... Far too many of my posts start with an apology of this nature.
Anyway. Good Intentions time! As a sign of good faith - AN ACTUAL POST
Book recaps coming back soon. Promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.
So here it is:
I have been pondering lately the wisdom of reading the
latest line of Famous five books, those new novels revisiting our favourite
celebrity quartet and dog as adults as they battle grown up issues – like
gluten intolerance and alcohol dependence. On the face of it, this is something
that would be right up my alley: it’s a mix of Enid and snark that I certainly
appreciate, and it harks back to the comic strip production “Five Go Mad in
Dorset”, which my sisters and I still quote at one another.
Huzzah! I thought when I saw them. More reading material for
me!
Then I thought about it some more.
Part of the joy of rereading Enid as an adult comes from the
fact that Enid is the straight man in the joke. One laughs and rages at Enid
BECAUSE what she says and the opinions she espouses are honestly held and
earnestly stated. She’s not in on the joke with the snarky reader. You can like
or dislike the characters because Enid’s Earnestness separates the characters
from the author. The joy of Enid is that you can enter into her sympathies to
whatever extent you want. The power is in your hands. Enid writes children’s
books for children, so adults can take away different things than was intended.
So when it comes to a snarky modernisation, I run into the
issue of a change of perspective. Writing a children’s book for adults, you
have to walk a fine line. Anne of Green Gables does it – the perspective of the
narrator is clearly an adult voice, and the view taken of the child characters
is fondly derisive.
Having not read any of them (I should point this out), the
idea of the books that comes to me is that I’m being expected to enter into the
views of the writer. I am expected to be complicit with the mocking of characters
who have been re-rendered to be universally unpleasant. The characters and the
opinion of the author are so intertwined that the reader cannot separate the
story or the characters from the snark.
But I’ll admit that I might be a bit biased.
I’ve been burned by such literary retellings before – Pride
and Prejudice and Zombies was (to me) a crushing disappointment (both the book
and the film). Other than the seminal “Lizzie Bennet Diaries”, vlog classics
retellings have rarely lived up to their initial promise. Stephenie Meyer tied
sparkly vampires to romantic and gothic classics because … well, you gotta
borrow storylines from somewhere.
Yeah, I may have had some bad experiences with non-canon
material.
Even within the realm of Enid has this modern take on a
classic burned me. Being a young naïve reader in the late 90s and early 2000s,
I was overjoyed to learn that Enid had written 10 Naughtiest Girl books. Now,
that number in and of itself was not a matter of suspicion to me at the time –
the prolific typewriter basher Enid went more for bulk than nuance in her work.
However, once I moved beyond “Here’s the Naughtiest Girl”, there was a change.
The writing … improved. It was still mawkish and sentimental, and it carried
something of the same cadence and vocabulary, but it was better. I felt betrayed.
THEN, I noticed:
- that the stories had become more toothless, while the dramatic stakes apparently became apparently higher.
- Conventional and cohesive storytelling arcs were used.
- “Modern” issues like bullying, the environment, and dealing with underlying psychological issues sensitively became more apparent.
- Teachers became figures of overt authority in Whyteleafe school, which had previously flaunted its Lord of the Flies ambience as being the main selling point of the school’s non-traditional system.
I’d been “Sweet Valley’d” (you know, where one name is used
to sell the work of a ghost writer – VC Andrews is another example).
Having realised the error in my understanding of the
authorship, I was left feeling betrayed. How Dared they replace Enid with a
competent alternative? How DARED they replace school fetish drivel with actual
stories?
NO. I won’t have it. And although the grown up famous five
might be funny and clever and much better than I expect, I’m not having
anything to do with them either.
I’ve got enough to get through with the original …
