Enid Blyton: One Of My “Best-Loved Authors”

The winners of the 2008 Costa Book Awards have been announced and children’s book writer Enid Blyton (along with Roald Dahl) has been named the UK’s “best-loved author”.

I’ve never done a post on Enid Blyton – and sadly, I no longer have any of her books, although I used to own them all. And that was quite a hefty collection, girl was PROLIFIC. As a child – from about 8 to 10 – I was obsessed – obsessed I tell you – with the “Adventure” series: Island of Adventure, Mountain of Adventure, Valley of Adventure … wherein 4 children continually got mixed up in international intrigues, involving smugglers, gun runners, counterfeiters, and God knows what else. I’m pretty sure Osama bin Laden was somehow involved. Children were kidnapped and thrown in trunks of cars. They emerged in captivity in an unknown location and had to somehow find their way out. They are ADDICTIVE books – and I was totally obsessed. Like so much else in my childhood, I have my cousin Susan to thank for my Enid Blyton mania. We lived those books. We would play-act them out. Like I’ve mentioned before, I was quite an Anglophile as a child (not knowing that I was embracing what should be my mortal cultural enemy as an Irish person! Ha!) – I think it began with Oliver Twist and Alice in Wonderland … but, in general, if it was a book about kids and it took place in the UK, and people used words like “frocks” or “macks” instead of “dresses” and “raincoats”, I was hooked. It also helped if it took place between the World Wars. Hence, my adoration of all things Noel Streatfield (excerpt here). Enid Blyton’s books have that echo of grimness Vera Drake sensibility … with rationing still a memory, and people saving their big brown paper bags, and the rain pouring down as everyone put on their macks … oh, it was all very British. But the scrapes these kids got into! I LOVED them.

Lucy Mangan has written an article about Enid Blyton, in response to her winning the prize, that made me cry. Yes. Yes. She gets it!

She opens with:

I myself can barely bring myself to talk about my Enid Blyton years. Who wants to let daylight in upon magic?

Mangan talks about how the Blyton books don’t quite hold up to adult scrutiny … but I was very interested to hear Blyton’s own words about her process, and her extraordinary output:

She describes having her characters always walking and talking in her head, and needing only to look in on their dialogue and actions for her next story. It is, she says, “simply a matter of opening the sluice gates and out it all pours with no effort or labour of my own. This is why I can write so much and so quickly – it’s all I can do to keep up with it, even typing at top speed”.

And you know what? That’s how I read all of her books, too. So quickly it was like I was inhaling them and it was all I could “do to keep up with it”.

Blyton has not been voted the “best” English author. That would be a travesty, in my opinion. But “best-loved“?? Oh, hell yes.

At a certain stage of development, you ask for nothing more than a satisfying story and an unbroken contract of delivery from your author. You care not a jot that stumbling across a smuggling ring would be unlikely to end as well in real life. Although I do remember, even at the age of eight, feeling in some vague, inchoate way, that you could go a long time without ever coming across a more unforgivably prosaic, deadening and literal title to a series than The Five Find-Outers and Dog.

But this latest nomination is not for best children’s writer, it is for best-loved writer, full stop. Blyton’s gold medal position in this table, along with the high preponderance of children’s writers elsewhere on Costa’s list (Roald Dahl took second place and JK Rowling third, while JRR Tolkien and Beatrix Potter made the top 10), is evidence that it is the books we read, wholeheartedly, passionately, uncritically, in childhood to which we remain most firmly and irrevocably attached. The flaws we see in them as adults, the criticisms – and some pretty hefty ones, in the shape of accusations of sexism, racism and class snobbery have been flung Blyton’s way over the years – do not weaken those bonds. For hundreds of thousands of us, Blyton was the wedge that cracked open the pleasure-filled world of reading and allowed us in. Our rational adult sides reject and mock Kirrin Island and all the adventures played out there; our inner children remember it rightly, and gratefully, as the promontory from which we caught our first glimpse of the promised land.

Tears.

Oh please go read the whole thing!