them more influential than The Beatles. They are the wellspring of pretty much all alternative rock music. But this is how things were in the early ‘80s. If something wasn’t mainstream popular, you simply weren’t going to hear about it. Smash Hits wasn’t going to print the lyrics to ‘Heroin’; even John Peel was only ever going to play contemporary indie music. An art school pop star might namecheck The Velvets alongside Roxy Music and Captain Beefheart in an interview, but you’d never get any sense of who they might be, or what they might sound like. Or even when they might have been recording.

The cover art of their first record included the name ‘Andy Warhol’, which I vaguely associated with the ‘60s, and the photographs on the back looked like some hippyish freak-out, but the music didn’t sound like Pink Floyd or The Rolling Stones. I couldn’t tell whether this was music from that week or twenty years before. 

This is what the world was like. You could stumble upon cultural artefacts and not have any context for them: a late-night movie on TV, a paperback with an interesting cover in a spinner rack, a record in a discount bin. If they weren’t already popular or canonised, you could find it extremely hard to discover any more about them. They would exist as a singular, unrelated cultural object, unexplained and unmoored.

On the other hand, this meant they were yours, and your relationship with them was yours alone. I didn’t know that knowing about and venerating the Velvets was a prerequisite for being hip; I didn’t know that a whole lineage of alternative rock music descended from them. I just knew that they sounded unlike anything else I had ever heard, and in response my mind split open.

Contents

Serendipitously, and somewhat inexplicably, the school library had a copy of Uptight, a history of The Velvet Underground. It enabled me to put names to sounds: Lou Reed, John Cale, Maureen Tucker and Sterling Morrison, as well as Andy Warhol and the mononymous Nico. I could also put faces to scenes: the happenings and situations and movies and gigs. And I could put a ‘why’ to the ‘what’: Pop Art and Minimalist music and the underground movements of the mid-‘60s.

Finally, I had some context. This both diminished the music and enhanced it. I understood where it sat in the history of rock n’ roll: what it was influenced by, and what it influenced. It was no longer that sui generis marvel that belonged to me and me alone. But, on the other hand, whole new slices of culture were opened to me.

There was an underground to the underground. I had been raised on the legend that the Boomer generation had reinvented popular culture into a psychedelic revolution in the head, between the sheets and on the streets. Now, I learned there had been a revolution against that revolution: a parallel ‘60s that found peace-and-love, Haight Ashbury hippydom as boring as the ’80s post-punks did. As Velvets guitarist Sterling Morrison put it in the book, New York was the best place to be in the Summer of Love, because the Summer of Love entirely passed it by. Every flower child and ‘teenage ninny’, ‘every creep, every degenerate, every hustler, booster, and ripoff artist, every wasted weirdo’, packed up and left for San Francisco, leaving Manhattan a quiet and peaceful playground for Andy Warhol and his cohorts.

This sort of thing was absolute catnip to a Gen X teenager, not to mention that they all looked so extraordinarily cool in the photographs. All in black in Warhol’s silver Factory, motorcycle boots, strange jewellery and sunglasses after dark. It was a look that was quite at odds with the ‘60s stereotype of floating Kaftans and scraggly beards.

Then there was that fundamental attitude that gave the book its name. ‘Uptight’ meaning anxious, tense, angry, paranoid; this was the anti-hippy sensation that Warhol was trying to induce with ‘the Exploding Plastic Inevitable’, the multimedia experience that accompanied Velvet Underground gigs. Another word for this sensation is  adolescence: being at odds with the world, and oneself, and especially with all those Boomer adults who kept banging on about the ‘60s. A ‘60s that, it turned out, hadn’t been at all what the mainstream claimed.

Afterword

This book is about so much more than the Velvets. At one point Lou Reed lists all the bands he adored in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, enough material for a whole lifetime of bin-diving in record stores. And that’s just the start of the references: Frederico Fellini, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsburg; The Fugs, The MC5, The Stooges. Even the indicia contains clues: the book was laid out by Neville Brody, the designer responsible for reinventing magazine design with The Face.

You discovered context for one object and in return, like some shady deal with a storybook fairy, you were given a clutch of new mysteries, a bundle of new threads to follow through the cultural labyrinths; names to note down and remember for the next time you were in a second-hand book shop or record store. These were hyperlinks that took months to click. Sometimes they led to dead ends; sometimes they led to mind-blowing discoveries.

We’ve written before about the significance of Gen X’s cultural curators; the people – like Victor Bockris – who pulled together these webs of reference, bringing treasure and the starting points for new hunts. These hunts weren’t only for new authors or bands; sometimes they led to new friends, people who had made some of the same discoveries as you but who had also taken their own paths through the cultural wood. You had John Cale’s album Fear, but they had Nico’s Marble Index. They had Ginsburg’s Howl, but you had The Naked Lunch.

Now, of course, we can just click ‘About the artist’ in Spotify and start Googling the names we find there, spelunking the Wikipedia entries for obscure bands and watching the YouTube videos about them. We crave curation; paradoxically, with the world at our literal fingertips we need it even more. We need that advice about what’s worth seeking out, and where we might find hidden gems.

Anyone can find and listen to The Velvet Underground now, but we still need Victor Bokrises to make sure that people do, and have their minds blown all over again.

For more stories about friends passing on bands and changing lives, try Chris Waywell’s piece on Beck

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

Preface

Frank Cauldhame lives on a small island off the Scottish coast with his reclusive father. Frank believes he was castrated as a toddler by the family dog, and has developed a complex and violent series of rituals to shore himself up. But now his older brother Eric - unhinged by witnessing a terrible case of neglect - is on his way home, and Frank is about to learn some horrifying truths.

The Wasp Factory was Iain Banks’ first novel. He had always seen himself as a writer of science fiction but had been unable to get any of it published, so made a conscious decision to turn his hand to sensational literary fiction. Achieving a wild success would, he reasoned, mean he could get paid for writing about spaceships.

It bloody worked, possibly better than Banks could have imagined. There were a lot of young (and old) men affronting the bookish bourgeoisie in the early ‘80s - Martin Amis’ Money and Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine were both published in 1984 too - and Banks was careful to be shocking and wise to be brutal. The Wasp Factory was an immediate and massive hit. It was criticised for its violence and grand guignol horror, but it was undeniably compulsive with quite the twist at the end, and the controversy only drove more coverage. It was absolute catnip for a certain kind of reader, one who largely no longer exists. There were a lot of books like The Wasp Factory in the early ‘80s: readable but not pulp, well written but not art, tricksy but not subtle. It is precisely the sort of midlist novel that has been killed by the internet.

Contents (and spoilers)

The Wasp Factory is narrated by the sixteen-year-old Frank, who is a threefold unreliable narrator. First because he is a teenager, and thus intrinsically unreliable as a narrator of himself; second because his world is constructed by ritual and quasi-religious symbol, which like all symbolism is fluid and subject to interpretation; and third because he has been so comprehensively lied to about his world that he cannot describe it accurately.

Part of the book’s success is down to a reveal that is whisked out as a twist in the last few pages. Frank had not been castrated by the family dog. He had not had a penis in the first place: he was a born a girl, not Francis but Frances. His father has been slipping him male hormones and lying to him in order to bring him up as male.

But that happens right at the end, and while it’s a part of the book’s appeal - and was genuinely jaw-dropping for the average reader in 1984 - most of the book is an account of how Frank responds to the emasculation he believes he has suffered. This is where most of the book’s horror lies, and the bulk of its interest for the reader.

Frank builds up gothic, bloody rituals focussed on weapons and death, but he also literally builds material constructions. These include the eponymous ‘wasp factory’, a miniature maze of death made out of junk that Frank has found in the local tip. He feeds it with captured wasps who blunder through it in a panic, effectively choosing their own modes of execution:

If it falls into the many charged spikes of the Volt Room, I can watch the insect get zapped; if it trips the Deadweight, I can watch it get crushed and ooze; and, if it stumbles through to the Blade Corridor, I can see it chopped and writhe.

Frank’s self-created religion is operatically violent and cartoonishly masculine: ‘My greatest enemies are Women and the Sea. These things I hate.’ Writing about the book decades later, Banks said his intention was to write ‘a pro-feminist, anti-militarist work, satirising religion and commenting on the way we’re shaped by our surroundings and upbringing and the usually skewed information we’re presented with by those in power.’

It was unusual then for violent and dynamic popular fiction to come from an openly progressive stance. Re-reading it now, though, you can see that the satire doesn’t quite work. Frank's religion is weird and bloody indeed, but also entirely self-created, not imposed. He is as sceptical and self-conscious of it as he is devout and punctilious. And the critique of the performance of gender and what we would call today ‘toxic masculinity’ is anything but subtle, leading to an absolute clunker of a last line: ‘Poor Eric came home to see his brother, only to find (Zap! Pow! Dams burst! Bombs go off! Wasps fry: ttssss!) he’s got a sister.’

The Wasp Factory is a young man’s book, not just in the sense that Banks was a young man and still learning his craft when he wrote it, or in the sense that a lot of young men read it in the ‘80s. It is also a young man’s book in the sense that it is like a young man, full of daring and disgust and self-aggrandisement that is ultimately somewhat meaningless and more than a little annoying.

Afterword

Banks did, in the end, persuade someone to pay him to write about spaceships. After three more ‘literary’ books - Walking on Glass (1985), The Bridge (1986) and Espedair Street (1987) - he published Consider Phlebas (1987) and introduce us to his sci-fi setting, The Culture, a post-scarcity galaxy-wide meta-civilisation of luxury space communism. He continued writing sci-fi under the name of Iain M. Banks in tandem with his literary career.

The Wasp Factory isn’t much talked about these days, but his sci-fi is. In fact, as sci-fi has a habit of doing, it has started to leak out into the real world. Elon Musk has named several of his SpaceX vehicles after Banks’ spaceships, including ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ and ‘Just Read The Instructions’. (The spaceships in Banks’ novels are named by the artificially intelligent Minds that control them, often sarcastically and/or whimsically.)

This kind of thing is some small compensation for the fact that Banks died, far too young, of cancer in 2013. How painful, to see the militantly egalitarian social justice warriors of The Culture non-consensually co-opted by an alt-right-curious billionaire. One supposes that fans like Musk or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have been bedazzled by Banks’ techno-optimism and entirely missed the socialist underpinnings of his utopia.

As Banks himself said (interviewed by Jude Roberts in Strange Horizons magazine): ‘I pretty much despise American libertarianism… Have these people seriously looked at the problems of the world and thought, “Hmm, what we need here is a bit more selfishness?” …Which bit of not having private property, and the absence of money in the Culture novels, have these people missed?’

Banks says that he thought of The Wasp Factory as a sci-fi book manqué, in which Frank was an alien and his island a strange new world. But his portraits and satires of society were much more successful when he returned to the genre he’d always preferred. It was science fiction that allowed him to think about humans clearly, and allowed space for a more subtle and expansive exposition of his satire and his philosophy.

And the spaceships are much cooler than the wasp factory.

For more Iain Banks, how the influence on him by the computer game Civilization?

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

Preface

A graphic novel by celebrated Guardian cartoonist Posy Simmonds, Cassandra Darke is a Scrooge-ish take on London’s contemporary beau monde. The book opens on a snowy city during Advent; art dealer Cassandra Darke is in disgrace after being convicted of fraud, and briefly considers suicide in the solitary splendour of her Chelsea townhouse. (Simmonds, who knows her audience, finds an elegant way to tell us that the house is worth £8 million.) Then a mysterious break-in draws her into the murderous activities of a criminal gang, giving Cassandra a shot at sororal solidarity and redemption.

Chapter 1: A book for children

There is a moment, in the days leading up to it, when Christmas floods over the borders. Up to this point, Christmas is essentially an optional activity; after it, you will be pulled into the festive machinery whether you like it or not. The transition is marked by a sudden settling. Schools and offices close their doors, the streets are quiet, and you can get any table you like in West End pubs. 

At the last Christmas overwhelms the infrastructure, like an extreme weather event or Godzilla. One Christmas Eve afternoon in the early ‘90s, when my brother and I were setting off for a pub in the nearby town, the station manager - who had known us for years, and had justifiably concluded that we had no idea how the world worked - warned us not to miss the last train back; ‘the service starts to run down at 6pm’. On the deserted platform carols were playing quietly over the tannoy. As we waited I had a dreamy vision of the last few trains moving around south-east England, their windows shining in the dark, delivering solitary travellers at each station before running empty to the depot.

I love these moments when Christmas gets into the mechanism and imposes itself on ordinary things: the ordinarier, the better. When I was a kid I used to count the days until December 24. You might think there’s nothing so unusual about that, but I started counting on January 1. It was a long, lonely, lunatic enterprise, and even as a child I knew there was something unhinged about it. But in mid-December my furtive obsession was validated as everyone else started to get sucked into the machinery. Signifiers began to appear in otherwise sensible, grown-up contexts: holly motifs on the foil tops of milk bottles, the BBC Christmas idents, the illuminated sleigh that was towed around the residential streets of Mortlake by the local Rotary Club. 

The places where Christmas intersects with the real world are at the heart of Raymond Briggs’s Father Christmas (1973), which was everywhere when I was a child. (Briggs’s The Snowman was published in 1978 and wasn’t adapted for TV until 1982, which meant it missed my Proustian window.) Father Christmas is an animated account of the man himself’s Christmas Eve schedule, but the conceit is that Father Christmas is an ordinary man for whom everything is an enormous ball-ache, from waking up (‘BLOOMING CHRISTMAS HERE AGAIN’) and pushing the sleigh out of the shed (‘WORK, WORK, WORK!’) to fighting his way down narrow chimneys (‘BLOOMING SOOT!’). This is Father Christmas as a harassed functionary in the service economy, grumbling about his shift pattern and looking forward to his pension. He eats a meagre packed lunch on a snowbound suburban rooftop and gets irritably jammed in an Aga. As dawn breaks, he crosses paths with a laconic milkman: ‘Still at it mate?’ ‘NEARLY DONE.’ 

Father Christmas would not be such a perfect book without its humdrum houses, monotonous scrubby landscapes and professionally frustrated main character. Here is the emotional appeal of Christmas, for me at least: the transubstantiation of the everyday that takes place during a short ethereal period in the deep stretch of the year. 

I don’t read many graphic novels, and I’ve no idea whether Posy Simmonds is often compared to Raymond Briggs. I do know that Simmonds is most usually described as the chronicler of the urban middle classes, for which she has attracted a certain amount of disparagement, whereas Briggs’s work centred working class people in explicitly straitened contexts. (Father Christmas has an outdoor lavatory.) But in their close, affectionate observation of cussed, workaday English lives, they seem alike to me. 

Cassandra Darke is full of the moments when Christmas floods over the borders and intersects with everyday things. Here are the reasons I get it down from the shelf at the beginning of December every year: a perfectly rendered Big Issue seller outside a snow-covered Burlington Arcade in Piccadilly. In the middle of a row of identical grey townhouses, there is one that is ablaze with Christmas decorations. A huddled smoker stands under a swagged garland decorating a Victorian pub. A huge full-page panel shows a great grey crowd of shoppers on Oxford Street, cramped and pissed off, staring at their phones as they shuffle along; but disappearing into the distance there are two people wearing Santa hats. 

Chapter 2: A book for adults

Cassandra Darke has a lot of fun with the middle classes and particularly with the London art world, a world that Simmonds presumably knows pretty well (‘Francis Bacon? Once an interior decorator, always an interior decorator’.) The nature of life in the underpopulated posh streets of Chelsea, where houses are investments rather than homes, is captured in a tiny throwaway panel that renders a mother’s remark to her child in Cyrillic script. 

But Simmonds’s long tenure at the Guardian didn’t happen by accident, and she is also perfectly at home with the passionate activism of Dickens’s story. One sequence of panels shows the Christmas trees that light up the street-level lobbies of corporate offices all across London in December. Every Londoner knows the antiseptic perfection of these trees, decorated to convey core brand values and whatever measure of festivity is commensurate with the Q2 figures. If you walk down certain streets in the City - the streets where Scrooge had his counting house - it is as though the season has been disembowelled and embalmed. As Darke says, each atrium has ‘a Christmas tableau, the components as fixed as those of a crib scene: tree, reception desk, giant vase, someone keeping watch by night.’ (It would not have occurred to me to notice the giant vases, but Simmonds is absolutely on the money.) These ‘someones keeping watch’ in Cassandra Darke, as in real life, are all minority ethnicity Londoners in uncomfortable formal suits, and the Christmas atrium panels are followed by a matching set showing people sleeping in cardboard boxes outside the warming air vents.

As is the way with Scrooge-ish characters, Darke is magnificently unpleasant, selfish and solitary. Simmonds is very good at nasty characters, as she showed through her ‘Posy’ cartoons in the Guardian; she has the thin streak of brutality that makes everything a little bit more interesting. In an interview with her old paper to publicise her 2010 graphic novel Tamara Drewe she talked about ‘lulling the spouse’, a tactic she dreamed up and placed in the mouth of one of her characters, the inveterate philanderer Nicholas Hardiman:

‘Behind it is the idea that to avoid suspicion, you must first arouse it,’ Simmonds laughs. ‘So you tell the spouse, rather unconvincingly, that, unexpectedly, you're going to be very late this evening and you'll be at mutual friend X's house. And then you actually are at X's house when the anxious spouse rings up, which rather puts them off checking up on you again for a while.’

I find this kind of deviousness quite frightening, but her capacity to inhabit the minds of cunning, manipulative people adds greatly to the appeal of Simmonds’s work. It’s a particular boon when it comes to to re-inventing Scrooge, who tends towards cartoonishness in less capable hands. Darke is convincingly appalling, careless of her housekeeper (‘heavy-handed with the dill’), her office junior (‘I haven’t much sympathy’) and homeless people (‘Got any spare change?’ ‘Yes thanks.’) But as Dickens did with the original Scrooge, Simmonds also shows us all of the ways the world has been unkind or disappointing to Cassandra, an ageing and overweight woman who has been cursed with a plain face and an unusually good brain. We’re also shown some of the things that make her likeable and even admirable, not least her furious refusal to lie down and take punishment, her self-sufficiency and her doughty courage, all of which she shares with Scrooge. 

Some of this is conveyed subtly using Simmonds’s signature talent for drawing gestures and facial expressions. A faintly sketched passer-by is wordlessly disgusted by Darke’s bulk; beauteous young things have pity and contempt written all over their faces. At other times, key information about character and mores is delivered with miniature precision in the text, which is frequently extremely funny. When - for plot reasons - Darke receives a text message intended for someone else that reads ‘Break your fucking legs that’s a promise cunt’, she notes ‘I immediately assumed the message had been sent by a friend and fellow art dealer, Teddy Wood, during one of his benders.’

One brilliant panel about halfway through shows Cassandra slumped on the sofa. She has just overheard her young lodger having passionate, noisy sex. Her body is overflowing the seat cushions. Her head is down, and her jowls bulge around the thin, tense line of her mouth in a way that overweight ageing women will recognise with horror. The text narrates what she is thinking about:

I remember sitting overwhelmed by regret. It was the realisation that my diffidence in sexual matters had been just cowardice, the fear of losing control. I had denied myself pleasure.

This is Simmonds’ answer to Scrooge’s agony at the memory of his lost love. Rarely has A Christmas Carol been translated so thoughtfully to a contemporary context. Simmonds might usually be cast as the chronicler of the middle classes, but what is less often noted is the most Dickensian attribute of all, and one that underpins the message of A Christmas Carol: her abiding generous interest in human beings.

For more graphic storytelling, try our piece on Los Bros Hernandez and their version of Dean Motter’s underground comic Mr X:

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

Preface

Professor Arthur Bramhall has taken a sabbatical in rural Maine to write a novel, but a bear steals his manuscript. Under the name Hal Jam, the bear takes the book on to the big city, to fame and, eventually, to a kind of humanity. Legally speaking, at least.

In the ‘70s and ‘80s, before home video recorders were common, if you loved a film you had to treasure that love up, because you weren’t going to get the chance to see it again until the time, usually some years later, that it finally reached the TV. The only way to experience the film again, reasonably quickly, was through tie-in novels.

I discovered William Kotzwinkle because he wrote the tie-in novel for E.T. The Extraterrestrial. It was a book that I pored over, not really for the story but more for the delirious vision of suburban America it detailed: phoning out for pizza during a Dungeons & Dragons game. Reeses pieces. Recess. Station wagons.

The Bear Went Over The Mountain is not a tie-in book (although apparently Jim Henson bought the rights, and boy would I have loved to see that movie) but it is curiously like E.T.. An alien innocent (a black bear from the Maine woods) stumbles into the world of ‘90s celebrity and finds his essential self under threat from the very humanity by which he is fascinated.

Content

The Bear Went Over The Mountain is magical realism. The bear is very much a bear, even though all the humans he meets refuse to see this, and his essential bear-ness is key to the book’s satirical engine. It wouldn’t work if it was nothing but a lowly metaphor.

Magical realism is a genre curiously suited to the late ‘80s and ‘90s, a period in which, famously, history was supposed to have ended. Civilisation was a solved problem; capitalist democracy had won. The world - at least, the parts of it that most British teenagers knew about - had been reduced to a series of health and safety-approved shopping centres. It was necessary to introduce magic because reality promised little of its own. 

The Bear Went Over The Mountain is interested in how wrong that idea was, in all the apparently tiny, eventually shattering incongruities and inconsistencies that culture held. Hal Jam - the bear - is essentially an adult Paddington, a simpler, purer creature adrift in a world of complex etiquettes and deceptive appearances, whose bewilderment and misunderstandings only serve to highlight the ludicrous assumptions of society.

It is a world where it appears that all that matters is appearance but all anyone really wants to do is get below the surface, to something deeper. One of the characters Hal meets is a woman who writes about angels and how they intervene in human affairs. She is surrounded by plastic tat - cherubim extruded from Taiwanese factories, kitsch empyrean ephemera - and yet she completely believes in her heavenly guardians. What appears to be detached irony is anchored in sincerity.

A great deal of the comedy of the book arises from Hal’s basic, animal instincts juxtaposed with brittle human refinement; in an upscale restaurant the smell of salmon makes him writhe on the floor with delight. Yet Kotzwinkle takes pains to point out that this society runs on those base desires. Hal is overcome with the sheer quantity of calories to which humans have access. At his launch party he orders only cake for catering, cakes that the literary elite cannot bear to eat. Too rich, too common, too desirable. Consumerism rests on insensate greed - for food, sex, success - and guilt about that greed is added on top, a scaffolding of civilised denial and withholding, a kind of Puritan shopping ethic.  

Afterword

At this remove, it is grimly noticeable how much of what was funny in the placid ‘90s is no longer quite so amusing. At one point, Hal Jam saves the Vice-President from a conspiracy theorist assassin whose new world order ravings could have come off some 21st century QAnon message board. He meets a fiercely retrograde evangelist preacher who is planning a run for the presidency on a repressive right-wing ticket. Both ideas have, in the last thirty years, gone from unlikely jokes to ghastly realities.

Most of all, there is the central joke of the book: that none of the publishers, marketeers or journalists have read the novel that they turn into a hit. The publicity machine is everything, so effective that it can make a bear a household name. A wry joke then, a way of life now. Hal Jam is an influencer avant la lettre, paid to eat his favourite snack (Cheesy Things) while on tour.

At its heart The Bear Went Over The Mountain believes in books. It makes fun of the book that Hal steals (Destiny and Desire), but it points out it is a popular book, which people love and which changes their lives. But lurking out there in the woods beyond the writing cabin are the hulking shadows of content creation and the creative industries: the act of writing as one of product development and page filling rather than the making of art or the expression of self.

Where The Bear Went Over The Mountain is really of its time, though, is in it’s core theme, because this, eventually, is a book about stoicism. Bereft of his stolen book, Arthur Bramhall is taken under the wing of his neighbour, retired lumberjack Vinal Pinette (whose own name sounds like some mid-century decorative finish: pine effect vinyl). Pinette introduces Bramhall to all his acquaintances in the hope that their stories will inspire a fresh novel. Their stories all feature parodic bucolic misery. At one point a man they are visiting accidentally chops off one of his toes. On the way to the doctor, the toe falls through a hole in the bottom of his van and gets eaten by Vinal’s dog. All of this is received with an even stoicism. 

This is just how the world is. Terrible things happen to you and you just soldier on. This is class-coded; these are hardy, working class backwoods types, just as Hal, in his lack of polish and taste, is presented as a working class intruder in the middle class publishing world. But the polished city types are suffering just as much, suppressing their desires, their good sense and themselves; accepting the implacable horrors of the world with a stoicism that is just as placid and desperate.

It is the ultimate expression of ‘90s ennui: the West has won, and is that what we really wanted? Dissent is commodified; revolution is on sale again. Why bother doing anything? Hal Jam tries to change his very nature, to leave off being a bear and procure an agent and publicist (the American dream!), but gets fatally entranced by the debilitating delights of civilization. And he’s a bear. What chance do us poor humans have?

Mind you, in a twenty-first century world where history has started again and is making up for lost time, perhaps there’s something to be said for just enjoying the cakes while we can.

For more of the ‘90s pre-Internet, post-History moment:

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

Preface

Radiant City was supposed to be the city of the future, with revolutionary architecture engineered to make its citizens happy and fulfilled, but the developers cut corners on the materials and now it is a dark metropolis that drives its inhabitants mad. Only the mysterious Mr X, who stalks the shadows in his billowing overcoat and wraparound sunglasses, seems to have a plan to save the city.

The Return of Mister X is a comic with a fraught history. The title makes it sound like a sequel but Mister X was not, in fact, returning; he had barely arrived in the first place. The character was created by Dean Motter, who then worked with artist Paul Rivoche to build out his fictional world, in the process creating a series of stylish and intriguing posters that caught the attention of the comics world and drove up anticipation for whatever it was they were producing. Unfortunately they produced nothing.

In the end new young comics stars Los Bros Hernandez - three Mexican-American brothers best known for their comic Love and Rockets - were brought in to get the comic rolling. The produced an initial four issues that were then packaged together as a paperback.

None of which I knew when I wandered into Mega City Comics in Camden in 1986 and saw the book on the shelf. I vaguely assumed that it had something to do with the track ‘Mr X’ on Ultravox’s 1980 album Vienna, and maybe it did, somewhere back in the mists of inspiration (the figure in the song certainly seems reminiscent of the character in the comics, and Motter knew his New Wave music). I was grabbed by the same things that had grabbed everyone about Rivoche’s posters: the soaring, neon, Deco city, the Expressionist shadows, the mysterious bald man in the coat and shades. I bought it immediately.

What I discovered in the book was not so much the character or the story but the artists, particularly Jaime Hernandez, who did the bulk of the art and whose own comics - the stories of the fraught love-lives of LA punks Maggie, Hopey and all their friends - were about to become one of the great and abiding joys of my life. If Mister X achieved nothing else, he improved my comics collection immensely.

Contents

The Return of Mister X is coloured (by Rivoche himself, along with Klaus Schönfeld) but Jaime Hernandez mostly works in black and white and he has a confident, dynamic line even here. There is something of the European clair ligne approach of Hergé’s Tintin, but with the bravado of an American comic book by Jim Steranko or Jack Kirby. The backgrounds are full of detail, the characters full of life.

Those people are most notable - his ability to capture a sense of an individual in movement and thought, their postures in the drape of their clothes, their expressions flitting across the faces. The book is full of teeming streets and packed parties and every person that appears is distinct and recognisable.

All this is helped by his incredible range, switching from detailed, subtle portraits like something from Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon or Byrne Hogarth’s Tarzan to the exaggerated emotion and energetic action of cartooning like his hero Hank Ketchum (Dennis the Menace - the anodyne American one, not the sublime agent of chaos in the Beano).

The plot is mostly concerned with Mr X returning to Radiant City and trying to regain the plans that will help him fix his marred creation, setting up characters and clearing the decks for future adventures. The Hernandez brothers instinctively try and add in a romantic subplot but they can’t quite pull it off; they haven’t yet reached the emotional depth of something like Jaime Hernandez’s The Love Bunglers (2014), a book that still reduces me to tears every time I read it.

The story zips by, an enjoyable mash-up of film noir and 50’s ‘googie’ atom-age futurism, all gangsters and robots, exotic nightclubs and flying cars, but it’s ultimately as flimsy as the sub-standard construction of Radiant City itself.

Afterword

…but the concept: the concept is simply terrific. An obsessive architect develops a serum that stops him sleeping so he can devote all the time to realising a vision undercut by penny-pinching developers. That alone is the sort of ludicrous story premise which is only really possible in comics.

Indie comics in the ‘80s had an energy and a role reminiscent of the punk and New Wave music artists that Motter and the Hernandez brothers adored. Like a band, and unlike TV or film, comics allows an individual, or a small tightly knit group, to work intently and personally on their own mad projects, yet still produce something that can stand - with equivalent production values - against the mainstream.

From a European perspective, The Return of Mister X fitted perfectly into this sense of radical, alternative comics. While the US market was still dominated by superheroes, as a British kid I had grown up on Hergé’s Tintin and the French sci-fi psychedelia comics of Moebius, and the home-grown anarchy of The Beano and the punk dystopias 2000AD.

Indeed this defiant weirdness was about to infect American mainstream comics as 2000AD writers like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Warren Ellis crossed the Atlantic and started working on comics for DC and Marvel, changing superheroes forever. (There’s a good argument that you don’t get the Marvel Cinematic Universe without 2000AD, but that’s for another day.)

But more than just the concept, the image. Those Paul Rivoche posters, the cover that caught my attention, the neon canyons of the mid-century utopian city, the airships in the sky and the crowded streets below, the mysterious man, his expressionist shadow falling across the rooftops. It is an image composed of pure pulp, and as such overshadows its own story.

The image is, itself, in the lineage of great pulp images of the past. The famous portrait of Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain’s Fantômas (1911), the master criminal in opera coat and domino mask, leaning out over the skyline of Paris, bloody knife in hand. The cover of Detective Comics #27 (1939), as Bill Fingers’ Batman swings in over the roofs of Gotham City for the first time. Of Conrad Veidt’s Somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) and a chiaroscuro Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) in The Maltese Falcon (1941). 

It is an image that transcends and eclipses its own origins as so often happens with pulp fiction. These images take on a life of their own, casting long shadows across the culture that follows them. Just as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars and Tarzan influenced both Superman and Batman and set patterns for so much of superhero fiction to follow, or H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines carved out of Imperialism the tropes that in time brought us Indiana Jones, so Mister X is namechecked by Terry Gilliam in the creation of Brazil (1985), by Tim Burton in his Batman films, and by Alex Proyas in his Dark City (1998).

In some ways, part of the real joy of a comic like The Return of Mister X is in its imperfections and its failings. Where it succeeds it is wonderful, allowing us to enjoy the Los Bros Hernandez’ extraordinary skills at visual storytelling. However, where it fails, it inspires: it hands us imagery and settings that incite our own imaginations, invite us, like Mister X himself, to build our own glittering and shadowy Radiant City.

For more from the same underground ‘80s L.A. that brought us Los Bros Hernandez, you could do worse than Alex Cox’s Repo Man

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

Preface

Teenager Adrian Mole writes a tedious and awkward diary about his tedious and awkward life in early ‘80s Leicester. One of the core jokes is that the diary isn’t ‘secret’: it's being broadcast to the world. Another is that the emphasis on secrecy is belied by the tedium of the contents. This is eighteen months in the life of an unremarkable suburban boy, full of quite remarkable jokes and social observations.

Adrian Mole is a direct descendent of Charles Pooter, the anti-hero of George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody (1892), which records the insignificant ups and (mostly) downs of a pompous little clerk living in London suburbia. The small minded, narrow horizoned, petit bourgeois little Englander is one of the key stock characters in British comedy: he is (he is usually a he) the ultimate loser in the class war, mocked for the poverty of his ambition and for having any at all. Townsend’s brilliant trick was to wonder what Pooter, or Captain Mainwaring (Dad’s Army), or Martin Bryce (Ever Decreasing Circles) might have been like as a teenager. If you’re now imagining Captain Mainwaring measuring his penis, I apologise.

It’s a slightly unfair trick to play on Adrian Mole, because teenagers - particularly teenage boys - are somewhat pompous and foolish anyway and tend to make an easy target, like flicking pimples in a school disco. I am a year younger than Adrian; I turned 13 in 1982, around the time the book was published, and as a self-important, self-obsessed, self-abusing teenager myself I rather failed to see the joke.

Contents

This was partly because the jokes weren’t meant for me. It may have been a book about a teenage boy, but it was for his parents.

Adrian started out as ‘Nigel’ in a radio play Sue Townsend wrote for Radio 4, these being the extraordinary old days when Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy started as an obscure little project on BBC speech radio. Townsend realised that Nigel Mole was a little too close to that altogether more formidable schoolboy Nigel Molesworth, ‘Goriller of 3B’ (chiz, chiz). She changed his name to the altogether more Gen X-appropriate Adrian, but those origins are important.

There undoubtedly were other pretentious teenage twerps like Adrian and I listening to Radio 4, but the station’s core audience was primarily the parents of pretentious teenage twerps, and they were delighted. Part of Townsend’s joke is Adrian’s obliviousness; wrapped up in his own tiny emergencies, he refers to his parents’ deteriorating marriage and his father’s mid-life crisis only in passing. He even misses the Royal Wedding by going to the loo at the wrong time.

But around him, unnoticed, the adult world is happening. The book slyly commentates on the world-historical context of early ‘80s Britain - economic havoc, the destruction of the welfare state, immigration, women’s lib, class war - by describing events that occur in the corner of Adrian’s eye, noted but not understood. We, the readers, are in on a joke that the protagonist doesn’t get, a joke of which he is the butt. We are included in a chummy little huddle with Townsend, reassured that as small as our worlds are, they are bigger than his.

Afterword

Forty years later and that chumminess starts to feel a bit FBPE in parts. (For our American readers: ‘FBPE’ is a Twitter hashtag that began as a pro-EU indicator around the Brexit referendum, but increasingly denotes a kind of political in-group delirium.) Townsend, a lifelong Socialist, makes Adrian a staunch Thatcherite, and surely means us to understand that only an uncomprehending, self-absorbed teenager, or their older equivalents, could ever vote Conservative. We’re not just in on the joke, we’re being inducted into the club of smug petit-bourgeois democratic socialists; we’re laughing not only at Adrian, but at a lot of the world around him as well, safe in political righteousness as well as dramatic irony.

The slight discomfort you feel reading Adrian Mole now - the sympathetic twitch for this boy’s lost privacy, even though it’s all entirely fictional and above-board - has gathered new overtones in the twenty-first century. ‘The Very Public Tiktok of Adrian Mole’ would be an entirely different thing, both less candid and more regrettable. While the social lives of teenagers seem to be as reliably trivial and emotionally overwhelming as they ever were, they now happen in public and the record is indelible. Adrian Mole - all of us who are roughly his age - benefited from the luxury of fucking up and forgetting; our stupidity, dullness and ineptitude (well, the teenage parts of them) occurred largely in view of people who loved us and forgave us for it, or who barely knew us and would never remember. We could figure out who we were and might want to be in relative privacy. 

It also, naturally, is a less and less accurate portrait of what it's like to be a 13 year old boy, but then it never was that in the first place. What it is, and was, is a persuasive idea of how that experience appeared from the outside. The limits of Adrian’s conscious world and the smallness of the stakes are the book’s primary charms now. It’s a window into a time when a teenager’s life could be theirs alone, shared with no one but the entire nation’s parents, laughing in despairing solidarity with each other.

Adrian Mole was not the only ‘80s teenager with a less than nuanced appreciation of the politics of the period:

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

Preface

Chinese refugee Ping has been invited by Mrs Oldknow to stay at her mediaeval manor house Green Knowe, where he discovers that Hanno, a gorilla who has escaped from Regent’s Park Zoo, is living in a bamboo thicket in the grounds. Ping tries to hide Hanno, but with the whole country searching for him, it is only a matter of time before the gorilla is discovered and tragedy comes to Green Knowe.

Lucy M. Boston wrote a whole series of books set around the house of Green Knowe, an eleventh century manor house in the village of Penny Soaky in deepest, leafiest, eiderdowniest southern England.

The books usually focus on the history of the house and the Oldknow family who have lived in it down the centuries, often in a fantastical or magical realist way, with timeslips and ghosts and occasionally an intrusion by older and more sinister English magicks.

A Stranger at Green Knowe is different in that it deals with the present only, and a protagonist who is not of the Oldknow family (although the archetypal grandmother, Mrs Oldknow, treats him as one, of course).

Contents

One might, at first, feel a little queasy at the obvious equation of a Chinese refugee and an escaped gorilla, both lost in comfortable old England. Boston is using that alienation, of course. Ping first sees Hanno on a trip to a zoo, and is alive to the parallels with his own condition as Boston and the readers are:

What draws him to Hanno is the gorilla’s strength: his physical resistance and his insistent individuality. Boston is a terrific writer and both Ping and Hanno are drawn purposefully, as distinct personalities, never reduced to stereotypes. Ping’s background as the child of a Chinese timber merchant in Burma is given in careful detail, although from a small child’s view, so that we never quite know who kills his parents or the full bureaucratic apparatus that has landed him in the ‘International Relief Society’s Intermediate Hostel for Displaced Children’.

Hanno the gorilla is characterised just as determinedly. Indeed, the first part of the book is entirely an account of the life of a gorilla troupe in the African jungle and the events leading up to Hanno’s capture, all told from the gorilla’s point of view.

Boston gives a vivid picture of the environment but also of the complex social structures and behaviour of gorillas, all the more extraordinary not just for being extremely well written but because the study of gorillas was still very much a work in progress when this book was written. The first proper studies had been published in the ‘20s and ‘30s; Dian Fossey’s groundbreaking work was still to come.

There’s a disparity between the popular image of gorillas as rampaging, savage brutes and the reality of secretive, highly social great apes. Boston isn’t above using this disparity to make a point about xenophobia and bigotry, but she’s careful enough to place that all on Hanno and none of it on Ping.

The book is still, fundamentally, a call for tolerance, but it is wider than just anti-racist. It places the welcoming of a refugee within a wider culture that is just welcoming, full stop.

Afterword

A Stranger at Green Knowe depicts almost no antagonistic racism aimed at Ping. There is an awful lot of patronising, beginning with a simpering middle class lady who thrusts a peach into his hand in a display of magnanimity. Ping immediately gives the peach to Hanno, sealing their friendship.

The book is vague about whether the ‘stranger’ of the title is Ping or Hanno (or perhaps someone or something else). What matters is that they are at Green Knowe. They are welcome there, because everyone is.

Green Knowe was built by a stranger - a Norman invader - and through its history has welcomed strangers of every kind. It is an image of an England that is comfortable in its motley history but also its global Imperial reach, which has brought both Ping and Hanno into the folding bosom of the Home Counties.

It is also an England that hasn’t quite yet felt the full impact of Empire’s collapse. It was written a decade after the Windrush generation arrived and a decade before the expulsion of Asians from Uganda and the war in Bangladesh. This is not yet a country of large scale immigration, and tolerance for refugees comes easy.

Children of any provenance are essentially out-of-place great apes: they find themselves in unfamiliar surroundings, trying to understand a foreign country with strange traditions. Their senses are rawer and less scrutable, their desires fiercer and less conditional, their world more constrained and vivid. The parallel that Boston wants us to draw is not between refugees and gorillas, but between ourselves - young readers - and gorillas. A child is an immigrant, a wild thing in captivity, a stranger.

But Green Knowe is a safe space, and not just for refugees and gorillas.  Just as Mrs Oldknow is the archetypal grandmother, Green Knowe is the archetypal grandparent’s house. My grandmother was fairly archetypal herself and lived in a rambling sixteenth century cottage, all low ceilings and odd nooks. Part of what I loved about Stranger at Green Knowe as a child was not just the promise of a gorilla among the raspberry canes, but the idea of the house itself as an adventure.

A grandparent’s house is a magical space to a child. It is not home, where there are chores and school runs and inscrutable adult rituals; but it is not entirely unfamiliar either. It is full of wonder, but is family; it is full of adventure, but is safe.

Like so many other wondrous houses in children’s literature - the Professor’s house in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or Tove Jansson’s Moominhouse, or even Arthur’s Camelot - Green Knowe is the site of both the welcome home and the siege perilous, where adventures begin and end. It is a space of and for imagination, of escape and escapism. It is, in a way, a book.

For more on the role of the natural world in fiction for children:

The Metropolitan

The nature of animation

It’s odd, the things in a film that stick in your mind. One, for me, is an astonishing moment in the 1995 Studio Ghibli film A Whisper of the Heart. Astonishing in its mundanity. Seiya Tsukishima, the father of the heroine Shizuku, politely passes a neighbour on the stairs of …

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4 years ago · 5 likes · 9 comments · Tobias Sturt

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

Preface

Riding the train home for the Christmas holidays, prep school boy Kay Harker meets Punch and Judy man Cole Hawlings. Gnomically warning him that “the wolves are running”, Hawlings entrusts Kay with the eponymous Box of Delights. Kay must guard the Box from the gangster wizard Abner Brown and his gang (who are all disguised as vicars). Fortunately the Box allows him to “go small’ and “go swift” as well as travel in time, enabling Kay to enlist the help of figures from history and folklore, fairies, and a host of talking fauna.

“Hold on,” I hear you cry, “What is this doing in the X Libris section and not Friend in the Corner with all the other TV shows?” To which I say: I’m genuinely surprised (and a little gratified) that anyone’s been paying attention to The Metropolitan’s various format strands, but also, yes, I know, the first thing that sprang to your mind when you read the words The Box of Delights was the ringing, haunting, magically Christmassy theme music of the ‘80s BBC TV adaptation (which was actually an abridged version of the Andante movement from Victor Hely-Hutchinson’s ‘A Carol Symphony’.) Who knew ‘The First Noel’ played on the harp could be so spine-tingling?

With The Box of Delights we pretty much reached the peak of televised adaptations of classic children’s books. At the time it was the BBC’s most expensive children’s drama ever, with groundbreaking (for TV) special effects and a lot of snow. 

It was also ‘classic’ in the sense that it was period, cosy and wilfully old-fashioned. This sort of thing - the ceaseless round of unthreatening adventures with starchy Edwardian prigs - earned the BBC a reputation for well-mannered bourgeois stuffiness,. A parade of Pevensies and Bastables; poppets in pinafores befriending talking ponies, gaggles of Fauntleroys discovering they were princes of a nation of animatronic otters.

To be fair to the BBC, there was an audience for this stuff. I was a well-mannered bourgeois prep-school boy and I had grown up reading these books: Lewis Carroll and E. Nesbit, Richmal Crompton and A. A. Milne. As children we didn’t understand that these things might be out of date or jar with contemporary mores. These were the kind of stories we were given, so these were the kind of stories we wanted.

Which is to say, this piece is about the book, which I read long before it was adapted for TV.  

Contents

The book itself is a Box of Delights, in that it is the contents of a prep school boy’s imagination shaken up and dumped out on the nursery carpet in a heap: Romans and pirates, talking rats and Herne the Hunter, mysterious Punch and Judy men and gangsters in flying cars.

The Box of Delights is very seasonal indeed. A major plot point hinges on the villains kidnapping the staff of the cathedral to stop them celebrating the thousandth Midnight Mass to be held there. They do this by summoning down a tremendous snow storm that blocks all the roads, forcing our heroes to travel by sleighs drawn by lions and unicorns.

Rather like a box of Christmas decorations, the plot knots itself into a solid tangled mess. It advances from event to event seemingly at random, from pirate rats living in a wine cellar to the fall of Troy to a fairy ball inside an oak tree. And it has one fundamental structural element that is in many ways, the most Christmassy of all. A twist that made me gasp out loud and put the book down in outrage because it turns out, on the last page, that…

*** SPOILER WARNING ***

…it was all a dream.

Yes, the ultimate creative solecism; the grimiest, most amateur trick a writer can play. The first trope a child writing a story will deploy and the first cliché they will be told off for resorting to. 

For it is a cliché. We can probably let Lewis Carroll get away with it in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as it’s a foundational example in children’s literature (and it becomes positively admirable in Through the Looking Glass when Carroll inverts it and Alice is told that she’s nothing but a thing in the Red King’s dream), but even there it’s an unsatisfactory rug-pull.

It’s not just that it’s a lazy way to excuse away whatever flights of fancy have preceded it, but also that in doing so it subverts them too. It tells the reader that the world is not as full of wonder and surprise as it appeared to be; indeed it repudiates the act of storytelling itself, making the suspension of disbelief not an investment of time and imagination, but a waste. It is a cruel, cheap con trick, all the more cruel for its cheapness.

Many classic children’s books use the ‘portal fantasy’ sleight of hand instead, having the characters pass through some enchanted doorway or process into another, stranger world: the Pevensie children enter Narnia through the wardrobe, Milo travels through The Phantom Tollbooth, Dorothy is whirled away to Oz in a storm (and back again in the book, it’s the film that almost stoops to having been a dream all along, although you were in it, and you were in it, and Toto was in it…). This way the magic of the adventure can be preserved alongside the ‘real’ world.

When The Box of Delights ends with Kay waking up on the train we met him on, realising that he has dreamt the whole story, this bathetic conclusion puts, as J. R. R. Tolkien said, “a good picture in a disfiguring frame”. It is hard to take, hard to credit and hard to forgive.

Afterword

And hard to fault.

As an ending, that is; the book itself has plenty of faults along the way. It is a grab bag of early 20th century children’s book tropes, and some just don’t quite work, not at this remove. But some very much do, particularly the snowy, wintry, Christmassy bits.

And Christmas, after all, is just a dream. We spend twenty-four days planning, organising, imagining the perfect day and wake up on the 25th to discover it’s nothing like our vision. What matters, really, is not the day, but the dream that precedes it. The vision of Christmas defines the season. The Box of Delights is the vision of a children’s adventure book, full of fantastical feats and strange magics before revealing them to be airy nothings.

Masefield was Poet Laureate, and he knew what he was doing when he put one word after another. Once you’ve got over the shock of the ending, it becomes apparent that he has played fair, as any schoolboy should. The sense of randomness that attends the book’s events is very oneiric; the story slips from place to place with all the confusing ease of a dream. The reader is constantly unsure whether, for example, the talking rats really are talking rats, or maybe actual humans who somehow live in a drain, or maybe some third kind of tiny creature that has not yet been properly described. Beings are indeterminate and the plot is delirious.

The ending also reframes the prim middle-classness of it all. At first it seems outrageous that Kay Harker is entrusted with the Box of Delights for no other reason than he is a well spoken, privately educated boy and therefore obviously the protagonist. But once you discover that this is all his dream, it makes sense. The way that the great and secret powers of the world rush to his aid, that all animals and supernatural beings adore him, that all of history is his playground, becomes almost satire, almost a sneer at books that do not have the honesty to own themselves as wish-fulfilment.

But that ending is also most deeply Christmassy in being childish. And what is Christmas but childish? For indulging children, of course, but also for putting aside the sterner parts of our adult selves, the officious, regulating, tasteful parts. It is impossible to have a tasteful Christmas and a good one. You have to choose one or the other. Christmas is a time of self indulgence and merry making. It requires a degree of tastelessness.

Just as the book is overstuffed with every ornament of children’s fantasy, so Christmas should be overstuffed with decoration: every gaudy bauble and glittering loop of tinsel. So let us open our seasonal Box of Delights and enjoy the ludicrous Yuletide childishness of it all.

For more on portal fantasies and how they resonate with children, try our piece on Harry Potter and the early internet:

The Metropolitan

How to get into Hogwarts using a modem

There wasn’t much to do at boarding school in the 1970s. There was only one TV in the school and we weren’t allowed to watch it. There was, towards the end, a BBC Micro computer, but it wasn’t connected to anything. The only entertainment available was either bullying other childre…

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4 years ago · 2 likes · Tobias Sturt

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

Preface

The Scotland Yard Secret Code Register of Current Criminals has been stolen, and Inspector Lispington must summon Swedish master-detective (and Editor-in-Chief of the Bykoping Post) Agaton Sax, who will need all his cunning and brilliance to penetrate the criminal network masterminded by the faceless Boss.

The obsessions of childhood are fleeting, but all-consuming while they last. I fell into the Agaton Sax books and didn’t come up for air until I had read all of them. And yet no one else on The Metropolitan had ever heard of them (no doubt because of the brilliance of Sax’s disguises). There was a whole series of books. They were illustrated by Quentin Blake and read aloud on Jackanory by Kenneth Williams (what higher praise can there be?). There was even an animated series, for crying out loud. And yet Sax seems, now, to have quite disappeared. This seems rather unfair.

Agaton Sax is a round little man in moustaches and a bowler hat who nonetheless strikes terror into the hearts of Europe’s criminal gangs with his mastery of disguise, ventriloquism, detection, newspaper editing and anything else the plot might require. You’d think such a delightfully silly creation would have a more lasting legacy.

Content

The books were written in Swedish and translated (splendidly) into English by Franzén himself. We were surrounded by translated European children’s books in the ‘70s: classics like Spyri and Kästner, bandes desinée from Hergé and Goscinny & Uderzo (all hail the translators of Asterix, Derek Hockridge and Althea Bell, who managed to make it funny all over again in a different language). And of course, there was the humane genius of Tove Jansson.

Among these, Agaton Sax books stand out because they give a foreign view of England, particularly of the great tradition of English detectives. Sax’s detection is Holmesian, pondering problems over a pipe (one for every day of the week); his Scotland Yard contact, Inspector Lispington, is a Lestrade analogue, and the Boss in The Scotland Yard Mystery sits at the heart of his criminal web like an arachnid Moriarty.

All those translated works gave us windows into other worlds and ways of life, but the view of our own culture from without translated our own accepted customs and traditions and made us see them anew. What is implicit and understood is revealed as obtuse and inexplicable. This is particularly resonant for children, for whom all these ingrained habits and references are relatively new and frequently puzzling anyway.

Afterword

The Agaton Sax books are parody. They’re still pretty funny and there are several places in which Franzén pulls off what’s essentially visual comedy in prose, in his (at least) second language, which is truly admirable.

More importantly, they are, like all good spoofs, loving parodies. It’s only possible to write a good parody if you know the subject you’re playing with really well and, preferably, really like it too. This is why parodies of ‘genre’ fiction written by literary snobs never work; they don’t actually like what they’re parodying. Similarly, satire only ever really works from a place of clear-eyed understanding and recognition; loathing other people begins with loathing oneself.

The Scotland Yard Mystery contains clear references not only to Sherlockian plot points but also to Conan Doyle’s structure and set dressing. Just off the top of my head, we have a deserted suburban house straight out of The Engineer’s Thumb; sinister, gnomic messages as in The Dancing Men; and a Balkan hostage like The Greek Interpreter. Franzén knows his Conan Doyle, and he also knows the genre Conan Doyle helped perfect: the pulp detective story, with all its disguises and reveals, perilous traps and unlikely escapes (in this case a working galleon from a pirate movie that hoves over the horizon, broadsides blazing, at a crucial moment).

Because Franzén knows his sources so well, he is able to do the comedy within the structure of an actual detective story. There are clues and puzzles with which the reader can engage as they read, there is a plot behind all the silliness, although it’s pretty silly itself, of course.

What I liked as a child about Agaton Sax is largely what I was going to like about the actual Sherlock Holmes, when I finally met him; not just the intricate train of deduction but also Conan Doyle’s sense of humour, and, more importantly, his use of the sinisterly ridiculous, the unnervingly bizarre, the odd and easily overlooked details that unravel in tales of horror and mystery.

I discovered these things not through the originals, but through parody. This happens a lot as a child. You are surrounded by references to and transfigurations of originals you have never encountered. You learn that detectives wear deerstalker hats and vampires wear nineteenth century opera cloaks before you ever see Rathbone or Lugosi; you know that the villain will tie the heroine to the train tracks and that with one bound Jack will be free, without ever having seen The Perils of Pauline or similar Republic serials. 

These are precisely the unconscious tropes that translation reveals as strange, and they are strange to a child. You’re learning the tropes even as you’re learning the jokes about the tropes, the jokes that ought to rely on you knowing the tropes in the first place. You begin to discern the lineaments of the original in the degraded forms of its descendents, like a palaeontologist discovering dinosaur behaviour while watching chickens, terrible lizards by way of ludicrous birds.

This is why parodies like Agaton Sax are important. Not only do they introduce children to these cultural tropes and traditions, they introduce them to the originals too, watered down wine for palates not yet quite ready for the heady true brew. And a loving, exciting parody like Agaton Sax all the more so, since it cultivates appreciation even as it mocks, showing how enjoyable the original could be even as it points out its foibles. With a wink it places into our hands one end of a scarlet thread that will, in time, lead us through the foggy and fearsome streets of London, on to Scotland Yard and to mystery, to mischief and murder and great, and lasting, excitement.

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For more comedy for kids, crack open the Crack-a-joke Book:

The Metropolitan

The Crack-a-Joke Book

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. In X Libris we return to the books that made us. The Crack-a-Joke Book, edited by Jane Nissen (Puffin, 1978…

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4 years ago · 7 likes · 6 comments · The Editors

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

Preface

A county-by-county guide to the time-honoured weirdnesses of England, Scotland and Wales, listing hauntings, oddities and unnerving traditions village by village .

On the flyleaf of my copy of this book an official from the school library has written ‘Un-Wanted.’ This is a lie. It was wanted. By me. That official was a friend. We were both habitués of the library and, as you might expect, pettifogging little goody-two-shoes. It is a measure of how badly I wanted this book that I persuaded my friend to flout the rules and give it to me.

I shall not, of course, name my friend, but he should know that his indulgence was not in vain. I still love this book and it has been my constant companion through the last 40 years.

And not only is it full of enough stories to last a lifetime, it is also beautiful. A massive thing, full of maps with splendid information design, and illustrations by greats like Eric Fraser, Robin Jacques and Charles Keeping.

Contents

Full of maps with icons for things like ‘Drowned or Lost Lands’, ‘Mysterious Stones’ or ‘Bells’, the book portrays a Britain that is full of strangeness and mystery: strangeness and mystery that is happening all around you.

All around me. The pub in Colnbrook, where my grandparents lived, is in there, with a story of grisly serial killing using a vat of boiling ale. My great-grandfather claimed that he had been chased through Windsor Great Forest by Herne the Hunter, who gets a whole double page spread to himself.

‘Mysterious Stones’ and ‘Bells’ ranked as pretty good entertainment in the ‘70s. Holidays were spent trudging up hillforts, down mediaeval high streets, round National Trust houses. Our days were full of chalk figures and haunted houses. And the nights too; every children’s book we picked up appeared to have some ancient secret or sinister magic in it - The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Dark is Rising, and The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy all featured gangs of intrepid children venturing into the dark woods to discover occult Britain.

Plenty of my nights were spent with books written by contributors to Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain: Geoffrey Ashe (King Arthur), H. R. Ellis Davidson (Norse Mythology), the indispensable Dictionary of Fairies and collections of folktales from Katherine Briggs. This book brought them all together in one place.

Afterword

We were haunted children of a haunted isle. The more esoteric wing of hippiedom, intent on finding an alternative to the wipe-clean modernism of the sixties, discovered that their great-grandparents had tried exactly the same thing.

Victorian folklorists set out to rediscover the pre-industrial traditions of Britain and ended up reinventing a lot of them. The flower children reinvented a bit more. Historians, occultists, anthropologists and drop-outs all weaved a vision of a country that was weirder and more entertaining than the motorways and service stations that strung it together.

The result was an alternative version of both received history and expected futures; an outlook that insisted on questioning the national story and offered an alternate identity to the coming generation. (The folk horror of the ‘70s, in which traditions became threats and hedge-row spirits became devils, was largely a regressive, religious response to this movement.) It offered a different idea of Britain. Different to the modern world of hovercraft and computers, or the stifling establishment of gentlemen’s clubs and the W.I. British ley lines instead of British Leyland. A place of shadowed, high-hedged and twisting lanes, of half-remembered gods and drowned and forgotten lands. It gave us a sense of place, and a sense of enchantment in that place. It made our country magic.

Behind my grandparent’s farm in Colnbrook, was a stream, and across the stream was a wood. On the edge of that wood, in the thickening summer dusk, the Grey Lady walked, a ghost of our own, out there on the edge of the fields.

You didn’t go up there late at night.

The woods are full of movement. The walls are full of voices. The country is alive.

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For further reading that might explain some things about 70s childhoods, try some jokes:

The Metropolitan

The Crack-a-Joke Book

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. In X Libris we return to the books that made us. The Crack-a-Joke Book, edited by Jane Nissen (Puffin, 1978…

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4 years ago · 7 likes · 6 comments · The Editors

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

Preface

Literally just a compendium of hundreds of child-appropriate jokes, loosely organised by theme and interspersed with cartoons of puffins. 

What comes out of the wardrobe at a hundred miles an hour?

Stirling Moth.

The Crack-a-Joke Book was published by Puffin, Penguin’s legendary children’s imprint, and was a fundraising exercise for Oxfam back when giving money to Oxfam was an entirely morally uncomplicated business. It is heavily implied that the jokes were all submitted by children and there is a hall-of-fame list of child contributors at the end (‘Tina Sheppard from Wantage’). However, Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor were all editorially involved and - with a weary adult cynicism that would have got us kicked out of Kaye Webb’s office - we suspect they may have guided the selection. 

TEACHER: Andy, say something beginning with ‘I’.

ANDY: I is…

TEACHER: No, Andy, you must say ‘I am’.

ANDY: I am the ninth letter of the alphabet.

Contents

Finding out about the awful contingency of humour is a very deflating childhood experience. Babies and toddlers are extraordinarily funny, so by the time you come to self-consciousness around the age of five or six you’re used to provoking indulgent adult laughter without any effort at all. And then, just as you’re beginning to associate comedy with love, popularity, and getting away with murder, it suddenly becomes much harder to pull it off. 

Asking Auntie Mary why she has decided to grow a beard stops being funny and instead gets you a smack. Friends who used to giggle when you repeated the same phrase over and over now say it’s boring and stupid. Your dad will howl at a joke on TV, but when you tell him the very same joke a couple of hours later he won’t laugh at all. Inexplicable. Meanwhile there’s at least one child in your year accumulating friends by the bucketload because of an ungovernable comic flair that cannot be learned in books. 

Wait, though! What’s this in the paper bag stamped with the logo of your local independent bookshop (there was no Waterstones in 1978)? Maybe being funny can be learned in books after all. Because while The Crack-a-Joke Book contained an awful lot of filler (the allusion to cracker jokes is not accidental), there was a decent proportion of killer: jokes that gloriously, genuinely made people laugh, even when being haltingly read aloud by a seven year old. 

It didn’t actually make you funny. Being funny requires subtlety, spontaneity, timing, empathy - a whole host of stuff at which small children do not traditionally excel. But it did give you some solid jokes that you could learn by heart and pull out of the bag at will. The more you read and ingested it, the more fluent you became. This book allowed an entire generation to stop worrying about their material and really focus on their delivery.

FIRST CLEVER DICK: Every day my dog and I go for a tramp in the woods.

SECOND CLEVER DICK: Does the dog enjoy it?

FIRST CLEVER DICK: Yes, but the tramp’s getting a bit fed up.

Afterword

The young Generation X in the UK benefitted hugely from its curators, the benign experts and enthusiasts who gently sifted the culture and pushed the best stuff our way. Kaye Webb was a colossus of curation, and together with BBC children’s TV supremo Biddy Baxter she steered the cultural consumption and taste of millions of children. On taking over Puffin Books in 1961 Webb executed a strategic masterstroke, buying the paperback rights to almost every significant children’s book from the previous half-century or so: Watership Down, the Narnia series, the Bagthorpe saga, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory… just look at the list. This omnivorous selection, in affordable editions with parentally-trusted branding, put hundreds of stone-cold classics into the mass market. By the time The Crack-a-Joke Book was published in 1978 Webb had increased the number of Puffins published annually from 12 to 128. 

There was a class aspect to all of this, and to illustrate it we invite any readers who were Puffin Club members to tell us in the comments whether they were allowed to watch ITV. (Three of the four Metropolitan editors were not; two because of its unspeakable commercial vulgarity, and one because her dad worked for the BBC and resented the competition.) But the wide availability of classic children’s literature, together with a deliberate emphasis on new work by authors from a variety of backgrounds, reverberated via schools and libraries across the land. 

The Crack-a-Joke Book doesn’t stand up particularly well. Few of the jokes are actively offensive, but some of them wouldn’t make it into an equivalent collection now. Actually, hardly any of them would make it into an equivalent collection now. As a comparison in the effectiveness of crowdsourced humour, try putting The Crack-a-Joke Book up against TikTok. The average freely-available joke in 2022, drawing on the comic inventiveness of millions, is just better. We might, if we are very quiet and good, live to see the extinction of the lazy pun and the tortured near-homonym, twin spectres that haunt this volume like a bad smell (‘Why wouldn’t the man eat an apple? His grandmother died of apple-plexy.’) But if you were a child in 1978, suddenly able to direct the power of laughter like a tiny magus in cord dungarees, it was pure exhilaration.

At around the same time, although we weren’t yet old enough to know it, comedy was flexing and reshaping, undergoing one of its periodic generational shifts. Not The Nine O’Clock News was first broadcast the next year, The Comic Strip Presents the year after that; Alternative Comedy was getting on with the job of despatching Jim Davidson. Out with blatant racism, whoops-there-go-my-trousers farce and mother-in-law jokes; in with absurdist Alexei Sayle routines and talking rats addressing the fourth wall in The Young Ones. Many of our generation’s best and most totemic comedies - The Day Today, Hot Fuzz, The Office, Eddie Izzard’s stand-up - combine a hallucinatory silliness with a pinpoint subversion of form. Our comedies bent towards presentation and away from material commentary, and now our generation’s most significant British politician is Boris Johnson, the embodiment of Peter Cook’s vision of Britain ‘sinking giggling into the sea’. Perhaps, in retrospect, they shouldn’t have encouraged us.

WAITER: How did you find your steak?

DINER: Quite by accident. I moved a few peas and there it was.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this piece, the Crack-a-Joke book or just your favourite shaggy dog story (it’s the one with the penguin in the park, isn’t it?).

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For more on the curators who shaped the world for Generation X:

The Metropolitan

Sunday's Child

Welcome to The Metropolitan, a collective of British Gen-Xers diving into the lost world of our cultural past: the analogue, the not-on-demand-ever, the never repeated and the endlessly repeated. We grew up acquiring things in roundabout ways. As with school dinners, if you stayed put, you got what you were given. So you had to go out …

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4 years ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · The Editors